A junior’s confusion
When he saw the news that this year’s college entrance exams were staggered by a month due to the Epidemic, Li Hua subconsciously surveyed the projection of light and Time on his own body. Two years ago, he was one of the proudest winners of the college entrance exam, entering the college of his choice under the Boya Tower as he wished.
The high school teachers would always say, “You’ll have it easy when you go to college.” In their memories, college is “after class teachers handed everyone cigarettes, we all smoke together”, is “to make up for the middle school did not sleep all back. “Li Hua “will believe”, he thought, how can the university so idle, there are so many things waiting for them to do it. At least, he wants to “do the things I didn’t have the energy or permission to do in middle school”, “buy the books I didn’t read and take the time to read them, go to independent film festivals or film libraries every week to watch some good movies, or learn a second foreign language”. But after entering college, these intentions “slipped down the to do list as neither important nor urgent, to the point where they almost became a white moonlight in the back of my mind”.
He had longed for close friendships and a sense of belonging. Li Hua remembers the teacher of the Tsinghua admissions team revealing his shortcomings and saying that his school did not have a united atmosphere, citing the example that “everyone eats their own meals, but ‘next door’ (Peking University) likes to eat together and has a very collective atmosphere”. This was one of the factors that led him to enroll in “Next Door”. But in fact, “Next Door” is just a myth. It is common to have four seats at a table in the cafeteria, and no one knows anyone. The most important thing is that you have to be able to get to know the people you are talking to. WeChat received a message, basically all have something to do, no one is not actively looking for anyone. There may be one or two close friends, but not everyone has one or two.
“All of this can perhaps be explained by “busy”. The pressure of school work makes the best of the high school entrance exams also suffer.” So much so that now, every other holiday, I go back to the dormitory building with the cramped and depressing nightmare atmosphere of final exam preparation in my mind. “The school has two holidays for winter and summer, and two more 9-day long holidays for the National Day and the University Day, but holidays do not mean rest. During the winter break of his freshman year, Li Hua went to a southeastern coastal province for nine days as a reporter for the campus media, and spent the rest of the time busy compiling materials and organizing his articles. He divided his freshman summer break into two weeks of summer school, a month of internship, and a TOEFL exam. An international exchange program was cancelled due to the new epidemic, forcing him to take a “forced” break. This past summer, he spent another month or so doing fieldwork in economics.
After two busy years, as he entered his third year of college, Li Hua felt that his future plans were finally “much clearer”: he abandoned his sophomore year plans to do academic research and decided to look for job opportunities in the industry. To do so, he planned to leave Beijing to apply for a master’s program. He doesn’t care much about what he studies, “as long as the content is not exclusive and the school’s brand is loud enough. The idea of achieving this goal is also clear. In his junior year, he will retake the language test, try to “raise his GPA again”, and find a “better internship”.
But this “clarity” does not give Li Hua a sense of security. The self-questioning is sharp and painful: “In just two years, how did I become thinking only about my employment status and school title? “”I have done a lot of things in a roundabout way, and it is reasonable to say that I have tried a lot of trial and error”, but I only feel that “the teeth of the horse have increased in vain”, “and I have not gained a sense of ‘ownership’. I don’t have a sense of certainty”. Li Hua is sure that the school is worthy of first-class teaching in the subject, “it gives me strong skills to deal with everything I have to deal with”, but he is “unhappy”, even “depressed”. ” Perhaps this is not the problem of Peking University, where it is the same. “
The rational logic behind the performance points
For Liu Yunsun, associate dean of Peking University’s School of Education, Li Hua’s confusion is a familiar story. Liu spent four years doing interviews with more than 200 students, mostly one-on-one. At this top Chinese institution, unveiling pretty metrics and decent success, these brightest young people in China are facing a common dilemma: exhausted from extreme competition, where success overwhelms growth and peers PK each other.
“At Peking University and Tsinghua, a term often mentioned is ‘volume,’ which in short is a kind of energy consumption and waste due to competition. “Li Hua said. Everyone is in what economics calls a prisoner’s dilemma. He remembers when freshmen enrolled, there was an expectation that everyone would pick what they were interested in from the dizzying class schedule and “make a splash in the club and do something big.” But counselors and seniors quickly cool the impulse and focus rationally on one thing: GPA. Li Meng, Dean of Yuanpei College of Peking University, once summarized: “The learning characteristics of Peking University students – centered on merit points, students at different levels are concerned about merit points, and about the merit points of each course.
