System Of Competitive Examinations Research Articles

New development: Re-investigating the influence of China on the British civil service examination system

IMPACT In the UK, civil servant selection was arranged through patronage until the publication of the 1854 Northcote–Trevelyan Report, which led to the establishment of a competitive examination system for selecting civil servants. The UK may have referenced China's competitive examination system during this process. Missionaries, merchants and diplomats learned about the Chinese government’s system and disseminated it to Europe. This practice was described in books, making European countries, including the UK, aware of such a system. Although the availability of related information in books provides circumstantial evidence to support the Chinese influence on the British examination system, more direct evidence has previously been lacking. Therefore, the authors searched the records of debates in the UK Parliament between 1853 and 1860 and found relevant evidence regarding the Chinese influence on the British examination system. Although much has been written about British colonial rule, less is known about the exchanges of civil service systems and the critical role played by colonial administrations. This article offers valuable insights into a long history of policy transfer among countries, often appropriating better practices, to improve public and civil services.

The Contemporary Issues in Chinese Education

Over the past few decades, the Chinese education system has undergone significant changes, influenced by a number of social, economic, and political factors. This paper provides an analysis of contemporary issues in Chinese education, highlighting key challenges and proposing solutions. A major concern is the intense pressure placed on students to excel academically, which results in high levels of stress and mental health problems. A competitive examination system and societal expectations of success are responsible for this pressure. Additionally, the rigid curriculum and emphasis on ranking have been criticized as stifling the development of cooperative and creative skills. It is underway to reform the curriculum and teaching methods, but progress in reducing academic pressure and promoting innovation in education is inconclusive. While Chinese education faces a number of contemporary challenges, efforts are being made to address these challenges and improve its overall quality and equity. It will be necessary to maintain a sustained commitment and implement innovative strategies to achieve meaningful progress over the next few years.

Exploring pedagogic discourses of cultural responsiveness: a tale of two classrooms

ABSTRACT International concerns about the educational equity of ethnic minorities have continued to highlight teachers’ abilities to be culturally responsive. How do teachers manage cultural diversity through their pedagogical practices in the absence of relevant teacher training? The answer to this question is essential as it may help move our understanding of diversity education forward in societies where ethnic diversity is not necessarily the norm. Drawing from observational data in a Hong Kong multiethnic secondary school, this paper explores two teachers’ pedagogies. I interpreted the data using Bernstein’s sociology of pedagogy to identify the nature of the class activities and instructional patterns about teacher control and pacing. These pedagogical practices, I suggest, emerged from power relations that reveal teachers’ efforts in recognising their students’ ethnic diversity while negotiating academic expectations on the students to excel in Hong Kong’s competitive examination system.

Competitive Examinations, Special Competitions for Senior Servants or Open Market Competitions - Which of Them Determine Merit the Most?

Selection mechanisms that could identify the best candidates for the civil service are the first step towards the effective and efficient public administration. The competitive examinations, specific competitions for senior servants and selection available on the labour market are the forms of meritocracy, so the question is not to abolish or sustain them, but to know which of them the most expresses talent, effort, and achievement. And this knowledge is the aim of this paper. Merit seems intuitively the best option for the selection of the best public sector employees, but it is questionable which form of selection is the best. Having this in mind, this paper based on the recruiting processes of the first twenty ranked countries based on the rule of law, GINI index, corruption perception and public integrity indexes shows the competition on the labour market system of recruitment of public servants as the most effective; then follows the competitive examination system for senior public servants and as the last (and contra intuitively) the competitive examination system. Based on the country's low Gini index, results also show it is more likely that the competition on the labour market recruitment system is used.

