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The Chinese Civil Examinations (inference-review.com)
79 points by onepossibility on Dec 7, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 116 comments



Having finished reading this essay in full at last, I am astounded at how completely unsubstantiative this discussion thread is. Not a single comment seems to be informed by TFA, but rather by preconceived notions about the imperial Chinese civil examination system.

That said, I would say that if there's any flaw in this essay, is that it doesn't revisit those predominant notions until the last two sections of the essay ("Modern Prose Aesthetics and Individuality"), ("Meritocracy and Social Reproduction"). It instead spends most of the time describing the system in detail, which is of course very much appreciated. I particularly like how it explains that much of the exam material was prepared by "the so-called literati [...] the cultured elite." (There's probably all sorts of parallels one could choose to read into contemporary society, if one was inclined to treat history like a cudgel.)

Wikipedia's article on the eight-legged essay mentions there is a post-Opening Amplification section that elaborates and clarifies the themes of the essay. One wonders how this article would read if delivered in the baguwen format.


We in tech reinvented some of it:

1. Recite this problem from the Leetcode corpus as performance art (which FAANGs tell undergrads at top schools to spend months practicing, on top of their coursework, instead of exploring what interests them).

2. Demonstrate this particular method (which happened to be taught at our rich-kids alma mater, but no one else had heard of).

3. Now answer this culture question in STAR format (which we told you to take time ahead of time to practice, and to prepare correct answers, so you could speak them faux off-the-cuff, as a shibboleth).

It's upper classes creating the questionable gatekeeping rituals, and children of those classes who tend to have the spare time and coaching to best pass the filter.


Test prep is somewhat helpful for some people but some rich kids can't test their way out of a paper bag.

Standardized tests are a route to social mobility for some. This guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Webb

came from a hardscrabble background in Missouri, standardized test results helped him get into the Naval Academy, he was a marine lieutenant in Vietnam, got a law degree, spent a lot of time in Asia as a journalist, wrote some novels including one about a guy who becomes a US Senator, actually became a US Senator representing Virginia.

There is a lot of concern that attempts to get kids into gifted programs other than through testing will be influenced greatly by family SES

https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/2/17/22288448/nyc-gifted-admis...

There was that time I yelled at my son when he was a toddler and carried him under my arm out of a grocery store and somebody called child protective on me. They sent somebody to my house and fortunately my mother-in-law had just been cleaning and the house looked absolutely spotless, full of books, horses grazing in front of the house, at least middle if not upper class. They had no idea that my house doesn't even have central heat!

Had they come to a hovel I could have had a very different outcome. They interviewed people and had a short investigation but based on appearances they saw what looked like "a good home" and might have gathered we'd have resources to fight them in court.


I think people really overestimate the likelihood of CPS taking their kid after a visit.

There are lots of kids in absolutely horrid conditions that CPS doesn't take, they're not going to take them from your middle class home just because your mother in law didn't happen to clean.


Given that CPS in Texas will attempt to take gender-non-conforming kids who have the support of their parents in being GNC, and that it's in Texas, I am pleasantly surprised that there have been no deaths with that policy.


AFAICT this is not taken into account by Texas CPS in any way. Look for articles on it.

Yes, Texas legislators passed a virtue signaling law to do so, but it was blocked immediately. there is also a big gap between what laws are passed and the realistic chance of your child being taken away when the system actually confronts families.


> surprised that there have been no deaths with that policy

The lunacy of today's synthetic sex identity movement aside, what did you imagine, that the Texas state government would take these kids out back and shoot them?


That children would commit suicide after being taken from their parents due to their gender politics. Seems pretty plausible to me, transgender folks are already at increased risk of suicide.


Pretty sure he was surprised no parents had blown one of the CPS people heads clean off in their front lawn when they came around to take their kids.


Trans people denied gender-affirming treatment have monumentally higher suicide rates than their peers. You know that.


Trans people given gender-affirming treatment also have a monumentally higher suicide rate than their peers: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/acps.13164


Higher than cis people, perhaps, but much lower than if they had not received treatment.

Which is the whole point. They're better off with proper treatment than without. Anti-trans activists don't care about kids' welfare, they just want them to conform at any cost.

https://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X(21)00568-1/full...

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/fullarticle/277...

https://www.hcplive.com/view/suicide-risk-reduces-73-transge...


Yes, and?


No one knows that, it’s not falsifiable.


If "Demographic A has higher suicide rates than demographic B" is not falsifiable, then I'm not sure what is.


We can’t interview demographic A after they are gone.


I...what? If you find someone hanging from a noose with no sign of force or a struggle, you don't need an interview to know what happened.

