Notes on taking the GRE in China

Thousands of students across Asia hoping to enter American graduate schools took the GRE yesterday, finishing the second half of the split administration given in China, Taiwan and South Korea. And I was sitting right there with all of them.

I took the computer-based analytical writing section in July, just before I flew to Madagascar. I scheduled it a week prior and went in on a Tuesday. I was the only one there. The administrator made me leave my bag, phone and everything in my pockets in a locker. A security camera watched me the entire time, and cubicle walls kept me from seeing the empty stations next to me.

Yesterday was the opposite. When I arrived at DaWai, several hundred students were already waiting outside the academic building, reviewing and cramming, waiting to be let in.

The paper side of the exam is only given twice a year, and only in certain cities, so students flowed in from across the Northeast. We piled at the door, then piled inside, then piled into the testing halls.

Even in China, the GRE is an English test, and none of the material is in Chinese. A Chinese professor read an English script to a room full of Chinese students. Only after several runs through was anything translated, and then only the most essential directions.

As the administrator was reading and re-reading instructions, the student next to me picked up his test booklet and pushed the ends together to bow out the pages. Separating sheets of still-classified material with the point of a pencil, he examined the questions he could make out in that skewed angle. He was cheating.

I looked around the room. Nearly every student in the testing hall was trying to get an advanced look at the test questions while the administrator continued reading instructions. No one was shy about it. Some folded back covers; others bent the pages like the computer science major next to me.

A proctor walked up and down the aisles, either oblivious or (more likely) unconcerned. I looked at a student two rows back. He shrugged, as if to say, "You know a better way?"

A friend taking the test, another American, complained afterward that students near her were working ahead when they finished the designated section, or going back to a part of the test that was finished. I didn't notice this, but I wasn't looking for it, either. The guy next to me kept working after time had been called, almost up to when his exam was collected, and several minutes after mine was turned in.

I hate to make this sound like a "This would never happen in America" post, but, well, it wouldn't. In the universities where all these students are applying, breaking rules on a test will get you at best a failing grade, if not a ticket home.

The student who sat next to me wants to attend NYU, pursuing a doctorate in computer science. There's more opportunity there, he said. As fast as China is developing, it's not fast enough for some, and won't ever be. For some, studying abroad still conveys an advantage that can't be gained here.

Maybe he'll get in. Hopefully, he won't try the same thing and be thrown out.

Before: Fire on the home front | After: WordPress takes the moral high ground