Recently, pilot universities of the "Strengthening the Foundation Plan" have successively released the enrollment brochure for the year 2024. Before the May Day holiday, applicants have completed their online registration. This signifies the commencement of the new round of talent selection process under the "Strengthening the Foundation Plan".
In January 2020, the Ministry of Education issued the "Opinions on Carrying Out Pilot Work on Basic Discipline Enrollment Reform in Some Universities", deciding to carry out pilot reforms in basic discipline enrollment in some universities, known as the "Strengthening the Foundation Plan". This plan primarily aims to select students who aspire to serve the country's major strategic needs, possess outstanding comprehensive qualities, or excel in basic disciplines, in order to cultivate reserve talents for the country's major strategic areas.
Scientifically selecting various talents has been one of the core tasks of China's new college entrance examination comprehensive reform project initiated since 2014. With the implementation of the "Education Strong Country" strategy, the effective identification of top innovative talents has drawn attention from various sectors of society. Over the past decade, Chinese universities have followed a comprehensive evaluation approach in selecting top innovative talents, from independent enrollment to the "Strengthening the Foundation Plan", which focuses on evaluating students' knowledge, abilities, and qualities through diverse means rather than solely relying on the college entrance examination scores.
In my view, to better support the country's strategic needs, the implementation of the "Strengthening the Foundation Plan" should further optimize the comprehensive evaluation mechanism in the talent selection process based on summarizing and learning from existing experiences.
Clarifying admission criteria, focusing on professional competence
Admission criteria are the core embodiment of enrollment philosophy and serve as a beacon for controlling the quality of student sources. Reviewing the current enrollment brochures of domestic universities for the "Strengthening the Foundation Plan", many mention the admission of students with outstanding comprehensive qualities, excellent academic performance, or excelling in basic disciplines. However, the concepts and standards in such descriptions still appear generalized.
According to the positioning of the "Strengthening the Foundation Plan", professional competence, which refers to the qualities and key abilities necessary for engaging in basic discipline and key field research, should become the core admission criterion.
Specifically, professional competence should include three major dimensions related to the profession, along with six categories of factors - "interest (aspiration, interest)", "endowment (existing achievements, development potential)", and "quality (personal qualities, common qualities)".
Among these, "interest" combines students' aspirations and interests, where aspirations refer to students having ambitions and a sense of mission to serve the country's strategic needs, and interests indicate students' passion for the selected major, demonstrating focus and curiosity towards it. "Endowment" combines students' existing achievements and development potential, with the former showcasing the level and achievements students have demonstrated in specific majors, and the latter indicating students' potential to succeed and contribute after entering the system for cultivating top talents in the discipline. "Quality" includes the specific personal qualities required for the profession, such as emphasizing the concept of life in biological science or emphasizing a broad historical perspective in history, as well as common qualities transcending professional differences, such as problem-solving skills, innovative thinking, and communication abilities.
Diversifying assessment methods to obtain comprehensive information
Currently, the program design of the "Strengthening the Foundation Plan" is relatively comprehensive. However, the assessment methods primarily relying on the "college entrance examination + school examination" format, supplemented by comprehensive interviews and physical tests, lack obvious diversity, leading to limited decision-making basis for admissions.
In this regard, after clarifying the admission criteria, universities should further diversify assessment methods to obtain the most comprehensive and authentic information regarding professional competence, further enhancing the predictive validity of university academic success and development potential to accurately select ideal student sources.
Specifically, to assess whether students' professional interests are firm, universities can examine students' extracurricular activities and social practice experiences. Students who actively participate in and engage deeply and continuously in professional-related activities, such as subject summer camps, clubs, field surveys, voluntary services utilizing professional knowledge, or internships in university laboratories, often demonstrate an inherent passion and developmental orientation towards the profession. Such students usually maintain their interests after enrollment.
Furthermore, universities can request students to submit personal statements or recommendation letters issued by high school teachers to find more evidence that the applicants genuinely enjoy the chosen major, and to identify whether there is sufficient alignment between the students and the university's professional characteristics and the "Strengthening the Foundation Plan" training program.
For determining students' professional endowment and academic quality, a combination of quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods can be used for cross-validation.
On one hand, by comparing the results of various standardized or non-standardized professional tests, such as the college entrance examination, high school academic level examinations, university-organized entrance exams, and authoritative academic competitions, universities can use quantitative numerical indicators to help differentiate among numerous applicants with similar academic and college entrance examination scores, thereby improving the accuracy of selection.
On the other hand, through comprehensive quality assessment files, writing proficiency, interview performance, and other qualitative non-numeric factors, universities can gain a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of students' professional qualities and development potential.
Specifically, based on the university's enrollment philosophy and professional requirements, universities should carefully review the descriptive information recorded in students' high school comprehensive quality assessment files and conduct in-depth exploration and gap analysis through other means. By understanding the number of courses taken by students, their difficulty, content, learning performance, trends in grades, research-based learning, innovative achievements, and works formed during social practices, universities can infer students' future potential based on their past performance.
Enhancing evaluation validity and leveraging the value of interviews
As an important measurement tool, examinations have the advantages of comparability and efficiency, but they have significant limitations in identifying and obtaining students' potential for development, professional aspirations, contribution capabilities, and alignment. Therefore, in the talent selection process of the "Strengthening the Foundation Plan", comprehensive interviews, as an important means to assess students' research potential and innovative qualities, have been widely utilized. However, the current design of the "Strong Foundation Plan" interview process leans more towards procedural fairness, lacking consideration on how to ensure the reliability and validity of interview evaluation results. For instance, whether there is a focus on inter-rater reliability among evaluators or if the interview questions are carefully designed.
In-depth interviews are the best way for selectors to personally understand and verify who the students are and if they are a good fit for the university. Due to its subjective nature, universities should specially design the format, content, and evaluation criteria for interviews.
For example, 3 to 5 experts could jointly interview one candidate within 20 to 30 minutes. The interview should include both professional assessments, such as answering technical questions, describing a research experience, or sharing reflections on professional books, and holistic assessments, such as targeted questions on the candidate's overall qualities and submitted personal statements.
In designing technical questions, the focus should be on testing the candidate's ability to apply logic and reasoning to answer unfamiliar questions. The answers are not judged as right or wrong but rather evaluate the candidate's thinking skills and academic potential.
Moreover, interviewers should undergo training, familiarize themselves with evaluation criteria in advance, and participate in concentrated "real-world" simulations of the evaluation process to reduce subjective judgment errors, avoid personal biases, and prevent individual evaluation styles from influencing the assessment results.
(The author is an associate professor at the China Rule of Law Strategic Research Institute of East China University of Political Science and Law)