“The “merit point” makes the future, the way out, which still seems far away, quickly press on the children who just got out of the college entrance examination.” No matter which path you take in the future, GPA is the basic guarantee. “Taking a double degree depends on your ranking in the department, and the most popular double degree in economics or Chinese, without a 3.6 application will be really weak, and it depends on your freshman year,” Li Hua explained. “The first thing you need to do is to be recommended by your faculty, and generally speaking, you need to have an overall GPA ranking in the top 60%. Then, it also depends on the requirements of the receiving faculty, which range from 10% to 40%. If a student wants to go to a popular department, “not having a 3.7 may be very lackluster. There are different requirements for studying abroad depending on the program, and the requirements for good schools are naturally not low. As for finding a job, the GPA is the most obvious indicator on your resume.” You can feel it when applying for internships, and there are big Internet companies that will ask you to fill out grades at the level of a few percent. It is said that in the financial industry, the GPA directly determines what level of company you can go to. “
Behind the GPA is a change in the function of higher education. Liu Yunshan was a college student in the 1980s. In that era, the status of college students itself is equivalent to elite, is the state cadres. Nowadays, higher education has entered the era of the masses, with the continuous expansion of degrees and the continuous devaluation of qualifications, and higher education has become a proxy mechanism for elite talent selection.
In the 1980s, exams were graded solely on the basis of students’ mastery of knowledge and skills. Since 1998, grades have been graded on the basis of merit and failure rates. According to the 2007 regulations, the merit rate should not exceed 30% and the failure rate should not exceed 10% in general. This principle means that examination evaluation not only examines the mastery of knowledge, but also evaluates the relative position of students in group learning, and exams evolve into a competition among peers in the present, with scores becoming a tool for future competition.
In colleges and universities like Tsinghua and Peking University, the fight for scores will naturally be extraordinarily fierce. In the words of Liu Yunshan, “This is a group of ‘top students’ at all levels. The examination is not only a ceremony for them to be crowned, but also a daily battlefield to shape their mental quality and physical and mental habits. They have been through a lot of battles, and they are all very skilled, and everyone is very good at what they do.” To win, one can only look for tricks and keep adding up. One situation Li Hua often encounters is that the teacher of a course requires a 3,000-word paper, but some students find that they can get a higher grade by submitting a 5,000-word paper, so everyone gets involved in a word-count competition.
A high GPA requires not only a headlong effort to learn, but also a rational management, making a careful choice between gain and loss. In his study, Yunsun Liu analyzed: “Academic year or overall assessment learning performance = the sum of credit points of courses taken / the sum of credits of courses taken. All courses are involved in the calculation, and in terms of their contribution to the GPA, all other characteristics of the courses are leveled out, except for differences in credit size.”
The logic behind the GPA has been familiar to newcomers to the university from the beginning. Lihua’s college allowed him to make choices among all the courses in the university. He remembers that when he enrolled, some students wanted to challenge themselves by taking the “three highs” (Mathematical Analysis, Advanced Algebra, and Introduction to Computation A) or upper-level courses, and a “responsible brother or sister or counselor teacher” would tell him. “How difficult these classes are, and how the slightest mistake can be devastating to your GPA”.
This is not an “alarmist” statement. Under the GPA calculation method, the “hole” caused by one course is filled by the GPA of five or even ten courses. Yunsun Liu interviewed an economics student who studied liberal arts in high school. He did not have a GPA of more than 2 in his math course, which was a 5-credit course. In his four years of undergraduate study, he could not apply to go abroad, did not dare to take a double degree, and did only one thing – he worked tirelessly to earn points to fill the hole.
There is a kind of course in the university, named about “water course”. A student told Liu Yushan: “We need to have a class to brush up the performance points, this is the ‘water class’, class lecture PPT, exam test PPT ……PPT is to cheat him, like watching a movie, happy when watching, after watching I’ll forget, how much can I remember? …… I am now taking more than 100 credits, less than 20 credits of high quality.”
