Marking Schemes
While the HKEAA have been publishing booklets of past examination papers of each subject at an affordable price, the marking schemes (i.e. official detailed solutions) of past examinations were never readily available to the public. The official argument from the HKEAA for not publishing these marking schemes was that it might be "pedagogically unsound" and would encourage "rote memorisation" behaviors from students. Nevertheless, students were often able to obtain these "restricted documents" by taking classes at cram schools. Hence, the policy of the HKEAA indirectly denied less privileged students from gaining access to information pertaining to how examination papers are scored. This might have created a socio-economic bias in the ability of students to obtain good results in the HKCEE. Moreover, according to media reports, some so-called "star tutors" managed to earn more than HK$7 million per annum (~US$900,000), leading some to speculate that the HKEAA's policy had indirectly transferred large amounts of wealth to these cram schools.
To deal with this problem, the HKEAA started to release the marking schemes together with the year's examination papers in 2003.
Read more about this topic: Hong Kong Certificate Of Education Examination
Famous quotes containing the words marking and/or schemes:
“Hair of man, man-hair, hair of
breast and groin, marking contour as
silverpoint marks in cross-
hatching ...”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)
“Science is a dynamic undertaking directed to lowering the degree of the empiricism involved in solving problems; or, if you prefer, science is a process of fabricating a web of interconnected concepts and conceptual schemes arising from experiments and observations and fruitful of further experiments and observations.”
—James Conant (1893–1978)