Chinese students and UK exams
- by David Symington
Chinese students are game-changers. Across the world their ability to root out and find the “magic key” to exams is putting countries across the world on the back foot and making them play catch-up.
A decade ago, a new examination was devised in the UK called the U.K. Independent Schools Entry Test or (“UKISET”). It was designed, as its website proudly states, to help the UK’s most elite schools select the best international students. The idea was quite simple, students from different countries apply at junior high school age to enter elite British schools had usually not been taught according to the normal UK curriculum, so testing them in the same way as local British schools was out of the question.
UKISET, therefore, was supposed to be able to test a student no matter what his or her particular educational background was. It is supposed to test raw cognitive ability – i.e. that elusive quality called “potential”. In other words it could not be based on any particular set of knowledge points, but to put it bluntly, test intelligence.
Obviously schools also want to know how a student performs in English language too. The test claims to be able to test, though, not only a student “passive” grasp of the language – the number of words or phrases a student knows, but also a student’s ability actively to use the language and “think” using English. So this exam has two broad components, what is known as non-verbal reasoning – that’s the bit to test your raw cognitive abilities, and “verbal reasoning” – that’s the bit designed to test the depth of your English language skills.
That, at least, is the theory. When the exam first came out, it was trumpeted as something that you couldn’t prepare for, and was scientifically designed to find out “raw ability”...they were not prepared for the onslaught of Chinese students.
Chinese students and tutoring organizations, once they got their teeth into this exam, they started analyzing it for the sorts of questions it asks and carefully started to work out what methods you use to eliminate wrong answers (it’s all multiple choice, after all) and then started training up armies of students with the tried and tested method of 刷题.
Now the heads of admissions at a number of top schools in the UK tell me each year they get dozens of applications landing on their desks from Chinese and Hong Kong applicants. Inevitably, with all but a few exceptions, the results are nearly perfect. The results of these tests all show these students to be well above the average intelligence of their UK peers in good private schools.
A few years ago when numbers applying from China were limited, schools took the attitude of “take as many as we can”. Now, overwhelmed with applicants with such fantastic scores, the schools have to find further ways to distinguish.
In fact, though, it started to emerge that the problem was not simply about how to pick between so many excellent students. It started to become apparent that it simply wasn’t so that all these applicants were geniuses. In the early days, places were sometimes offered simply on the basis of these excellent scores. However, once students arrived their performance in class was very disappointing. Often it wasn’t simply that they were in culture shock, or unable to adapt to the more student-focused interactive methods of teaching. Often, these schools discovered that students who’s UKISET said were excellent at English, were struggling even to understand classes at a most basic level – especially in subjects like History, English and humanities. This, in turn, slowly led British independent schools to realize that the UKISET exam, far from being a neutral test of raw ability, was an exam that could be conquered by “technique” rather than ability. A UK student performing very well on “verbal reasoning” would, almost certainly, be a very skillful wielder of the English language, and ought to be very eloquent and an excellent writer. A Chinese student performing just as well, might struggle, though, to write good clear sentences or follow a class on the renaissance.
The result is that with each passing year this exam that was supposed to be an easy way of helping to filter international applicants, has become little more than a formality, a most basic requirement. The great battlements to keep out the hoards, has been reduced by Chinese exam prep to mere rubble.
In effect, the ability of Chinese students to “neuter” the attempt to assess by standardized multiple choice exams is only something that we should be grateful for. It means that these elite schools now have to fall back on other methods to make their selections: qualitative written tests where students have to show their appreciation for literature, difficult interviews, and day long assessment days, where candidates have to perform in a variety of settings – drama workshops, debating sessions, practical experiments in laboratories, team projects and sporting activities have become far more emphasized by these elite schools.
UKISET and exams of its ilk were never really about truly testing well-rounded abilities, and certainly have never been able to do what they purported to do – test raw ability and intelligence. They were always about giving schools an “easy” way to outsource their selection to computer algorithms. If Chinese students have played a role in the slow demise of such exams, we should all applaud.
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