Beijing yesterday banned written exams for six and seven-year-olds, as part of sweeping education reforms aimed at relieving pressure on pupils and parents in China’s hyper-competitive school system.
China’s exam-oriented system previously required students to take exams from Grade 1 onward, culminating in the feared university entrance exam at age 18 known as the gaokao (高考), where a single score can determine a child’s life trajectory.
“Too frequent exams ... which cause students to be overburdened and under huge exam pressure,” have been axed by the Chinese Ministry of Education, new guidelines released yesterday said.
Photo: AFP
The ministry said that pressure on pupils from a young age “harms their mental and physical health.”
The regulations also limit exams in other years of compulsory education to once a term, with mid-term and mock examinations allowed in junior-high school.
The measures are part of wider government reforms of China’s education sector, which include a crackdown on cram schools — seen by parents as a way to inflate their children’s educational fortunes.
Late last month, China ordered all private tutoring firms to turn non-profit, and barred tutoring agencies from giving lessons in core subjects at weekends and holidays, effectively crippling a US$100 billion sector.
The aim is to reduce China’s education inequality, where some middle-class parents willingly fork out 100,000 yuan (US$15,462) or more per year on private tutoring to get their children into top schools. Many also snag property in schools’ catchment areas, driving up housing prices.
“There is no other country that has such a strong tutoring culture [as China],” said Claudia Wang, partner and Asia education lead at Shanghai-based consulting firm Oliver Wyman.
With population growth at its slowest in decades, Chinese authorities lifted a two-child birth limit earlier this year and plan to increase incentives for parents to have more children.
Beijing city authorities last week announced that teachers must rotate schools every six years, to prevent a concentration of top talent at some schools.
Education officials yesterday reiterated a ban on schools setting up “priority” classes for gifted students.
The ministry also banned written homework for Grade 1 and 2 students earlier this year, and limited homework for junior-high students to no more than 1.5 hours per night.
However, many Chinese parents still regard education as a path to social mobility. The gaokao is one of the few ways that poor, rural students can access better educational opportunities and job prospects at top universities.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
RSS