College Entrance Examination Research Articles

Traveling with a desirable destination: a dialogical analysis of professional identity formation among freshman medical students.

We aimed to examine medical students' perceptions regarding their professional identity and explore their creative narratives utilizing the Dialogical-Self Theory (DST). This is a mixed-method study. First-year medical students at Tehran University of Medical Sciences (TUMS, Tehran, Iran wrote a creative narrative about their perspectives on their future profession. Based on DST, qualitative-directed content analysis and summative approach were used to identify and quantify different "I-positions" to assess professional identity formation. One hundred eighty-eight first-year medical students at TUMS participated in the study in 2021-2022. In the creative narratives, the reference to "I" was more than other pronouns (he/she/they). The use of "I" positively correlated with rank in the university entrance exam (P value = 0.03). The highest application of "I" per participant belonged to the "present I-position," and the lowest to the "promoter," which has the highest rank in the formation of professional identity. Women tended to use the "present I-position" more than men (P value = 0.03). First-year medical students have accepted their self-role in forming professional identity; however, they have not found a vast perspective of it, as shown by their inability to use meta I-position and promoter I-position. Therefore, educators must provide plans within the curriculum to enhance competencies of professional identity formation. These plans can include incorporating narration writing to encourage medical students to reflect on their professional identity.

The Impact of Double Reduction Policy on College Entrance Examination Performance: Empirical Evidence

In China, the College Entrance Examination weights great in both students' and parents' hearts, which is even recognized as the rare chance to change a people's fate. At this circumstances, heavy homework, countless tests, little break time, burning night oils and even extracurricular tutoring on the weekends have become the daily routine for Chinese high school students, which have hurt their health conditions and added great burden on their mental health. To curb this long-standing issue caused by this phenomenon, a new educational policy called Double Reduction was released by the Chinese government on 2021 and nine Chinese cities are selected as the national policy pilot areas to test the effect in advance. This paper aims to verify the impact of the Double Reduction Policy in some provinces in which lie the selected policy pilot areas. Through continuous difference-indifference method, this study found no significant correlation between the Double Reduction and the College Entrance Examination performance in these areas. Policy makers should make proper actions to implement this new policy, in order to lighten the physical and mental burden of students and the financial burden of parents while take students learning effectiveness into consideration meanwhile.

The Influence of the Imperial Examination System on the Phenomenon of Internal Competition in the College Entrance Examination in China, Japan, and South Korea

The imperial examination system, as an important means of selecting officials in ancient China, has undergone thousands of years of evolution. It has not only profoundly influenced China’s history and culture, but also had an undeniable impact on the modern college entrance examination system and the phenomenon of educational competition in China, Japan, and South Korea. The issue of internal competition in the college entrance examination has attracted widespread attention in today’s society. It not only concerns individuals’ educational pressure and quality of life but also poses challenges to the country’s education equity and talent cultivation model. In the context of globalization, the traces of the imperial examination system still affect the college entrance examination systems of these countries to some extent and have received widespread attention. This article analyzes the impact of the imperial examination system on the internal competition in the college entrance examination in China, Japan, and South Korea, and focuses on the universal influence of the imperial examination system on education internal competition worldwide. Based on this, this article proposes the following suggestions: relevant education departments need to consider the integration and innovation of different education models in the context of globalization, to achieve sustainable development of education.

Entrepreneurial Reluctance: Talent and Firm Creation in China

Abstract This paper examines the correlation between cognitive ability and firm creation. Drawing on administrative college admissions data and firm registration records in China, we investigate who had created firms by their mid-30s. We find a clear pattern of entrepreneurial reluctance: Given the same backgrounds, individuals with higher college entrance exam scores are less likely to create firms. Through an exploration of firm performance, alternative career trajectories, and variations across regions, we propose an explanation: The ability represented by exam scores is useful across occupations, yet higher-scoring individuals are attracted to waged jobs, particularly those of the state sector.

