Reform Pathways for the Examination and Admission System of International Graduate Students in China: A Sino-American Comparative Perspective

Abstract

Over the seven decades since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, China’s education for international students has passed through five developmental stages, entering a phase of rapid expansion after the launch of reform and opening up. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the share of international students enrolled in degree programmes—especially postgraduate programmes—has risen continuously, while their disciplinary distribution has extended from language-related fields towards non-language fields. Drawing on lessons from a comparison with the United States and on China’s own conditions, the examination and admission system for international students should be adjusted and refined. At the macro level, the reform principle of separating admission from examination functions should be upheld; at the micro level, the language proficiency examination system should be further standardised and a corresponding academic aptitude examination system established, so as to raise the overall quality of the selection and training of international graduate students in China.