Gao Jie is an 18-year-old girl living in Beijing. She appears to be a quiet student. However, what she did surprised many people.

 

When she graduated from the No.4 Middle School, a key high school in Beijing, she was enrolled by a famous university in central China. However, she did not register at the university. Someone might think that she quit because she aimed at more prestigious universities like Peking University or Tsinghua University. In fact, she wants to go to a US college to study, Beijing Youth Daily reported.

 

When most of her high school classmates are studying in universities, Gao Jie is busy preparing for her TOFEL test, writing essays and preparing related application documents. When she was in senior high two, she registered for a training class on Scholastic Assessment Test, or SAT test, which is somewhat like the college entrance examination in China. After the class, she went to Hong Kong to take the SAT test.

 

Gao Jie said that she feels that more and more Chinese high school students now aim at studying in a US college. So they try to pass the SAT test and finish their postgraduate courses in the US.

 

Her feeling is right. Over the past two years, more and more Chinese high school students choose to go to the US to study and the number of students registering for SAT training classes has surged year by year, said Zhang Hongwei, who is responsible for the North America Testing Program at the New Oriental School.

 

Apart from Beijing, a large number of high school students in Shanghai also follow this trend. In fact, the first SAT training class has opened in Shanghai. The number of students who intend to study in a US college is "far more in Shanghai than in Beijing," said Gao Jie.

 

In 2007, this trend will continue, said Zhang. He even called 2007 the year of Chinese high school students studying abroad.

 

(Chinanews.cn January 25, 2007)