Enhancing anatomy comprehension through competency-specific formative assessments: A study on the effectiveness of pre and post lecture multiple-choice questions in CBME

Modern medical education was required to include clear, tailored and regular formative assessments, especially for Millennials. Competency-Based Medical Education (CBME) emphasized the objective assessment of anatomical competencies. Question-answer and viva-voce tests were considered subjective and resource-intensive. This research was conducted to examine how competency-specific formative assessments using multiple-choice questions and photos before and after competency-based medical lectures improved anatomy comprehension.: The research involved 150 first-year MBBS students who were enrolled in online anatomy courses. Competency-specific, picture-based, clinical scenario-based and multiple-choice pre-questionnaires were distributed. The questions were reviewed and attempted by students before attending the theory classes. Lecture classes were conducted according to the curriculum and competencies of the National Medical Council. After the lecture, the questions and answers were reviewed and a feedback questionnaire was administered. The feedback survey included Likert scale responses and open-ended questions to gauge students' opinions on the teaching and learning methodology.: It was observed that the method was effective, stimulating curiosity, motivation and engagement. Participants expressed that the approach facilitated memorization, imparted clinical knowledge and reinforced theory. Clinical scenario-based multiple-choice questions were found to enhance memory, spark interest and improve understanding of anatomy's clinical relevance. Students believed that this method would benefit them in university exams. Overall, 89.7% of participants found the methods highly satisfactory, 50% satisfactory and 10.3% unsatisfactory.: Competency-specific formative assessments using multiple-choice questions and photos before and after lectures were found to improve anatomy knowledge. The strategy was found to promote engagement, memory and clinical understanding, reinforcing anatomical concepts. The results of this study suggested that competency-specific formative assessments added value to the current CBME-based medical education by increasing learning and practical application.

Examination as knowledge development: A case study from vocational education and training

Post-graduate and further education can easily be overlooked as a contribution to collective knowledge and practice development in a field of practice. An overarching theme of this article is how the organisation of a post-graduate and further education initiative can influence collective knowledge in vocational education and training. This article aims to inquire about what teachers and school managers in vocational education and training experience with an examination format where the teachers conduct a university exam at their school, with their management as audience and potential participants. This case study is based on qualitative data from four focus group interviews with teachers and five focus group interviews with school managers at five vocational training schools. The teachers participated in the ‘Vocational Teacher Training Initiative programme’ (YFL) in Norway. ‘The third space’ is used as the overarching theoretical framework. Through a thematic content analysis, the findings were crystalised into three categories. 1) The examination format facilitated a proximity to practice. 2) Knowledge sharing appeared as concrete actions. 3) The examination format revealed new possibilities for co-creation with higher education. The result is that the examination format seemed to function as a bridge between conventional teaching practices in higher education and collective development in vocational education and training. Minor changes in the examination format appeared to open the door to what is termed ‘a third space’ between higher education and schools.

Research on the Consistency between the New Era College Entrance Examination Evaluation System and Career Planning Education

This paper systematically analyzes the relevant characteristics of career development theory and the core functions, assessment content, and requirements of the college entrance examination evaluation guided by the “China College Entrance Examination Evaluation System” in the context of educational evaluation reform in the new era. It discusses the implementation of career planning education in high school to meet the basic goal of "student-oriented" in the current education evaluation reform, which helps to form a college entrance examination evaluation system of "categorized examination, comprehensive evaluation, and diversified admission". Through investigation and research, it summarizes the policy support and practical situation of implementing career planning education for high school students across the country. Ultimately, it suggests approaches to highlight the principle of "integrated development with dual wings" and to foster students' "meta-competence" in order to enhance career planning education at the high school level.

Does School Consolidation in Rural Areas Affect Students' Education? Empirical Evidence From China

ABSTRACTIn the late 1990s, an extensive consolidation of schools in rural China led to the amalgamation of numerous primary and secondary schools into urban schools or their discontinuation. The study aimed to investigate whether China's school consolidation movement has influenced the educational attainment of rural students. The data are sourced from the China Household Income Project (CHIP) and regional statistical yearbooks, and the cross‐section difference‐in‐differences (DID) method is used to analyse the differences in high school enrolment of rural students between regions with different degrees of school consolidation. Empirical analysis results indicate that school consolidation substantially enhances the probability of rural students receiving high school education, as well as having a positive impact on rural students taking the college entrance examination and receiving a longer formal education. Moreover, the findings of the empirical analysis remain significant even after controlling for variations in government educational expenditures, substituting the explained variables, as well as eliminating the influence of school‐entering age. The adjustment of rural schools, as an inevitable historical trend, is beneficial to improving rural educational attainment.

