COMMENTARY
SANITSUDA EKACHAI
These people must really hate children. Otherwise they could not have possibly come up with new schemes to torture our children no end.
I am talking about our university rectors.
Ask any parent. Ask any high school student. Ask them about the endless and poorly thought-out changes these rectors have introduced to the university admission system, and they will say the same thing.
Before 1999, all high school students sat in the same annual national university entrance examination to get seats in the university of their choice.
Indeed this system had many flaws. The emphasis on just one annual exam made it a do-or-die matter for high school students. They ignored classroom learning, preferring to attend tutoring schools which helped them crack the exams.
Despite the flaws, it was undeniably a fair and reliable screening system, given the corruption in all levels of our society.
All hell broke loose when the Council of University Rectors replaced the exam with a poorly designed regime that turned things from bad to worse.
For example, take the use of high school cumulative grade points average (GPAX) as one of the key ingredients in the new university admission system. According to a recent study, more than half the number of state high schools inflate their students' grades to give them the extra push.
The devil is also in the other details. Inaccurate grade calculation, for example.
According to Amnuay Soonthornchote, a vocal critic of the admission system, a raw score of 50% in high school may be the equivalent of a D grade. But when translated into the university admission score, that D gets only 25%.
In the same vein, a student with a raw score of 90% may have got an A in high school. Yet that translates into a full 100% in the university admission system.
This unfair calculation must stop, demand the affected students. So must the rule requiring students to take O-Net (Ordinary National Education Test) the same year they sit in the university admission exam.
What if your kid got sick and could not take the O-net test that year? Do they get a second chance?
The answer is no.
What if your children want to take the university admission exam again to study in a different faculty or university?
What if they want to change track from science to liberal arts, or vice versa?
The answer is again no, and no. High school grades in foundation subjects are a requisite under the new admission system. And without the O-Net scores from the same admission year, your children are considered unqualified.
Mind you, all those choices were possible under the old system.
So what do we have now? The tutoring school business is thriving as ever, if not more. Meanwhile, our children are under much greater stress. Now, the students must sweat throughout high school to ensure good cumulative grades. Instead of one annual exam, they must take two national exams, the O-Net and the A-Net (Advanced National Education Test).
That's not all. Many deans in different universities think poorly of the admission system designed by their rectors, so their faculties offer their own additional exams.
Two years from now, the Council of Rectors will make our children take even more exams, by replacing the A-net with two general and professional aptitude tests. At first, they did not even include foreign languages in the professional aptitude test. That changed after protests from teachers of foreign languages.
It is clear that these rectors simply do not know what they are doing.
That is why the consortium of medical schools has announced that it does not trust the aptitude tests and will continue recruiting its medical students directly.
More will follow. The Faculty of Science, Chulalongkorn University, is considering direct recruitment because the students under the admission system are too weak academically.
How weak? One-third of the new students had to drop out, said one lecturer.
The demand for a return to the old system is getting louder and louder. Unless the Council of Rectors stops playing the deaf game, an end to our kids' predicament is nowhere in sight.
Sanitsuda Ekachai is Assistant Editor (Outlook), Bangkok Post.
Email: sanitsudae@bangkokpost.co.th
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