What are you even trying to do, here?


Pretty surprising a research scientist doesn't know what falsifiability is.


Well, in general falsifiability and its application to psychology is up for debate because it is generally unethical/impossible to run single variable control experiments on humans :)

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0062...


You don't need to have single variable control to make inferences about differences between population subgroups, only to infer causality.

We certainly know that people who identify as transgender are at higher risk of suicide than the broader population.


Exactly, I was poking at the confidence expressed by the OP that inferred causality. Having more nuance and expressing less confidence would be closer to reality.


Irrelevant in this case. You don't need a double-blind experiment to determine suicide rates, as I already said.


Gender non-conforming children are being helped by this new Texas law, which prevents parents from transing them at the first hint of GNC behavior.


[flagged]


This misuse of "groomer" to mean "queer sympathizer" pulls vital attention away from kids who are actually being groomed for abuse. Believe what you want, but don't pretend you care about the kids.

Edit: BTW, there are mountains of evidence showing far better life outcomes for trans kids and adults who receive gender-affirming treatment, with or without surgery. If you actually care about the welfare of trans kids, you should educate yourself and stop listening to lying bigots.


upper classes always win. if now system offer too many social mobility, they will change it.


There will always be people impacted positively and negatively by these decisions, so the presence of some people who benefitted from standardized tests doesn't say much about their rightful place in the world. In any case, Jim Webb is an exceptionally weird example to make that case, it's not like he grew up the son of a sharecropper -- his dad commanded a missile squadron for the Air Force and was a full Colonel when Webb joined the Naval Academy.


The alternative is gating on soft skills and job experience. Do you really think it's easier for privileged kids to game our industry's admissions tests?

A poor kid would have a much harder time developing soft skills and getting job experience than a rich kid would have passing our admissions tests, which would be worse for social mobility than the status quo. A poor kid with a blue collar dad can't get an internship at his dad's friend's startup. A poor kid didn't go to a high school with a computer science club. A poor kid didn't grow up developing soft skills at a dozen different after school activities.

However, the poor kid can go to college on a Pell Grant (like me), study hard, and at least have a chance to meet the Leetcode bar and gain entry to the middle class.


Chiming in to agree here. Standardized tests + leetcode tests gave me the ability to overcome being a ward of the state and become a software engineer/ then founder of a YC company with zero connections.

Quick aside, in addition to the Pell Grant, there's also for former foster youth the CHAFEE grant (California specific).


truly privileged "kids" ain't going around looking for jobs thorough interviews, they show up as "investors" or are otherwise brought in by their 'connections'...


Granted, but we're talking about upper-middle-class versus poor. Upper-middle-class means you speak the prestige dialect, you know what "business casual" means and you already have the proper outfit, and you have access to the relevant technology at home, not to mention free time to use it.


A servicable laptop at the pawn shop can be had for $200.


but the internet no longer teaches you how to use it

that content has been paywalled.


> tell undergrads at top schools to spend months practicing

Come on. A friend of mine spent 2 weeks studying the leetcode corpus and then passed Google's coding screening. He complained about having to do the study, and I suggested that Google's salaries were such that it would be the most cost-effective 2 weeks he'd ever spend.


Multiple FAANG recruiters have told entire student bodies that.

Interview loops aren't deterministic, nor are they entirely objective. Congratulations to your friend for passing.


It all depends on how good you are at programming / math. If you have a natural talent for those then you don't need to spend much time preparring (hence why they're used a test). People try to "cheat" the test through preparing for months.


If a person has to study leetcode for months, then either the person:

1. doesn't know much of anything about programming, and should consider taking programming courses

2. is just not cut out to be a high level programmer, and should consider a career path more suited to their abilities


False.

I've been operating as a high level programmer for over a decade and have a MsC in comp sci from a top school and a statistics/comp sci related Ph.D.

I was bored at my job and thought I'd apply at Meta. I've never really used python professionally (more of an R person, though I've solo dev'ed apps which have been in clinical usage for 3+ years with typescript front ends).

Did hours of leetcode over the course of 2 months to prep, because I was bored at my job and I thought it would be a fun way to improve my python skills.

Failed the coding section of the interview. Feedback was:

"The candidate clearly understands the problem and is an excellent communicator, but seems rusty with python."

No worries and no complaints, the story has a happy ending.


> Feedback was:

> "The candidate clearly understands the problem and is an excellent communicator, but seems rusty with python."

The feedback is always worthless. It may -- or may not[1] -- honestly reflect what the interviewer thought of you, but the interview process is not set up to produce reliable results, which means that what they thought of you isn't really related to your characteristics. There is only a very tenuous connection between their assessment of you and your performance.

