你相信奇蹟嗎？

First of all, thanks a lot for your crit­i­cism. It is because only through the eval­u­a­tion of argu­ments of both sides, we can get a clearer pic­ture of the situation.

Before we can com­pare your case with the case I men­tioned, we must clar­ify whether we are tak­ing about some­thing sim­i­lar, oth­er­wise the com­par­i­son is not fair and not valid.

When I say 100, it is actu­ally 105 out of 800 which means about 1 stan­dard devi­a­tion in SAT test. If you are tak­ing about a total of 240 in crit­i­cal read­ing and writ­ing, does it mean 240 out of 1600 ? If this is the case, the improve­ment is more or less the same or a lit­tle bit bet­ter because the assess­ment of improve­ment also depends on the actual final score accord­ing to the law of dimin­ish­ing return.

More impor­tantly, did you take 3 con­sec­u­tive tests in 6 months as the stu­dent I men­tioned and got the results of the sec­ond test almost exactly the same of the first test after 3 months of seri­ous study ? Ref­er­ence : How did the project start and what was the result so far ?

If your answers are all yes to my ques­tions, then we may use your case for a fair com­par­i­son oth­er­wise the improve­ment may be due to inad­e­quate prepa­ra­tion of the first test rather than a gen­uine improve­ment in ver­bal ability.

More­over, I never said that voca­blearn­ing is the only pos­si­ble way to improve the sit­u­a­tion. If any­body can pro­vide us a fea­si­ble alter­na­tive to close the per­for­mance gap, I will sim­ply walk away peace­fully. Ref­er­ence : The Starfish Story; $500,000 – a Dis­proof or an Alter­na­tive wanted Would you mind telling us more about how you got 240 marks more and how long the whole process took? I am sure that you got 240 marks more not by NOT doing voca­blearn­ing but by doing some­thing else.

Fur­ther­more, my claim is not only based on this iso­lated inci­dence. Sim­i­lar results were also observed in 2(not 1) years of Form 7 chem­istry stu­dents with another year of chem­istry stu­dents not using the sys­tem in the mid­dle and 1 form of Form 1 stu­dents using the same sys­tem to study chem­istry and Eng­lish vocab­u­lary respec­tively. The improve­ment is sta­tis­ti­cally sig­nif­i­cant and with high con­fi­dence lev­els. Iso­lated cases give us insights while gen­er­al­ized cases give us confidence.

For the case of the Alevel stu­dent men­toned, get­ting 4As in HKCEE is not as dif­fi­cult as you think and get­ting 4As in HKAL is not as easy as it seems to be. Ref­er­ence : Pre­sen­ta­tion Slides pre­sented to the School Man­age­ment Com­mit­tee pg32. The chart showed that there were quite a num­ber of stu­dents who got more than 6As in HKCEE stayed put in Wah Yan to take the ALevel. The red line rep­re­sents the aver­age per­for­mance of Wahyan­ites in the last 13 years and each dot rep­re­sents the per­for­mance of a real stu­dent in HKCEE and ALevel. There were a lot of F7 Wahyan­ites who got more than 4As in their HKCEE but nobody except one who got 9As and 1B in HKCEE man­aged to get 4As in HKALE. The case I men­tioned is really an excep­tional feat. There­fore, I asked the stu­dent to write a tes­ti­monal for me for what he did shortly after the release of his result. Ref­er­ence : A Tes­ti­mo­nial of Revi­sion Organizer

Stricter F1 recruit­ment will be fea­si­ble only if there are more than enough bril­liant stu­dents choos­ing our school. Could you ask $1000 for a bot­tle of Coke if nobody really agrees to pay that much? You may keep ask­ing nonethe­less. At present, we are already admit­ting only the best stu­dents who are choos­ing us. 70% of our F1 stu­dents are already in the HK top 20% per­centile. If they can upkeep their rel­a­tive aca­d­e­mic achieve­ment in the pop­u­la­tion, the UGC-admission rate of the school should be about 75.5% rather than the present fig­ure of 28.1%.

The main point of my argu­ment is not about the absolute per­for­mance but the change in per­for­mance of the stu­dents in the whole process, thus what value we can cre­ate for our stu­dents. Even if we aban­don our feeder school all in a sud­den irre­spon­si­bly, do you think the rel­a­tive per­for­mance gap cre­ated by the whole process will close auto­mat­i­cally by itself with­out doing anything ?

This only swaps a group of stu­dents that we fail to man­age prop­erly with another group of stu­dents. No real change is tak­ing place under­neath. The whole soci­ety will not ben­e­fit from the swap. We only shift some­thing that we don’t have the courage to face to some­body else.

Lastly, the case of Oxford admis­sion was spe­cial not because it was Oxford but because of the miss­ing of admis­sion dead­line. Do you know any wahyan­ites or any stu­dents of any schools who got admit­ted to Prince­ton, Cam­bridge or Oxford despite miss­ing of admis­sion dead­line? I am very inter­ested to know.

Peo­ple Often Don’t Want to Hear the Truth
An excerpt from Hard facts, dan­ger­ous half-truths, and total non­sense : prof­it­ing from evidence-based man­age­ment / Jef­frey Pfef­fer, Robert I. Sut­ton. (Har­vard Busi­ness School Press)

這只是機會率的問題,你還沒遇到而且.