Thursday, June 11, 2009

Exams in China

Now that we have finished our exams, I found the essay questions of for China's college entrance tests to be interesting in their emphasis on creative and original thought. Here's the link to the questions:

http://www.danwei.org/scholarship_and_education/invisible_wings_2009s_college.php

If I had a pair of invisible wings, I still couldn't write comments any faster and I probably couldn't sit in a chair for a long time because that would be uncomfortable. Damn those wings...

2 comments:

  1. Well, those are some interesting prompts. I can just see the Confucian answer to the one about invisible wings: "The wisdom of the ancestors is like the wind beneath my invisible wings...."

    I wonder how they manage to grade them all. It must be like grading the AP US, but for a country of more than a billion people....

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  2. I'd be curious to see the grading standards that examiners use. Is there a set formula for 'originality'? Because there's a fine line between creative and loopy, a fact to which we can all attest eight times over.

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