Thank you Yujun for sharing. It is interesting to know that the professor you worked with made the students know that the usage of laptop in classroom lowers that test scores and this strategy did not last very long. It may due to that the lowering of scores is not significant or horrible, or the entertainment on laptop is too attractive.

The first sentence in your post brought me back to high school immediately. When we were preparing for the College Entrance Exam, we were forced to received much more knowledge that we can absorb in class, memorize it all day except the limited amount of sleeping time (sometimes I even dreamed about it), and did exercise repeatedly until I cannot be more familiar with the pattern to solve the problems anymore. This is a conservative way to ensure that we get good grades under big pressure with a single chance, like robots with program imbed that can perform exactly the same every time even without a brain. I wish we could be able to learn driven by our interests and curiosities. Thank you for sharing.

Thank you for the concise post. It is difficult but important to develop and maintain the authority as educators in order to create a disciplined learning environment while free the minds of students for creative and critical thinking. I can still remember the industrial conveyor scene in Pink Floyd, too. Hope this will not happen in current education scenario anymore.

You are so lucky to meet with one of your favorite professors at WUSTL, who encourages and inspires you. Not many professors even advisors notice the difficulty of studying abroad, and sometimes they are too busy to talk with students on feelings and experiences out of the academia world. Because English is not my native language, and it takes me longer than native speakers to speak out my idea, sometimes people do not want to slow down the pace and listen to me. But I am working on improvement and try to be a quicker responser in efficient communication.

I agree with you that the customized learning is better than the standard one. But there are many limitations for customizing, especially regarding evaluation. I attended the College Entrance Exam with almost 1 million high school graduates from the same province in China in 2010. How can we expect any exam other than the standardized one? It will be crazy to evaluate 1 million personal statements and CVs stilling holding the same standard. So the standard exam is the most fair way for all the teenagers who are eager for college in this situation. Only students with higher exam scores can get into college.