Removing institutional barriers or reframing inequality: effects of China’s college entrance exam reform on inequality in internal migrant students’ higher education attainment

Removing institutional barriers or reframing inequality: effects of China’s college entrance exam reform on inequality in internal migrant students’ higher education attainment

How to Enhance Functional Adequacy in Senior High School Students’ Writing

With the reform of the new college entrance examination, senior high school English writing has received great attention. The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools (2017 Edition Revised in 2020) proposes that English teaching in senior high schools should focus on cultivating students’ core competence in the English discipline. In particular, English writing, which can fully reflect students’ comprehensive English application skills, plays a significant role in English learning. However, according to current learning situation, the writing performance among senior high school students is not satisfactory. In the recent years, the importance of functional adequacy as an essential component of L2 proficiency has been observed by some scholars. Based on this, this study highlights the effectiveness of functional adequacy in facilitating students’ writing performance and emphasizes the importance of developing students’ pragmatic writing ability. Also, this study explores how to develop functional adequacy in senior high school students’ writing and puts forward some pedagogical implications of improving pragmatic performance in writing for English teachers.

A Study on Calculus Examination in Japanese Top University Entrance Exams and Educational Enlightenment for Gifted Students in Mathematics

Calculus is the cornerstone of many branches of modern mathematics and a crucial component of mathematics education. This article conducts in-depth qualitative and quantitative research and analysis on the calculus questions in the entrance exams of three top universities in Japan (University of Tokyo, Kyoto University, and Tokyo Institute of Technology). It is found that the calculus questions in the entrance exams of the three universities cover a wide range of knowledge and are highly comprehensive, with comparable difficulty in testing calculus knowledge. At the same time, the examination of calculus emphasizes the characteristics of students' comprehensive mathematical literacy.

The new college entrance examination reform investigation and research on comprehensive quality evaluation

The comprehensive quality evaluation is an evaluation system that identifies and explores students’ strengths. By examining the developmental progress of pilot provinces that have implemented comprehensive quality evaluation, valuable insights and guidance can be derived for other provinces preparing to adopt this evaluation approach. This study conducts an investigation and research on students, teachers, and middle managers from 12 high schools in two pilot areas, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces. Using a combination of empirical and qualitative research methods, it aims to explore the levels of satisfaction and recognition among different research subjects regarding the current implementation situation and analyze the existing issues in the current implementation process. According to the corresponding theory, an in-depth analysis is conducted from four dimensions to uncover the underlying causes of the problem, while proposing recommendations to enhance and advance comprehensive quality evaluation. These recommendations are first to enhance further the standard level of matching and integration in comprehensive quality evaluation; second to augment the utilization level of comprehensive quality evaluation; third to elevate the significance of comprehensive quality evaluation results; and fourth to improve the credit rating system associated with comprehensive quality evaluation.

Grading exams using large language models: A comparison between human and AI grading of exams in higher education using ChatGPT

AbstractThis study compares how the generative AI (GenAI) large language model (LLM) ChatGPT performs in grading university exams compared to human teachers. Aspects investigated include consistency, large discrepancies and length of answer. Implications for higher education, including the role of teachers and ethics, are also discussed. Three Master's‐level exams were scored using ChatGPT 3.5, and the results were compared with the teachers' scoring and the grading teachers were interviewed. In total, 463 exam responses were graded. With each response being graded at least three times, a total of 1389 gradings were conducted. For the final exam scores, 70% of ChatGPT's gradings were within 10% of the teachers' gradings and 31% within 5%. ChatGPT tended to give marginally higher scores. The agreement on grades is 30%, but 45% of the exams received an adjacent grade. On individual questions, ChatGPT is more inclined to avoid very high or very low scores. ChatGPT struggles to correctly score questions closely related to the course lectures but performs better on more general questions. The AI can generate plausible scores on university exams that, at first glance, look similar to a human grader. There are differences but it is not unlikely that two different human graders could result in similar discrepancies. During the interviews, teachers expressed their surprise at how well ChatGPT's grading matched their own. Increased use of AI can lead to ethical challenges as exams are entrusted to a machine whose decision‐making criteria are not fully understood, especially concerning potential bias in training data.

Study on Ethnic Minority College Entrance Examination Extra Points Policies under the Perspective of Educational Equity

Taking Mianning County of Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in Sichuan Province as an example, this paper analyzes the implementation of the ethnic minority college entrance examination bonus points policy and its impact on local education from the perspective of educational equity. Through the study of the policy background, implementation process and effect evaluation, the positive effects of the policy in promoting education equity and improving the education level of ethnic minorities are discussed, and the problems and deficiencies in the implementation of the policy are also pointed out. This paper aims to provide references and suggestions for the further improvement of the bonus points policy of the college entrance examination for ethnic minorities in China.

