NoticeThis post is a draft translation from the Chinese version which have not yet been thoroughly proofread.
Recently, several articles discussing vocational high schools (高職) in Taiwan have appeared on “Wiwi Blog Universe”:
- Eo《後悔讀高職》
- JN《讀高職是我一點都不後悔的事情》
- ikuka《讀高職不代表我成績差》
- 黃碩人《高職 FAQ》
Let me also tell you about Hong Kong’s education system.
In Hong Kong, most mainstream secondary schools allow students to choose their elective subjects for their senior secondary education. After choosing your subjects, you don’t need to ever touch the subjects you didn’t choose again, besides Chinese, English, Mathematics, and Liberal Studies (or later “Citizenship and Social Development”) and two or three elective subjects. So I really didn’t have to worry about what to do with the humanities subjects that I wasn’t good at in my junior secondary.
… Unless the gap in your grades lies in your core subjects. My own situation is that I’m quite good at maths, okay at English, and Chinese and Liberal Studies are the worst, and my grades in maths and various science electives aren’t particularly outstanding either (didn’t get those “star grades” in DSE), which is quite a rare type, and can’t find a place within the Hong Kong education system1. So after failing Chinese in DSE, I was forced to take English continuing education courses and higher diploma programmes with countless others who failed English instead, even though my original English proficiency wasn’t too bad2, which is quite absurd.
If I had a star grade in maths and science subjects, then even if I fail Chinese, you can still try to seek admission to a university through special consideration. Furthermore, there is no such thing as “admission to university through Mathematical Olympiad” in Hong Kong; otherwise, I would very likely have been pushed onto that path long ago. ↩︎
Compared to my secondary classmates, the average English proficiency of IVE students is like a bottomless pit. ↩︎