The Joint Entrance Exam Monster Is Dead!Now What?

Year after year on the day of the big test, students have gathered at testing sites all across Taiwan, scribbling furiously and sweating in the sweltering summer heat, as their parents wait outside to ply them with tea and refreshments during breaks.

A Mrs. Liu, whose son is in this last class of joint entrance exam takers, says, "When a child is in the last year of junior high [ninth grade], it's as if the whole family is living with a time bomb that ticks down to the day of the test. The whole clan centers on the needs of that child." Her son attends a highly regarded junior high on posh Tunhua Road, and Mrs. Liu notes that more than 100 students from the school were admitted to their first-choice high schools last year. That comes to about five or six kids in each class, which is more than many whole schools can boast.

Junior high schools in good districts are very competitive, but this competition also creates frustrations for the children. "He frankly told me that both the school and his parents were putting pressure on him by fixating on his grades." This mother has mixed emotions about the new admissions methods. On the "recommendation track," schools nominate selected students to take tests for specific high schools. On the "application track," students apply themselves to high schools of their choice. She is happy that it is now possible to advance to high school without taking the joint entrance exam. Yet she holds that multi-track admissions is itself an experiment, and it is now too late to review results and come up with something new.

Era of experimentation

Why have these various admissions methods been pushed forward? And how will they be implemented?

Taiwan has undergone rapid political and social change since it reverted to ROC rule at the end of World War II. Meanwhile, ideas about education have been gradually loosening. Recent years in particular have witnessed a steady stream of educational reforms.

In 1990, the Ministry of Education announced a new policy, called somewhat misleadingly the "self-study plan," which provided junior high school students with an option of seeking senior high school admission without taking the joint entrance exam. Scores in five different areas of school performance (ethical, intellectual, physical, group spirit, and aesthetic) started being used in place of a single score in the joint entrance exam for determining senior high school admissions. The intent was to make the educational experience in junior high school healthier, by eliminating the all-consuming fixation on the joint exam. In August 1990, a trial run of this program began in Taipei, Kaohsiung and Kinmen. First-year junior high students could choose for themselves whether to participate.

In Taipei City, for instance, 21 schools and more than 800 students participated in the first year. The number of students would grow to 9,000, before tapering off. The rise and subsequent fall in these numbers reflect the two sides of public opinion about the program. It was hailed as Taiwan's first step in admissions reform. But its impact on students' actual educational experiences fell well short of society's expectations.

In the spring of 1994, public interest groups organized a march for educational reform on April 10. The marchers demanded broader access to senior high school and college education, as well as smaller classes and schools. In response, the Executive Yuan established an Educational Reform Evaluation Committee, which held general discussions on the drawbacks of Taiwan's educational system and made a list of eight priorities for educational reform. These included "easing the path of advancement and creating multiple tracks for admission." The committee suggested to start by reforming college and university admissions and only then shift the focus to senior high school admissions.

The recommendation and application tracks are based on British and American models. Stress is placed on the student's grades and extra-curricular performance. The difference between them is that on the recommendation track, junior high school teachers, who naturally understand students' educational situation, nominate students based on their own assessments. Each individual senior high school then conducts its own written test to choose among the students recommended by the junior highs. On the application track, it is the students themselves who apply to individual senior high schools.

Beginning in 1997, each senior high began setting its own quotas for the number of students it would take on these tracks. Those students who are admitted to a senior high school on either track no longer need to take the joint entrance exam. Yet because the Ministry of Education first stipulated that schools could take no more than 50% of their students using these methods, many students still needed to take the joint exam in order to get into senior high school.

Along with researching new admissions methods, educational authorities have been moving toward eliminating the joint entrance exam altogether. Toward that goal they commissioned the Research Center for Psychology and Educational Testing (RPET) at National Taiwan Normal University to create a new Basic Competency Test (BCT) which will replace the joint entrance exam altogether in 2001.

This makes for six separate admissions tracks: (1) the joint entrance exam or BCT track, (2) the recommendation track, (3) the application track, (4) the earlier implemented grades-oriented "self-study" program, (5) the direct promotion of some students from junior high schools affiliated with senior high schools, and (6) the exams for students gifted at math, science or languages.

"No matter how many times you tinker with admissions policy, you won't get far from a few basic models," says Ding Gih-jen, head of the Jendo Education Society. Ding holds that the reforms embrace three basic criteria: standardized national exams (such as the joint entrance exam or the BCT), grades, and the tests that individual schools now devise for themselves. The schools differ from each other only in the relative stress that they put on each of these three basic methods.

In contrasting multiple-track admissions to the joint entrance exam, he says, "The joint exam was like a general ledger: only the final figure counted, so that eventual success could wipe clean earlier failures. But the problem was that children just had one way to succeed. What's worth applauding about multiple-track admissions is that it lets children with different sets of strengths all have a chance to get ahead."