Reports of adolescent emotion regulation and school engagement mediating the relation between parenting and adolescent functioning in India

Much like other parts of Asia, late adolescence in India is a particularly stressful time with academic pressures of a highly competitive examination system that determines future occupational success. The present study examined interrelations among reports of parenting, adolescents' regulation of academics-related emotions, school engagement, adolescent socio-emotional functioning and state-exam performance. Four hundred and fifty 10th and 12th graders from suburban high schools in India participated, along with their mothers. At the beginning of the school year, mothers completed measures of parenting, and adolescents completed measures of emotion regulation, school engagement and behaviour problems. At the end of the school year, grades from state exams were obtained from the schools. A multiple mediator model was tested using structural equation modelling. Authoritarian parenting was positively related to adolescent behaviour problems, but not adolescent state-exam performance. Maternal non-supportive responses to adolescent negative emotion were indirectly positively related to adolescent behaviour problems through adolescent emotion dysregulation. Adolescent school engagement mediated the positive relation between maternal supportive responses to adolescent negative emotion and adolescent state-exam performance. These findings underscore the relevance of adolescent emotions for their academic functioning, with implications for the development of interventions for those who struggle during these highly stressful years.

Scholars East and West

The great contribution of China to politics was the development of a bureaucratic, meritocratic civil service, based on mastery of a well-defined canon of scholarship. Civil servants were scholars. Already under the Han dynasty, Confucianism (the Rújiā or school of the scholars) was made the official ideology of the State and the basis of the competitive examination system. Europe was less advanced in political organization than China. Rulers and their courts relied on family ties and brute force. The only working bureaucracy belonged to the Catholic Church. This paper follows the parallel development of both the Western and the Chinese traditions and emphasizes their points of intersection, such as the Jesuit missions to China in the 16th and 17th centuries and the visits of Bertrand Russell and John Dewey around 1920.

Behind the academic motivation of East Asian students

This study identifies Confucian values and social rigidity as the foundation for both positive (educational) and negative (psychological) outcomes of East Asian students. It highlights (1) how persistently and powerfully the Confucian value system has molded the achievement-orientation of Confucian Asian students; (2) illustrates how historical accounts of Confucianism have contributed to the rigidity of a society; and (3) presents what forms of social rigidity is notable in Confucian Asian culture. Factors contributing to social rigidity of Confucian Asian countries are identified as the strict and competitive examination system and its heavy influence on distribution of social rewards. The study concludes with four sets of recommendations for educators, policymakers, and parents who are willing to address the challenges of Confucian Asian education systems.

The Genesis of the Medical Field: France, 1795-1870

What characterized the medical field in France in 1795 as it emerged from the reconstruction of medical and scientific institutions consequent to the abolition of the Ancien Regime was that it had already been differentiated into three distinct spaces constructed around distinct institutions. These spaces respectively produced clinical medicine, social medicine, and what were termed the sciences accessoires (i.e., sciences auxiliary to medicine). The medical field—the product of a set of closely interrelated scientific and social determinants, all concerning the functions assigned to hospitals of producing medical knowledge, training physicians and selecting an elite through a system of competitive examinations—was dominated by hospital physicians in the clinical space. That domination worked to preserve the field’s autonomy, since the spaces of social medicine and auxiliary sciences overlapped those of other fields and developed through the construction of hybrid rather than specifically medical knowledge and practices; i.e., knowledge and practices in those two spaces could be mastered by other professional groups. However, it was through the development of those dominated spaces that medicine was able to extend the variety and types of its own practices and assume an active role in preventing disease, reducing mortality and pushing forward knowledge of life, thereby increasing its authority in French society.

Buying your way into college? Private tuition and the transition to higher education in Ireland

A number of countries, including Ireland, have experienced a recent growth in the prevalence of ‘shadow education’, that is, paid private tuition outside the schooling system. Previous international studies have indicated that such tuition can enhance academic performance and facilitate access to tertiary education. However, such studies have rarely taken account of important differences between those taking private tuition and other students. This paper explores the characteristics of students taking private tuition and the impact of such tuition on academic outcomes in the Republic of Ireland. Participation in private tuition is disproportionately concentrated among students from middle‐class families, those with higher prior performance and those with greater engagement in the schooling process. When the selective nature of the group taking private tuition is accounted for, private tuition yields no advantages in terms of upper secondary examination performance. It is argued that, rather than representing a rational strategy for the middle classes to secure educational advantage, participation in private tuition must be seen in the context of the competitive examination system in operation.