[1] The last time I interviewed with Google, the recruiter congratulated me on doing well in the interviews and told me to expect a job offer. What followed was multiple weeks of silence (technically, not silence, they also asked me to make changes to my resume) and then the message that they were not interested in hiring me because my interview performance was poor. Whatever else we may say about this, we cannot avoid the conclusion that some of the feedback you get consists of intentional lies.


That's just the problem though, isn't it? Because the leetcode format is known, unless the person tells you, how would you know they studied for months to pass it?

Brilliant person A does leetcode for a week to get the hang of the format, then interviews and gets a job offer. Person B who just isn't brilliant but is highly motivated, studies leetcode for months, interviews, and also gets the job.

You might have fantasies of outlawing "studying for months for the test" but be real. Person whos "is just not cut out to be a high level programmer, and should consider a career path more suited to their abilities", it turns out, is doing just fine with their career path having studied for the test.

I also think calendar time is the wrong way to measure it, since there's a huge difference between studied leetcode for 40 hours a week like it's your job or being in school; and studied leetcode for 4 hours on Friday nights instead of going out, for months.


I don't see the problem. If one studies leetcode for months, and passes the test, that's a pretty good sign he learned a lot about programming from it. How could he not learn by doing all this studying?

It's like saying someone cheated on a Calculus exam by studying Calculus.

> not cut out to be a high level programmer

I think that was misunderstood. I'll try again. If one studies for months and yet fails to learn the material, perhaps one is not suited to that field of endeavor. There are certain things others excel at that I would just fruitlessly beat my head into a wall trying. For example, anything involving hand-eye coordination or a musical instrument.

And so what? Sometimes people ask me what kind of career they should pursue, and I don't say "STEM". I advise draw a circle around things you're good at, and another circle around things that pay, and your career is in the intersection.


I've never understood why FAANGs are so fond of leetcode. Maybe they just get the headcounts and want a dumb and easy filter to hire some not terrible programmers. And that's part of the reason why the massive layoff is ongoing.

But STAR costs you little time to practice and communication skills will definitely pay off for a programmer.


STAR is what you do when you want to hire professional talkers.

Leetcode is not the only way to hire professional builders, but is much better than STAR.


I was surprised by the kind of things people openly admit to during STAR interviews. I don't enjoy doing them but they've surfaced enough red flags from candidates to save a previous employer a few bad hires.


I'd question whether it's really that effective. A dishonest candidate could craft a boring, safe scenario for a STAR interview question that paints them as an empathetic team-player, even if that's not how they've really acted in the past.

Meanwhile, a forthright, but flawed candidate who supplies real examples from their past they regret, but would like to improve on, would look like an iffy hire.


Leetcode is the only thing that scales consistently.

At small companies, a senior engineer can ask about past projects and get a sense of whether the candidate was a meaningful contributor or just along for the ride, but that's subjective and inconsistent when you have thousands of seniors.


Leetcode is dead, and it just doesn't know it yet. High quality LLMs killed it. Either proctor, in person onsite, or your hire likely cheated.

Leetcode can't die fast enough.


? Leetcode interviews are "proctored"


Obviously not well enough to stop cheaters.

I unironically refuse to go on video for my interviews because of my "lack of webcam" (which is true for my desktop). Literally never had a single interviewer stop due to it, and I've virtual onsite interviewed at most of the FAANGs.

What I mean by proctoring is really intense, invasive shit.


Leetcode exercises are pretty effective at weeding out incompetents. If they have a false positive rate, that's fine, you've got plenty of applicants. If they weed out some of the best that's also fine, because the number one concern when hiring is to find someone competent enough that they don't become an embarrassment to anyone involved.

Real world business decisions are dramatically less optimized than people imagine they are.


Like the SAT, it probably does a reasonable job of providing a repeatable/scalable floor for skills that are a proxy for, if generally not the same as, what's needed for the job. And, like the SAT, the effort to prepare for the test is externalized.


> I've never understood why FAANGs are so fond of leetcode

Is part of it the recent frenzy to avoid bias?

If you can't take into account how smart or personable the candidate "felt", maybe leetcode is what you're left with?


OpenAI chat could probably pass leetcode.


It can pass easy leetcodes. Here's a transcript of it solving an easy leetcode problem, and I also asked it for additional test cases.

https://pastebin.com/BpdcuWEM

There was another problem I tried where it gave an almost correct answer. Fixing the answer from then was probably faster than if I had to do from scratch.


