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Reading Assignment: China's Cram School from Hell NAME: __________________________ DATE: _______ PERIOD: ______ irections D Read the article titled “China’s Cram School From Hell” by Rachel Lu. When you are finished, answer the 15 questions seen below and the required essay. Remember to express yourself fully and carefully in your answers, using the skills you have learned in Language Arts class this year. Use your own paper to answer. READING ASSIGNMENT: CHINA’S CRAM SCHOOL FROM HELL PART I: SHORT ANSWER: 1. How many Chinese students take the “gaokao” each year? 2. What are the seven main topics covered on the test? 3. How high of a score on the test does it take to make headlines? 4. What can a student do if they feel their test score was too low the first time? 5. What is the “dark art” that Maotanchang High School specializes in? 6. How big does the 5,000-person town of Maotanghang get when school is in session? 7. How many much downtime does a Maotanchang student have during the course of the daily schedule? 8. How much would it cost a parent to send their child to Maotanchang High per year? 9. Why did people from the town of Maotanchang decide not to open their karaoke parlors and Internet cafes? 10. According to one source – what was the punishment for a student who was sneaking online instead of studying? 11. What does the Weibo user @CCDCG think about the fairness of the gaokao test? 12. What percentage of the Maotanchang students pass the gaokao test? 13. Why would “gaokao factories” be more likely to emerge in the poorer areas of the country? 14. Why are college graduates in China facing a brutal job market right now? 15. When @eltonzhg wrote, “…goods like them are overstocked on the market.” – who is he referring to? PART II: ESSAY: Write a short-constructed-response of at least 10 sentences that answers the following writing prompt: Do you think Maotanghang High School is a good thing or a bad thing? Explain your reasoning with evidence from the text. STANDARDS FOR GRADING THIS READING ASSIGNMENT: GRADE C: 1. The requirements for a C are the same as for a B except that there are one or two errors or omissions that would prevent the student from getting a B. GRADE B: 1. The report answers all of the short answer questions in complete sentences. 2. The short answer section shows only minor factual errors. 3. The essay question or questions are of proper length and written in complete sentences. 4. The essay question addresses the topic clearly. 5. Paper is neatly written and carefully proofread with no more than four typos or spelling errors. GRADE A: 1. The report meets all the requirements for a “B”. 2. The essay question or questions show outstanding effort and analysis as well as an exceptional overall understanding of the topic chosen. 3. The report is carefully proofread with no more than two typos or spelling errors. 4. The report is word-processed. CHINA'S CRAM SCHOOL FROM HELL CHINESE STUDENTS ARE PREPARING FOR THEIR NATIONAL COLLEGE ENTRANCE TEST, THE GAOKAO. By RACHEL LU SBS.com October 14, 2013 Students taking China's hypercompetitive college entrance exam, according to a popular saying, resemble an army of 10,000 rushing across a narrow log. So what happens to those who fall off? It's 17 hours a day and goofing off can get you arrested. Each year, more than 9 million Chinese students endure the gaokao, as the exam is known. A grueling two or three days' experience, the test covers Chinese, mathematics, a foreign language, chemistry, physics, geography, and history, among other subjects. The test results, which range from the 200s to the 600s (scores of over 700 sometimes make headlines), comprise almost the entirety of a student's college application portfolio. While some of the multiple-choice questions would be familiar to U.S. teenagers sweating over Advanced Placement exams, gaokao essay prompts are sometimes so bizarre that even Chinese state media challenged its mostly adult readers to answer some of the more notorious essay prompts, such as this one: "It flies upward, and a voice asks if it is tired. It says, 'No.' Because Chinese parents often expect their children to become family breadwinners, the pressure to perform is intense. Faced with the gaokao's high stakes and frustrating unpredictability, tens of thousands of test takers choose to sit through the ordeal again, when their scores fall short of their, or their parents', expectations. Having already graduated from high school, some of these re-takers hunker down at home for a year to study. Others attend cram schools like Maotanchang High School, which lies tucked away in a small town in the mountains of central China's Anhui province and specializes in the dark art of military-style test preparation. With an annual enrollment of more than 10,000 students, the school has earned the dubious honor of being called, "China's Largest Gaokao Factory," in Chinese state media. A Sept 18 article in China Youth Daily, offered an inside look at the topsy-turvy economic and social life of this exam-obsessed town. The piece, which incited a debate on the benefits and drawbacks of the gaokao system, immediately became popular on Chinese social media. The China Youth Daily article claims that Maotanchang, a speck of a town with only 5,000 registered residents, becomes home to more than 50,000 people when school is in session; classes are so crowded that teachers must use loudspeakers to address the hordes of students. The article describes schedules that run from 6:10 a.m. to 10:50 p.m., with students' waking hours consumed by endless lectures and repetitive practice exams that abate only for two 30-minute meal breaks and one hour of downtime. According to the article, one year in Maotanchang's cram program can reportedly cost up to $8,000, roughly three times the average annual disposable income in Anhui. The article depicts a local economy so tightly bound to the cram school that townspeople have refrained from opening up the karaoke parlors and Internet cafes otherwise ubiquitous in China. Instead, enterprising locals rent out their rooms or dwellings for about $1,300 to $3,300 annually, exorbitant for a Chinese town of that size, to parents who accompany their children for the academic year. After the report became a trending topic, people claiming to be alumni of the school took to the web to share personal accounts of this "gaokao holy land." @FORTHECITY tweeted on Weibo, "I remember a classmate of ours sneaking online [instead of studying]; he was sent back to his hometown in a police car with sirens blazing." His comment couldn't be confirmed, though investigations by Chinese media tell similar stories of local governments putting their towns' resources, including the police force, behind Maotanchang's brand of paramilitary cramming. One user wrote, "You only see the high passage rate, but you don't see how much we have given up to go to university. You scratch the surface, but you don't see how much scolding and physical punishment there is from teachers, or how many students commit suicide under pressure." Another user, however, had warmer memories: "Before going there, many thought they'd go crazy. But after leaving, many start to miss the place." The gaokao is not just difficult and sometimes arbitrary, but also administered in a way that deliberately stacks the odds against students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Millions of Chinese citizens have lived and worked for decades in large cities, yet remain unable to obtain the elusive hukou, or household registration, that would allow their children to take full advantage of the superior education afforded urban locals. Nonetheless, in a society with so many deeply entrenched disparities, the gaokao still provides students with an opportunity for upward mobility. Weibo user @CCDCG, who claims to be a Ph.D. student from a rural area, wrote, "The gaokao is the fairest competitive exam, relatively speaking. With an 80 percent passage rate, Maotanchang is really quite impressive. Getting a higher education is the only way up for many, especially kids from rural areas. Nowadays, education resources are highly concentrated [in cities], and I hope more underdogs can succeed in the system." Another user agreed: "These 'gaokao factories' are likely to emerge in poor areas. People from these places want to change their fate, but they have no other path." Getting into university is only the first rung on China's slippery social-mobility ladder. As China's GDP growth slows from an annual rate of over 9 percent over the last decade to about 7.5 percent a year, recent college graduates, especially those without the right connections or parental support, find themselves in a brutal job market. In China's hyper-competitive society, even a sterling gaokao performance, hard as that is to achieve, no longer seems to be enough. As @eltonzhg wrote, "These poor 'raw materials' undergo hellish molding and rigorous selection, [but] they don't even know that goods like them are overstocked on the market." .
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