[HN Gopher] The Chinese Civil Examinations
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The Chinese Civil Examinations
Author : onepossibility
Score : 50 points
Date : 2022-12-06 23:08 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (inference-review.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (inference-review.com)
| neilv wrote:
| We in tech reinvented some of it:
|
| 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.
| aswanson wrote:
| Upper class folks send their kids into law & medicine.
| Technology is more of a proletariat aspiration.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Test prep is somewhat helpful for some people but some rich
| kids can't test their way out of a paper bag.
|
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| 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.
| spiritplumber wrote:
| Given that CPS in Texas will attempt to take gender-non-
| conforming kids who have the support of their parents in
| being GNC, and that it's in Texas, I am pleasantly
| surprised that there have been no deaths with that policy.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| AFAICT this is not taken into account by Texas CPS in any
| way. Look for articles on it.
|
| Yes, Texas legislators passed a virtue signaling law to
| do so, but it was blocked immediately. there is also a
| big gap between what laws are passed and the realistic
| chance of your child being taken away when the system
| actually confronts families.
| prottog wrote:
| > surprised that there have been no deaths with that
| policy
|
| The lunacy of today's synthetic sex identity movement
| aside, what did you imagine, that the Texas state
| government would take these kids out back and shoot them?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| That children would commit suicide after being taken from
| their parents due to their gender politics. Seems pretty
| plausible to me, transgender folks are already at
| increased risk of suicide.
| djbebs wrote:
| Pretty sure he was surprised no parents had blown one of
| the CPS people heads clean off in their front lawn when
| they came around to take their kids.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| 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.
| a1pulley wrote:
| 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.
| fyresala wrote:
| 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.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| STAR is what you do when you want to hire professional
| talkers.
|
| Leetcode is not the only way to hire professional builders,
| but is much better than STAR.
| ggambetta wrote:
| I was surprised by the kind of things people openly admit
| to during STAR interviews. I don't enjoy doing them but
| they've surfaced enough red flags from candidates to save a
| previous employer a few bad hires.
| throwaway973591 wrote:
| I'd question whether it's really that effective. A
| dishonest candidate could craft a boring, safe scenario
| for a STAR interview question that paints them as an
| empathetic team-player, even if that's not how they've
| really acted in the past.
|
| Meanwhile, a forthright, but flawed candidate who
| supplies real examples from their past they regret, but
| would like to improve on, would look like an iffy hire.
| woooooo wrote:
| 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.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Leetcode is dead, and it just doesn't know it yet. High
| quality LLMs killed it. Either proctor, in person onsite, or
| your hire likely cheated.
|
| Leetcode can't die fast enough.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| ? Leetcode interviews are "proctored"
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Obviously not well enough to stop cheaters.
|
| I unironically refuse to go on video for my interviews
| because of my "lack of webcam" (which is true for my
| desktop). Literally never had a single interviewer stop
| due to it, and I've virtual onsite interviewed at most of
| the FAANGs.
|
| What I mean by proctoring is really intense, invasive
| shit.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| Aunche wrote:
| > 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.
| hellothere1337 wrote:
| 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
| bitxbitxbitcoin wrote:
| That would be the Taiping Rebellion for anyone interested.[0]
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiping_Rebellion
| pkoird wrote:
| 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.
| _shadi wrote:
| aren't people already tired of those tweet size tropes.
|
| 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
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Also, Hitler was like a minor German Army intelligence
| agent tasked with infiltrating the Nazis back when they
| were an obscure group. He just ended up agreeing with their
| message and taking them over.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I didn't know this and now I like the FBI even less.
| idlewords wrote:
| Congratulations on your Godwin's Law speedrun.
| idlewords wrote:
| _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.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| _God 's Chinese Son_ by Jonathan D. Spence is a good account.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| 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.
| laretluval wrote:
| > but there is much precedence for rebel leaders who took on
| dynasties to be of millenarian, even foreign beliefs.
|
| The modern Chinese government's suppression of Falun Gong
| makes sense from this perspective.
| oc852 wrote:
| The modern equivalent = national university entrance exam
| PaulHoule wrote:
| See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaokao
|
| 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.
| glitchc wrote:
| 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.
