Testing out

For the vast majority of Chinese high schoolers, taking the National Higher Education Entrance Examination (Gaokao) and trying to get into a good Chinese university are the most natural things in the world. Many kids’ lives are oriented around these goals from infancy. Students are swamped with classes after school and on weekends, and the last year of high school is spent doing almost nothing other than taking piles upon piles of practice exams, without learning anything new (except test-taking techniques).

Finally, the exam arrives in early June after senior year. Over the course of three days of extreme stress, all of a student’s life experiences, talents, abilities, and personality get distilled down to a single number: the Gaokao score. All the universities have to do is look at the final distribution and decide on their cutoff score for the year. Essentially, they are enrolling numbers, and the actual people come afterward. This system sucks.

As I neared the end of high school in China, being a U.S. citizen, I decided that studying in the U.S. would be a pretty straightforward thing to do. For one thing, I would be avoiding the hassle of Chinese examination fever. Also, I had no idea what I wanted to major in, and most Chinese universities have students specify their desired department before even taking the exam. My classmates found themselves holed into specific areas like “information security,” “water supply management,” and “railroad engineering” before even taking a single class, much less having any idea what their majors were actually like. That just wouldn’t work for me.

I may have been one of the few U.S. citizens applying from a regular, non-international Chinese high school, but I was by no means the only Chinese high schooler who wanted out of the system. While the roots of China’s screwed-up, life-consuming college exam system can be traced back to the imperial examinations of the Tang Dynasty, China has an equally illustrious, albeit somewhat shorter, tradition of having its talented students pursue studies overseas. Many of China’s greatest thinkers, writers, and political figures of the Modern Era received some education abroad, and were instrumental in accelerating the modernization of their country over the past century. As the Communist takeover soured China’s relations with the West, however, such exchanges came to an almost total standstill for decades. My parents were part of the first generation to have the opportunity to study abroad again, after the Cultural Revolution ended. Having completed their studies, they returned to China and made great contributions in their respective fields (and put me in an odd, not-really-international/not-typical-U.S.-situation). To this day, thousands of eager Chinese students continue to be attracted to places of higher learning in the West, especially in the United States.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the number of Chinese students wanting to study abroad, the Chinese government’s attitude has been oddly ambivalent, at least at the undergraduate level, so there is not a single public SAT testing center in all of mainland China. There are other difficulties, too. Students need to develop very strong English skills to have any hope of going overseas. Assistance in the application process is hard to come by, letters of recommendation need to be translated, and sometimes school administrators might even be reluctant to provide transcripts. Stressful and undesirable as it may be, the Gaokao remains the path of least resistance by a wide margin.

Living and studying in another country is a huge undertaking. Not everyone is comfortable going far from home to stay at a place with different customs and ways of life. And yet the Chinese internationals I know have all adjusted really quickly to the life in the States, and perform well even in classes like Literature Humanities, where one would expect them to be disadvantaged. And while they understandably enjoy the company of their compatriots from time to time, they get along and socialize with students from the U.S. and other countries just as easily. They are sociable, outgoing, open-minded, and can go after an objective with all their energies once they decide on it. It would be quite hard to imagine a Chinese student getting into an American university, much less an Ivy, without these traits. And these things are precisely what the Chinese exam system in its current form is unable to reflect.

I suppose a lot of this applies to students from other countries as well. Surely, going abroad to pursue an education is never the easiest choice. Making that decision takes a special kind of person. International students are not afraid to take matters into their own hands in order to get what they want. With that spirit, and everything they learn while over here, it is to be hoped that they will do great things, wherever they were born.

The author is a Columbia College first-year.