Many tracks, many hurdles

Although one might think that parents ought to be celebrating that those dreadful days of endless quizzes, mock exams, and cram school classes are over, their feelings turn out to be rather more complicated than that.

In May, 1998, when then-Minister of Education Lin Ching-jiang announced the plan to abolish the joint entrance exam for high schools, the Humanistic Journal polled parents with children in the sixth grade and found that 56% were in favor of eliminating the joint entrance exam, 26% were opposed, and more than half believed that eliminating the test would reduce children's educational stress.

Yet it's worth noting that in Taipei City, which has more high schools than any other city or county in Taiwan and where admissions reforms were started in 1997, more than half of recently polled parents were against eliminating the joint entrance exam. A survey carried out by the office of Taipei City Council Member Chiang Nai-hsing showed that 73% of Taipei parents understood what the attempt to diversify admission tracks was all about. And it turned out that parents who were in the know were 2.6% more likely to oppose doing away with the exam.

Parents aren't the only ones skeptical about the plan. Even those adults on the front lines of education, the teachers, have grave doubts.

One teacher at a prestigious high school says that the ten best students in her class these past two years were all admitted based on their performance on the joint entrance exam. "Those kids who got in on the recommendation track were only tested on their Chinese, English and math. As a result, their schoolwork shows an imbalance. Many of these students are weak in history, geography, physics and chemistry." She worries that after the joint entrance exam is completely eliminated the level of the students' work will decline even farther. "Everyone is groping for solutions, but the end result is that students these past two years have been treated like guinea pigs."

At a time when multi-track admissions have yet to meet with widespread support among parents and teachers, an unfortunate incident occurred at the end of February. It was discovered that students at about a dozen junior high schools had been leaked the answers to the mock joint exams. This led to fears that the multiple track admissions policy was not as fair as the joint entrance exam.

Back when everyone took the joint entrance exam, the mock exam scores were just used as tools to predict how students would perform on the actual tests. Yet now that multiple-track admissions have arrived, grades in school have become an important factor in admissions, and some schools use the mock tests to determine who the school nominates on the recommendation track, from which many senior high schools take 40% of their students. Some junior highs have chosen to recommend just one student from each class, with the result being intense competition between classmates.

At least the joint entrance exam was over and done with very quickly. Now that it has been scrapped, every test seems to take on long-term ramifications, so that there has been no real easing of academic pressure. And when teachers select students based on their grades, some will inevitably complain about the "human factor."

In March a third year junior-high student wrote about his experiences applying to high school in a letter to a newspaper. He had begun preparing his applications to high school, but some of the teachers at his school would only write recommendation letters for the top students in their class or for kids with well-connected parents. The teachers said that students with average records wouldn't get in anyway, so they didn't want to waste their time. Some students who couldn't get recommendations from the school had written excellent application essays, and the school even went as far as to give those essays to the top students to use as models. The whole process struck him as being quite unfair.

Examination frustration

But was the joint entrance exam really fairer?

Ting Ya-wen, chair of the multiple-track admissions committee for the Taipei school district and the principal of Chungshan Girls Senior High School, says, "The joint entrance exam represents complete standardization. With it, there is only one standard for admissions, and one standard for scoring." She points out that over the past 20 years we have seen time and again the ill effects of overemphasizing rote memorization at Taiwan's junior high schools. The exams have ended up determining the curriculum. Anything that wasn't going to be tested simply wasn't taught. It has been very confining for teachers, and the poor students, who became test-taking machines, have been even more deserving of our pity.

Ting Ya-wen says she will never forget a letter that a junior high student wrote to former Minister of Education Wu Ching, which related that during his three years of junior high the student had taken more than 2,500 quizzes. School had produced mechanistic reactions in him. He had become a test-taking animal. "The evaluation methods smothered these youngsters, so that they had no space to think," says Ting Ya-wen. "And it was all the system's fault. Standardized admissions had to be changed."

One of the purposes of multiple-track admissions is to encourage high schools to take on individual character and make the most out of school autonomy. Under this system, each high school is allowed to set its own quotas for how many students it will take under the recommendation and application tracks. The system has been in place for three years now, and most schools have settled upon admitting 40% from the school-submitted recommendation track and 10% from the applications submitted by students themselves. The remaining half have been admitted based on their performance on the joint entrance exam. But starting next year that half will be taking the BCT instead.

By eliminating the joint entrance exam and replacing it with the BCT, has anything really changed?