| kelipso wrote:
| Even if that's true, it's an entirely different scale from
| an entire class of people being able to pass their status
| onto their children through college admissions like the
| upper middle class and richer people can do in the US.
| Vt71fcAqt7 wrote:
| >Is it the grades that decide admission or the number if
| steps removed from the Premier?
|
| First off, the premier is not the leader of China. Second,
| while I can imagine that members of the Politburo _could_
| get their children in, and perhaps some others with power,
| this doesn 't extend so far out. The CCP has tens of
| millions of members, more than 99% of them are irrelivant.
| If that kind of scandle would be revealed it would end
| their career. It is much safer to send their children
| abroad: something that Xi Jinping did for his daughter (and
| Kim Jong Il did for Kim Jong Un). That is what I imagine
| more likely. Additionally it would be easier to just get
| them a good job with a degree from a worse college (In
| their own or their freinds comapny). If you have any
| evidence otherwise I wouldn't be surprised per se but I
| think a source for your claim is needed.
| oli5679 wrote:
| Xi's daughter went to Harvard
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_Mingze
| [deleted]
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > 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).
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/china/archive/2013/06/chinas-
| unf...
| YoumuChan wrote:
| 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.
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| With the Indian JEE you just rank all your choices (major,
| university). The system then allocates the highest
| available choice for the student sorted by the student
| rank. This avoids all the guesswork and game theory that
| you describe. There are also well defined quotas for lower
| caste/disabled/state locals etc
| NhanH wrote:
| Same thing here in Vietnam. But I don't think it detracts
| from the point (standardized testing is good for social
| mobility).
|
| Normally almost everyone know roughly how competitive your
| own self is, so only people at the margin of admission has
| to care. There are some majors where everyone is at the
| margin (sometimes it get to 29.75 out of 30 as the cutoff),
| but at that point, it really doesn't matter who you would
| get among all those people, and the effect is roughly the
| school pick a subset of very talented and hardworking
| student at random. Again, doesn't affect the mobility issue
| lordnacho wrote:
| And you have one bad day and you lose your lottery
| ticket...
|
| You catch a flu, your grandma dies, maybe you
| menstruate...
| cuteboy19 wrote:
| Can't you try next year?
| lordnacho wrote:
| Why can't you try in 3 months? Everyone who had some
| unforeseen event must find money to live another year?
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| thelock85 wrote:
| I don't agree but I think it's fair to say standardized
| tests are a very mediocre solution for measuring students'
| capacity for academic work at any institution that requires
| them, and few universities have the resources to develop
| and implement better admissions procedures and entrance
| exams that are more reflective of their institutional
| values on their own. It's much easier just to get on board
| the College Board gravy train.
|
| My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the
| function of MS/HS education. They are tied to school
| funding, teacher effectiveness, local/regional reputation
| and create a trickle down effect from SAT/ACT > PSAT >
| state-level tests so that the worst-served students are
| practicing multiple choice and boilerplate prompts from
| February to May every year. And these students hardly even
| go to college if they graduate, so that's time that could
| have been spent exploring trades, developing life skills
| (civics, taxes), understanding how to cope with any
| learning differences, etc.
|
| Then there's the fact that a student can be taught to bump
| their score past a nominal requirement, gain admission,
| take out loans and never graduate. Not necessarily the
| fault of the test but part of the overall complex.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> My two cents are standardized tests greatly reduce the
| function of MS /HS education._
|
| Eh, depends on how your country's standardized tests are
| set up. You don't _have_ to ask multiple-choice
| questions.
|
| There's no reason you shouldn't use standardized tests in
| trade education - if you're teaching plumbing with copper
| pipe, have them solder some joints and quiz them about
| air locks and suchlike.
|
| You can cover things that are truly impossible to examine
| by just requiring a certain number of hours. If you want
| people in the first year of high school to receive sex ed
| but don't want to do exams on it, you can just require
| that schools deliver a certain number of hours of it.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Then they should just test for that and make it a lottery
| for everyone over the bar. Anyone who's been to an elite
| university will tell you that a lot more people could
| handle it than are admitted.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| A lot more people could handle it than are admitted
| because you can pick the classes you want to take.
