final essay
College Admission in China: Problems and Improvements A 15-year-old girl decided to drop out of the school after having been told that she can’t attend the Chinese National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) in Shanghai because she was not born there. She began fighting for her right to attend the exam earlier this year, and soon attracted the public attention with her posts on Weibo, China’s version of twitter (Global Times, December 4, 2012). Her case re-ignited the public debate over the country’s current policy for the Chinese National College Entrance Examination (NCEE), an academic examination that held annually, taken by students in their final year of high school, and crucially determines students’ entrance into colleges and their future success. In this essay, I’m going to argue that the College Admission System in China which, based solely on the NCEE score, is neither reliable nor impartial; and I’m trying to provide some directions for a further solution or improvement on the current system. NCEE has been recognized as an essential tool to assess students’ academic ability and to select candidates for college entry ever since it was first introduced in 1945. Test takers are asked to take three mandatory subjects: Chinese, Mathematics and English, and choose from taking either three science subjects (Physics, Biology and Chemistry) or three humanities subjects (History, Politics and Geography). The test is administered uniformly within each provinces of China, and graded variously across the country. The college admission starts three weeks after the exam, based solely on the NCEE score. As a standardized exam to assess candidates’ ability to undertake college studies, what matters most is whether NCEE provide a reliable and comprehensive assessment of a student’s ability and potential? “I’m quite confident with the test today, and I believe it will be quite similar with the previous papers I did. There will be some changes, for
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