A question of testing?

In his 1870 article Competitive Examinations in China, the inaugural President of Imperial University of Peking10 _{and famed sinologist, W.A. Martin (1870), deemed the Chinese}

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Imperial Examination (keju 科举) to be China’s fifth great invention (1870).11 _{At Martin’s}

recommendation, the Keju was influential in the development of the US civil service examinations, as it was in countless other countries, including famously the UK adding it to the list of borrowings from Chinese culture (Bodde, 1948).12 _{While the keju may have}

afforded “the best method of ascertaining the qualifications of candidates for government employment” (1870, p. 70), the keju and China’s legacy of testing has been accused of being responsible for hindering its scientific development (De Saeger, 2008). As already noted, the eight-legged essay had been the dominant form of assessment in the keju. In the Chinese revolution, the Imperial Examination and especially the essay were derided by Chinese scholars such as Zhu (1934) who stated “as everyone knows, [the eight-

legged essay] was a senseless thing, but the ruling classes used it to encage the intellectuals […] talent selection became talent obliteration” (as cited in Kirkpatrick & Xu, 2012, p. 77).

De Saegar (2008) explores the role of the keju in the Needham Question (as mentioned in 2.1.4.2), arguing that the examination acted as an epistemological obstacle to scientific thinking. Invoking Bachelard’s philosophy of science, De Saegar splits knowledge between common knowledge, which is static, empirical and instrumental and scientific knowledge, which is theoretical and rapidly changing. The difference between these conceptions, according to Bachelard (1975 as cited in De Saeger, 2008) is an “epistemological rupture” needed to achieve scientific knowledge, or a break from the authoritative view of a subject. With the Keju’s attention to particular rhetorical style and the memorisation of a set body of texts, which included the Four Books and the Five

Classics of Confucian literature (四书五经) (Elman, 2013). While it may have been

suitable for choosing the best candidates for government, it was not conducive to science.

11 _{Evoking China’s creative, scientific past, with the inventions of gunpowder, paper, the} compass and the printing press.

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Over the thousand years of the examination, science and especially mathematics had been covered in the exam at one time or another, however reforms had made the topics more orthodox (Elman, 2013). As Ellman (2013) details, students who failed the keju may turn their hands to science as alternative to civil service, yet the Imperial government and scholars were not primarily concerned with its development, instead preferring officialdom and rituals of power. While scientific advances were being made, they were not being discussed and shared widely through scientific literature as they were in Europe (De Saeger, 2008).

The “epistemological obstacle” posed by De Saegar (2008) bears a startling resemblance to the debates around the impact of high stakes examinations on students in modern China. The successor to the keju is the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, better known as the Gaokao (高考). Initially introduced in 1952 it was reintroduced in 1978 and welcomed by Chinese students as a meritocratic opportunity to enter university, after institutions had been highly politicised and essentially shut down as academic institutions during the Cultural Revolution (Muthanna & Sang, 2015). The

Gaokao is not simply a reworking of the keju, it does not utilise eight-legged essays nor

is it based on the Confucian classics. The exam is divided into two streams focusing on social science (political sciences, history and geography) and natural sciences (physics, chemistry and biology), with all students studying the compulsory subjects of Chinese, mathematics13 _{and foreign languages. Up until 2014, English was the foreign language}

until reforms shifted the focus as “English fever” reached a watershed in Chinese education, leading to the introduction of other options14_{(Wang & Li, 2014; Wikipedia,} 2018b). The examination is taken over days and lasts nine hours, with nearly 10 million students taking the exam annually (Wikipedia, 2018b).

13 _{Students in the natural science stream take an extended mathematics stream, including} calculus and hyperbolas.

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In detailing why Chinese education is both the best and worst in the world, Zhao (2014)

cites the Gaokao, and more generally “naked” centralised testing as a key obstacle to China’s scientific development and also the quality of life in China. Calls for reform are widespread and the government is reacting, with the change of language requirements being a major reform in recent years (You & Hu, 2013). The issue of reform, however, is not simply pedagogical; the dilemma of China’s modernisation project is whether culture change can keep up with economic development (Ci, 2014). One significant problem in regard to this is the growing inequality in China which has hindered attempts to diversify the curriculum, as students in the richer regions of the east coast have access to better resources and university places (Gow, 2016; G. Zhang, Zhao, & Lei, 2012). These factors add to the pressure cooker environment and damage the image of the system as meritocratic and fair.

This is not to say the system is not effective, in recent PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), Shanghai has been voted top for mathematics, reading and science (Tan, 2017). These results however are not without controversy and significant implications. Firstly, by only entering Shanghai into the assessment, there is admission of the inequality within the Chinese system (Tan, 2017). More significant for this study is the negative impact of the testing culture, which other countries including the UK are aiming to emulate (Sellar & Lingard, 2013). Zhao (2014) compares the problem of reform of the testing culture in China with a prisoner’s dilemma, in which whilst “new policies might bring better education for all [by relieving pressure], no player in the education game is willing to take the risky first step” (p.155). The evocative language of students as ‘prisoners’ with parents and teachers acting as prison guards may not be far-fetched. The pressure to succeed is extreme, as the Gaokao is often labelled the toughest examination in the world (Shen Lu & Griffiths, 2016). Student breakdowns are common, as is suicide (Bregnbaek, 2016; Muthanna & Sang, 2015; Zhao, 2014). Bregnbaek (2016)

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relates the issue of suicide in educational contexts, with reference to the work of Wu Fei (2005) on suicide in rural China, to social justice and fairness, and it represents what is a complex reaction to the tensions between modernity and tradition in Chinese society.

It is important to note that the testing culture in China is not only restricted to Gaokao. Testing is pervasive in the education system particularly at undergraduate level in China, where the exam focus remains and even moves to the Graduate School Entrance Examination (kaoyan 考研) (He, 2010) or the modern National Civil Service Examination (guokao 国考) (Liu, 2016).