Following is the transcript of remarks by the Secretary for Education, Mr Kevin Yeung, at a media session after attending a meeting of the Coordinating Committee on Basic Competency Assessment and Assessment Literacy today (March 16):

Reporter: Some schools will be able to receive the reports of the assessment (Primary 3 Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA)). Do you think the culture of drilling will not continue? And why did you come up with the figure of 10 per cent (of P3 students as sampling units)?

Secretary for Education: As I said before, I think, over the past two years, with the work of the Committee (Coordinating Committee on Basic Competency Assessment and Assessment Literacy), we have done two trials, in 2016 and 2017, with the four improvement measures, one of which is to review the questions of the assessment. We think that the situation of drilling has greatly improved. So with the sampling method that we are going to adopt for 2018, we believe that, with all these measures together, there should not be any serious drilling, I think, among the schools, even if we still provide an opportunity for the schools to get the school reports. And on the percentage, it has been assessed by the Committee with the support of a lot of professionals who have expertise in the area of statistics. So the sample size should be sufficient to provide very reliable results.

Reporter: Why did the Bureau consider using students as the units of sampling instead of using schools as the units of sampling?

Secretary for Education: We are using students as the basis for sampling and we are just asking every school to participate with the same sample size of students.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)

Ends/Friday, March 16, 2018
Issued at HKT 15:32

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