CHINA, SOCIETY, EDUCATION, Opinion: Everything is Down, Except Tests

By Lianne Li

Even before being able to hold a pen, I was repeatedly exposed to the truth of life: Everything is down, except study. Any of my distracted peeping out of the window, idly gazing and head scratching was prone to receive my father's thunderous roars: "You girl with no future! What's the sense of keeping you, huh?" In order to convince me, he cut off the TV cable at the discovery of my secret infringement of his ban on watching my favorite cartoons.

I began to get the sense of my father's roars later, with gratitude: In this country, entrance to a fine college is the first knock on future's door, if your future is to elevate above jobless high school graduates and low-paid vocational school graduates.

But entering college is like having a thousand troops cross a narrow footlog--in this most populous country, only three out of five average junior-high graduates get to enter high school; four out of five average high school graduates get to enter college, and for an average high school graduate to enter a prestigious university is to be one out of a thousand.

So there's no wonder at the swarms of parents waiting at the examination-section border, or at the news of a student killing himself for failing a catastrophically complex Mathematics test. A test is a test, and marks are the lifeline of students. There is no way to argue your way into college for lack of one or two marks. A mark can drag you above two thousand test-takers and onto your dream college's admission list, or push you down to the catch-22 of choosing between another grisly year of test preparation and an unwanted major in an unthinkable college.

In the present schooling system, no one cares whether you can play several instruments if you pass the test for a science degree; no one cares whether you are great at oil-painting if you fail tests to be allowed to pursue an art degree.

The question is simple: Pass or fail? If you pass whatever, worthy of your devotion or not, you are among the most educated group; if not, you are out. For Cheng Danqing, an art professor at Tsinghua University, it was a disheartening breakthrough to see the truth that has been inherently seen by students. After five years of futile effort to admit one post-graduate student of art with talent and enough English and politics marks in the post-graduate exam, he handed in his resignation with no hesitation last October.

"I don't intend any misunderstanding for Tsinghua University. My resignation is my private issue and education is the public issue. What I criticize is the general policy of admission and examination as well as the current academic administration instead of any specific school," he said, after enclosing his resignation letter in his book The Collection of Regression, an observation of current art development of China. "By my observation, the domestic art education, whether in fundamental studies or high-level studies, has two unspoken clear-cut objectives that have been reached: firstly preserving its furnishing and secondly filling our stomach by preserving its furnishing."

Upon his first year in Tsinghua, not one of the 24 applicants for master's degree were able to pass the English test, and the five students admitted later received no degree for failing the suspended make-up tests. In the year 2002, all of the 19 applicants for post-graduate degrees failed, including a female student who achieved more than 90 points on her major tests but lacked one mark in both the English and politics test. "Our leaders reiterated in the conferences that we should admit talents without sticking to one pattern. Then I said, there is one pattern all over the hand-out application forms."

Even for those who eagerly look back into the age when Qian Zhongshu and Wu Han (both became prestigious writers) were still admitted even when they failed their Mathematics tests, there is no sense not to prepare for what everybody is preparing for, despite that English has little to do with the capacity to hold a paint brush or that politics is never so important as to deny one access to a music school.

The present schooling system is designed for more than a hundred million students, not for an individual student like Han Han (a young writer who only finished high school because he failed all the tests except for Chinese). Not that we have any say on what we should learn, it is the schools that choose to make us into mass products to fit the massive demand of society.

Ironically, both the school and society tend to sniff at high-mark, low-ability students who end up unemployed, with little regard to how much pressure is imposed on every student to pass the demanded tests. Revolutionary efforts are made, but the broth of the soup doesn’t change. Although the advocacy for "Quality education" has been around for a while, high-school students still have to compete their heads off for the college entrance exam. Although the renovated CET 4 and CET 6 test policy settled no division on Pass and Fail, marks still exist, and it is up to the schools and companies to decide what means passable. In a nutshell, the pass-or-fail pattern is never stirred. A test is a test.

What we can choose, however, is how we are going to take it. Those with a smarter head migrate to provinces with less competition in college admission quotas, or find a backdoor and pay their way in. As long as the tests are immovable, there's no shortage of ways to cope with it--legal or illegal, survival is best.

Now if you excuse me, I have my TEM 4 to prepare for. Though I don't know what I can get out of the test, I guess I still have to bear my father's instruction in mind: Everything is down, except tests.