Make the exam fair

The following is an excerpt from an article by 21st Century Business Herald

The core issue of permitting migrant workers’ children to take part in gaokao, or national college entrance examination, is if they can be treated as same as their urban counterparts when vying for a place at university.

Since the exam papers vary from place to place, migrant children, who have to take the test in their hometown, will not be on the same footing as their local classmates if they have studied in Beijing or Shanghai.

But local residents in big cities fear that if migrant children are able to take the local test and compete with local students for university places, it will make the competition fiercer. The authority proposed to solve the issue by granting the cities with more quotas for college enrollment to ensure local residents’ children will not be affected.

Beijing and Shanghai’s population only accounts for less than 3 percent of the national total. But these two cities boast many more top universities than the rest of the population. The enrollment ratio for children with Beijing and Shanghai hukou, or permanent residence registration, is almost 90 percent.

If the authority increases the enrollment scale in Beijing and Shanghai, it has to decrease the quota allocated to the other provinces, which is unfair for the kids not coming to Beijing. It is also likely to trigger a new migration wave to Beijing and Shanghai.

So the central and local authorities must come up more specified and pragmatic plans to address this complicated issue.