The Coordinating Committee on Basic Competency Assessment and Assessment Literacy submitted a report on the review of the Territory-wide System Assessment (TSA) to the education secretary on Thursday. The report contains a number of recommendations in response to recent controversies surrounding the test.

The public may or may not fully understand what purpose the TSA serves, but school administrators, teachers and parents whose children are still at school should know it was conceived for good reasons.

Those who jumped on the TSA-bashing bandwagon lately need to ask themselves what exactly they found so unacceptable about the TSA which they wouldn't find in any other school test. And ask the politicians who lined up a bunch of schoolchildren in public and made them shout slogans they probably did not understand anyway why they single the TSA out? What exactly makes it so dreadful compared with other exams which we all take at some point in our lives?

Most of us hated examinations when we were at school but what did we know then? Now most of us understand why they exist, otherwise they should probably have been phased out by now. Exams are here to stay whether one likes them or not.

Our primary and secondary education system costs billions of dollars in public resources each year. There has to be a way for the public as well as the government to know so much money is being reasonably well spent. It should be noted that the education authorities never claimed the TSA would be a benchmark test in the first place. In fact, it has only provided all parties concerned with some sample data for reference with the ultimate purpose of improving the education system.

That said, the desire to reduce the pressure this exam has put on pupils and parents is also valid. The steps - including exempting 90 percent of primary schools from the Primary Three assessment this year and making the test less demanding - announced by the Education Bureau on Thursday are therefore most welcome.

If students' interests are the main concern in this controversy, then there really is no insurmountable divide between the parents and the education authorities. We must be on guard against politics being introduced into the deliberations on the TSA. Otherwise, the controversy will never be resolved in the best interests of the students.

(HK Edition 02/05/2016 page9)