Stratégies et pratiques de développement des compétences des cadres dans les organisations publiques

<titre>Strategies and Practices for the Development of top-level administrative Competencies in Public Organizations </titre> The article describes how competencies management in the main English-speaking countries. In order to meet various demands (cost, adaptability, evaluation, etc.), these countries have put in place a new type of management for top-level state administrators based on competencies and not on careers. The article shows the effects of this new system on human resource management, mainly a new approach to human resources based primarily on the notion of competence and much less on the former system of competitive examinations, diplomas and seniority. It describes the theoretical and practical means by which this competence approach has been implemented, through an analysis of the most significant experiments carried out in the United States, Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.

School stress in India: Effects on time and daily emotions

Like adolescents in East Asia, Indian middle-class adolescents face a highly competitive examination system. This study examines the influence of school demands on the daily time use and subjective states of Indian young people. One hundred urban, middle-class, 8th-grade students carried alarm watches for 1 week and provided 4764 reports on their activities and subjective states at random times, following the procedures of the Experience Sampling Method. These adolescents were found to spend one third of their waking time in school-related activities, with girls spending more time than boys. Schoolwork generated negative subjective states as reflected in low affect state, below-average activation levels, lower feeling of choice, and higher social anxiety. These negative states were most frequent during homework. The trade-off faced by Indian adolescents were evident in the findings that those who spent more time doing homework experienced lower average emotional states and more internalising problems, while those who spent more time in leisure experienced more favourable states but also reported higher academic anxiety and lower scholastic achievement.

From Student Markets to Credential Markets: The Creation of the Regents Examination System in New York State, 1864-1890

In 1864 the Regents of the University of the State of New York announced their intention to develop a system of competitive examinations for students at academies and high schools across the state. Aimed both at strengthening those institutions and at stimulating the ambitions of students, the exams would provide “positive evidence of actual merit” in learning and instruction. On the basis of the exams the Regents would then distribute state funds to institutions and award “promotions and honors” to students. Thus New York launched the first state-wide system of standardized examinations and performance-based credentials in the country.

The Trial of an Innovative Science Programme for Preservice Primary Teachers in Fiji

Science teaching in Fiji is often very formalistic and didactic. This is in part due to an extremely competitive examination system, but work by Muralidhar (1989, An exploratory study of a science curriculum in action: basic science in Fiji, Unpublished Ph. D. thesis, Monash University) has also indicated that at the primary‐ and lower‐secondary‐levels teachers’ content knowledge of physical science was often lacking. This in turn impacted on the teachers’ confidence, and often resulted in a teacher‐centred approach in which there was little deviation from the set text. This article outlines an innovative science programme which was developed and trialled with Fijian preservice primary teachers in an attempt to improve their content knowledge of physical science. It also reports some of the student teachers’ views on the various teaching strategies employed during the programme.

