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Testing time for college aspirants

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-04-29 07:44

The college entrance examination reform is not a simple choice between test and quality, but needs to combine the two into one, says an article in the Beijing News. Excerpts:

The test center director of the Ministry of Education recently said that future college entrance examinations would include both academic performance testing and comprehensive evaluation and break away from the current test-oriented recruitment.

Although we all hope to reform the current entrance examination system, we are still debating the issue of how it should be reformed. The present unified test-oriented system has obvious defects, but will universities abuse their power in the process of independently recruiting students if the old system is replaced?

The old system can ensure at least procedural fairness: the same test questions, the same standard answers and the clear-cut scores. However, independent recruitment by universities may leave many people wondering whether the judgments on suitability of college candidates will be too arbitrary as the deciding factor would be not objective scores but subjective judges. Due to credibility scandals at universities, the public has every reason to doubt that even basic procedural fairness may be lost when we stop using test scores as the yardstick.

Faced with the public outcry for reform, many universities are perturbed over the lack of power to recruit students independently. But independent recruitment is not the key for opening the route to reform.

What the public wants is not an either/or choice. People are more interested in striking a balance between the two systems so that the deficiencies of both are overcome by combining the best of both. In which case, besides test scores, why not look at the quality side of a student, too?

(China Daily 04/29/2009 page8)