Voices

Exam piles too much pressure on students, parents don't help

By Earle Gale (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-09 08:06

I still wake up, occasionally, wondering where I put my Y-fronts.

Other times, the sheets are wet and I'm in a cold sweat, as I roll out of bed frantically hunting for a pen that works before realizing, with great relief, that I am awake, that it is not 1983, and that I really don't need one.

The good news is I don't get the bad dreams very often these days. After all, there has been an ocean of water under the bridge since I took my A-levels. But once or twice a year, they still haunt me.

In the dreams, I turn up for my exams without clothes or every one of the hundreds of pens I take into the exam hall is a dud or I get into an elevator that takes me everywhere except the floor I need to be on or I realize, a day late, that I missed my final test.

Such self-torture is not uncommon. It seems like most people who ever sat an important examination have had bad dreams about the experience and some, like me, still get them, from time to time, years, even decades later.

Which is why my heart goes out to the 9.5 million students who took their national college entrance examination this week.

And I wonder how many of them will still have nightmares about it 25 years from now. Sadly, probably quite a few because, here in China, the university entrance examination seems to be taken even more seriously than A-levels were back in England when I was a kid - and that was bad enough.

Both sets of examinations essentially decide who gets to go to university and who is left behind. I can't help thinking China's university entrance examination is as serious as a heart attack compared to the A-levels we sat in the UK or the ACT and SAT examinations taken in North America.

Back home, we knew the exams were important, but we also knew they were not a matter of life and death. If we got bad grades or failed them entirely, there were always the November re-sits, or, if that didn't work, you could do it all again the following summer.

I just don't get the same feeling here in China, where the national college entrance examination seems to be seen more like a fork in the road that is never to be passed again, than a pit stop.

Here, exams are so important that construction sites near schools are ordered to stop work, traffic police put in overtime to keep vehicles moving so no one is late, and students are even offered a police escort should they get delayed. Here, parents stay in hotels along with their offspring so they can be near the exam rooms, and passers-by are urged to keep the noise down as they walk past schools.

With everyone taking the exams so seriously, there is no doubt the kids sitting them - apparently, this year, it was about 85 percent of Beijing's eligible students - were acutely feeling the pressure and desperate not to let their families down.

So, it's not surprising that some youths choose to avoid the pressure cooker of the examination rooms and duck the test completely - apparently, this year, 650,000 fewer students took the exam than last year. Some - mainly those with money - short-circuit the system entirely and find places in foreign universities.

There's no doubt that a university education these days can be vitally important but, in the interests of everyone, it's time to reduce some of the pressure on students.

The college entrance examination is no longer a one-shot, winner-takes-all affair. And university freshmen no longer have to be a certain age. Students today can re-sit the examination if they fail it and they can enter university later in life if they want to.

I only hope parents passed on this good news to their children.

This was not the week that will define the rest of their children's lives. It was an important week but not a make or break week. Their children, whether they pass or fail the examination, still have the potential to be either a success or failure in life because that is something that is decided over a matter of decades, not days.