re: #4 justaminute

Let’s be clear, this is a really HUGE problem on the mainland. Not so much Taiwan, where I lived for 5 years.

My wife is from Taiwan and works with a lot of mainlanders. Every day she comes home with stories that have root in a culture that condones test scores and cheating above all else.

Another example, when we enrolled our daughter in a Chinese class (she’s 6) the teacher tried a little competition in class. There was a HUGE argument, those who wanted to base it only on raw test scores, and those that wanted to base the score on how much personal improvement each student had made. All the mainlanders wanted it to be who knew the most Chinese, which was ridiculous since they all spoke Chinese natively at home and was in the class just to learn writing, whereas the rest of the class was there to actually learn. They did not see the problem at all.