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I also heard that the big after-school companies are discussing acquiring the US companies to survive. I really wish they can't. I love AOPS and RSM for their passion and their focus on fundamentals. I'd hate to see those companies turn into the soulless TAL, and teach students to memorize all kinds of patterns. Case in point, below is how TAL teaches elementary students to solve problems:

Bob and Alice have 10 candies in total, and Bob has 2 more candies than Alice. How many candies do Bob and Alice each have?

TAL's solution: this is called addition-subtraction problem. Add the two numbers and divide the sum by two, you get the bigger value for Bob. Subtract the difference from the total and then divide the result by two, and you get the smaller value for Alice. No mention of why. No mention of underlying intuition. No mention of any mathematical concepts. This is the most abhorrent teaching I've ever seen.

However, if you were to memorize that solution, you can get really fast and accurate with relatively little actual math ability. I believe that method probably will have the greatest increase in test scores for the lowest common denominator. It really is quite abhorrent though.

They're doing "educate well enough to do the paperwork of our businesses" better than the US.

Sounds like what China really needs, then, is a new approach to testing that manages to distinguish deep understanding of the underlying concepts from mechanistic/formulaic memorization.

(Tangent: Has anyone yet tried to prompt GPT3 to generate "deep" word problems?)

On the other hand if you're a US nationalist interested in your team succeeding against the Chinese team this is excellent news.

What's a TAL?

A tutoring company. It’s stock ticker is TAL.

Genuinely curious on what their proposed solution is if they have 10 candies in total and Alice has 3 candies more than Bob.

10+3 / 2 = 6.5 candies for Alice.

10-3 / 2 = 3.5 candies for Bob.

You may think that's a strange solution, but it's the only one that matches the problem statement. What was your solution?

Well first of all I am not a mathematician, but I enjoyed assimilating the basic principles of math.

Considering the problem as follows: "Bob and Alice have 10 candies in total, and Bob has 2 more candies than Alice. How many candies do Bob and Alice each have?"

My own solution would be to just define the variables as follows: Bob = Alice + 2; Bob + Alice = 10; 2xAlice + 2 = 10; Alice = (has) 4 candies; Bob = (has) 6 candies.

Adjusting the problem with an odd difference instead of an even number we have: "Bob and Alice have 10 candies in total, and Bob has 3 more candies than Alice. How many candies do Bob and Alice each have?" Bob = Alice + 3; 2xAlice + 3 = 10; Alice = (has) 3.5 candies; Bob = (has) 6.5 candies.

I find my solution to be easier to understand and somehow more logical than "let's add/substract this and that and divide by two". Probably my main issue was explaining to a kid how having 3.5 and 6.5 candies works seeing candies I known all my life are basically unbreakable (unless you have a kid's teeths which is known to be able to devour metal).

As an anecdote I recently dated a lady who has a teenage daughter and she showed me the math exams her youngling has been taking. Having never been one to withdraw from a challenge, even mildly implied, I printed the things and started working on them only to be horrified how much I've forgotten in terms of elementary mathematics. I genuinely felt shame even though I scored a decent number (but nothing to write home about).

I feel we're failing our children in how we're pumping them with information but without always teaching them how to learn and that makes me really sad :(

I'm sure it varies by region but there's already a form of degree specialization in high school - you can choose between focusing on liberal arts vs. science/engineering, and the liberal arts kids basically don't do any more math. College is even worse, you can go the whole four years without doing any math.

Another difference between China and the US is the philosophy towards achievement. The US tends to bias resources towards underachievers, whereas China tends to just give up on them and focus on the overachievers. So again there's pressure to compete, because as soon as you fall behind you'll just be at a further disadvantage because nobody is trying to help you (unless you pay them).

Honestly, the end result is kind of the same in both scenarios - the best and brightest (strongly correlated with wealth) go to elite universities, with the occasional feel-good story about rural kids making it in. They're pretty much set for life, while everyone else is stuck with a useless degree. Although many menial jobs won't hire you unless you have a degree, so it's good for that.

That bias might explain why there's no gifted schools / class-years in smaller school districts which add still large enough to have several schools.

Where are you getting that 50% don’t pass the high school entrance exam? It’s not pass-fail. Which high school you get accepted to is based on your relative score, yes, but I haven’t heard anything like that 50% number going to vocational schools. Many students with lower scores end up going to private high schools.

And I’ve never heard that high schools don’t teach calculus. The Chinese people I know who went to the US in later high school years and for college all found that the calculus classes were repetitive for them.

"Ailun" is right.

I'm not sure where the original commenter is at in China where 50% are not going to high school. "Ailun" is also right about the private school thing. It's big in China. Finally, the idea that Chinese students are not learning calculus is patent nonsense.

Are the majority of public students, in the year the commenter specified, not accurate...?

This was 20 years ago, but my wife went to a public school in China and never learned calculus or linear algebra (and had only the faintest grasp of trigonometry).

The news is everywhere: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%88%9D%E5%8D%87%E9%AB%98+..., for a long time.

About calculus: https://www.gaokzx.com/c/201901/33164.html

Using the elite students from private schools who you know as a counter argument is really not that strong. Only 14% of the high school students are in private schools.

Also consider that Chinese people who study abroad are paying the full sticker price of a US university, so it's really not any sort of representative sample of Chinese education. Hell, paying full sticker price for a US education is a tough lift for most Americans, who have higher standard of living.

