Dear Editor,

Hong Kong has adopted the 334 New Senior Secondary School curriculum and the number of public exams has been integrated into one test system. It means that students only need to take part in one exam to decide their future. In order to prepare for this public exam, secondary school students will rush to the tuition centres even if they feel exhausted after a busy school day. In the following, I am going to discuss this phenomenon and its effects on students.

There are two reasons for the proliferation of the tuition centers. First, tuition centres can cater to students’ psychological needs. Under the new curriculum, students are not familiar with the assessment format. They will try all sorts of ways to better prepare themselves for the exams. Due to the intensive advertisements of the tuition centres, the portraits of professional images of tutors and the excellent results from their students, this has drawn students’ attention to the tutorial classes to improve their public exam results.

Moreover, the teaching mode of tuition centres is another thing that attracts students to their classes. It is because the tutorial classes adopt the exam-oriented strategy to teach students. They are drilled with skills to tackle the public exams, such as question analysis and answering techniques. This extra support is what schools cannot provide to students. Because of this, students rush to the tuition centres to get extra information.

With their full concentration on the tuition centres, there are negative effects on students. First, students cannot focus on the lessons. With the daytime formal schooling and nighttime tutorial classes, students will have no energy to focus on both modes of schooling. As a final outcome, it will weaken their ability to attain the knowledge.

Moreover, attending tutorial schools may narrow students’ learning behavior. It is known that tutorial schools are exam-oriented. They only teach what is relevant to the public exams. When students merely focus on the tutorial materials but put less effort into what their school teachers teach them, they are squandering their learning at school and neglecting their teachers’ efforts in preparing notes and teaching during lessons.

To sum up, attending tutorial classes is good for students to sharpen their skills in tackling the pubic exams. However, we cannot pay too much attention to the notes from the tutorial centers. The tutorial notes are merely complementary in our learning, we should put more emphasis on our school teacher’s work as they are professional and experienced in teaching.

Yours faithfully,

Wong Ming Wa
HHCKLA Buddhist Ching Kok Secondary School