A Happy Sad Promotion Day

Least anyone do not know, teachers can actually decide if a pupil promote to the next level of his/her studies. It is done on Promotion Day, when we decide to play "GOD" with the future of the pupils. Two main situations will occur: first - the failures of the Express stream will either be given some "help" to be promoted or retain at the same level for another year. Second, the top pupils of the Normal Academic will be pushed to Express. (These Normal Academic pupils usually do very well in the Express stream, better than most existing Express stream pupils.)

So I am very happy for my track runner, who top the Normal Academic and will be promoted to the Express stream next year.

The former situation is abit sad. Why I say this? Two pupils: A and B failed and have to decide what to do with them.

Pupil A passed English and Mother tongue, failed the rest of the four subjects at 30%, only Geography at 46%.

Pupil B failed everything at 40+ %.

At the end of the day, pupil A gets the 4% to promote to the next level, because the promotion criteria is to pass english and two other subjects. Pupil A only needs 4% to pass Geography, but Pupil B need maybe 4% in three subjects to promote him (total = 12% rough).

Let's re-look this. Pupil B failed at broadline for all his subjects and have one more year to work on him before 'O' levels, most likely he will be able to pass all subjects after working with him for a year. However, Pupil A failed his subjects at 30%, meaning the he failed to understand the fundementals of the subjects and from past experiences, these pupils cannot cope at 'O' levels because at secondary four, they need to learn new topics (They do not understand the old topics, how to move on with the new topics?) and re-learn the old topics that he did not do well. At the end of the day, they will still fail the same subjects at 'O' levels.

I wondered if this is going on in other schools, are we really promoting pupils who really deserved to be promoted or just for our convenience, we retain a pupil who is more able to cope at higher level???