2022-07-07 09:10:34
The Chinese educational system is centered around tests. A side effect of this is that students focus on test scores and have organized social hierarchies around them. Students with high test scores enjoy higher status in school than those who do not. But at top high schools, where everyone is high performing by national standards, this system is impractical. Instead, students at these schools adopt a secondary criterion: the ability to make testing high look easy.
This resulted in a four-tier status system:
- 学神
- 学霸
- 学渣
- 学弱
The impact of this status system influences students’ perceptions of themselves and others long after their high school graduation, as they attend college in China, the United States, or Europe, and even as they begin their professional lives.
In follow-up interviews with the students I shadowed, I found them working in places such as Wall Street, Silicon Valley, or Singapore’s Marina Bay. They no longer referred to themselves or others as
xueba or
xuezha, but they continued to uphold the same status system — only with job performance substituted for test scores.
While the adult world and adolescent society are hardly identical, high school coping and sorting mechanisms follow students throughout their lives. In school, the students I shadowed learned to differentiate their peer interactions based on test scores. Almost a decade later, they differentiate peer relationships based on job performance.
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