Source: www.chinanews.com 2014-03-24
Written by: Liao Lili, Xu Jing
Translated by: Bai Yang
Edited by: Wang Dongmei

SYSU 2014 independent recruitment interview was held in Guangzhou on March 23. About 1,000 candidates from 29 provinces, municipalities and autonomous regions around China attended the interview. Chen Chunsheng, Executive Deputy Secretary and Vice President of SYSU, revealed that SYSU is going to launch a special plan to increase the enrollment of rural students. The plan is to select hard working high school students with good academic performance from 832 impoverished counties around China, as well as 28 impoverished counties and 16 key counties included in the national plan for poverty alleviation through development in Guangdong province.

Cowgirl, smart city, MH370… These are the topics in SYSU 2014 independent recruitment interview. It is reported that SYSU has seven general discipline categories for independent recruitment, including the humanities, social sciences, economics & management, basic sciences, information science & engineering, resources & environment, and medicine & pharmacy.

The interview takes the form of “group interview” where 7 students are interviewed at the same time by 5 experts in the general discipline category. Through self introduction, random question choosing, discussion and debate, the interviewers inspect various aspects of the candidates, including their understanding of the major, knowledge structure, hobbies and interests, critical thinking, language skills and teamwork spirit. The candidate group, test room, interviewer group and questions are all selected at random.

The interview in the humanities category is quite unique. For example, in self introduction, the topic “About Me” lets the students introduce themselves in a casual and poetic way. Besides answering one’s own questions, the candidate must make comments on other students’ questions and answers, some even comment on their group members. Candidates express their own views and discuss about hot issues such as the pros and cons of “abandoned baby island” in Guangzhou, tension between doctors and patients, the dust-haze weather, etc.

Chen Chunsheng said that according to the relevant requirements of the Ministry of Education, this year SYSU pays more attention to the principle of justice, fairness and openness in determining the interviewee list, selecting the interviewer group, arranging the interview procedure, and determining the interview result. SYSU has taken a series of measures to prevent loopholes in the independent recruitment.