I think this sums up a lot of my students in China. Many of them are just good at taking tests and don't really have much to offer.
The program and company I work for hires foreign teachers who teach following a Western pedagogy. So students debate, discuss, do group work, and inquiry based learning. This way the students are exposed to this type of teaching style they will experience when they go to colleges abroad. Most of my students go to America for college, but some attend schools in Canada.
However after going through the program and applying to foreign colleges some students still believe the Chinese model is better. The Chinese education puts an amazing emphasis on tests. You have to take an exam at the end of middle school to determine if you go to high school and what high school you attend. The best schools (usually with the best resources) take the highest test scores and then lower schools take the worst. Schools are numbered in order of their rank. My school is one of the top schools in the region and its name means first under heaven. Some of the top students with the top scores come to Tianyi and then only the best from that group of best becomes a part of the AP program. Although they usually leave spots open for people with low test scores that just happen to be friends with the principal or is the son of a politician Many things are done by nepotism or by who you know in China. Then there is Wuxi #1 school which is also a part of the company that I work for that offers A-level (British curriculum) and IB curriculum. Then there is Wuxi #2, #3, etc. They all get students with lower and lower scores. Some students do not attend high school at all.
Then at the end of high school your entrance into college is not based on grades or letters of recommendation, but on a score. The students spend their entire senior year studying for an exam. This exam takes three days to take and rules are strictly enforced. You can not be one minute late for the exam and you will be turned away. Female students must have their hair tied up and many consider taking birth control so they don't have their period during the exam. Days before the exam students have been known to study while connected to an IV full of vitamins to ensure that they don't get sick. These IV's are often paid for or provided by the government. Your score on this one exam determines which school you will get into. You must have a good score to get into a good school.
So many of the students that come into this program with the idea that education should be heavily exam based. Most of their schooling before this has been based on exams and they are good at taking them. They study for the SAT, SAT II, TOEFL, and AP tests constantly. One student took days off from school to study for an SAT II subject test over American History. They had never really formally studied it and probably had some misconceptions about it from their Chinese teachers. However after a few days studying they did well on the exam. This student in particular seems to excel at everything, but not to enjoy any of it. The student can ace an exam and write pretty good papers; however sees no value in the holistic and inquisitive nature of American education. The student I am discussing will be attending Notre Dame in the fall and I hope will find something to be passionate about besides taking exams. I had several students that were similar to this one who were not passionate about anything and had no extra curriculars. They did not really participate in class, but did well on every assignment or exam. I had to write them letters of recommendation that we pretty short and didn't have much substance because all there was to them was the ability to take exams. If these students don't learn that there is more than just exams they won't have much to put on her resume when applying for jobs like the character in the cartoon.
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