Back in the good old days, when there were more applicants than places, the entrance exams simply scooped up a number of students without worrying too much about whether or not the students were of a suitable level. All of the students applying possessed the basic skills for success in college. Now as universities reach further and further down the intelligence quotient they have started to question how to insure that students are college ready.
My favorite entrance exam story deals with a Chinese student. Foreign students usually don’t have to take the standard entrance exam. An essay or an interview is usually sufficient. When the Chinese student applied, she was asked to write an essay and then a department meeting was held to approve or disapprove her application. No one questioned whether the girl had the English ability to enter the English department, a table or other suitably stable piece of furniture would possess the English ability required to entire my department. But some worried that because Japanese was not her native language she might have trouble understanding registration or other administration tasks. The department head held up her essay and pointed to a line and said, “She writes Japanese beautifully. She even knows the character for I SHO KEN MEI (to do one's best).”
Writing Japanese is difficult. There are three scripts – four if you include the Roman alphabet. Two of the scripts are phonetic and these are relatively easy to learn and write. But a lot of vocabulary has been borrowed from Chinese and these words are written with Chinese characters, KANJI.
The phrase "to do one's best" , I SHO KEN MEI, consists of four characters. It looks like this:
一生懸命
The character in the middle, pronounced KEN, is complicated and most Japanese when they write by hand don’t use the Chinese character. Instead, they write it phonetically so it looks like this:一生けん命
One can see how this is easier. But in China, they don’t use a phonetic script and if one wants to write about doing one's best, one must use the Chinese character.
When the department head held up the Chinese student’s essay and pointed to the complicated character she could write, my immediate reaction was, “Of course she can write the Chinese character, you daft old git. She is Chinese!” But I was alone in my protests. The rest of the faculty members were as impressed as the department head and she was admitted.
Chinese students at Japanese universities have become a bit of phenomenon recently. As part of its compensation package of benefits for its brutal treatment of the Chinese people during WWII, the Japanese government provides scholarships for Chinese students. Recently, because of the declining student numbers, Japanese universities have latched onto Chinese scholarship students as a way to fill the gap in their enrollment. The scholarships are of course provided at the taxpayers expense and there is a robbing Peter to pay Paul quality about the system, but it has put butts in the seats as they say.
In some Japanese universities, the percentage of Chinese butts in classroom seats has passed fifty percent and to say that all of them are sincere in their desire to study is belied by reports at one university of an immigration raid that found 90% of the scholarship students had slipped away to Tokyo to work at convenience stores and restaurants full-time rather than go to class.
Still in our case, the student did well. She graduated with honors and even if she could write the character for doing one's best, there is no evidence that she had any reason to attempt it while a student at our university.
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