China orders halt to history tests for students seeking credits for US university courses
- Test centres confirm they have been told to suspend Advanced Placement tests from next year
- Advanced courses and exams in science, mathematics and other subjects remain unaffected, they say
Beijing on Thursday ordered a suspension of history exams run by a US non-profit organisation for students seeking credit at American colleges, as the ruling Communist Party cracks down on educational material it deems unfriendly.
The suspension of Advanced Placement (AP) tests will hit secondary school students looking to ease the academic workload at US universities by earning credits for some college courses, enabling them to graduate faster.
Five test centres across the cities of Beijing, Guangzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai confirmed they would suspend the tests by 2020, after a directive from China’s Ministry of Education.
“This is a bit sudden, we don’t know the reason,” a Nanjing-based centre, SAT Test Web, said on social media platform WeChat. “If you apply for any of these four subjects, it means you need to go to other exams outside the mainland.”
The tests affected were in US history, world history, European history and human geography, said the International Exchange and Cooperation Centre in Educational Measurement (IECC), a Chinese body authorised to administer the exams.
The ministry did not respond to a request for comment.
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Officials at the AP test centres declined to comment on the reason for the ban, but said they would follow it to avoid punitive measures.
However, advanced courses and exams in science, mathematics and other subjects were unaffected, the centres said.
The College Board, a non-profit organisation based in New York that works with the IEEC and receives fees for offering the exams globally, declined to comment directly on the suspensions or the numbers of students taking AP history exams in China.
A spokesman for the board said it had never moved to deny students access to AP exams, which, outside the United States, were “relatively rare and dependent on the willingness and ability of a school to administer the classes”.
It was not immediately clear what proportion the affected exams constitute of those taken in China.
The suspensions come as Beijing ramps up efforts to expunge educational history content that is not approved by the Chinese Communist Party.
Negative interpretations of topics like the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the Sino-Japanese war and the South China Sea are strictly censored in China, where cyber laws make it a criminal offence to share non-sanctioned history online.
In September the ministry launched an inspection of school textbooks to strip out unapproved content, and refocus education on communist ideology and history.
The move also comes amid rising US-China acrimony as US President Donald Trump’s administration takes a harder line on immigration, with Chinese students becoming a focal point of tension between the world’s two biggest economies.
China is the United States’ largest single source of foreign students, with the Institute of International Education putting their numbers at 363,000 in the 2017-18 academic year.