A lot of Chinese students paying for full priced universities abroad is a long term strategic move by the family and/or family owned business backing them. That's why you can often see families paying for $50,000 USD/year high school abroad even. The plan is 1. start to develop a foothold overseas, 2. then move money over, 3. then get one family member with a foreign passport and 4. keep building a stronger base for emigration and large scale eventual shift of wealth. It's not equivalent to US private middle-class citizens paying for the same institutions.

First of all, not everything is an "argument." How about a discussion? I'm not interested in an argument.

It's interesting that there's no calculus on the gaokao. It's an elective in high school (same as the US). I wouldn't have guessed that. However, some very basic linear algebra does seem to be in the compulsory high school math curriculum(1). More than I learned in high school in the US, anyways.

Also, generally the private schools are considered worse options. The elite students with the highest middle school test scores mostly go to public high schools. Maybe students at the private high schools are more likely to go overseas, and so they are more likely to take the calculus electives. But even among the private school students, only a small percentage will go overseas.

For the vocational school thing, I had no idea it was so extensive. Very interesting. I knew about sports high schools, where most of the graduates go on to teacher colleges and become PE teachers. What other kinds of vocational high schools are there? How does it work for smaller cities - how many special types of vocational school can they really support?

(1) https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%AB%98%E4%B8%AD%E6%95%B0%E5%...

My bad. By argument I meant “ a reason or set of reasons given with the aim of persuading others that an action or idea is right or wrong.”, as in you have a point, and offers a number of arguments to support the point

I knew what you meant. A better way for me to put it would have been: "I wasn't making a counter argument, just telling you my current understanding and the reasons for it." To me there's a big difference in attitude. I'm not sitting here coming up with a perfect counter-argument, both because I don't want to put that much effort in and because I don't think it's an effective way to learn.

> The news is everywhere: https://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%88%9D%E5%8D%87%E9%AB%98+... , for a long time.

The top results (for me) all say that it's not literally correct that only 50% of middle school students make it to high school, but most (suspiciously) only mention numbers for Beijing. https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/368135272 has a table covering every province, showing that the rate goes from 53.11% in Henan to 70.49% in Heilongjiang.

A data point: I was raised up in a tier 2/3 city in northern China, finished high school at about 2013. I'm not exposed to calculus or linear algebra at all while in high school.

OTOH, friends of same age who were in Shanghai did get exposed to linear algebra.

High school isn’t compulsory in China. Many students don’t even sit for the exams, they are already going to start work or go to a vocational school depending on their means.

My wife took the art/liberal arts track in high school and most definitely didn’t learn calculus (she still got into one of the best arts academies, though). So at least on that track, you won’t learn calculus (you generally take the same classes together, unlike the USA). I’m not sure about the STEM track, but my bet is first tier Shanghai and Beijing would be way different from a tier 88 like Chenzhou. I also can’t imagine kids at a school like renmin zhongxue not learning calculus, and that’s just a middle school.

So is the arts track an example of the vocational schools hintymad is talking about? Or is it just a different track at the same high school? Another thing I don't understand - he's saying 50% of kids go to vocational schools, and also 50% of students go to college. But there are also vocational colleges, right? Teacher's college, hospitality college, sports college, etc.

No. The liberal arts high school kids still go to university (think lawyers, political scientists, literature majors, and designers). The vocational student kids aren’t going to high school at all usually. Like I said, high school isn’t compulsory in China, I think they are at about 40% or so kids attending high school at the moment, up to 50% already would be surprising.

Teacher schools (normal universities) require high school. I’m not sure about tourist or sports schools. But the tourist college I visited (in Zhangjiajie) seemed more like a college than the vocational schools I’ve seen. I didn’t ask, though. I assume Beijing Sports university is a real university, but I’m not sure about the other more provincial ones.

> problems in the National College Entrance Exam become tricky instead of deep

I assume that is because entrance exams are forced not to cover material outside the national high school subjects?

Brazil’s hardest entrance exams (ITA and IME) are not bound in any way, so they go arbitrarily deep.

Yes, you're right. There's a national syllabus.

In Québec we learn analytical geometry, it was actually tremendously helpful for me to excel at Calculus and Linear Algebra. I don't really think it's obsolete.

I have always wondered about the causes behind Québec's anormaly high PISA score in mathematic¹ and I think that your annecdote is probably highlighting of of them.

1- Table 1 and 2 of that document: https://www.fraserinstitute.org/sites/default/files/math-per...

Calculus (Derivative and definite integral) is taught in some areas, It's elective 2-2. It does not involve Limit although number sequence is taught.

My province, the NCEE had Calculus, linear algebra and inequality and it's choose two from three.

Students tend to choose this (if it's availble in that area) because it's generally easy. And if you're like me, not good at computing numbers, you would choose inequality (mean inequality and Cauchy's Inequality in most cases) as you only need to do some transformation to the problem. Some students will do matrix if they cannot solve this quick enough.

These were my experience, I do heard that recent education revolution was moving inequality to compulsory but removed Cauchy and so on.

BTW, I don't understand how analytical geometry can be replaced by calculus and linear algebra.

> Case in point, the most challenging problems are usually about analytical geometry, which US does not even teach because calculus and linear algebra render this 19th-century subject in a way obsolete.

I looked up analytic geometry on Wiki and it looks like stuff that would definitely be taught in the U.S. Usually in the weirdly named "precalculus" course, though some of it would even be covered in previous courses.