TNAG-1072-FCO40-1322-Policy-of-the-Government-of-Hong-Kong-on-education-1981 — Page 132

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ACHIEVEMENT OF THE COURSES' AIMS

Members do not consider that the professionally related aims of the Hong Kong Baptist College courses can be achieved. These are to provide a technician level of training at year 2 and to educate a professional engineer by the end of year 3. The main reason is that the staff are academically rather than professionally inclined and qualified.

Most of the Honours Diplomates (80% perhaps) and most of the students who succeed in the Senior Diploma and do not enter the subsequent year will enter Hong Kong industry. The staff however have consciously attempted to make the final year specifically academic and even 'research' oriented and indeed members find that a number of electives on the course are of specialised theoretical interest which will contribute more to postgraduate study than to professional practice. The inclusion of this kind of theoretical work means that more practical studies, for example traffic engineering, and more geotechnics have to be omitted despite their great relevance to Hong Kong.

This

It is to be hoped, with the establishment of an advisory committee for Civil Engineering, that the staff will be able to take account of the needs of the Hong Kong industry in the future design of their courses. should counteract what members see as a lack of professional and industrial advice in the development of the course.

Hong Kong Baptist College could offer various courses, but it seems to members that the type of course which the present staff would be best able to present would be a course in structural engineering of good academic quality but of only limited professional and practical aspirations.

The Higher Diploma course at the Polytechnic has been devised with the intention to provide an education for technician engineers. The quality of the students is very high, however, and staff find that to keep the students' intellectual curiosity active it is necessary to teach material beyond the declared aim of the course. In this manner material beyond the aims of the course has. been covered and many students have aspirations beyond what the course intends.

It is the Polytechnic staff's hope that once the government's attitude has been clarified and the CEI review in May 1981 is complete it will be possible to