peking university

Color me skeptical.

I feel the Chinese students do not understand what ‘original thought’ means. It doesn’t mean being an Albert Einstein and inventing lightbulbs when lightbulbs did not exist. It simply means the stance you take in your paper, the sources you select, and the way you argue for your stance using your sources. It means being able to get sources offering different opinions from your stance (probably not so easy for Chinese students since censorship is applied), weighing these opinions, arguing for and against these opinions and arriving at a final conclusion. I think, as far as an essay is concerned, it’s not so much arriving at a right or wrong answer as it is about the way you arrive at the answer. And I think Chinese students are too concerned about arriving at the right answer. I think this is what happens when your education system penalizes you for not regurgitating out correct textbook answers. But above all, perhaps this is the fault of censorship and an authoritarian government making sure that its countrymen share unified thoughts.

~methegirl3, currently studying at Peking University in China

Update: Although Andrew Sun may prove me wrong….

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