Having finished reading this essay in full at last, I am astounded at how completely unsubstantiative this discussion thread is. Not a single comment seems to be informed by TFA, but rather by preconceived notions about the imperial Chinese civil examination system.
That said, I would say that if there's any flaw in this essay, is that it doesn't revisit those predominant notions until the last two sections of the essay ("Modern Prose Aesthetics and Individuality"), ("Meritocracy and Social Reproduction"). It instead spends most of the time describing the system in detail, which is of course very much appreciated. I particularly like how it explains that much of the exam material was prepared by "the so-called literati [...] the cultured elite." (There's probably all sorts of parallels one could choose to read into contemporary society, if one was inclined to treat history like a cudgel.)
Wikipedia's article on the eight-legged essay mentions there is a post-Opening Amplification section that elaborates and clarifies the themes of the essay. One wonders how this article would read if delivered in the baguwen format.
1. Recite this problem from the Leetcode corpus as performance art (which FAANGs tell undergrads at top schools to spend months practicing, on top of their coursework, instead of exploring what interests them).
2. Demonstrate this particular method (which happened to be taught at our rich-kids alma mater, but no one else had heard of).
3. Now answer this culture question in STAR format (which we told you to take time ahead of time to practice, and to prepare correct answers, so you could speak them faux off-the-cuff, as a shibboleth).
It's upper classes creating the questionable gatekeeping rituals, and children of those classes who tend to have the spare time and coaching to best pass the filter.
came from a hardscrabble background in Missouri, standardized test results helped him get into the Naval Academy, he was a marine lieutenant in Vietnam, got a law degree, spent a lot of time in Asia as a journalist, wrote some novels including one about a guy who becomes a US Senator, actually became a US Senator representing Virginia.
There is a lot of concern that attempts to get kids into gifted programs other than through testing will be influenced greatly by family SES
There was that time I yelled at my son when he was a toddler and carried him under my arm out of a grocery store and somebody called child protective on me. They sent somebody to my house and fortunately my mother-in-law had just been cleaning and the house looked absolutely spotless, full of books, horses grazing in front of the house, at least middle if not upper class. They had no idea that my house doesn't even have central heat!
Had they come to a hovel I could have had a very different outcome. They interviewed people and had a short investigation but based on appearances they saw what looked like "a good home" and might have gathered we'd have resources to fight them in court.
I think people really overestimate the likelihood of CPS taking their kid after a visit.
There are lots of kids in absolutely horrid conditions that CPS doesn't take, they're not going to take them from your middle class home just because your mother in law didn't happen to clean.
There will always be people impacted positively and negatively by these decisions, so the presence of some people who benefitted from standardized tests doesn't say much about their rightful place in the world. In any case, Jim Webb is an exceptionally weird example to make that case, it's not like he grew up the son of a sharecropper -- his dad commanded a missile squadron for the Air Force and was a full Colonel when Webb joined the Naval Academy.
The alternative is gating on soft skills and job experience. Do you really think it's easier for privileged kids to game our industry's admissions tests?
A poor kid would have a much harder time developing soft skills and getting job experience than a rich kid would have passing our admissions tests, which would be worse for social mobility than the status quo. A poor kid with a blue collar dad can't get an internship at his dad's friend's startup. A poor kid didn't go to a high school with a computer science club. A poor kid didn't grow up developing soft skills at a dozen different after school activities.
However, the poor kid can go to college on a Pell Grant (like me), study hard, and at least have a chance to meet the Leetcode bar and gain entry to the middle class.
Chiming in to agree here. Standardized tests + leetcode tests gave me the ability to overcome being a ward of the state and become a software engineer/ then founder of a YC company with zero connections.
Quick aside, in addition to the Pell Grant, there's also for former foster youth the CHAFEE grant (California specific).
truly privileged "kids" ain't going around looking for jobs thorough interviews, they show up as "investors" or are otherwise brought in by their 'connections'...
> tell undergrads at top schools to spend months practicing
Come on. A friend of mine spent 2 weeks studying the leetcode corpus and then passed Google's coding screening. He complained about having to do the study, and I suggested that Google's salaries were such that it would be the most cost-effective 2 weeks he'd ever spend.
It all depends on how good you are at programming / math. If you have a natural talent for those then you don't need to spend much time preparring (hence why they're used a test). People try to "cheat" the test through preparing for months.
I've never understood why FAANGs are so fond of leetcode. Maybe they just get the headcounts and want a dumb and easy filter to hire some not terrible programmers. And that's part of the reason why the massive layoff is ongoing.
But STAR costs you little time to practice and communication skills will definitely pay off for a programmer.