At the end of March the Ministry of Education announced the kinds of questions that would be on the BCT and the two dates on which the test would be administered. The social science and natural science questions will put more stress on real life and current events. The Chinese, English and mathematics sections will not test knowledge found outside school texts. And the math section will avoid questions that require the use of too many formulae, excessively long calculations or techniques not covered by junior high school textbooks. The main goal is to test students' ability to reason and to apply and integrate their knowledge.

Ability that you can take with you

Lin Shih-hua is director of RPET, which was commissioned to create a bank of questions for the test. He explains that it's not that the BCT has better questions than the joint entrance exam, but rather that the two tests have different questions that are a result of their different aims. "What we are emphasizing is ability that 'you take with you.' We don't put much emphasis on testing knowledge or memorization skills."

Take, for instance, this question from the social science section: "Jane is reading a masterpiece of world literature. The book contains Arabian princes, Persian princesses, cunning pirates, and palaces in Baghdad. She is likely to be reading this book in conjunction with her study into which of the following historical topics: (A) Greece and the Hellenistic Age; (B) the development of the Islamic world; (C) the flourishing of Indian culture; or (D) the Eastern Roman Empire.

The BCT has been praised for its nimble questions, but people still wonder if questions of this type are not too easy. And if just 5% of the nation's students end up with the same score, it will cause a big admissions problem.

"The problem with the joint entrance exam was in all the restrictions it imposed on what questions couldn't be used," explained ROC Minister of Education Kirby Yung at a press conference held to introduce the BCT. "You couldn't use questions from the teachers' handouts, and you couldn't use what had already been on old tests. This led to the questions getting more and more difficult. It was the sole basis for determining educational advancement, but it was completely removed from the basic educational level. What we want to do is to expand the base." As long as the schools put the emphasis on imparting basic knowledge, then they will be meeting the goal of the reforms.

Education and selection

As for the matter of score distribution, he holds that choosing between candidates is a problem for individual schools to decide for themselves. "We don't want to walk down that old path of the questions getting more and more obscure and all students being admitted under the same test. How to go about choosing between students with the same scores is a problem that the individual schools can handle by themselves."

While the multiple-track admissions system appears to be complete and fully formulated, it will be hard to implement, and there is much opposition to it.

"The biggest point of controversy involves using school grades, because this will make educational stress a constant," says Ding Gih-jen. "It overturns the roles that schools and teachers play in getting students to advance to the next level. In the past, schools worried about teaching but didn't worry about selecting, but now the junior high schools can't avoid getting involved in decisions about senior high school admissions." Teachers are responsible for giving grades and selecting which students can enter the recommendation track. They are trying both to be members of the same team as the students and also the referees, and this makes it hard for them to maintain fairness. And what about those marks given for artistic ability, ethics, sincerity, and students' ability to put what they've learned into practice? These are simply not the kind of things that you can score. "This is a blind pursuit of fairness," Ding says, "and it twists the whole notion of what art and ethics are."

Take, for instance, the "self-study" track in which admissions are entirely based upon one's grades. Striving for higher "group spirit" grades, students have been known to take clothing to the dean of students that had been left by their classmates in the school yard. The idea was to show the dean how they would never consider taking an object that wasn't theirs. The dean, however, thought that since these pieces of clothing all bore name tags, it would make more sense just to take them to their owners. Then the students starting pulling the name tags off the clothing they found.

Hu Chia-hsiang, a math teacher at Chungshan Girls Senior High who participated in the planning of the multi-track admissions policy, is opposed to using grades as a criterion: "Students with potential don't need to get good grades all three years of junior high." He believes that students in the first two years of junior high (seventh and eighth grades) should be making explorations according to their own interests. Putting too much stress on school grades just ends up tying students down. And there's the problem of the gap in mental and physical development between girls and boys at this age. In the first two years of junior high, girls earn most of the top marks, but by the third year many boys surpass them. The truth is that grades don't mean that much.

One parent of a student at Sanmin Junior High points out that such decisions as whether to pick students for the recommendations track by their grade point average or their class rank is enough to get some parents up in arms. The school's position is that it is "better not to encourage inferior students to compete to get into superior schools." In order to get as many students into their first choices as possible, it selects children who are among the top 20 school-wide. But some parents argue that since the classes within each grade are no longer ranked by ability, the school should just take one student from each. "Suffice it to say, no matter what method you adopt, some people will oppose it," notes this parent.

Students' big gamble

The source of even more reservations is an apparent lack of fairness in the criteria used for multiple-track admissions.

Take, for instance, the requirements to go the application route. The most selective senior high schools impose extremely strict conditions: students have to have grades that put them in the top 10% of their class, and they must have competed in music, speaking or computer competitions at the national or district level. As a result, students from well-to-do backgrounds who had private lessons to cultivate special skills enjoy a great advantage. "This has everything to do with the parents' position in society and nothing to do with the student's inherent abilities," says Hu Chia-hsiang.

