The Chinese Civil Examinations
inference-review.com
inference-review.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
What are you even trying to do, here?
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.0062...
We certainly know that people who identify as transgender are at higher risk of suicide than the broader population.
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.
Quick aside, in addition to the Pell Grant, there's also for former foster youth the CHAFEE grant (California specific).
that content has been paywalled.
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.
Interview loops aren't deterministic, nor are they entirely objective. Congratulations to your friend for passing.
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
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.
> "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.
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.
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.
But STAR costs you little time to practice and communication skills will definitely pay off for a programmer.
Leetcode is not the only way to hire professional builders, but is much better than STAR.
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.
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 can't die fast enough.
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.
Real world business decisions are dramatically less optimized than people imagine they are.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
The modern Chinese government’s suppression of Falun Gong makes sense from this perspective.
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
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.
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.
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
You catch a flu, your grandma dies, maybe you menstruate...
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?)
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...
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.
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.
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.
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?
Of course, the process is still a far way from random.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
Modern European concepts of civil service was essentially influenced by the Chinese bureaucracy who selected members based on learning advancements rather than aristocratic birth.
> 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.
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/...