Leetcode is the only thing that scales consistently.
At small companies, a senior engineer can ask about past projects and get a sense of whether the candidate was a meaningful contributor or just along for the ride, but that's subjective and inconsistent when you have thousands of seniors.
Leetcode exercises are pretty effective at weeding out incompetents. If they have a false positive rate, that's fine, you've got plenty of applicants. If they weed out some of the best that's also fine, because the number one concern when hiring is to find someone competent enough that they don't become an embarrassment to anyone involved.
Real world business decisions are dramatically less optimized than people imagine they are.
Like the SAT, it probably does a reasonable job of providing a repeatable/scalable floor for skills that are a proxy for, if generally not the same as, what's needed for the job. And, like the SAT, the effort to prepare for the test is externalized.
It’s a poorly implemented method to attempt to introduce some equity or actual measurable outcome.
It has to be poorly implemented because people have successfully asserted in court that assessments that correlate with IQ are illegal. So making an assessment a grind is key to weeding out the lazy or people not crafty enough to figure out what’s up. They handle the intelligence part by targeting select schools.
In government, this has been incredibly impactful. Professional civil service jobs in the US had a mixture of professional expertise and general intelligence component weighted differently depending on the job. Now, if they still exist, they consist of trivia or grammar evaluations. The result is, in professional civil service, professions without gating credentials are hiring lower IQ individuals.
> Demonstrate this particular method (which happened to be taught at our rich-kids alma mater, but no one else had heard of).
This is one of those things that often gets repeated online, but I've never seen in practice. I've never seen a Leetcode interview question that can't be solved with knowledge outside of what you'd learn after the first semester of sophomore year. Helping my wife with Leetcode, I can see why some people would think this way though. Some people simply have better algorithmic intuition than others, so that may come off as memorization.
The only somewhat esoteric questions I've been asked is Indian immigrants asking about the minutiae about the JVM. Even then, I don't think these would be unreasonable if you were explicitly screening for Java developers.
Wasn't there a chinese guy that failed these three times, put his family in poverty due to the expense, realized he's the brother of Jesus and started a rebellion that killed 40 million people? History can be weird sometimes
Hong Xiuquan’s story is pretty bonkers, but I think the more sensationalist aspects of it overshadow the possibility that some sort of disruption to the tottering Qing was due in that era. Increasing foreign entrenchment with defeat in the Opium Wars, an increasingly sclerotic government, and much local turmoil (even prior to the rebellion, there had been ethnic and class-based revolts in Guangzhou, iirc, and some of Hong’s support base was because he was of the Hakka minority) all made the situation fraught.
Hong being influenced by American Christian missionaries is odd, but there is much precedence for rebel leaders who took on dynasties to be of millenarian, even foreign beliefs. Throughout Chinese history, the White Lotus society, with millenarian Buddhist beliefs, had challenged the Qing and the Yuan (the Ming founder was a member). The Yellow Turbans of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms fame were Daoist esoterics. Manichaean rebels fought the Song. I think a lot of times it’s just that religious cultists had the necessary social structures in place to launch rebellions, and the cohesion to continue the fight as opposed to scattered peasant revolts. The history of Chinese dynastic shifts is replete with secret societies. The Taiping were noteworthy not only because they were Christian-influenced, but because it was an act of such an organization being created in real-time, out in the open.
Suspiciously similar to a certain someone who failed an art admission and went on to start off a war that killed around 70-80 million people? History does repeat itself.
Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom by Stephen Platt is a fantastic popular history of the Taiping Rebellion. He's especially good on covering the weathervaning western attitude towards something that was initially believed to be a sort of Christian holy war. The whole book is super interesting reading even if you have zero background in Chinese history.
My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers. It's a method of elite production that allows for social mobility and limits the ability of parents to pass their status on to their children. I've wondered if much of reason why Harvard-associated people have been negative about standardized tests
It is not how it works. Depending on the province, student submits a list of preferred universities with majors before taking the test, after taking the test, or after knowing the score. The list is divided in groups, and also depending on the province, the universities in each group may or may not be ordered.
In a province where the universities are ordered, students with the same first choice are grouped together and the said university gets the result and admits top scores within quota. If there are more quota than students, university looks at students putting it as second choice AND not admitted by another university yet. Never figured out how unordered group works so I won't explain that.
There are also nuances if students could submit list after knowing their scores, because universities can approach top students in private and negotiate terms with them to lure them into putting the universities as first choice.
Hence Beijing University only gets results if it is on the list of a student. And it is not always a good idea to put Beijing U as the first choice since in a province with ordered group, not getting admitted by first choice hugely decreases the chance of getting into second choice university.
> My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers.
