Examination Damnation

For the past year, Liu Qichao has focused on one thing, and only one thing: the gao kao, or the high test. Fourteen to 16 hours a day, he studied for the college entrance examination, which this year will determine the fate of more than 10 million Chinese students. He took one day off every three weeks.

Though the energy of the group of young ladies at the neighborhood cafe was frenetic, they hardly seemed nervous to me. Perhaps it was the phenomenon of a traumatic experience shared that put them at ease; or perhaps they had already gone through the worst of the battery of exams. Whatever the reason, I was glad I was not a young Chinese whose fate rested on a single set of exams, and whose desires were compressed by family expectations from the bottom, and by a government whose policies were stacked against the students from on top.

Chinese and Western media around this time of year focus a lot of discussion on the efficacy of the Chinese examination system. James Fallows recently published several letters from Chinese and non-Chinese alike on their experiences with and perceptions of the system.

One of the most telling points to surface about the examination system that Chinese had to say reminds a bit of what Churchill said of democracy: “Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Chinese believe that Western systems of university admittance - letters of recommendation, community involvement, extracurricular activities, essays, grades and test scores - are too easily rigged in China. And though certain cities have lower standards of entry for their own residents than for those from other cities - and especially from the countryside - Chinese see the exams as flawed yet objective-as-they’re-ever-going-to-be measures of intellectual ability and stamina, difficult to corrupt.

Nevertheless, I tend to side with one young Chinese lady in Fallow’s thread who just graduated university and is heading off to Harvard for graduate school. Her point is that it is not the examination system that is so much so much at fault as the locally-funded schools - which reminds me a great deal of the arguments State-side about how local schools are funded by the property taxes of the communities in which the schools are located: the ghetto gets zip while “the North suburbs” (or wherever one finds the affluent in America) gets a great deal more.

No matter the examination system in use, if the schools are funded well enough and teachers well-enough trained in China then Chinese would be passing the exams in the tens of millions each year, instead of just the millions. As it is, the Central Government is having enough difficulty generating jobs for the graduates of the new millennium, of whom there are twice as many now graduating per year as there were even eight years ago. Imagine if the government was then responsible for the creation and maintenance of high-end jobs for half its population, instead of just the small fraction it is now.

Certainly, the current elite (whether political and/or the nouveau riche) would find themselves under threat by a new, brighter group that would be far larger than them and emboldened to rock the boat 1989-style due to the lack of opportunities and because of a lack of forgiveness over how the elite had “rigged the system” to benefit itself.

Little do those young ladies I met at the cafe know.

Good luck to them, nonetheless.