Word: tested
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Last year the Chinese government instituted nationwide standardized tests for all prospective college students for the first time since the Cultural Revolution in 1966. On July 20 nearly six million students took the test to compete for only 300,000 places in Chinese colleges and universities. The test covered eight subjects--politics, history, geography, physics, mathematics, chemistry, Chinese language and a foreign language. All students were required to take the tests in politics, Chinese and math, and they had to choose two or three of the remaining subjects...
Political observers see the introduction of standardized testing as the latest move in China's campaign to modernize rapidly through building up a technocratic, managerial elite, ending Mao's long-term efforts to eradicate all hierarchy and status inequalities even at the cost of slower growth and inefficiency. Experts also note the testing may be evidence of growing strength within the Chinese hierarchy by the backers of Teng-hsiao Ping, who was intrigued by the massive test-administering bureaucracy he saw when he visited the U.S. Hua Kuo-feng is a known foe of SATS, and the establishment...
...this high-level politicking is far from the minds of the students themselves. Like their American counterparts, they are unable to think of anything but their test scores and whether they can get ahead in the system. With only five per cent of the applicants getting places in college, competition is fierce and anxiety abounds...
Meanwhile, across the continent, a judge has just given a boost to one group of testing reformers. In San Francisco, U.S. District Court Judge Robert F. Peckham last month ruled that California could not use the common Stanford-Binet IQ test to screen pupils for placement in a special program for the "educable mentally retarded." California's EMR program is 25% black, although blacks make up only 10% of the statewide school population. Even under the improbable assumption that black children have 50% more mental retardation than white children, said Peckham, the EMR enrollment pattern had just one chance...
...culprit, he declared, is the culturally biased IQ test. Peckham quoted a similar ruling in which Judge J. Skelly Wright summarized the reformers' point. Said Wright: "Although test publishers and school administrators may exhort against taking test scores at face value, the magic of numbers is strong...