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Opinion | Reform of Hong Kong’s education system should start with less focus on standardised tests
- Drilling students for exams that fail to measure deep understanding and key skills or prepare them for the real world of work will not alleviate Hong Kong’s talent shortage
- What’s more, standardised tests put students from lower income backgrounds and ethnic minority groups at a disadvantage
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Hong Kong knows it must build its local talent pool to remain globally competitive. Yet in the 2018 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development to assess the skills of 15-year-olds around the globe, Hong Kong fell from its previous rankings in 2012.
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More worryingly, a survey conducted in 2021 found that more than 50 per cent of secondary school learners showed signs of depression.
While we can debate how to change our education system for the better, it seems clear from the data that “business as usual” is not the way to go. And although education reform is a multifaceted issue, changing how students are assessed can be the much-needed first step.
At present, we rely on standardised tests, which are not good indicators of deep understanding or key skills. Attributes such as teamwork, curiosity, resilience, empathy and morality simply cannot be measured. Moreover, studies have at best shown a statistically insignificant relationship between deepness of thinking and high grades, and at worst a statistically significant relationship between shallow thinking and high grades among some younger learners.
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Even looking past these limitations, the variability in so-called standardised tests is larger than most would think. The danger lies in treating our public exams as the only reliable determiner of a young person’s career path, and in training students for 12 years exclusively for those exams while inadequately preparing them for the future.
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