Peking U to enroll recommended students

(Xinhua)
Updated: 2009-11-16 23:01

BEIJING: China's one of the top higher education institutions Peking University on Monday released a name list of 39 high school principals nationwide who are recognized to recommend their students to be enrolled without taking national college entrance examination.

The recommended students could be given offers to the university after interviews rather than written exams, which is part of the university's practices for its own admission regulation.

According to an announcement issued by Peking University, the university received over 400 applications to get qualification of the recommendation for enrollment.

According to Peking University, three percent of undergraduate admission quota are scheduled to be enrolled through the recommendation method in which the university's experts will evaluate the recommended student's comprehensive abilities and specialities.

Officials with the admission office of Peking University said that the recommendation method for admission has been expected to attract student's attention to positive quality cultivation from dealing with all sorts of tests, and gradually change the current simplex college enrollment method by a national exam.

However, the new admission measure aroused 70 percent opposition on the Internet.

A survey, conducted by Chinese leading web portal sina.com, showed that as of Monday, 10,046 out of 14,227 people oppose the new measure and hold the opinion that the recommendation by high schools is unfair to the rest of students.

A netizen on sina.com said, "It's true that hopefully college entrance examination would not be a canoe to study in college attributable to presidents' direct recommendation, but high school presidents' rights are far from regulation now."

Peking University promised to abolish qualifications of both the principals and the recommended students if falsification and abusing authorities were found among their practice.

But netizens thought the penalty is too weak compared with huge attraction of admission without exams and pressure from power.

A netizen on the website of Phoenix TV, wrote that administrative power should not intervene educational departments. Otherwise, high school principals would care more about their assess results, promotion, and appointment decided by administrative service division, rather than academic reputation.

Professor Xia Xueluan with the department of sociology, institute of sociology and anthropology of Peking University, told Xinhua Monday that recommendation of high school presidents is an experiment of enrollment reform.

"The experiment and original college entrance exam provide us two divisions to find out a more reasonable measure in college students enrollment," Xia said, "let alone three percent is a small part compared with huge amount of high school graduates in our country."

College entrance exam was restored in 1977. Totally 273,000 people were enrolled nationwide that year.

Compared with the total number of college applicants, it has been regarded by millions of high school students as a single-plank bridge toward the gates of universities.