Of course, the other thing is that there's a ton of effort that goes into writing that question so well. I think if jira tickets were that well written, I'd be able to go much faster too.


Past the edit window; https://leetcode.com/problems/two-sum/ is the problem I fed it.


That is O(n^2), when I believe it could have been O(n.log(n)).


It’s a poorly implemented method to attempt to introduce some equity or actual measurable outcome.

It has to be poorly implemented because people have successfully asserted in court that assessments that correlate with IQ are illegal. So making an assessment a grind is key to weeding out the lazy or people not crafty enough to figure out what’s up. They handle the intelligence part by targeting select schools.

In government, this has been incredibly impactful. Professional civil service jobs in the US had a mixture of professional expertise and general intelligence component weighted differently depending on the job. Now, if they still exist, they consist of trivia or grammar evaluations. The result is, in professional civil service, professions without gating credentials are hiring lower IQ individuals.


> Demonstrate this particular method (which happened to be taught at our rich-kids alma mater, but no one else had heard of).

This is one of those things that often gets repeated online, but I've never seen in practice. I've never seen a Leetcode interview question that can't be solved with knowledge outside of what you'd learn after the first semester of sophomore year. Helping my wife with Leetcode, I can see why some people would think this way though. Some people simply have better algorithmic intuition than others, so that may come off as memorization.

The only somewhat esoteric questions I've been asked is Indian immigrants asking about the minutiae about the JVM. Even then, I don't think these would be unreasonable if you were explicitly screening for Java developers.


Upper class folks send their kids into law & medicine. Technology is more of a proletariat aspiration.


Wasn't there a chinese guy that failed these three times, put his family in poverty due to the expense, realized he's the brother of Jesus and started a rebellion that killed 40 million people? History can be weird sometimes


Hong Xiuquan’s story is pretty bonkers, but I think the more sensationalist aspects of it overshadow the possibility that some sort of disruption to the tottering Qing was due in that era. Increasing foreign entrenchment with defeat in the Opium Wars, an increasingly sclerotic government, and much local turmoil (even prior to the rebellion, there had been ethnic and class-based revolts in Guangzhou, iirc, and some of Hong’s support base was because he was of the Hakka minority) all made the situation fraught.

Hong being influenced by American Christian missionaries is odd, but there is much precedence for rebel leaders who took on dynasties to be of millenarian, even foreign beliefs. Throughout Chinese history, the White Lotus society, with millenarian Buddhist beliefs, had challenged the Qing and the Yuan (the Ming founder was a member). The Yellow Turbans of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms fame were Daoist esoterics. Manichaean rebels fought the Song. I think a lot of times it’s just that religious cultists had the necessary social structures in place to launch rebellions, and the cohesion to continue the fight as opposed to scattered peasant revolts. The history of Chinese dynastic shifts is replete with secret societies. The Taiping were noteworthy not only because they were Christian-influenced, but because it was an act of such an organization being created in real-time, out in the open.


> but there is much precedence for rebel leaders who took on dynasties to be of millenarian, even foreign beliefs.

The modern Chinese government’s suppression of Falun Gong makes sense from this perspective.


That would be the Taiping Rebellion for anyone interested.[0]

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion


Suspiciously similar to a certain someone who failed an art admission and went on to start off a war that killed around 70-80 million people? History does repeat itself.


aren't people already tired of those tweet size tropes.

Revanchism, extreme nationalism and economic anxiety among other reasons what led to the rise of the ww1 veteran who happened to fail an art admission


Also, Hitler was like a minor German Army intelligence agent tasked with infiltrating the Nazis back when they were an obscure group. He just ended up agreeing with their message and taking them over.


I didn't know this and now I like the FBI even less.


Congratulations on your Godwin's Law speedrun.


Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen Platt is a fantastic popular history of the Taiping Rebellion. He's especially good on covering the weathervaning western attitude towards something that was initially believed to be a sort of Christian holy war. The whole book is super interesting reading even if you have zero background in Chinese history.


God's Chinese Son by Jonathan D. Spence is a good account.


The modern equivalent = national university entrance exam


See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao

My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers. It's a method of elite production that allows for social mobility and limits the ability of parents to pass their status on to their children. I've wondered if much of reason why Harvard-associated people have been negative about standardized tests

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man

is precisely because a test-based system wouldn't produce the same elite Harvard produces.


It is not how it works. Depending on the province, student submits a list of preferred universities with majors before taking the test, after taking the test, or after knowing the score. The list is divided in groups, and also depending on the province, the universities in each group may or may not be ordered.

