From the Independent

Chinese pupils prepare to sit the exams that will decide their fate

By Clifford Coonan in Beijing
Wednesday, 9 June 2010


You can hear a pin drop, the clock is ticking down, and your future depends on the Chinese characters you are putting to paper in front of you. College entrance exam time in China, which began yesterday, brings the kind of pressures that would break most children, in Britain and elsewhere. Fail these exams and a secure place in the New China is lost.

Outside the exam hall gates, mothers wait for exams to end, having visited temples of Confucius, the site of examinations in imperial times, having burnt incense, lit candles, made offerings and prayed for success. Many will have spent a hefty £20 on a tablet on which they have written a note saying: "Please help my child pass the exams."

The exam is called the "gaokao" and it decides whether or not a student gets into college. Nearly 70 per cent get through, but the slide down the academic food chain for those who fail can be intense. Earlier this week two students from Hebei province committed suicide, overwhelmed by the pressure to perform. The temptation to cheat for some is too great.

It is common for families to book a hotel for the duration of the exams, in quiet roads away from traffic, patrolled by police officers who understand the need to keep the streets clear and quiet. Any motorist beeping their horn near an examination centre risks becoming the centre of a riot.

The one-child policy of birth control means that many of the candidates sitting these exams are only children, bearing a weighty burden of expectation from aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins. The family needs them to get into Tsinghua or Peking University in Beijing or Fudan in Shanghai to secure the family's future.

Because of the declining birth rate and the increase in the numbers going overseas, the number of mostly sixth-formers sitting the exams has fallen significantly. This year, there are 9.57 million students sitting the three-day exam, 650,000 fewer than last year. It is the second straight year of decrease, according to the Ministry of Education. The peak was in 2008, when 10.53 million sat the exam.

"It mirrors the decreasing birth rate caused by the one-child policy," Wang Guangzhou, a researcher in demography at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the China Daily.

The ability of an increasingly wealthy Chinese middle-class to send their children abroad, coupled with, to some, the perceived superiority of education outside of China, has also contributed to the falling numbers taking the exam. Data shows that about 220,000 students went to study overseas in 2009, 50,000 more than in 2008.

"Chinese parents have more choices and are able to make their own judgement on the education quality of Chinese and foreign universities," said Wang Huiyao, vice-chairman of the China Western Returned Scholars Association. Some of the scholarships on offer are remarkably attractive. Shanghai's Fudan has promised 50,000 yuan (£5,000) to applicants who are in the top five in their provinces.

Such lures also bring in the cheats, and over the years there have been some inventive ones. One student suffered a perforated eardrum after he lost a tiny listening device, measuring just 3mm across, inside his ear.

Another student needed an operation to have a hearing device removed while a student who had strapped an electronic recording device to his body was taken to hospital after it exploded.

In one exam hall in Wuhan, examiners found more than 100 devices to help the students cheat, including more conventional items for the would-be cheat such as laptops and mobile phones, as well as tiny transmitting devices hidden in vests, wallets and the waistbands of trousers.

Some universities have installed cameras and mobile-phone blocking technology inside exam halls to stop people using technology to cheat.

Chinese university exam question: why do cats chase mice if fish are plentiful? - Telegraph

Quote:

Tuesday is the day that every Chinese teenager dreads, when some 9 million students file into examination halls across the country to compete for a limited number of coveted university places. The experience, according to an old Chinese saying, is like "an army of ten thousand horses trying cross a single log bridge", with the successful candidates having to find answers to questions that would make the average British A-Level student blanche. Most feared of all are the abstruse essay questions, redolent of the one-word essay prompt recently dropped from the All Soul's entrance exam, that are worth up to 40 per cent of the final marks and intended to sort the wheat from the chaff. This year's national question showed a cartoon of three cats sitting at a table eating fish while disparaging a fourth cat trying to catch a rat. "Why chase mice when there are fish to eat?" asked the paper, inviting students to respond in an 800-character essay. The elliptical nature of such questions attracts great interest on the Chinese internet, where every year furious debates rage about the true meaning of the questions, with leading bloggers and writers posting their own efforts at answering them. Other prompts this year included "Looking at the stars with your feet on the ground", a line from a poem written by Chinese premier Wen Jiabao in 2007; "The world I live in" and "recovering childhood". Observers looking for themes in this year's tests noticed that sustainability and the environment recurred in several of the questions set by provincial examining boards. In Shanghai, the essay question was titled "Danish Fisherman", accompanied by a quotation from the Chinese philosopher-sage Mencius: "If fine nets do not enter the pools, there will be more fish and turtles than can be eaten." The numbers of Chinese graduates has risen sharply in recent years – from 1.5m in 2002 to an estimated 6m this year – as the country seeks to improve skills and technological innovation in a bid to move up the manufacturing value chain. However, even those lucky enough to win places in higher education have no guarantee of success, with some 2 million new graduates failing to find jobs last year in an investment-driven economy that is growing fast but failing to create significant numbers of new jobs. Even those that do find employment often find the pay disappointing after years in which their families have often invested a large proportion of life savings in their education. According to a government survey in the manufacturing heartland of Guangdong, the average salary of university graduates in the province was 1,699 yuan (£170) a month, which is less than many unqualified factory workers can expect to earn with overtime.

In theory these are the sort of questions I'd love to get in an exam. In practice everyone memorises a bunch of set phrases and chucks in some praise for the Party and a tedious moral lesson.

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