Telling lies gets higher grades, say Chinese

Indo-ASIAN NEWS SERVICE

BEIJING - A majority of Chinese people say they lie about their real life experiences, while almost half of them say lying helps get better grades in school.

Many students \”fictionalise\” their real life experiences in order to satisfy the strict composition formula that teachers insist on in order to get a high grade, a survey of students, academicians and education researchers has found.

The survey, conducted by China Youth Daily in May, said 83 percent of 2,639 respondents born after the 1970s admitted they had faked the content in school compositions.

About 70 percent of the respondents said they falsified their real life experiences because they had difficulty observing life, and 50 percent of them said it was because of the grading system.

\”Composition is the first lesson for Chinese to learn about telling lies,\” Han Han, a renowned writer and blogger, was quoted as saying by Global Times.

\”Exam-oriented education has something to do with children faking their compositions,\” Chu Hong, a professor at Beijing Normal University, said, adding that the evaluation standard can kill a student\’s creativity.

Meanwhile, Sun Hongyan, deputy director of the Children Research Institute at the China Youth and Children Research Centre, said students are told to follow a strict writing style to score good grades, and their creativity and emotions are compromised in the process.

\”To stop them from making up stories, they should be encouraged to think more and experience more,\” she said.

A university student, Huang Ming, said he did not like writing composition.

\”The teachers ask us to follow the same style. The kind of words, the quotations we use and the viewpoints we express are all pre-set. I write compositions just for test scores. It has nothing to do with writing,\” Huang said.