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Of the issues connected with education in China, none is so sensitive within the bureaucracy and so controversial among students as the manner in which candidates for entrance to certain secondary and all postsecondary institutions are chosen, for few things can effect greater change or offer greater opportunity to a Chinese youth than to become one of the few allowed to continue education beyond the eighth grade. Ironically, few things in China have varied so widely and changed so often over the past few decades as admissions policies.
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Louis R. Smerling (1978) studied this question.
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