THE AFFILIATED HIGH SCHOOL OF PEKING UNIVERSITY
An Exam without Correct Answers
Pro-bono Initiative
Beijing, 2018
Launched
The first-ever fake school entrance exam in China’s education history that inspired Chinese students to prepare for their future, not for their exams.
THE INSIGHT
High school students in China have been conditioned to believe that it's the answers they choose in exams that will determine their future. Trainings to pursue exam success pressures them to prioritize achieving the “right” answers, overshadowing the importance of exercising their own decision-making.
THE IDEA
To remind students that it’s in fact the choices they make outside of exams that will follow them for a lifetime, we conducted a real social experiment by staging a fake school entrance exam. Our experiment empowered students to realize that, unlike in exams, model answers do not exist for the choices to be made in real life.
The video is for private use
inside the School only.
HOW WE CONDUCTED THE EXPERIMENT
10 minutes after the start of the exam, we revealed our real intention when the teacher unexpectedly announced to hand out the 2nd exam paper, where we kept the same question set-ups as in the 1st exam paper, but changed the questions and multiple-choice answers for students to make choices for themselves about different aspects of their own life.
Each exam question was carefully designed to match with the 9 personal development objectives of the School.
After the exam, students were invited to one-on-one interviews to compare the differences of this exam and other exams to be taken in a high school and reflect on which exam is more important to their future.
The experiment was recorded and edited into a 4-minute short documentary video that was premiered during the inauguration ceremony of the new school year and used in the following admissions events.
LAUNCHED BY
Creative Team:
Nan Yi (Creative Lead)
Yifei Zhang
Jintong Liu
Xi Zhao
Cihang Liu
Production Team:
Nan Yi (Co-director, Producer)
Willde Ng (Co-director)
Shirley Yeung (Co-director, Editor)
Rika Kojima
Bubi
Rosita
With Special Thanks To:
Mengfei Liu
Yao Zeng
Xiaoli Liu
Zhuoyun Wu
Yuanzhou Xu
Yulei Sun
Tongqi Wang
Zheng Wang
Property Management Office of the School
Alumni Association of the School