In a province where the universities are ordered, students with the same first choice are grouped together and the said university gets the result and admits top scores within quota. If there are more quota than students, university looks at students putting it as second choice AND not admitted by another university yet. Never figured out how unordered group works so I won't explain that.

There are also nuances if students could submit list after knowing their scores, because universities can approach top students in private and negotiate terms with them to lure them into putting the universities as first choice.

Hence Beijing University only gets results if it is on the list of a student. And it is not always a good idea to put Beijing U as the first choice since in a province with ordered group, not getting admitted by first choice hugely decreases the chance of getting into second choice university.


Same thing here in Vietnam. But I don’t think it detracts from the point (standardized testing is good for social mobility).

Normally almost everyone know roughly how competitive your own self is, so only people at the margin of admission has to care. There are some majors where everyone is at the margin (sometimes it get to 29.75 out of 30 as the cutoff), but at that point, it really doesn’t matter who you would get among all those people, and the effect is roughly the school pick a subset of very talented and hardworking student at random. Again, doesn’t affect the mobility issue


And you have one bad day and you lose your lottery ticket...

You catch a flu, your grandma dies, maybe you menstruate...


Can't you try next year?


Why can't you try in 3 months? Everyone who had some unforeseen event must find money to live another year?


With the Indian JEE you just rank all your choices (major, university). The system then allocates the highest available choice for the student sorted by the student rank. This avoids all the guesswork and game theory that you describe. There are also well defined quotas for lower caste/disabled/state locals etc


> There are also nuances if students could submit list after knowing their scores, because universities can approach top students in private and negotiate terms with them to lure them into putting the universities as first choice.

That seems unnecessary? I asked several students at 复旦大学 and 上海财经大学 how they got into those schools, and about half of them told me they'd gone through the normal process of "take the gaokao, apply to the school, and be admitted based on exceeding the 分数线".

Other responses:

- "I took 财大's own entrance exam, so I didn't need to take the gaokao."

- "I went to the high school affiliated with 复旦, and they recommended me to 复旦. I had a meeting with an admissions officer and he liked me, which meant that I could be admitted with a lower gaokao score [than would otherwise have been required]."

If admissions has this much leeway, I don't really see why they'd need to lure students into listing their school first. Surely the student who didn't bother taking the gaokao at all also didn't need to submit a ranked list of school preferences with the gaokao she didn't take?

> In a province where the universities are ordered, students with the same first choice are grouped together and the said university gets the result and admits top scores within quota. If there are more quota than students, university looks at students putting it as second choice AND not admitted by another university yet. Never figured out how unordered group works so I won't explain that.

I've heard about the rank ordering, but I wasn't able to understand how the system works. As I understand things, the first thing that happens in an admissions year is that the school publishes their 招生计划, the schedule of how many students they plan to admit from each province. Then, aspiring students take the gaokao for that year and submit their ranked school preferences. Then, each school looks at the students that picked them first, and admits them in top down order of score. Then, if they haven't filled out the 招生计划, they look at the students that picked them second, and so on...

Finally, the school publishes their 分数线 for each province (and major) that year, the lowest score that resulted in being admitted from that province in that major.

The thing I don't understand is that the 分数线 appears to be fully discretionary. I am not aware of a rule that tells the school when to stop looking at students that ranked it first and start looking at students that ranked it second. How is that decision made? It will always be possible to scrape the bottom of the first-choice barrel a little harder, so that you have more first-choice students and a lower 分数线, or to maintain a higher standard, reject the first-choice student with a terrible score, and move on to the second-choice group, where you can start over from the top scorer in that group. That will be good for your 分数线. Why not do it?

(The other problem is that the first set of students you're looking at is well-defined, but the second set is not - they might be admitted by their first-choice school. Do you know how the system handles this? When can a school learn what their second-choice students look like?)


> My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers.

There are quotas for each province, city/rural area (I think the quotas are by major, which have to be declared ahead of time before you take the test). It can be really hard to get in from rural Henan, for example, but much easier to get in from urban Beijing. Someone who gets into Beida from a rural village in the middle of nowhere is going to have a much higher gaokao score than someone who gets in from Shanghai (there is a large quota for Shanghai kids even in Beijing University, but a very low quota for rural Henan). So it actually acts as a way of limiting social mobility for those without urban rich city hukous.

It is sort of analogous to America's public university system, where you get differences between in state and out of state tuition (except here, it isn't tuition, but quotas for regions).

https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-unf...


At the end of the day, the purpose of the standardized tests is to provide a reasonable guide to admitting students who are (subject to various caveats) capable of doing the academic work. It's mostly true to say that elite universities are not looking to admit students solely (or maybe even primarily) on the basis of their scores on standardized test(s). And, yes, other factors are perhaps more influenced by family background but can be influenced by many other non-academic qualities as well.


