New TSA welcomed as more suitable for students and less stressful by schools
The feedback on the revised Territory-wide System Assessment has been mostly good so far
Feedback from schools say the TSA shouldn't be scrapped.Teachers have welcomed the revised Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA). They say its difficulty level is now more suited to most Primary Three students in Hong Kong’s public schools.
About 50 schools have been invited by the Education Bureau (EDB) to take part in a trial run of the new Primary Three TSA this year. They decided to change it after parents and teachers complained the test put unnecessary pressure on students.
The results found that students did better in English and maths this year compared to last year. But a slightly lower number of pupils met the minimum levels for Chinese this year.
PLK HKTA Yuen Yuen Primary School was one of the schools invited to take part in the trial run. Principal Alex Cheung told Young Post last Friday that there were only a handful of “tricky” questions. He said the TSA helped find a student’s weak areas.
Li Shuk-yin, a principal from Fung Kai Innovative School which also took the revised TSA, said the test should not be scrapped. “The TSA is a key standardised test. Most schools test things at different levels and to different standards. We can use this guide to compare our levels with other schools, and see if we have any particularly weak areas,” he said.
This year’s TSA report says many students misspelled words in the English paper, such as “very”, “breakfast” and “teacher”. Grammatical mistakes, including subject-verb agreement, were common in their writing. Some students also only used commas in their writing, without any full stops.