应试教育(Exam-oriented education)

ding; they do not enable him to seek more and more knowledge, but induce cramming. they lower the standards of teaching, for they deprive the teacher of all freedom. teachers themselves are often judged by examination results and instead of teaching their subjects, they are reduced to training their students in exam techniques which they despise. the most successful candidates are not always the best educated; they are the best trained in the technique of working under duress.

　　the results on which so much depends are often nothing more than a subjective assessment by some anonymous examiner. examiners are only human. they get tired and hungry; they make mistakes. yet they have to mark stacks of hastily scrawled scripts in a limited amount of time. they work under the same sort of pressure as the candidates. and their word carries weight. after a judge’s decision on you have the right of appeal, but not after an examiner’s. there must surely be many simpler and more effective ways of assessing a person’s true abilities. it is cynical to suggest that examinations are merely a profitable business for the institutions that run them? this is what it boils down to in the last analysis. the best comment on the system is this illiterate message recently scrawled on a wall: ‘i were a teenage drop-out and now i are a teenage millionaire.’