I don't agree but I think it's fair to say standardized tests are a very mediocre solution for measuring students' capacity for academic work at any institution that requires them, and few universities have the resources to develop and implement better admissions procedures and entrance exams that are more reflective of their institutional values on their own. It's much easier just to get on board the College Board gravy train.

My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the function of MS/HS education. They are tied to school funding, teacher effectiveness, local/regional reputation and create a trickle down effect from SAT/ACT > PSAT > state-level tests so that the worst-served students are practicing multiple choice and boilerplate prompts from February to May every year. And these students hardly even go to college if they graduate, so that's time that could have been spent exploring trades, developing life skills (civics, taxes), understanding how to cope with any learning differences, etc.

Then there's the fact that a student can be taught to bump their score past a nominal requirement, gain admission, take out loans and never graduate. Not necessarily the fault of the test but part of the overall complex.


> My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the function of MS/HS education.

Eh, depends on how your country's standardized tests are set up. You don't have to ask multiple-choice questions.

There's no reason you shouldn't use standardized tests in trade education - if you're teaching plumbing with copper pipe, have them solder some joints and quiz them about air locks and suchlike.

You can cover things that are truly impossible to examine by just requiring a certain number of hours. If you want people in the first year of high school to receive sex ed but don't want to do exams on it, you can just require that schools deliver a certain number of hours of it.


Then they should just test for that and make it a lottery for everyone over the bar. Anyone who's been to an elite university will tell you that a lot more people could handle it than are admitted.


They should increase difficulty until the number who can handle it matches the number they can admit.


Why? Because there's no signal other than standardized test scores? If you believe that then you probably should just admit the highest scores.

When I last looked at the research many years ago, other signals certainly tended to be noisier but there's no particular reason to think that admissions would be better if universities simply set a test floor then rolled a dice.


We can't really resolve this with the current data, because the current system encourages people to get as high a score as possible at the cost of maximum stress. How do we know whether changing the system would lead to a less stressed system where people just do enough to leap the bar, perhaps like the diving test?


The selection process has a cost. If it doesn't produce value it should be replaced with a lottery.


It's pretty clear however that the selection process at elite universities, however imperfect and to whatever degree it factors in things (like legacy admissions) that you may think shouldn't be factored in, still produces better results than just randomly admitting some percentage of whoever applies. (Especially if applicants knew it would be a completely random process.)


It's not clear that the existing selection processes at most universities actually adds value in proportion to its cost. What value, and to who? What are the shortcomings you think they're trying to fix?

Even if everyone agreed on a standard and its impact on admissions (+3 for participation in the Model UN, for example) it's not clear how we'd judge "better results" as we evaluate our admissions criteria. Are we optimizing for an even racial/religious mix of students? Higher output grades? Higher wages? More children raised successfully by the age of 40?

Then even with an agreed upon goal and some objective measures to used to approach it - is it worth doing? If we could get 1% better results by doubling the difficulty of the application process for the students then it probably wouldn't be worth doing it when the plan was considered holistically. What's an acceptable trade-off? What's the cost on transparency and perception of bias when we start considering subjective criteria?


What university has done this experiment?


For the SAT/ACT specifically, it's optional at a fair number of schools--elimination mostly started during COVID has been extended. (And not used at all at a few.) Of course, they still look at high school grades and class rank. I guess they'll have a better understanding in a few years how things turn out.

Of course, the process is still a far way from random.


A lot more people could handle it than are admitted because you can pick the classes you want to take.

If you are saying a lot more people could handle taking the top level classes than are admitted, I would also agree - but most of those people go to similarly elite unis.


I'm only looking at own experience, where you couldn't just choose whether classes you liked.


Right, but as one of those "anyone" who has been to an elite university, I'm giving my two cents.


I went to a selective uni where I thought basically half my year at high school would have been just fine there. The other half were not particularly interested in studying anything and would have screwed up at any university.

It's not like the laws of physics depend on what college teaches them, right? The content of just about any course is going to be more or less the same. A lot of the books were the same as well, comparing notes with friends who didn't get in.


> It's not like the laws of physics depend on what college teaches them, right? The content of just about any course is going to be more or less the same. A lot of the books were the same as well, comparing notes with friends who didn't get in.

To restate your claim (correct me if I'm wrong): Because the laws of physics are constant, there is only small limited possible variability in the difficulty, knowledge transferred, and comprehension needed to take a physics class between that at an elite university vs. any other university.

The facts: Only 19% of American highschoolers take calculus. This already precludes 80% of students from taking the standard physics classes at my university.

