June 7, 2010
China Begins to Reform Its Controversial College-Entrance Exam
AFP Photo
A Chinese student makes her way out past police guarding the gate to a school after the nation's annual college-entrance exams. Chinese officials tightened security at test sessions in response to school attacks and concerns over cheating.
This week millions of Chinese teenagers are undertaking one of the most stressful experiences of their young lives: the annual college-entrance examination, known as thegaokao.Their scores will determine not only where they go to college but what they will study.
During the two-day exam, 9.57 million students will compete for 6.57 million places at China's universities, from elite research institutions to small vocational colleges.
In an increasingly competitive economic environment, where students end up studying is key to their future, gaokaofailures can expect to work on farms or in factories under bleak conditions, while top scorers will gain entree into the cosmopolitan cities of China's east coast.
Passing thegaokaoremains "the only real route for families to get their perfect, precious bundle into a higher income bracket," says Heidi A Ross, director of the East Asian Studies Center at Indiana University at Bloomington, and an expert ongaokaoreform.
Now, China's education ministry—and a number of provinces and universities—are trying to change that equation, albeit modestly.
In a recent 10-year education reform and development plan, ministry officials acknowledged the unfairness of "a single examination that defines a student's destiny."
The primary means of gaining entrance to college will remain the standardized national exam, but the ministry is encouraging universities to design their own "university-based assessment" to identify candidates with special talents. This effort is part of a broader government goal to develop a more independent higher-education system, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.
The grading system for thegaokaohas historically been complex, opaque, and based on residence rights. Provinces first set a local-student quota for each college and major, then work out what portion of students to take from other parts of China.
This system hands a huge advantage to pupils in Beijing or Shanghai, who automatically have a better chance of getting into a top-flight university than do out-of-towners with higher scores.
As partial compensation, individual students receive bonus points to lift their scores if they come from ethnic minorities, are orphans with a parent who was a police officer, or belong to other underprivileged groups.
This framework has not changed, and will be hard to pick apart. However under some recent reforms, some provinces now give bonus points to students who win competitions in mathematics or English. Such contests are widespread and often televised.
Critics of those new scoring criteria, however, say they can intensify pressure on candidates and are widely perceived as even more elitist than the current system, thus intensifying China's cram-school culture rather than curing it.
A small number of universities are developing their own exams and interviews, offering conditional admissions to students.
The problem, says Wang Yimin, a doctoral student and researcher at Indiana Bloomington, is that success in this process is impossible for anyone without an urban education, which is far superior than what is offered in rural areas.
"This policy is basically favoring those students who are very elite. They probably do well in exams, so whatever channel they go through, they can be admitted," she says.
Ms. Wang cites the example of Shanghai's Fudan University which is trying harder to recruit from rural areas, but tests students in 10 subjects, compared with six commonly taken for thegaokao.
"Some students haven't studied these subjects in high schools," Ms. Wang says.
Another new entrance model allows some institutions, mainly the elite ones, to accept students based on recommendations by high-school principals. Peking University started admitting up to 3 percent of its students on such recommendations, starting last fall.
It's a controversial policy, though, as some fear corruption could enter into the admissions process. Nor does it guarantee diversity, critics say, as principals would most likely recommend students who scored well on the exams anyway.
An online poll on the SOHU news Web site found that 79 percent of respondents were against this method, and only 10 percent in favor.
"Bigwigs control the recommendation system," one commenter wrote.
Other reforms emphasize different types of skills.
Most provinces test students on the compulsory core subjects—Chinese, math and English—plus three other subjects that vary for arts or science students.
Recent experiments focus on spoken English communication skills rather than on written exams.
Reformers know that any changes they make risk unleashing fresh resentment. Certain groups, including disadvantaged groups, would resist losing the special considerations they get in the exam-review process, for example.
Bonus points are so desirable that 31 students in Chongqing, in central China, faked minority identities to scoop up extra points last year, including the city's top-scoring student, the Xinhua new agency reported.
The Chongqing scandal illustrates both how corruption has seeped into the system and how complicated the reform process will be.
As long as the gulf in quality between urban and rural schools remains,gaokaocan be a lightening rod for wider resentments.
"There's a tremendous amount of energy going into rethinking these proposals," says Ms. Ross. "But it's just beginning to crack the nut."