Why some students don't care about exams

Now that we've arrived at the business end of the semester, it's time to give the dreaded exams. as like every other aspect about the subjects i teach, i have been given no guidance on how to set my exams. Pretty much it's up to me how i want to assess the students. Actually the only thing admin do ask of me is to let all my students pass (eventually).

This to me has probably been the hardest thing to swallow, since I'm a firm believer in fairness and credit for hard work. I already knew beforehand that things are done differently in Chinese universities, especially the less reknowned ones, compared to western institutions. As with everything else here in china, money and connections are the bottom line, and it's not like i could fight against the system, especially since the final grade can easily be changed by someone above me. But the most i can hope to effect is to give the poorly performing students a bit of a scare, to re-invigorate their study habbits, before eventually, and reluctantly, letting them pass the amazingly easy supplementary exam.

Before I go on I have to explain the system of many universities here in China. My uni is actually made up of two different sub campuses. The two campuses are within the same grounds but are located at different ends. Everything about the two are seperated - teaching facilities, dorms, cafeterias. The only thing they share are the teaching staff, library and admin. Although there are no physical fences or barriers to seperate the two cohorts of students, each cohort tends to stick to itself and it's own side.

Now the difference between the two campuses is that one is for the top performing students in the gao kao (the college entrance exam done at the end of high school), while the other campus is for the lower performing students. all chinese students receive a scale grading from their gao kao exam, ben yi (the highest), ben er, ben san (the lowest). so ben yi kids go to one of our campuses, while ben san kids go to the other campus. Why allow some of the lower performing kids to come to your uni? money of course. a former students has told me that the ben san kids pay 3 times as much in tuition fees as the other campus. So you can think of them as cash cows. Anyway, the reason i'm explaining this is that after giving the same oral exam to both my ben yi classes and ben san classes, you notice not just a clear difference in ability, but also in study attitudes and work ethic. You do have some ben san students who are really concientious and have good ability, but unfortunately on the whole, the ben san class skill level is much lower, and more disturbingly, they just don't seem to care about study.

But you might be thinking, don't these kids care about passing their exams? Even i thought that most of them would perk up when i mentioned the E word, like the students in my ben yi classes did, but unfortunately thats not the case. the only way i can explain it is that these kids know they are guranteed to pass, since their parents are paying a lot of money to the university. Fair enough. So i've tried to use the tact of explaining that graduating is not enough, and that without the skill and aptitude they still won't be able to get jobs in the highly competitive chinese job market. nope, still doesn't raise an eyelid. and i think it's because most of these kids have rich parents, rich parents with connections who can land them jobs regardless of their skill or abilities. that, or these kids are just plain spoilt and short sighted. I mean seriously, I never knew i'd meet chinese students this plain lazy and apathetic when it came to exams. i can't ration their attitude any other way. i certainly hope their parents have damn good connections, because for a bunch of english 2nd year majors (who have probably been studying english for 10 years), they can barely understand or hold a conversation above the sophistication level of a 5 year old.

So as it stands at the moment, one of my ben san classes should see half of the class fail. But because of the scheduling of the supplementary exams and the sheer number of failing students I would have, logistically i wouldn't be able to do supp exams for all of these students. I will probably have to re-scale my marking criteria down so that only the worst of the worst students are forced to sit the supp. I would like to scare the shit out of all of the poor (and invariably lazy) students, but unfortunately i just can't. Hopefully they'll remember the reason why they're in uni themselves next semester. At this rate they have bucklys chance of landing a job without using connections.