Page 77 - FSTE A5 Handbook

Students’ Evaluation of the Benefits of GE Courses at Sub-degree Level

During the focus group interviews, achieving a higher academic result was a very high
priority for all of the students, since getting a higher GPA was an important factor for degree
articulation:
“If you are talking about my study in associate degree, I think it will pretty much affect my
grade. It is because I wanted to focus on the subject that I wanted to take. I would be happy if
I study the courses that I like. It would usually turn out to be well in grades. It is because we
aimed at getting into university; GPA became of utmost importance and so as for grades.
Then, you would learn that GE could be dragging you away from good grades. Therefore you
would choose those courses that you are confident to do them well, be it a repeated course.”

The survey results also supported this finding. 66.6% of the respondents considered their
chance of getting higher GPA was moderately or seriously affected by GE courses that they did
not have confidence in.
Some students in the double cohort year came from the A-level programme. These students
found the contents of the GE courses easily and manageable. They felt they had the advantage
to easily achieve higher grades:

“From a utilitarian perspective, as we have just mentioned, we once had a course, Chinese
Language and Culture which was something we had studied for the A-level examination before.
Since our year was the double cohort year in which we had both A-level and DSE students, the
latter would be disadvantaged as they did not seem to have studied enough in the area of
Chinese Language and Culture. So seeing this from a utilitarian perspective, we’re born to obtain
a higher grade. The grade differences between the two groups were huge, but unsurprisingly.”

Students were quite conscious of their ability about whether they could do well with GE
courses. It has become one of the determining factors in deciding which programme they
enrolled in.

“I feel it is usually GE that makes my GPA low. This is evidenced because my GE grades have
never been good, be it in my higher diploma study or degree. Therefore, I chose to study a
higher diploma programme instead of an associate degree. The weighting of GE in the former
is lower than that in the latter.”

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