I have spent the past week in the Shenzhen, a city located just north of Hong Kong. It’s one of China’s first Special Economic Zones, which means that the city is granted management policies and more flexible government control to encourage business growth and prosperity. The city itself is noticeably more modern and prosperous than many other cities in mainland China.
We happened to be there when scores for the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, commonly known as Gao Kao, were released. The exam is taken mostly by students in their last year of high school, although there are no age restrictions, as the only prerequisite for entrance into higher education in mainland China. Every year the scores of this government-sanctioned exam fluctuate, which in turn means that standards into the most prestiguous universities (such as Peking University and Qinghua University) change from year to year. The highest scores typically gain entrance into the best schools, and the gao kao score is the only prerequisite considered for admisson.
The problem for many is that Beijing students are given priority into Beijing University and Tsinghua University, also located in the capital, simply due to their residency. Other schools offer the same favor to students in their respective areas, but some schools like Shenzhen University are typically ranked so low that the city’s students grimance at any mention of attending. There are simply too many students vying for a position at only a few quality universities, and as such it is almost impossible for students in certain provinces to gain entrance to a top-notch school.Thus some families retain residency records in large cities such as Shanghai and Beijing even if they move to a smaller or different area in the hopes of earning their children a better education.
Likewise, although SAT scores in America have long been contested for beingin accurate and unfair depictions of students’ apitude and knowledge, standardized tests can be retaken time and time again while a variety of other factors like GPA and essays are also considered. With only one administration of the gao kao, anything from a slight cold to a bad night’s sleep could literally jeorpardize a student’s college career and consequently his future. There are a select few students (less than one percent of all incoming college freshmen in China) who are exempt from testing due to extraordinary ability or demonstrated talent; a few others are given special priority due to ethnicity, Taiwanese residency and military affiliation. The rest are at the mercy of a thick packet of paper, pencils, their brains and hopefully enough luck to get them into (an okay) college.
My mother has a friend in Shenzhen whose daughter opted not to take gao kao and spent her final year of high school studying at home to raise her SAT score and navigate her way through English college applications (all of which, she told me, she spent just as much time trying to read as filling out) to study abroad. The small desk in her room is piled with Chinese-English textbooks covering everything from AP Calculus to the chemistry SAT Subject Test to American US history, which was hard enough for me as an American student, yet alone a Chinese student with little grasp of English and even less knowledge of how America works. She told me stories of trying to sign up to take her SAT, for which the nearest testing site is in Hong Kong, and panicking while the ETS employee on the other end of the phone irritably repeated instructions over and over; of writing her essays in Chinese and then translating them to English; of trying to figure out how to obtain her ninth grade transcript when it is the last grade of middle school in China and records are poor, if not sometimes nonexistent after graduation.
Her efforts eventually resulted in her acceptance in University of California-Berkeley. And that, she told me, made the hours of frantically cramming SAT vocabulary and poring over a second language worth it; even with only a few months of preparation, Berkeley will probably offer a better education than any other school she would have tested into in mainland China after 11 years of learning.
Maybe we American kids really do have it easier. We can choose majors depending on taste, not how high we scored in each subject in comparison to everybody else. Not only do colleges and universities in the US consider much more than one test score, but they look for individuality and passion (or claim to) instead of a number characterized by long hours spent diligently at a desk.
Perhaps this is why Chinese mothers, such as Amy Chua, the “Tiger Mother”, are notorious for being harsh on their kids: for them, there is often no way to even have a chance at quality education if their student is not at the very top.
Note: Senior County Line co-editor, Amy Yu, is traveling to China this summer and will post story updates on her experiences.
