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The Life of a Chinese College Student vs. Life of an American College Student

By juliareinholdgw

The Chinese school system is entirely different from the US school system. From a very young age, Chinese students are put in a competitive and stressful academic environment both at home and in school. In contrast, American kids are taught about sharing, creativity, and given a fun, playful environment during their earliest school years.

The Chinese teaching method is all about memorization. This method is ancient, stemming all the way back from the teachings of Laozi, a Confucian-Daoist scholar. Ancient China’s entire political and educational system revolved around memorizing Confucian Teachings. Although today Chinese students still learn through memorization, they learn all different subjects like Chinese, Math, Science, History, and English.

In primary and secondary school, Chinese students can be in school from 7 am to 9 pm. They spend most of the day in class, and the rest of the day is spent doing homework while being supervised by a teacher. In America, grades are a personal, confidential thing.

In China, they are not. Every student is ranked based on their academic performance and subsequently seated within the classroom based on the rank. For example, the student who gets the highest grades is ranked as number 1, and sits in the front of the classroom. Number 2 sits immediately next to him/her, and number 3 next to number 2, and so on and so on. The worst students are in the back of the class. Students have enormous pressure at home for them to be ranked well because a student’s academic success if reflective of their parents caregiving abilities. Parents constantly badger their kids to study and study in order to get those prime spots in the classroom.

You may think that US college admissions process is stressful, but it is not nearly as stressful as the Chinese system. In China, everyone wants to go to three schools – Qinghua and Beijing Universities in Beijing, and Fudan Unviersity in Shanghai. However, your ability to get into a school is based on your scores on one test, the 高考(gaokao).

The Gao Kao has many different sections of all the subjects you study in high school, and is basically reflective of the education you have received so far. Because of this, Chinese students spend their entirety of primary and secondary school preparing for this test. In high school especially, students stay up till 1 or 2 am studying and get up again at 5. In a country with almost 1.5 billion people, pressure for Chinese students to score well is enormous, and there is a reason why China’s youth suicide rate is so high.

Once in college, however, things start to change for students, especially the slim amount who were able to test into the top 3 schools. However, Chinese college students lives are still entirely different from ours in the US. First, the dorms at Chinese schools are nothing like the comfortable dorms we are used to at GW. Thurston may have been some of our definitions of hell, but at least we did not live 8 to a small room with outdoor bathrooms and showers.

Chinese college social life is a lot different than ours too. While we pound shots late at night and Uber off to U-street, Chinese college students don’t really drink or participate in nightlife, seldom do they go downtown to the extravagant night clubs of Chinese cities. College in China is a whole different experience from college in the US, and one that I don’t think I’m quite ready to try yet.