Industrialisation and Everyday Life by Rudolf Braun

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 605 compressing 19th- and 20th-century technology into 184 pages—a feat not likely to be equaled by the Anglo-Saxons. But the motto of this series of paperbacks—to introduce students to a subject by providing a rapid survey of the “essentials”—is a venerable pedagog­ ical tradition in France, where the system of competitive examinations for state diplomas has caused such history manuals to abound at least since Napoléon. This is the first one, however, to be devoted to our discipline, which has only recently become part of the French secondary-school curriculum as well as a regular subject for students preparing the competitive exams for admission to the grandes écoles. Not a few high school teachers, now suddenly in need of knowing the difference between Watt’s engine and Parsons’s turbine, will be grateful to Beltran and Griset. Drawing on recent scholarship, a good bit of which is from SHOT, the authors organize the major innovations of the last two centuries into four parts: energy, production technologies, transportation, and information technology. Each part falls into several chapters and many subsections, so that the student can quickly find the internal combustion engine and its consequences in chapter 2, or the nature of the AC-DC controversy in chapter 3, all the while learning that developments varied from France to Britain to Germany to the United States, though space precludes discussion of the reasons why. Or in part four, chapter 14 highlights the vacuum tube in the beginning of a new age of communication around World War I and closes as this first electronic device reaches its limits after World War II, while the final chapter achieves focus by dramatizing the transistor and integrated circuits as the breakthough into the age of information and global communications. Why do no English-speaking members of SHOT feel duty bound to provide undergraduates with such a concise survey of what is neces­ sary for “technological literacy” in historical perspective? Cecil Smith Dr. Smith has been teaching the history of technology at Drexel University since 1964. Industrialisation and Everyday Life. By Rudolf Braun. Translated by Sarah Tenison. New York and Paris: Cambridge University Press and Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990. Pp. xi+ 231; notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $44.50. Industrialisation and Everyday Life was published in 1960 in Gottingen by Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht; there was a second edition in 1979. Now two great publishing houses have collaborated to make a translation available. But the library catalog entry alone cannot reveal the significance of a work that Charles Tilly described as “the most 606 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE important untranslated work of social history to be published in the last generation.” When Industrialisierung und Volksleben first appeared, it ignited a profound debate because of its method and its contents. It formed a model for numerous regional studies, and it gave great impetus to the flood of research and publications on the theme we now call protoindustrialization. Its frequent citation as a source of empirical information and theoretical statements is evidence of its lasting relevance. Yet for those who do not read German it has been available only in truncated form, as a chapter in a collection of brilliant essays edited by David Landes in 1965, entitled The Rise of Capitalism. At last a wider audience now has access to the whole of this remarkable work. Rudolf Braun’s was one of the first modern studies to look at the production of industrial products in individual households by hand­ icraft methods using relatively primitive technologies. It focused on an upland Swiss canton (the Oberland area, near Zurich) and assessed the impact of widespread cottage industry on the life-styles and mentalités of its inhabitants. The approach was descriptive in character (in currentjargon, “thick”), and the author drew heavily on folklorist traditions, using a great variety of literary and artistic sources. We learn about the impact of the domestic textile industry on family life, housing, and popular culture. Topics examined include diet, mar­ riage customs, clothing and fashion, luxuries, and changes in com­ munity institutions, such as churches and schools, singing groups...

Identifying and Nurturing the Promise of Gifted Black American Children

World history swells with the accounts of people with superior abilities. The records of practically every culture reveal a special fascination for their ablest citizens (Renzulli, 1986, p. 53). For example, as early as 2200 B.C. the Chinese had developed an elaborate system of competitive examinations to select outstanding persons for government positions (DuBois, 1970). To this day, education tailored to the needs of the gifted generates consuming interest and enthusiasm, such that the literature includes an abundance of information about these students, especially about those who are middle-class White children. We cannot, however, say the same about the research devoted to minority, particularly Black American, gifted children. An examination of the relevant literature since 1924 reveals that, of approximately 4,000 articles on the gifted, a paltry 63 (less than 2 percent) address minority group members. The percentage would be lower still if one counted only those articles about gifted Blacks. Educators find this proportion discouraging because less information means less understanding and less understanding means inadequate identification procedures, definitions, theories, and programs-all of which results in an underrepresentation of Black Americans in programs for the gifted. There is growing awareness that the number of Black students in classes for the learning disabled or emotionally impaired is inordinately high; however, the reverse probably is true in programs for the gifted (McCormick, 1984). Equally unsettling, many of the articles on giftedness and minorities bear the stigmatic heading, which implies or states that race itself limits the development of such intelligence. Jensen alluded to this idea in 1969, and educators who support hereditary rationales for the development of intelligence joined him. Still, as Passow (1986) points out, while considerable overlap exists between minority students and disadvantaged conditions, by no means are the two terms synonymous.