There are quotas for each province, city/rural area (I think the quotas are by major, which have to be declared ahead of time before you take the test). It can be really hard to get in from rural Henan, for example, but much easier to get in from urban Beijing. Someone who gets into Beida from a rural village in the middle of nowhere is going to have a much higher gaokao score than someone who gets in from Shanghai (there is a large quota for Shanghai kids even in Beijing University, but a very low quota for rural Henan). So it actually acts as a way of limiting social mobility for those without urban rich city hukous.
It is sort of analogous to America's public university system, where you get differences between in state and out of state tuition (except here, it isn't tuition, but quotas for regions).
At the end of the day, the purpose of the standardized tests is to provide a reasonable guide to admitting students who are (subject to various caveats) capable of doing the academic work. It's mostly true to say that elite universities are not looking to admit students solely (or maybe even primarily) on the basis of their scores on standardized test(s). And, yes, other factors are perhaps more influenced by family background but can be influenced by many other non-academic qualities as well.
I don't believe that for a second. Are you saying Xi's children and grandchildren would be denied admission at Beijing University if they wanted it? I'm betting the answer is no. Now extend that thinking to the Standing Committee? Would any of their kids/grandkids be rejected? Now extend that to the entire Politburo.
Now we can ask the question: Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if steps removed from the Premier? Merit, my ass.
I'm only halfway through the book but it's been an informative and entertaining read so far. It delves into the bureaucracy that this kind of examination system produces and describes how individuals struggled in vain to turn things around during the last years of the Ming dynasty. Even the Emperor can be powerless against a vast bureaucracy, at least in pre-modern times.
Something is seriously wrong about this article. Good read and that make it the worst article on this subject. Both horizontally (culture) and vertically (history) sort of figure speak.
First there are obvious a few major break of that system. Start with no such system unlike what is said. In fact the very examination was sort of inverted by a Tang dynasty emperor, even with a declaration that from now on all the literate will be in my grasp. And unlike that eight-box system, it is much more free style and corrupted as such. Hence the system to standardize the exam. Genarlaisation if one has to should at least divide into period.
Another thing is call it chinese, which is whilst “obvious” but is also wrong. The whole thing is Hans. It is exclusive due to its subject matter. Of course they do not look at you on race as Hans is not a race. Look at today so called chinese. You can sense there are major difference even in height and look (the southern and northern “race”) that nobody care. Still it is strictly Hans from Tang to Qing. That is reason why when they escalate to university the study of “Chinese” disappears and becomes modern day Hans. You cannot say non-Hans language not chinese for political reason. But just ignore them and concentrate on Hans.
There is no chinese before 1911, an invention in 1911 to trick the Manchuria emperor to write that essay and Mongolia and Tibet to toe the line.
(United Kingdom all are English and let us study only English exam as uk exam. Work well for some foreigner and English. Wales aide, let us use the dominate language dominate and generalize it to America and Ireland which also use “english” as part of the English system.)
Well written and as lie goes, it is very bad as somehow it generalize to the extent that it is wrong.
Modern European concepts of civil service was essentially influenced by the Chinese bureaucracy who selected members based on learning advancements rather than aristocratic birth.
While most critisim against the “eight-legged essay” (baguwen) were true, these was a reason to do so.
> mindlessly memorize classical texts and reproduce them in calligraphic writing in a strictly parallel format
Before the selected "classical texts", nobel family can easily outperform other competitors by studying obscure non-classical texts from non-popular books, which the common public had no access to. Although China did invent the printing press first, but still some academic books were passed on only in a small circle. So children of the elites can easily ace the civil examination in imperial court. It was similar how private univsecities exclude Jews or colored people by introducing Latin or Greek exams in the past.
During the Ming dynasty, the "eight-legged essay" was invented and enforced. Creativity was eliminated for the sake of "fairness". The exam only allows courses from classical texts where everyone had a copy, namely the "Five Classics" & the "Four Books", and the essay were narrowed down to a specific format so poor family can afford a small tutor fee.
Readit News
That said, I would say that if there's any flaw in this essay, is that it doesn't revisit those predominant notions until the last two sections of the essay ("Modern Prose Aesthetics and Individuality"), ("Meritocracy and Social Reproduction"). It instead spends most of the time describing the system in detail, which is of course very much appreciated. I particularly like how it explains that much of the exam material was prepared by "the so-called literati [...] the cultured elite." (There's probably all sorts of parallels one could choose to read into contemporary society, if one was inclined to treat history like a cudgel.)
Wikipedia's article on the eight-legged essay mentions there is a post-Opening Amplification section that elaborates and clarifies the themes of the essay. One wonders how this article would read if delivered in the baguwen format.
