Small step or giant leap: Former university of Neil Armstrong, Purdue, raises English requirements amid rising China applications
The alma mater of the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, will expect its international applicants – including Chinese students – to reach for the stars when it comes to their English language proficiency, following a recent change in its requirements.
The rising number of applicants “gives us something to work on”, Mitch Daniels, president of Purdue University in the United States, said during a recent visit to Hong Kong.
“We raised, this year, for the second time recently, the English proficiency standard, and made it a little harder, I think, for some Chinese students – not Hong Kong, usually, but the mainland students – to be accepted.”
Daniels, who is the former governor of Indiana, told the South China Morning Post that about one in 10 of the university’s 30,000 undergraduates was a Chinese student from Hong Kong, the mainland or Taiwan.
About 30 per cent are from Hong Kong and Taiwan, and the rest from the mainland.
Ten years ago, the number was half the current level, he said.
“We just found that [among] some of the students in previous years, many had adequate reading and even written English, but their spoken English wasn’t quite as good,” Daniels said.
This year, the minimum requirements for TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language), SAT and ACT (American College Testing) have all been raised - to 80 (from 79 last year), 550 (from 480) and 24 (from 20) respectively.
Daniels said raising the English standard was important because the Indiana university, which has the second-highest international student population in the US, emphasises social as well as academical learning, “and that’s easier if you can communicate well, especially verbally”.
He said the university was switching to a more interactive way of learning, where students watch lectures online before engaging in discussions and projects in classes, which means the ability to communicate is more important.
The “extremely high” demand from international students allows Purdue to raise the standards, Daniels said, and at the same time, still have “the large numbers that we like”.
Daniels said some Chinese students were not very confident about their spoken English, while they were surrounded by many other Chinese students, so “it’s sometimes too easy for a Chinese student to stay within a comfortable circle with other Chinese students”.
“And we love that we have so many and [that] they have organisations and places to live where they can be with other Chinese students and feel comfortable, but we also want them to integrate and mix for their own sake, as well as for the benefit of the other students,” he said.
As well as Armstrong, other notable Purdue alumni include the founding father of China’s nuclear-weapons programmes, Deng Jiaxian.
