The Office of Teaching Excellence Projects announced that according to the 2007 Student English Proficiency Test Award Statistics, TKU had 1665 students passed GEPT, including 361 having passed the advanced preliminary test of GEPT. The College of Foreign Languages and Literatures pulled out the first with 540 students passed, and the runner-up, the College of Business had 450. The College of Management had 358. In terms of the departments, the Department of English won the first place with 319 students past, the Department of International Trade got the 2nd place with 216 passed while the 3rd, the Department of Business Administration had 107.

First Class Award applicant, sophomore Tourism major, Xin-shan Cai mentioned that in addition to test her English proficiency, taking part in the GEPT was very helpful for her plan to study abroad in her junior year. PhD. candidate Jun-wen Chen from the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering scored 765 in TOEIC, and he said that taking part in the TOEIC training courses by the university and following the teachers’ instructions and systematically preparing for the test, one could naturally get high scores.

Vice President for Academic Affairs , Kan-nan Chen indicated that participating in the GEPT, you would obtain an extra “Graduation Certificate” for future employment. He would like to continually encourage and invigorate students to participate in it by offering more awards. For this academic year, TKU is continuing to hand out awards to successful participants until March 24, 2009. Students can download the application form from the website by the Office of Teaching Excellence Projects: http://excellent.tku.edu.tw. Submitting the qualified GEPT certificates after August 1, 2008 and relevant documents to their departments, students will have the opportunity to win the awards.

To enhance students’ English proficiency, in addition to awards for the successful GEPT participants, the university also requires students to reach a certain English level before graduation. All day-time students enrolled in September, 2008 must pass the preliminary test of the Intermediate GEPT or its equivalence before graduation. All students at Lanyang Campus must have TOEFL (IBT) 61 or IELTS 5.5 and up. Language major freshman Jun-ren Liao expressed that he would prepare to take the GEPT early to meet the graduation requirement. ( ~ Dean X. Wang )