Meritocracy and Its Discontents investigates the wider social, political, religious, and economic dimensions of the Gaokao, China's national college entrance exam, as well as the complications that ...arise from its existence. Each year, some nine million high school seniors in China take the Gaokao, which determines college admission and provides a direct but difficult route to an urban lifestyle for China's hundreds of millions of rural residents. But with college graduates struggling to find good jobs, some are questioning the exam's legitimacy—and, by extension, the fairness of Chinese society. Chronicling the experiences of underprivileged youth, Zachary M. Howlett's research illuminates how people remain captivated by the exam because they regard it as fateful—an event both consequential and undetermined. He finds that the exam enables people both to rebel against the social hierarchy and to achieve recognition within it. In Meritocracy and Its Discontents, Howlett contends that the Gaokao serves as a pivotal rite of passage in which people strive to personify cultural virtues such as diligence, composure, filial devotion, and divine favor.
The Gaokao, a mandatory postsecondary entrance examination for all Chinese students, is often associated with psychological stress among Chinese students in their final year of high school. This ...project was conducted in summer 2017 in urban Beijing and rural Xi’an, China. The purpose is to explore the perspectives of urban and rural secondary school graduates after they have completed the examination, using in-depth clinical interviews. The study draws on Self-Determination Theory and research on moral reasoning to examine several themes surrounding Chinese adolescents’ perceptions of the Gaokao, including general perceptions of the purpose of education, intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, sources of support and pressure during study for the Gaokao, and issues of fairness and social inequality. The major findings are that students from all backgrounds reported psychological conflict regarding their general views of the aims of education and the extrinsic pressure deriving from the high-stakes Gaokao examination. Inequality was seen as further exacerbated by family background, resources, and quality of teaching. Urban parents tended to provide more support, both academic and interpersonal. Rural students rated their mental health as significantly lower than urban students during their senior year of high school.
This article investigates the association between cultural capital and the likelihood of attending an elite university within the Chinese socio-educational context. Drawing on data from the Beijing ...College Students Panel Survey, we show that (1) objectified cultural capital is negatively correlated with the likelihood of attending an elite university whereas embodied cultural capital shows a positive effect; (2) both types of cultural capital enhance the proficiencies of extracurricular activities, which, however, are negatively associated with different quantiles of the National College Entrance Examination (NCEE) score; (3) learning capabilities can be strengthened by both types of cultural capital, but they cannot guarantee the attendance of an elite university since they only raise the middle and lower quantiles of the NCEE score; (4) only embodied cultural capital helps one attend an elite university by virtue of the channel of the NCEE exemption.
The postgraduate entrance examination can be a milestone for many medical students to advance their careers. An increasing number of students are competing for limited postgraduate offers available, ...and failure to enter postgraduate studies can have adverse mental health consequences. In this paper, we aim to investigate the mental health status of medical students during the postgraduate application entrance examination and to provide a targeted basis for mental health education and psychological counselling.
Using the Symptom Checklist-90 scale (SCL-90) questionnaire, the mental health status of 613 students who passed two rounds of the Postgraduate Entrance Examination in 2019 to enroll in Guangzhou Medical University in China was evaluated and followed up for retesting 6 months later. We used SPSS 20.0 statistical software for comparative analysis, including One-Sample T-Test, Independent-Samples T-Test, Paired Samples T-Test and Chi-square Test.
Our data showed that 12.10% of students had mental health problems during the postgraduate entrance examination, and it decreased significantly to 4.40% at the 6-month follow-up after the examination period finished (P < 0.01). Somatization was the most significant symptom of the students both during and after the postgraduate entrance examination stages. All SCL-90 factors were scored significantly lower both in and after the postgraduate entrance examination stages than the 2008 national college student norm score (P < 0.01). Excluding psychiatric factors, all other SCL-90 factors in the postgraduate entrance examination stage scored higher than the graduate stage (P < 0.05), and the total score of SCL-90 in female medical students was higher compared to male students (P < 0.05).
The postgraduate entrance examination event has a significant negative influence on students' mental health. The mental health of college and graduate students as an important part of their higher education experience should be systematically studied, and psychological counselling or help should be provided to them throughout their studies, specifically during the examination period. Educating applicants about mental health should be implemented during the postgraduate entrance examination curriculum.