British Battleship Design 1840–1904

AbstractThe growth in size of battleships during the latter half of the nineteenth century was unsteady and this is often portrayed as due to the irrational whims of admirals and naval architects. With few exceptions, this growth and the changes of style were the result of technical developments in metallurgy, propellants for guns, machinery and of the laws of naval architecture. Better materials, used more efficiently with a more informed selection of dimension enabled the naval architect to produce a hull which was lighter, and hence could carry more than its predecessors. Their interdisciplinary interplay is here discussed. The naval architect was one of the first professional engineers to embrace all disciplines and to see his task as primarily one of putting together the work of other engineers while still advancing in his own specialization. The development of the naval architect was achieved by a ruthless and competitive examination system in academic subjects, combined with intensive practical work.

Science in the Civil Service

I HAVE read with sustained interest your leading article on science in the public schools and the Civil Service. The preference given to classical subjects in the competitive examinations for higher appointments in the Civil Service is patent. This might be remedied, as you appear to suggest, by a different allocation of marks to the various subjects of the examination. But are there not serious objections to the whole system of competitive examinations as applied to these appointments? I venture to suggest that the system should be ended rather than mended—“off with his head”, as the Red Queen would say, with admirable directness.

The Vices of Our Scientific Education

THE subject which I desire to bring to the notice of the Association to-day must necessarily remind you of the attack which was recently made on our competitive examination system in the Nineteenth Century.

The Protest in The Nineteenth Century

THE present age is eminently a sensational one. Everybody deals in superlatives and universals. Morning and evening the newspaper bills vie with each other in appealing to that particular form of curiosity which feeds upon alarms. Our civilization is declared to be altogether wrong. Dr. Pangloss's doctrine is reversed—nothing that is right. We are incessantly invited to take stock of our arrangements political and social, and treated to denouncements of almost every detail of them. We are too serious, too frivolous, a prey to panics, stolidly blind to dangers, distrustful, credulous. To crown all, what was fondly supposed to be one of the greatest of modern improvements is roundly declared to be a sham; to be worse—a lure to destruction, mental and physical. Loud were the paeans sung some forty years ago over the then new system of competitive examinations which so vexed the soul of the author of “Gryll Grange.” Now we are assured that the whole examinational system is utterly stupid, and, in effect, that it were better at once ended than in any way mended.

The Psychological Bearings of the recent Matriculation Examination of the London University

The questions set at the recent Matriculation Examination of the London University afford food for the student of mental science. The whole system of competitive examinations, as understood by our universities, is so much at variance with the true principles of mental development that it is somewhat difficult to judge the papers by the standard of the metaphysician. When the present system is tending to make of education an art rather than a science, when the test of a man's capabilities is rather to see how many pages of carefully prepared “Guides to University Students” he can assimilate rather than how much he has had called into play his powers of personal observation, and how much experience he has really mastered; when, in short, an undue importance is given to book knowledge to the detriment of mental wisdom, it is not to be wondered that we find the questions of the Matriculation Examination of the London University falling below the standard that we should like to see our universities set before them. If there is to be any reform in our educational systems (and it is sorely needed) one would naturally look to our universities for its genesis; but for the most part we look in vain. Perhaps the temptation to extol mere book learning, and to lose sight of the aims of education, beyond those merely of acquiring knowledge, is more likely to be experienced by the examiners of the London University than by any others. For in a university where residence for a certain academic course is not a sine qua non of becoming a graduate, and where elaborate crams and “examination papers worked out in full” are ready a few days after the conclusion of the examination, it may be a difficult matter for an examiner to avoid falling into the errors to which we have referred. On the other hand, no body of people in the whole country-have more opportunities for good or more facilities for raising the intellectual status of our teachers, and so of our educational systems, than have those gentlemen who draw up the questions of the London University Examinations. And let us say, at the outset, that we are fairly well pleased, on the whole, with the result of their efforts in the January matriculation questions. We shall have to point out errors and failings, but many of the questions strike us as a decided improvement on the general run of such questions, and may assist in opposing the vicious system of cramming that is decimating the ranks of the teaching profession of its best—because most independent and original—men.