College in Nanjing breaks academic convention in China by showing underperforming students the door.
By Fan Yiying
Nanjing Forestry University in eastern China’s Jiangsu province is in many ways just like any other university, except for the fact that it’s kicking out students at an unprecedented rate, Sixth Tone’s sister publication The Paper reported on Thursday.
In an effort to get students to take classes more seriously, the university adopted a measure empowering it to expel students for low performance after a warning. Gao Handong, deputy director at Nanjing Forestry University, told The Paper that about 17 out of 100 students failed at least one course in one semester in 2011 and “a few students even failed 11 courses,” which, he said, was “hard to believe.” The new measure was adopted in the fall semester in 2014, and has allowed the university to remove 49 students since.
Statistics provided by Nanjing Forestry University to The Paper show that the proportion of students who failed at least one class had decreased to five percent in 2016. The number of students who received a warning dropped from 343 in the fall semester of 2015 to 235 during the spring semester in 2016.
Universities in China rarely kick out students who underperform. After senior middle school students sit through the grueling gaokao, China’s university entrance exam, and are accepted by a school, they can usually expect to graduate regardless of their performance. But some universities in the country have come to realize the importance of controlling the quality of the student body — Nanjing Forestry University is one of them.
Apart from warning students who aren’t performing well enough, the university makes study plans to help them catch up with their schoolwork. Gao said that, because the school had kept records of each score and warning, none of the parents of expelled students had raised objections.
Students who are asked to leave the school are given an opportunity to study one more year under probation and restore their status as a student provided they pass the required exams. Among the 13 students who were expelled in 2015, four managed to return to the university as students.
Xiong Bingqi, vice president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, a non-profit organization that conducts research on education policy, told Sixth Tone he supports establishing expulsion procedures at universities. He said it’s a way for universities to improve the quality of their schools.
However, he said, China doesn’t have a system guaranteeing the rights of the dropouts. Once they are kicked out from their current university, the students will have to take the college entrance examination again. “The students should have the right to choose another university or major that they are interested in after being eliminated,” Xiong said.
Additional reporting by Wang Lianzhang.
(Header image: A student reads a book at Nanjing Forestry University, Jiangsu province, Jan. 4, 2014. Wang Xin/VCG)
