Some students disappointed with HKDSE top scorer's YouTube tutorial classes
Tutor Tiffany Pun tries to help DSE students through videos, but does not impress
Tiffany Pun decided to start a YouTube channel to tutor students who can’t afford tutorial classes. Six years after scoring a 5** in the first HKDSE Chinese exam, Tiffany Pun decided to start a YouTube channel that tutors students who can’t afford tutorial classes.
The 23-year-old tutor and Chinese University graduate started posting two weeks ago, and earlier last week, she uploaded a video of her doing a sample paper for the 2018 HKDSE while humming some songs. This year’s candidates will face an additional challenge: being tested on 12 classical Chinese texts.
“HKEAA has allowed an extra 15 minutes for you to complete this part [of four pages],” says Pun, who had 15 minutes to spare after she finished the reading papers in 2012’s HKDSE in the video.
Pun rants about how she struggles to finish the paper before going on to explain how to do the classical Chinese part of the exam.
In comments for her video, students sing her praises. "Miss makes things sound interesting and easy to understand. Haha, like it," said YouTube user GA - Ming.
"Shame I only found this video now, I enter the exam room in an hour!" GM!, another YouTube user, lamented.
However, not all students were as impressed with her guidance.
“To be honest, I think the video is useless,” says Lawrence Yau Yuet-shing, a 17-year-old Hong Kong and Kowloon Chiu Chow Public Association Secondary School student. “I can’t find any skills or strategies [that can help me] tackle the exam, [just] some boring songs and [the] process of doing the exam,” says Lawrence.
The Form Five student doesn’t go to Chinese tutorial classes but he says the content of the video is mostly covered in school.
Pauline Wong, who is also in Form Five, says Pun’s video covers what she has learned in tutorial classes. “There are a lot of facts about the marking schemes and what the markers want for answers,” says the Maryknoll Convent School student.
“It would help a lot of newbies who have never touched the Chinese paper before but ... I’ve been doing these papers for a while now and the problem is not knowing which questions are tricky, but rather how I can tackle these tricky questions.”
Edited By Nicole Moraleda