The question being asked is why students can fly through the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the International Chemistry Olympiad or the International Mathematics Olympiad but there are no Chinese Nobel Laureates? This is baffling China's educational officials.

 

Chinese students' abilities in examinations have stunned the world again after a girl from Wuhan Foreign Languages School obtained the highest score on this year's SAT. Xu Ningxi scored 2,330 out of a possible 2,400 in the American equivalent of China's gaokao (university entrance examination). This was reported by the Hubei-based Chutian Metropolis News on November 13. Xu has applied to prestigious Harvard and Yale universities, according to the paper.

 

Each year millions of people around the world apply to study at American colleges or universities. The most widely used college admission test is the SAT. The test covers math, critical reading and writing. Each section has a possible score of 800.

 

Xu's achievement is testament to Chinese students' examination abilities. "Math is less difficult with most of the questions coming from my first year in senior high school," Xu said. "And there is a fixed style to writing."

 

China's education system is under fire for students' successes in taking SAT because students learn by rote memorization instead of strengthening their other abilities. A number of Chinese students are having a hard time with the pressure of gaokao and have applied to universities in Hong Kong and overseas.

 

An increasing number of students who originally applied to China's Peking and Tsinghua universities have joined the trend of gaining access to US schools by taking the SAT, the Beijing News reported.

 

In the future American universities will be the greatest competition for Chinese educational institutes. This is likely to prompt a change in China's education system, the paper said.

 

Currently Chinese students who want to apply to US universities have to take the test in Hong Kong. It's not the first time for Chinese students to stun the world with exceptionally high SAT scores.

 

Last year a Chinese girl, who studied at a senior high school in California, returned to China and attended a training course at the New Oriental School, China's best-known training school, in an effort to pass the SAT.

 

Media reports were critical of the girl, saying it is ridiculous for a girl who studied in the US to have to undergo training in China to pass the test. In the end she scored perfectly on the SAT and was accepted by two of the most prestigious universities in the US: Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

 

(China Daily November 16, 2006)