1. Recite this problem from the Leetcode corpus as performance art (which FAANGs tell undergrads at top schools to spend months practicing, on top of their coursework, instead of exploring what interests them).
2. Demonstrate this particular method (which happened to be taught at our rich-kids alma mater, but no one else had heard of).
3. Now answer this culture question in STAR format (which we told you to take time ahead of time to practice, and to prepare correct answers, so you could speak them faux off-the-cuff, as a shibboleth).
It's upper classes creating the questionable gatekeeping rituals, and children of those classes who tend to have the spare time and coaching to best pass the filter.
Standardized tests are a route to social mobility for some. This guy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Webb
came from a hardscrabble background in Missouri, standardized test results helped him get into the Naval Academy, he was a marine lieutenant in Vietnam, got a law degree, spent a lot of time in Asia as a journalist, wrote some novels including one about a guy who becomes a US Senator, actually became a US Senator representing Virginia.
There is a lot of concern that attempts to get kids into gifted programs other than through testing will be influenced greatly by family SES
https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2021/2/17/22288448/nyc-gifted-admis...
There was that time I yelled at my son when he was a toddler and carried him under my arm out of a grocery store and somebody called child protective on me. They sent somebody to my house and fortunately my mother-in-law had just been cleaning and the house looked absolutely spotless, full of books, horses grazing in front of the house, at least middle if not upper class. They had no idea that my house doesn't even have central heat!
Had they come to a hovel I could have had a very different outcome. They interviewed people and had a short investigation but based on appearances they saw what looked like "a good home" and might have gathered we'd have resources to fight them in court.
There are lots of kids in absolutely horrid conditions that CPS doesn't take, they're not going to take them from your middle class home just because your mother in law didn't happen to clean.
A poor kid would have a much harder time developing soft skills and getting job experience than a rich kid would have passing our admissions tests, which would be worse for social mobility than the status quo. A poor kid with a blue collar dad can't get an internship at his dad's friend's startup. A poor kid didn't go to a high school with a computer science club. A poor kid didn't grow up developing soft skills at a dozen different after school activities.
However, the poor kid can go to college on a Pell Grant (like me), study hard, and at least have a chance to meet the Leetcode bar and gain entry to the middle class.
Quick aside, in addition to the Pell Grant, there's also for former foster youth the CHAFEE grant (California specific).
Come on. A friend of mine spent 2 weeks studying the leetcode corpus and then passed Google's coding screening. He complained about having to do the study, and I suggested that Google's salaries were such that it would be the most cost-effective 2 weeks he'd ever spend.
Interview loops aren't deterministic, nor are they entirely objective. Congratulations to your friend for passing.
But STAR costs you little time to practice and communication skills will definitely pay off for a programmer.
Leetcode is not the only way to hire professional builders, but is much better than STAR.
At small companies, a senior engineer can ask about past projects and get a sense of whether the candidate was a meaningful contributor or just along for the ride, but that's subjective and inconsistent when you have thousands of seniors.
Leetcode can't die fast enough.
Real world business decisions are dramatically less optimized than people imagine they are.
Is part of it the recent frenzy to avoid bias?
If you can't take into account how smart or personable the candidate "felt", maybe leetcode is what you're left with?
It has to be poorly implemented because people have successfully asserted in court that assessments that correlate with IQ are illegal. So making an assessment a grind is key to weeding out the lazy or people not crafty enough to figure out what’s up. They handle the intelligence part by targeting select schools.
In government, this has been incredibly impactful. Professional civil service jobs in the US had a mixture of professional expertise and general intelligence component weighted differently depending on the job. Now, if they still exist, they consist of trivia or grammar evaluations. The result is, in professional civil service, professions without gating credentials are hiring lower IQ individuals.
This is one of those things that often gets repeated online, but I've never seen in practice. I've never seen a Leetcode interview question that can't be solved with knowledge outside of what you'd learn after the first semester of sophomore year. Helping my wife with Leetcode, I can see why some people would think this way though. Some people simply have better algorithmic intuition than others, so that may come off as memorization.
The only somewhat esoteric questions I've been asked is Indian immigrants asking about the minutiae about the JVM. Even then, I don't think these would be unreasonable if you were explicitly screening for Java developers.
Hong being influenced by American Christian missionaries is odd, but there is much precedence for rebel leaders who took on dynasties to be of millenarian, even foreign beliefs. Throughout Chinese history, the White Lotus society, with millenarian Buddhist beliefs, had challenged the Qing and the Yuan (the Ming founder was a member). The Yellow Turbans of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms fame were Daoist esoterics. Manichaean rebels fought the Song. I think a lot of times it’s just that religious cultists had the necessary social structures in place to launch rebellions, and the cohesion to continue the fight as opposed to scattered peasant revolts. The history of Chinese dynastic shifts is replete with secret societies. The Taiping were noteworthy not only because they were Christian-influenced, but because it was an act of such an organization being created in real-time, out in the open.
