Testing times stymie student hopefuls

The exam

No official date has been recorded for the creation of the entry exam for overseas Chinese. However, government documents show that in 1997, it was held in six places during the month of June, including Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hong Kong and Macao.

About 100 colleges and universities on the mainland were qualified to recruit overseas Chinese students on the basis of the exam results that year.

The exam divided prospective students into two streams: those following a liberal arts track and those studying the sciences. Students who wished to study liberal arts at a university were tested in five subjects: Chinese, English, math, Chinese history, and geography.

To qualify to take the exam, the students must first have obtained long-term or permanent residency, and must have lived outside China for at least two of the previous four years.

Now, almost two decades later, the form and content of the exam haven't changed a great deal, but the number of colleges and universities qualified to recruit Chinese students from overseas has risen to more than 300.

Zhou Yan, who runs a tutorial class in Beijing for overseas Chinese who plan to take the exam, said the students usually earn quite low scores as a result of poor adjustment to the domestic learning environment and the content and form of domestic tests.

"These students are especially bad at math, with many failing the math tests," Zhou said, adding that some students speak and write good English, but it depends on the country they resided in before arriving in China.

"The only subject they are all generally good at is geography, which I guess has something to do with their experience of living and traveling abroad," he said.

Unlike many of her peers residing overseas, 19-year-old Li Sijia was sanguine about taking the entry exam because she left China at a relatively late age, which meant she had finished most of her high school courses before moving abroad.

However Li, who was born in Jiaozuo, Hunan province, was still beset by difficulties. She said the math test is far harder than those she took in South Africa, where she has permanent residence, and the number of historical figures and events make it difficult to study for the history test.

"Besides which, I haven't read or written Chinese characters for two years. It will take me some time to get used to it," she said.