Justifying Meritocracy

The theoretical aim of this paper is to articulate a novel analytical framework that makes sense of our interlocutors’ apparently conflicting claims about the reality of meritocracy in China. The theoretical argument is rooted in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a Chinese high school, where teachers and working-class students live under the shadows of the demanding and high-stakes university entrance exam (the gaokao). How is it possible to preserve the outwardly inconsistent positions (1) that the gaokao is egalitarian and, thus, fair and (2) that students’ much wealthier counterparts have significantly higher probabilities of success when compared to poorer students? This article argues for the possibility of dynamism in epistemic standards, suggesting that belief in structural systems like meritocracy might be founded in cognitive attempts to maintain the aims of ethical life. Keywords: China, epistemology, ethics, meritocracy, metacognition

E-Assessment Architecture for Higher Education: A Case Study of University Entrance Exam, Higher Education of Afghanistan

Purpose: The main aim of this study is to demonstrate that which e-assessment architecture can be useful and effective for the higher education sector in Afghanistan. Methodology: The research method was design science, where 100 questionnaires were distributed for specifying the functional and non-functional requirements of the e-assessment system. Questionnaires were distributed to 50 lecturers, 20 Administrators and 30 graduate students. This study conducted the structured interviews for analyzing the e-assessment architectures and find an applicable and accurate e-assessment architecture for university entrance exam. In this study, interviewed with five participants and the interview has 24 questions. This study used close-ended questions in the interview and considered different perspectives including interoperability, security, reusability, performance, scalability and flexibility for analyzing the e-assessment architectures. Findings: After analyze the interview results, this study propose the architecture based on NREN for the university entrance exam of Afghanistan’s higher education. This study used the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method (ATAM) for the evaluating the e-assessment system architecture based on NREN. For this purpose, ATAM workshop established and evaluated the proposed architecture by fifteen experts. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: This study recommended the e-assessment application architecture. After the literature review, we carried out the survey in different higher education institutes, including Kabul Polytechnic University, Kabul University and Kabul Education University and the respondents were the lecturers, students, administrators and the higher education ministry decision makers. The study evaluates the requirements for the e-assessment system.

Mass Spectrometry in Exam Questions (8): The Common Test for University Admissions (2024) provided by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations, Japan, the First Half

Mass Spectrometry in Exam Questions (8): The Common Test for University Admissions (2024) provided by the National Center for University Entrance Examinations, Japan, the First Half

Exam scheduling under pandemic conditions: A mathematical model and decision support system

The scheduling of university exams is a complex task that involves various constraints such as administrative limits, pedagogical needs, student volume, and different courses. The emergence of Covid-19 and future pandemics has added new constraints related to infection prevention and contact tracing. To address these challenges, this study proposes a multi-objective mathematical model that considers university resources, reduced classroom occupancy, and minimized student interaction. The model aims to minimize violations of pandemic-related constraints and categorize exams by difficulty. To facilitate scheduling for entire faculties or universities, a Genetic Algorithm based web-based decision support system is developed. With these tools, the study successfully created an optimal schedule for eight departments simultaneously.

The long‐run educational benefits of high‐achieving classrooms

AbstractThis paper examines how placement in high‐achieving classrooms within high school impacts students’ short‐ and longer‐term academic outcomes. Our setting is a large and selective Chinese high school, where first‐year students are separated into high‐achieving and regular classrooms based on their performance on a standardized exam. Classrooms differ in terms of peer ability, teacher quality, and class size, as well as level and pace of instruction. Using newly collected administrative data and a regression discontinuity design, we show that high‐achieving classrooms improve math test scores by 23% of a standard deviation, with effects persisting throughout the 3 years of high school. Impacts on performance in Chinese and English language subjects are more muted. Importantly, we find that high‐achieving classrooms raise enrollment in elite universities by 17 percentage points, as they substantially increase scores on the national college entrance exam—the sole determinant of university admission in China. We provide suggestive evidence that the most likely mechanism driving our results is exposure to higher‐quality teachers.

Teaching Strategies for the New Continuation Writing Task in China's College Entrance Examination Guided by Scaffolding Theory: A Case Study of the

Teaching Strategies for the New Continuation Writing Task in China's College Entrance Examination Guided by Scaffolding Theory: A Case Study of the