In a world ruled by merit points, a student may be successful, but not growing at all. Yunshan Liu interviewed a child who, after entering college, found that “the classroom only teaches very simple statements and rules, and a lot of exercises need to be applied and built by themselves. I have poor initiative and am not willing to learn new things; if I design a project and need to learn a new language to match, I find it so annoying and difficult. The group worked together on a big assignment, and I ended up doing a PPT with zero substantive contribution, which was awkward for me in the group and awkward for others. Later, I stopped taking such classes because I didn’t want to drag others down either”.
In college, he followed the logic of the entrance exam to achieve “success” in terms of GPA: “I may be at the bottom of my major, but my GPA must be in the front. In my junior year, I had a required course, usually copied my roommate’s homework, and 70% of the course exams were from previous years’ papers, with maybe 20% new questions from the TA and 10% new questions from the teacher. I printed out all the test questions I could find on the BBS, and chased the teaching assistant to ask them one by one; I also cleverly set the 20% of the test questions from the teaching assistant, and finally scored 95 points in this class! Second place in the naked score! I was amazed at myself, because I really didn’t learn anything.” The same logic doesn’t just hold true for GPAs. In today’s universities, students can do student work, participate in competitions, apply for programs abroad, internships, etc., each of which can appear on their future resumes and become capital to run for the elite in society later on. The only criterion to evaluate these activities is no longer whether or not they have been able to learn something or whether they are in their own interest, but the Gold content on their resume must be considered. So, this has become a kind of “volume”, in order not to lag behind the classmates, trapped in passive, everyone had to fill their resume as much as possible.
When Li Hua enrolled in school, it may not have been a common phenomenon to participate in internships in freshman year, most people just spend their summer vacation normally and travel around for fun. Now he finds that the percentage of students doing internships freshman year has gotten much higher, and it has become almost standard for business students to start their internships freshman summer.
Student work is also utilized as much as possible: you can add a point or two to your overall evaluation every year when evaluating scholarships, and if you don’t perform well academically, you can have a chance to keep your graduate school by relying on your academic work experience. In addition, some employers also look for student work and club experience in their resumes. Some of Li Hua’s classmates who had no interest in working in their freshman year suddenly became active in their sophomore year. “Talking about it people may say helplessly, ‘it’s just one more way for myself’.” Recently, he was surprised to find that freshmen entering their freshman year now show awareness of this aspect of the problem in question-and-answer groups. “For example, how to choose a transfer, where is the best central and local, and what is the specific doorway all ask. Many of the development paths that used to be cold are now coming more and more into everyone’s view as well.”
“The most head resources are too limited, and everyone has to fight for these things in an otherwise crowded track.” Li Hua said, “Perhaps the previous students will more or less take some detours, but the new students in the ears of the seniors, almost as soon as they come up to take the shortcuts tried out by the previous people.” The shortcut corresponds to the “strategy”. Yunshan Liu found that in college, the relationship between students and their peers becomes distant, but the relationship with their older brothers and sisters becomes close. The competition between them is weak, and the latter can become the provider of “cheats”.
There is a “cheat sheet” for almost everything. In his sophomore year, Li Hua “wanted to go to a top U.S. university for a Ph.D. in economics,” and he soon learned the path to achieve this goal: “First, you need to do very well in your classes, and then you need to take a few more advanced math and statistics courses, such as functions of real variables, general functions analysis. In addition, you need to have a strong research background to prove that you are indeed capable of research, including but not limited to papers that you have done independently, working as a research assistant for a teacher, etc. The last important thing is that you need two to three letters of recommendation. Domestic professors writing letters of recommendation have limited recognition overseas, so undergraduate students can exchange for a semester in the U.S., take some hardcore courses, and get a letter of recommendation through excellent performance, or email a lot of professors in the U.S. to ‘magnetize’ them and ask if they can work for them as research assistants in exchange for a letter of recommendation. “
Just as important as the “instructions” is the “risk assessment” – “very discouraging”. “Very dissuasive”. Lihua learned that economics academics is not a very big field, and “it has been said before that to apply to the best PhD program in economics means that you have to be in the top 100 competitors in the world in this field.
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