Hong Kong student takes exam authority to court over decision to scrap controversial DSE history question

Name: Hong Kong university exams go ahead despite coronavirus pandemic
Uploaded: 2020-06-04T02:30:08.000Z
Duration: 51 s
Description: Hong Kong university exams go ahead despite coronavirus pandemic

Loh Ming-yin has applied for a judicial review into decision to invalidate question on Sino-Japanese relations

Lawyers argue that authority had violated academic freedom and was ruling some ‘opinions can no longer be held’

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Isaac Cheng, of the Hong Kong Secondary School Students Action Platform, Zita Leung, from youth political group Demovanile, and Karis Wong, of Ideologist, speak to media outside the High Court. Photo: May Tse

Jasmine Siu

Published: 10:30am, 4 Jun 2020Updated: 5:19pm, 4 Jun 2020

A Hong Kong student has mounted a legal bid to overturn the decision to scrap a controversial exam question on early 20th century Sino-Japanese relations.

Loh Ming-yin, a candidate in this year’s Diploma of Secondary Education (DSE) exams, on Wednesday applied for a judicial review of the decision by the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA) to invalidate a compulsory question in his history paper on May 14.

The university entrance exam question asked 5,214 candidates whether they agreed “Japan did more good than harm to China in the period 1900-1945” and drew immediate outrage from Beijing and pro-establishment figures in Hong Kong.

It was scrapped a week later, on May 22, after the Education Bureau made an unprecedented request for the HKEAA to invalidate the question, while the city’s leader, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, said the independent statutory body had made “a professional error”.

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Hong Kong university exams go ahead despite coronavirus pandemic

The bureau claimed the reference materials provided were biased, while the question was leading and had seriously hurt the feelings of the Chinese people who suffered during Japan’s invasion and occupation of the country between 1937 and 1945.