The culmination of years of work is rapidly approaching Taiwan''s junior high school students. Ninth graders will sit the Comprehensive Assessment Program, or CAP exam, on May 16 and 17. Education authorities have instituted many changes to CAP arrangements this year, to minimize the risk of COVID-19 being spread. A second exam sitting will be held for students in quarantine, for the first time ever. And Taipei City has announced particularly strict rules: parents won''t be allowed to hang around at the exam center to offer support, as is a common practice. Crowds of parents waiting for their children outside exam rooms are a familiar yearly sight. But this year, for students taking the CAP in Taipei, it won’t look like this.
To minimize infection risk, Taipei students will be required to eat lunch at their exam desk, with food provided by invigilators. They’ll have isolation boards on the desks to prevent droplets of liquid spreading. All exam rooms must have the door open, a window open, and air conditioning on, to ensure a constant flow of fresh air.
Tseng Tsan-chin
Taipei Education Dept.
We’ll do a demonstration of lunch being distributed and eaten, as these are rather important points. In the Taipei area, in the Taipei basin, it might be awfully hot. So for the first time in history, everyone will turn air conditioning on as well as open doors and windows. So this must be thoroughly rehearsed.
Almost 21,000 teenagers will take the CAP in Taipei this year. Twenty-four exam centers have been prepared for the event, with four special rooms at each center reserved for students with fever symptoms. Invigilators will take students’ temperatures as they enter the exam center in carefully spaced groups. Students will be given two masks each to wear during the exam. Any students with fever or respiratory symptoms will be directed to the separate exam rooms, which will have capacity for up to 20 students. Invigilators will wear protective clothing.
Tseng Tsan-chin
Taipei Education Dept.
Currently the plan is four special rooms per center, each of which can accommodate about five students, four in each corner and one in the center. So the capacity is 20. Students in self-isolation at home or in quarantine will not be able to attend exams. We will use official data to manage this. Students in that situation only will be permitted to attend special extra exam sittings on May 30 and 31.
Across Taiwan, more than 209,000 teenagers will take the exam. This is the first time in history a second round of CAP sittings has been arranged. The test questions are by National Taiwan Normal University’s Research Center for Psychological and Educational Testing, which will produce a second exam booklet of equal difficulty. Officials hope that will mean all students get a fair crack at the test.
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