The modern Chinese government’s suppression of Falun Gong makes sense from this perspective.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
Revanchism, extreme nationalism and economic anxiety among other reasons what led to the rise of the ww1 veteran who happened to fail an art admission
My understanding is that Beijing University gets the test results for every high school graduate in the country and automatically admits the top scorers. It's a method of elite production that allows for social mobility and limits the ability of parents to pass their status on to their children. I've wondered if much of reason why Harvard-associated people have been negative about standardized tests
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mismeasure_of_Man
is precisely because a test-based system wouldn't produce the same elite Harvard produces.
In a province where the universities are ordered, students with the same first choice are grouped together and the said university gets the result and admits top scores within quota. If there are more quota than students, university looks at students putting it as second choice AND not admitted by another university yet. Never figured out how unordered group works so I won't explain that.
There are also nuances if students could submit list after knowing their scores, because universities can approach top students in private and negotiate terms with them to lure them into putting the universities as first choice.
Hence Beijing University only gets results if it is on the list of a student. And it is not always a good idea to put Beijing U as the first choice since in a province with ordered group, not getting admitted by first choice hugely decreases the chance of getting into second choice university.
There are quotas for each province, city/rural area (I think the quotas are by major, which have to be declared ahead of time before you take the test). It can be really hard to get in from rural Henan, for example, but much easier to get in from urban Beijing. Someone who gets into Beida from a rural village in the middle of nowhere is going to have a much higher gaokao score than someone who gets in from Shanghai (there is a large quota for Shanghai kids even in Beijing University, but a very low quota for rural Henan). So it actually acts as a way of limiting social mobility for those without urban rich city hukous.
It is sort of analogous to America's public university system, where you get differences between in state and out of state tuition (except here, it isn't tuition, but quotas for regions).
https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-unf...
Now we can ask the question: Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if steps removed from the Premier? Merit, my ass.
I'm only halfway through the book but it's been an informative and entertaining read so far. It delves into the bureaucracy that this kind of examination system produces and describes how individuals struggled in vain to turn things around during the last years of the Ming dynasty. Even the Emperor can be powerless against a vast bureaucracy, at least in pre-modern times.
First there are obvious a few major break of that system. Start with no such system unlike what is said. In fact the very examination was sort of inverted by a Tang dynasty emperor, even with a declaration that from now on all the literate will be in my grasp. And unlike that eight-box system, it is much more free style and corrupted as such. Hence the system to standardize the exam. Genarlaisation if one has to should at least divide into period.
Another thing is call it chinese, which is whilst “obvious” but is also wrong. The whole thing is Hans. It is exclusive due to its subject matter. Of course they do not look at you on race as Hans is not a race. Look at today so called chinese. You can sense there are major difference even in height and look (the southern and northern “race”) that nobody care. Still it is strictly Hans from Tang to Qing. That is reason why when they escalate to university the study of “Chinese” disappears and becomes modern day Hans. You cannot say non-Hans language not chinese for political reason. But just ignore them and concentrate on Hans.
There is no chinese before 1911, an invention in 1911 to trick the Manchuria emperor to write that essay and Mongolia and Tibet to toe the line.
(United Kingdom all are English and let us study only English exam as uk exam. Work well for some foreigner and English. Wales aide, let us use the dominate language dominate and generalize it to America and Ireland which also use “english” as part of the English system.)
Well written and as lie goes, it is very bad as somehow it generalize to the extent that it is wrong.
Modern European concepts of civil service was essentially influenced by the Chinese bureaucracy who selected members based on learning advancements rather than aristocratic birth.
> mindlessly memorize classical texts and reproduce them in calligraphic writing in a strictly parallel format
Before the selected "classical texts", nobel family can easily outperform other competitors by studying obscure non-classical texts from non-popular books, which the common public had no access to. Although China did invent the printing press first, but still some academic books were passed on only in a small circle. So children of the elites can easily ace the civil examination in imperial court. It was similar how private univsecities exclude Jews or colored people by introducing Latin or Greek exams in the past.
During the Ming dynasty, the "eight-legged essay" was invented and enforced. Creativity was eliminated for the sake of "fairness". The exam only allows courses from classical texts where everyone had a copy, namely the "Five Classics" & the "Four Books", and the essay were narrowed down to a specific format so poor family can afford a small tutor fee.