Advanced classical mech. classes for first-years can go much beyond that, delving into lagrangian and hamiltonian formulations, fictitious forces, difficulty relativity problems, etc.

If you are claiming half of your year at high school would have been fine taking a course like this, you went to a very unusual high school in my opinion.


Well the ones in the higher math classes would have been, but that's perhaps a small class size effect. I mean half of them did do either a math or engineering degree, one did a math PhD. I'm not too knowledgeable about the ones doing other subjects like history or art.

But yeah it would seem of the people who were on the path to apply to Oxford (or any other mathy course at a university) would have been fine if they had gotten in.

I'm extrapolating that the other kids in other subjects were just as qualified.

I mean of course I'm not saying people who hadn't done the prerequites would be fine, just the ones who did and didn't get in would be.


My US experience, which is probably pretty typical, is some choice of core courses, choice of major, with some required and some options within that major. Undergrad I'm pretty sure I could have made choices that would have made it pretty much impossible for me to graduate and I could have made choices which--while they certainly wouldn't have made my undergraduate education trivial--would have made things easier.


I'm saying for almost every major there is a very easy path.

But I absolutely disagree if they're saying that there are tons of people who could grok the advanced first-year physics classes like Physics 16 @ Harvard who are just being turned away and also not getting into other similarly good schools.


I don't believe that for a second. Are you saying Xi's children and grandchildren would be denied admission at Beijing University if they wanted it? I'm betting the answer is no. Now extend that thinking to the Standing Committee? Would any of their kids/grandkids be rejected? Now extend that to the entire Politburo.

Now we can ask the question: Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if steps removed from the Premier? Merit, my ass.


Xi’s daughter went to Harvard

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Mingze


>Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if steps removed from the Premier?

First off, the premier is not the leader of China. Second, while I can imagine that members of the Politburo could get their children in, and perhaps some others with power, this doesn't extend so far out. The CCP has tens of millions of members, more than 99% of them are irrelivant. If that kind of scandle would be revealed it would end their career. It is much safer to send their children abroad: something that Xi Jinping did for his daughter (and Kim Jong Il did for Kim Jong Un). That is what I imagine more likely. Additionally it would be easier to just get them a good job with a degree from a worse college (In their own or their freinds comapny). If you have any evidence otherwise I wouldn't be surprised per se but I think a source for your claim is needed.


Even if that's true, it's an entirely different scale from an entire class of people being able to pass their status onto their children through college admissions like the upper middle class and richer people can do in the US.


There is a reason that it's pretty much 100% upper middle class people that complain about standardized tests being unfair.


Huh, poor people who can't afford tutoring complain about it as well.

The only people who can opt out are the ones who are either rich or connected enough to choose a different system.

In China that might mean Ivy League, in the UK it means you pay a very expensive private school to give the kids the best chance.


It is mostly the lower classes (or their advocates) complaining about standardized testing not being equitable. And they have a point about biases (not having access to tutoring, or questions that rely on a middle class or better background to answer correctly).

Many richer Chinese kids bypass the Gaokao completely and just take the much easier SAT/ACT to go to school in the states (or equivalent in other countries).


> or their advocates

Not really their advocates, but upper middle class people giving themselves moral cover by saying they want to get rid of standardized test to help poor people. Really they want to make sure smart poor people cant out compete them.


I’m not sure where you are getting your info, but rich people do much better on standardized tests (ACT/SAT/GaoKao/etc…) then poor people given the resources they have available to prep for the tests. If you think these are equalizers for poor people (or that they think so), you are misidentifying the problem.


If this is interesting to you, I also recommend Ray Huang's "1587, a Year of No Significance": https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/815857.1587

I'm only halfway through the book but it's been an informative and entertaining read so far. It delves into the bureaucracy that this kind of examination system produces and describes how individuals struggled in vain to turn things around during the last years of the Ming dynasty. Even the Emperor can be powerless against a vast bureaucracy, at least in pre-modern times.


Something is seriously wrong about this article. Good read and that make it the worst article on this subject. Both horizontally (culture) and vertically (history) sort of figure speak.

First there are obvious a few major break of that system. Start with no such system unlike what is said. In fact the very examination was sort of inverted by a Tang dynasty emperor, even with a declaration that from now on all the literate will be in my grasp. And unlike that eight-box system, it is much more free style and corrupted as such. Hence the system to standardize the exam. Genarlaisation if one has to should at least divide into period.