|
| If you are saying a lot more people could handle taking
| the top level classes than are admitted, I would also
| agree - but most of those people go to similarly elite
| unis.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I'm only looking at own experience, where you couldn't
| just choose whether classes you liked.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Right, but as one of those "anyone" who has been to an
| elite university, I'm giving my two cents.
| ghaff wrote:
| My US experience, which is probably pretty typical, is
| some choice of core courses, choice of major, with some
| required and some options within that major. Undergrad
| I'm pretty sure I could have made choices that would have
| made it pretty much impossible for me to graduate and I
| could have made choices which--while they certainly
| wouldn't have made my undergraduate education trivial--
| would have made things easier.
| lordnacho wrote:
| I went to a selective uni where I thought basically half
| my year at high school would have been just fine there.
| The other half were not particularly interested in
| studying anything and would have screwed up at any
| university.
|
| It's not like the laws of physics depend on what college
| teaches them, right? The content of just about any course
| is going to be more or less the same. A lot of the books
| were the same as well, comparing notes with friends who
| didn't get in.
| ghaff wrote:
| Why? Because there's no signal other than standardized
| test scores? If you believe that then you probably should
| just admit the highest scores.
|
| When I last looked at the research many years ago, other
| signals certainly tended to be noisier but there's no
| particular reason to think that admissions would be
| better if universities simply set a test floor then
| rolled a dice.
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| The selection process has a cost. If it doesn't produce
| value it _should_ be replaced with a lottery.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's pretty clear however that the selection process at
| elite universities, however imperfect and to whatever
| degree it factors in things (like legacy admissions) that
| you may think shouldn't be factored in, still produces
| better results than just randomly admitting some
| percentage of whoever applies. (Especially if applicants
| knew it would be a completely random process.)
| lordnacho wrote:
| What university has done this experiment?
| LawTalkingGuy wrote:
| It's not clear that the existing selection processes at
| most universities actually adds value in proportion to
| its cost. What value, and to who? What are the
| shortcomings you think they're trying to fix?
|
| Even if everyone agreed on a standard and its impact on
| admissions (+3 for participation in the Model UN, for
| example) it's not clear how we'd judge "better results"
| as we evaluate our admissions criteria. Are we optimizing
| for an even racial/religious mix of students? Higher
| output grades? Higher wages? More children raised
| successfully by the age of 40?
|
| Then even with an agreed upon goal and some objective
| measures to used to approach it - is it worth doing? If
| we could get 1% better results by doubling the difficulty
| of the application process for the students then it
| probably wouldn't be worth doing it when the plan was
| considered holistically. What's an acceptable trade-off?
| What's the cost on transparency and perception of bias
| when we start considering subjective criteria?
| lordnacho wrote:
| We can't really resolve this with the current data,
| because the current system encourages people to get as
| high a score as possible at the cost of maximum stress.
| How do we know whether changing the system would lead to
| a less stressed system where people just do enough to
| leap the bar, perhaps like the diving test?
| fallingknife wrote:
| They should increase difficulty until the number who can
| handle it matches the number they can admit.
| fallingknife wrote:
| There is a reason that it's pretty much 100% upper middle
| class people that complain about standardized tests being
| unfair.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Huh, poor people who can't afford tutoring complain about
| it as well.
|
| The only people who can opt out are the ones who are either
| rich or connected enough to choose a different system.
|
| In China that might mean Ivy League, in the UK it means you
| pay a very expensive private school to give the kids the
| best chance.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| It is mostly the lower classes (or their advocates)
| complaining about standardized testing not being equitable.
| And they have a point about biases (not having access to
| tutoring, or questions that rely on a middle class or
| better background to answer correctly).
|
| Many richer Chinese kids bypass the Gaokao completely and
| just take the much easier SAT/ACT to go to school in the
| states (or equivalent in other countries).
| xster wrote:
| Not mentioned in this article: from
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service#Modern_civil_ser...
|
| Modern European concepts of civil service was essentially
| influenced by the Chinese bureaucracy who selected members based
| on learning advancements rather than aristocratic birth.
| nobody0 wrote:
| One of the reasons that China hadn't have a strong private school
| of thoughts.
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