<p>U.S. students may complain about standardized tests, but the importance of such testing is mild compared to the impact in some Asian countries.</p>
<p>A NYTimes article calls the "gaokao" test in China, a college entrance exam, " the single most important test any Chinese citizen can take." </p>
<p>Because the test is a major factor in which university a student can attend, the score is believed to affect the rest of the student's life. Even more than in the U.S., the university one attends in China can have a major impact on career prospects. This high stakes test is coming in for criticism:
[quote]
But debate appears to have grown more heated lately over the value of the gaokao (pronounced gow-kow). Critics say the exam promotes the kind of rote learning that is endemic to education in China and that hobbles creativity. It leads to enormous psychological strain on students, especially in their final year of high school. In various ways, the system favors students from large cities and well-off families, even though it was designed to create a level playing field among all Chinese youth.
<p>The importance of the test leads to extreme behavior. One viral video showed students cramming for the test hooked up to intravenous drips of amino acids. In another case, a student wasn't told of her father's death for two months to avoid upsetting her before the exam. </p>
<p>One reason students are under such pressure is the extreme selectivity of China's top schools. The article estimates the acceptance rate at Peking University at 0.5%, less than a tenth of Harvard's.</p>
<p>All this makes the U.S. process seem rather benign!</p>
<p>I’ve talked to a number of foreign students from India and China, and from what I’ve heard, the entire school environment is different. It certainly sounds stressful and somewhat absurd to many of us, but it’s a completely different culture.</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard, first hand, the acceptance rate is much, much higher than 0.5%. Peking University is the size of USC, not Harvard, which allows more students to attend. In addition, not as many people apply to Peking as to Harvard, since students can only apply to 3 colleges. Almost no one applies for a reach school since everyone has a rough estimate of their test score range, and they don’t want to waste one of their 3 choices.</p>
<p>TLDR Peking University acceptance rate NOT 0.5%, but still difficult to get into.</p>
<p>Don’t know anything about China but it certainly gets absurd here in India.I basically did not get into any of the so called top colleges after securing about 60,000 rank among 1,060,000 candidates in an exam.</p>
<p>I watched a documentary about this over exams! It helped me stop complaining about how much I had to study.
They followed this girl whose mother quit her job and moved to an apartment near the school so that she could do everything for her daughter so that she could spend more time studying. They said something like she got up for school at 5:30 AM, classes ended at 9PM, and then she studied until midnight! She ended up doing really well and went to the top uni. in China but, I don’t think I could handle it! </p>
<p>It was called Chinese School and it was on BBC. I think they have the majority of it on Youtube though.</p>
<p>I have cousins who have to worry about this. Not everyone’s as desperate as the mom mentioned by allyjay.</p>
<p>It probably does come down to culture. Anyone remember the Confucian examination system (AP world history!) for prospective government employees? That exam lasted days and examiners had to eat and sleep in their exam rooms. Some even died during the exam!</p>
<p>acceptance rate at Peking University varies highly from province to province as the university allocate certain number of admissions for each province. One year it was >1% for Beijing applicants but it was 10 times lower for many other provinces. OTOH, Beijing students applying for Shanghai universities are facing the same long odds.</p>
<p>High stakes testing in East Asian countries is nothing new. I do not know why China’s test is only recently come under scrutiny. Japan and South Korea have been relying heavily on some form of standardized exam/s for the past few decades to determine college admissions, although they are slowly trying to break away form that.</p>
<p>In South Korea, the college entrance exam is such a big deal that one day every year Korea changes its plane schedules and redirects traffic away from testing areas to provide students with a quiet environment while taking the test.</p>
<p>@ moviepopcorn China does a similar thing, or at least used to. Traffic isn’t allowed and they have security all around the buildings. Parents usually stand outside the entire time waiting for their kids.</p>
<p>I feel that acceptance rates are more than 1% for ALL provinces. Are you basing this on the number of people who apply, or the number of people who take the test?</p>
<p>I know that the local high school in my mom’s hometown regularly sends around 10 students to Qinghua, the number 1 or 2 college. Chinese high schools are ranked, and that high school is the Seventh in the city. Class size ~300.</p>
<p>The hysteria here is ridiculous. Better than it was some forty years ago when my mom was applying to colleges (96% of all students received no acceptances), and when the exams were in July and temperatures would soar to 40+, but still, ridiculous.</p>
<p>/me is glad he attends an international school.</p>
<p>To whoever said that they re-rout traffic in Korea on that test day: Not true. I lived in Seoul for 4 years, and no such traffic was redirected (I also lived near a woman’s university for a while, and a church, and a school…);</p>
<p>Sorry, I was mistaken. While traffic is not explicitly re-routed per se, “the National Police Agency asks motorists not to honk their horns near schools and teams of volunteers and special police units work as traffic managers. The US military halts live-fire training and aviation missions to give test-takers quiet time. The South Korean stock market opens late and closes early. Even the aggressive farmers protesting the rice market opening agreed to mellow out for the day.”</p>
<p>The quote comes from an article called “Life and Death Exams in South Korea” by James Card written in 2005, though I do not know if South Korea still does this.</p>
<p>symptoms of the plight of modern-day education. can you imagine what kind of stress these Chinese students have to deal with? it certainly must cause them psychological/emotional problems to some degree, depending on the individual’s psychological makeup. sure, education’s important, but it’s devastating to place it as one’s top goal in life where the more important things in life (family, friends, relations to other human beings) are valueless compared to higher education. misplaced values, the “Little Emperor” generation caused by the one-child policy, materialism are a number of problems that have been threatening Chinese society and will continue to if parents continue entrenching these dangerous values into their children.
what difference does it make if a student makes it into China’s top university, yet has been taught that nothing matters more than making a name, fame and fortune for yourself, to not even sacrifice some of your “study” time to help the hurting human being next door or is just a phone call or email away? i just hope this or the next generation of Chinese will stop inheriting such worthless values from their parents! a highly education indivdual who is heartless is just a useless product of education. back in the ancient days, students pursue education with the goal of making society a better place. nowadays, as in China’s example, education is a way to prove oneself’s worth and to make more money and have more power. such is the plight of modern-day education. do educators teach morals and ethics in the classrooms, in the universities? i guess not. otherwise, why is there so much fraud, corruption, and injustice in all aspects of Chinese society, trailing from the govn’t to the industries, to the courts? the problem is the pursuit of material gain while the Chinese gov’t seeks to eliminate from the face of Chinese society the most important thing upon which moral standards are based upon (care to discuss about Christianity anyone?)</p>
<p>In Japan and Korea, things like grades and ECs are not nearly weighed as heavily as performance on standardized tests.</p>
<p>Standardized tests are so important because admission into an elite university guarantees success, despite a student’s performance in said university.</p>
<p>Though it seems unreasonable as a method to select students, it is still vital in China. Since comparing with other methods, Gaokao can effectively reduce illegal activities such as bribe which is very common in many aspects in China. Imagine China without Gaokao. At that time, people with power or money can easily send their children to universities, while the poor face more difficulty when their children want to attend university.</p>
<p>Similar stuff happens in India with exams like the IITJEE and the AIEEE. 500,000 students write IITJEE and less than 10,000 get into the top IITs.</p>
<p>There are even schools made specifically for teaching students the knowledge ( which is not included in the normal high school curriculum) required to get a decent rank in these colleges.</p>
<p>Moreover, these exams are the ONLY factor in admissions into most engineering colleges.</p>