"The high school admissions reforms were modeled on those carried out for colleges and universities, but they didn't take into account students' differing levels of maturity." Hu points out from his own experience advising third-year junior high students that at least two-thirds of those who try to get into senior high school on the recommendation track will fail. He often finds himself "preparing students for the worst," telling them not to have their heart set on getting in this way. "But it's not as if you just say this, and they're prepared. From the start of spring vacation, those students who don't pass those recommendation-track tests given by individual high schools are going to feel depressed, and when they come back from vacation to take the mock joint entrance exam, they almost certainly will do poorly. Some of these students even end up performing below their abilities on the actual joint exam." Hu wonders how many teachers really understand this process and can help these students pass through this difficult psychological period. "It is especially tough on the good students, for they don't know where they have failed. They are three years younger than students applying to colleges and are less able to cope psychologically."

"The idea behind multiple tracks was a good one," Hu sighs, "but it comes up short in implementation. Perhaps it would be better to return to the joint entrance exam for everyone, when at least hard-working students from poor backgrounds, like Chen Shui-bian, had a chance to succeed."

Wu Hui-mei, a teacher at Chengcheng Junior High also sees many shortcomings in multiple-track admissions. She says the top schools are very competitive and hard to get into, whereas vocational senior high schools are easy to get into and often short of students. The result is that the schools in the middle end up getting overloaded. What's more, those who get in on the recommendation or application tracks don't have to take the joint entrance exams and end up getting out of three months of studying. This naturally pleases them no end, but the problem is that if there are some students in the class who are no longer taking their schoolwork seriously, they are liable to have a bad influence on the rest of the class.

Huang Jen-hsiang, the director of academic affairs at Chienchung Junior High, says: "Your status is unclear with multiple-track admissions. The quota for the application track is small, and it is hard to get in on the recommendation track. Those with good grades can try every method, whereas those with poor grades seem to have little opportunity, and feel ashamed. Where should they turn? To them, it seems as if none of the channels are suitable."

While educators may still be groping to find answers to the problems associated with multi-track admissions, many people praise the system for allowing individual high schools the freedom to select their own students. This has in turn breathed new life into the education available at junior high schools.

The new atmosphere in education

With implementation of multi-track admissions, there have been students admitted to senior high school because of their talents at Chinese chess or making kites. This April there was one student admitted on the application track because she was a stellar figure skater. There have also been those who get in because of their excellence in the fine arts. "When everything hinged on one's academic record, this kind of student had no chance," says Su Ming-tsung, principal of Chinghsing Junior High.

"If students graduate from junior high today with only good grades, they won't stand much of a chance under the new system." Su explains that in the past many parents believed that students were just wasting their time by serving their peers as class officers. But now participating in service groups or various competitions, or serving as class officers, has become a plus for admission to senior high school.

"In the past the schools were just concerned with imparting knowledge to students, and if they did that then society felt that they had done their job," notes Su. "But now they've got to help students think about where their opportunities lie." Su explains that among the 700 students in a grade, there are some at the school who never get a citation for meritorious service or have a chance to serve as a class officer. If teachers don't help these students find service opportunities before they graduate, they will be filled with anxiety. The school's method is to seek out opportunities to do volunteer work in the neighborhood institutions, such as ward offices of the city government or nursery schools. Every week students go at appointed times to sweep up in the parks or nursery schools, or clean the pasted advertisements off of telephone poles. "If students can both receive citations and have evidence of their public service, they're very happy."

He has also seen how students applying under the recommendations track have gotten into the habit of helping others. In the past, when students didn't know how to use the Internet in computer class, they would just feel frustrated. But now the school has extended the spirit of service to encouraging students to serve as "little teachers," and those who do receive "meritorious service points" for tutoring classmates in how to use computers. The result is that after school the computer lab is full, and struggling students have become hotly sought after commodities.

Success through individuality

Multiple-track admissions may still be experiencing growing pains, but at least it has fostered a sense of educational vitality that was missing back when "a single test decided one's fate for a lifetime" and academics were "stressed above all." Yet the new system still poses numerous challenges to students, parents and schools.

"How to go about guiding students is a major challenge facing the schools," says Huang Jen-hsiang. "How should teachers on the front lines make suggestions based on the students' own abilities and proclivities? It requires great prudence on the part of the teachers."

Ting Ya-wen admits, "Education won't change that fast. First you change the system, and then you wait for everyone's conceptions to catch up. This starts with changing teachers' attitudes-getting them to think that multiple-track admissions is a road that they can keep walking down."

The river of time keeps flowing, and now a single test no longer decides one's fate in life. In this new era of multiple-track admissions, the first step is to understand yourself. Only then can you select the track that suits you best.