Shanghai's millions of primary school students will have an easy time this autumn, a traditional season for mid-term examinations.

The city's education reforms will focus on alleviating academic pressures on school students, from this year onwards. Henceforth students of grades one and two will not have mid-term exams and those from grades three to five will have more flexible academic assessments instead of the mid-term exams, today's Oriental Morning Post reported.

The reform will introduce a guideline and each school will apply the same, depending on their own limitations.

Though the reform varies among districts, the key purpose remains the same; that is to relieve the students of academic pressures, according to Fang Yin who is with the Yangpu District Educational Commission.  Fang is in charge of the district's primary school management.

Another reformatory act (prior to the mid-term exam cancellation) deals with the score report system, Fang noted.

The previous student handbook which records test scores has been replaced with a brochure called "student growth record book". Instead of the rigid assessments such as "good", "excellent" or "fail", lenient encouraging wording as "you need more hard work" will appear in the book, according to Zhu Jianwei, with Shanghai Education Commission's primary education division.

(Shanghai Daily News November 4, 2004)