staging a national education conference late last month. Its effects were ruined almost as soon as the curtain fell on the event, however, because junior high schools held as usual a first academic competence test for third-year students on the first day of the new semester. The test shows that there has been no change in the deeply entrenched 'scores first mentality' among our grown-ups, despite all these years of education reform hype. When the last national education conference took place 16 years ago, a large number of proposals were presented, with the hope of lessening the pressure on young students to get into a few prestigious senior high schools and universities. The practice of using scores from written examinations to determine school admission remains unchanged. During the just-concluded conference, a flurry of topics were brought up, ranging from a white paper on education policy for the next decade to strategies for coping with the declining number of students amid the falling birth rate. The agenda, however, did not touch on how to reduce the workload on students. Education administrators should stop their empty talk and come up with a concrete timetable for implementing a 12-year compulsory education system, along with other measures to reduce the pressure on our youngsters caused by their heavy workload. (Editorial abstract -- Sept. 3, 2010). 