Utilizing the framework of the L2 motivational self‐system as its theoretical foundation, this study focuses on a total of 52 students who discontinue their English learning within a senior high ...school in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. The primary objective of this study is to discern the underlying motivations prompting students to discontinue their English learning through a methodological approach encompassing video‐mediated interviews with the students, subsequently subject to meticulous qualitative scrutiny through the Nvivo software. The analysis focuses on the systematic decoding and recoding of the interview transcripts to discern thematic patterns, hereby unraveling the motivations contributing to students' cessation of English learning. The results indicate a spectrum of negative factors contributing to this phenomenon, including an aversion to the extant English learning milieu and the pressure of English learning, waning interest, diminished academic attainment, cultural disparities vis‐à‐vis English‐speaking regions, and eroded self‐efficacy in mastering the language. Moreover, this study elucidates various factors that collectively contribute to a lack of motivation among students, including the large class sizes, a paucity of English application contexts, the absence of phonetic pedagogy culminating in compromised autonomous learning ability, test‐oriented teaching methods, ineffective English core subject literacy, and an overall substandard learning milieu.
Practitioner points
The formulation of language education policies must be based on the academic pressures and resource allocation faced in actual teaching.
Policies concerning the optimization of the learning environment are worthy of attention and consideration by policymakers.
Reducing formalistic rule‐making and review systems in actual teaching is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed.
Every year, millions of students take Advanced Placement (AP) exams hoping to score enough points to earn college credit and save on their tuition bill. But are they getting a real college education? ...The College Board says that AP classes and exams make the AP program more accessible and represent a step forward for educational justice. But the program's commitment to standardized testing no longer reflects its original promise of delivering meaningful college-level curriculum to high school students. In "Shortchanged," education scholar Annie Abrams uncovers the political and pedagogical traditions that led to the program's development in the 1950s. In revealing the founders' intentions of aligning liberal arts education across high schools and colleges in ways they believed would protect democracy, Abrams questions the collateral damage caused by moving away from this vision. The AP program is the College Board's greatest source of revenue, yet its financial success belies the founding principles it has abandoned. Instead of arguing for a wholesale restoration of the program, "Shortchanged" considers the nation's contemporary needs. Abrams advocates for broader access to the liberal arts through robust public funding of secondary and higher education and a dismantling of the standardized testing regime. "Shortchanged" illuminates a better way to offer a quality liberal arts education to high school students while preparing them for college.
This study investigates the quality of the critical thinking skills of applicants (n = 77) seeking entry to the faculty of educational sciences in a Finnish university and how these skills are ...associated with the applicant's age, previous higher education experience, and matriculation and entrance examination scores. The data consist of the applicants' responses to problem-solving tasks and their matriculation and entrance examination scores. Critical thinking skills were measured with comparison and argumentation tasks. The results indicate that comparison of the texts and analysis of the arguments they contained were more difficult tasks than putting forward arguments both for and against of one's personal standpoint. In addition, previous experience of higher education predicted participants' comparison skills and their matriculation examination grades predicted their argumentation skills. The feasibility of using critical comparison tasks in the entrance examination tests is discussed.
Purpose:
This study focuses on courses that prepare applicants for universities’ highly competitive entrance examinations in Finland. The analysis clarifies the market-making practices and the ...construction of this field.
Design/Approach/Methods:
To understand these processes, we use Çalişkan and Callon’s five framings for studying marketization as a heuristic framework. In our analysis, we combine different data sets, including data on course provision, thematic interviews, documents, and ethnographic notes.
Findings:
In this article, we argue that the preparatory course markets in Finland are an example of private tutoring which operates in the privacy of the university applicants’ exam preparation process, thus commercializing this process. The market making of this type of private tutoring is an assemblage of a variety of agents that interact in parallel with each other.
Originality/Value:
This study aims to contribute to the systemic understanding of the assemblage of private tutoring markets in an equality-focused Nordic country by providing new heuristic lenses from economic sociology through which to view private tutoring.
PDF