Another thing is call it chinese, which is whilst “obvious” but is also wrong. The whole thing is Hans. It is exclusive due to its subject matter. Of course they do not look at you on race as Hans is not a race. Look at today so called chinese. You can sense there are major difference even in height and look (the southern and northern “race”) that nobody care. Still it is strictly Hans from Tang to Qing. That is reason why when they escalate to university the study of “Chinese” disappears and becomes modern day Hans. You cannot say non-Hans language not chinese for political reason. But just ignore them and concentrate on Hans.

There is no chinese before 1911, an invention in 1911 to trick the Manchuria emperor to write that essay and Mongolia and Tibet to toe the line.

(United Kingdom all are English and let us study only English exam as uk exam. Work well for some foreigner and English. Wales aide, let us use the dominate language dominate and generalize it to America and Ireland which also use “english” as part of the English system.)

Well written and as lie goes, it is very bad as somehow it generalize to the extent that it is wrong.


Not mentioned in this article: from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service#Modern_civil_ser...

Modern European concepts of civil service was essentially influenced by the Chinese bureaucracy who selected members based on learning advancements rather than aristocratic birth.


While most critisim against the “eight-legged essay” (baguwen) were true, these was a reason to do so.

> mindlessly memorize classical texts and reproduce them in calligraphic writing in a strictly parallel format

Before the selected "classical texts", nobel family can easily outperform other competitors by studying obscure non-classical texts from non-popular books, which the common public had no access to. Although China did invent the printing press first, but still some academic books were passed on only in a small circle. So children of the elites can easily ace the civil examination in imperial court. It was similar how private univsecities exclude Jews or colored people by introducing Latin or Greek exams in the past.

During the Ming dynasty, the "eight-legged essay" was invented and enforced. Creativity was eliminated for the sake of "fairness". The exam only allows courses from classical texts where everyone had a copy, namely the "Five Classics" & the "Four Books", and the essay were narrowed down to a specific format so poor family can afford a small tutor fee.


One of the reasons that China hadn't have a strong private school of thoughts.


That is why such generalizations is really bad for understanding. There are so many schools and “college” that are private. In fact nearly all are private except a few official one. And because of that there are many different schools of thought throughout. That exam system whilst extract a lot of student into it, it is much later first. And when it is bad it did kill a lot of innovation but it is not the examination. In fact it reflect something else.


Interesting article. I learned a lot.

A old book that I keep returning to is An authentic account of an embassy from the King of Great Britain to the Emperor of China by George Staunton, published in 1797 [1, 2, 3]. In the eyes of someone raised in class-bound England, the Chinese examination system seemed admirable:

“In Pekin alone is conferred the highest degree of literature upon those who, in public examinations, are found most able in the sciences of morality and government, as taught in the ancient Chinese writers; with which studies, the history of their country is intimately blended. Among such graduates all the civil offices in the state are distributed by the Emperor; and they compose all the great tribunals of the empire. ... Those examinations are carried on with great solemnity, and apparent fairness. ... There is a body of doctrine composed from the writings of the earliest sages of the empire, confirmed by subsequent lawgivers and sovereigns, and transmitted from age to age with increasing veneration, which serves as rules to guide the judgment of those tribunals. This doctrine seems indeed founded on the broadest basis of universal justice, and on the purest principles of humanity.” [4]

“The examinations of students for degrees are said to be always public. The body of auditors who attend, as well as the presence of the governor and chief magistrates of the district, who preside, must awe any disposition to partiality in the judges. ... The rewards of those who succeed, are not confined to the honours of the university; for these become the ascending steps which lead to all the offices and dignities of the state. Even those who fail in the main pursuit, have, in the prosecution of the contest, made such acquirements as fit them for useful avocations, and add to the general mass of knowledge in society. ... Tho the opulent youth have no doubt greater facilities and better opportunities of instruction, than the children of the poor, yet genius may have occasionally the strength to counterbalance such disparity; and at any rate, the possibility of success is an enjoyment even to those who are never likely to obtain it. ... Such a system of government promises indeed great benefits to society; and can fail only when the temptation to do evil is greater than the strength of principle and the risk of being detected in the sacrifice of it. The poor and private individuals in China, who have no means of communicating their complaints, or declaring their sentiments on the conduct of their particular rulers, are left in great measure at their mercy; and foreigners, when in the same predicament, are equally liable to suffer.” [5]

[1] https://archive.org/details/authenticaccount01stau/page/n5/m...

[2] https://archive.org/details/authenticaccount02stau/page/n7/m...

[3] https://archive.org/details/gri_33125008481562/page/n9/mode/...

[4] https://archive.org/details/authenticaccount02stau/page/152/...

[5] https://archive.org/details/authenticaccount02stau/page/482/...




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