About

Problem Diagnosis

The current application process in China, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam is not holistic, valuable for, nor aligned with the interests of applicants and universities.

Watch the video on the right to understand why we believe this is the case. Visit the "Problem/Context" section of our Resources page to learn more about the current college application landscape in these countries, and scroll down to see what we, with the collaboration of your university, hope to do about it.

“I got nearly full score on my essay in Gaokao because I memorized all the writing techniques. Now the techniques have taken control over my creativity, and I can never write true art again."

“我把应试技巧背得滚瓜烂熟，所以高考的时候我作文几乎拿了满分。可现在我的写作里面全是技巧，已经再也写不出真正的艺术作品了。"

Peng L, Beijing

So, what is our solution?

Although we can’t get rid of the college entrance exam itself, we can de-emphasize its importance by forcing it to cede space to other components in the college application. For this reason, we have created a digital encyclopedia of supplemental application materials that your university can ask for, which you can find on the Assessments page. These supplemental assessments are centered around the Hewlett Foundation's 6 Competencies.

In addition to making the application more holistic, we believe that asking for any of the suggested supplemental materials will make the college application more valuable for and aligned with the interests of both the applicant and the admissions officer. Applicants will gain exposure to or practice the skills they will need to do well in college and the real world in the very act of applying for college, and admissions officers will gain a more accurate and relevant picture of an applicant’s competencies, interests, and college preparedness to inform their admissions decisions

Each entry is tagged with the specific competencies it targets for easy navigation and includes more detailed descriptions of the qualities it evaluates for further filtering. In addition, each entry has an explanation for how engaging applicants in the specified task would draw out the characteristics or competencies in question. There are also example prompts and timelines to demonstrate how the supplemental assessment might be implemented. We believe that one of the greatest strengths of adding supplemental assessments to the application, though, is in its potential for customization, so feel free to simply use these examples as inspiration. Alternatively, one of the challenges of adopting additional components of this nature is figuring out how to evaluate them. As such, each entry also includes questions that highlight the vast array of insights the supplement may provide and may be used to guide admissions officers through the submissions. We have also created an Evaluation page with further suggestions on this matter.

Finally, we certainly do not expect that universities try to adopt all these supplemental tasks—instead, we encourage you to find one or two that are well-suited to your university’s particular interests and capacities.

Click to find out!

Key Drivers

Learn about what our team believes are the leverage points in making deeper learning mainstream in K12 education.

Our team focuses on four Asian countries - China, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam. These countries share many commonalities in expanding deeper learning such as:

- the education system is fairly centralized and has common national college exams

- high school students study for college entrance exams that occur only once a year

- rankings exist within universities with public universities regarded as having more prestige

The application processes introduced on this website can be applied to higher institutions in other countries that share similar problems.

Our final leverage point for integrating deeper learning into the college application process is to work with private universities. Compared with national universities which use national common testing, private universities have more agency in building their own style of applications to reflect the mission and culture of each institution. When deeper learning college applications work in private universities, best practices will trickle down to public universities, making this change national. For example, in Japan, private universities began applying Admission Office processes in the 1990s, and the knowledge has become more major to public universities in the 2010s.

Changing K12 classrooms into deeper learning environments all at once is a big picture... so our team has decided to concentrate on introducing deeper learning methods to college applications. Universities in Asian countries tend to assess high school students solely on academic mastery. If the universities begin assessing other 21st-century skills such as collaboration, communication, and critical thinking, high school and lower grades must adapt to growing these skills as well.

Universities have the flexibility to choose the application processes which fit their school mission or combine these processes with the current standardized testing to ensure academic mastery.

Hewlett Foundation's Six Competencies

The competencies proposed by Hewlett Foundation lies at the heart of our product design, which entails skills that students should possess to succeed in the 21st century civic and job life:

Students monitor and direct their own learning. When students face setbacks, deeper learning requires them to diagnose the difficulty, choose suitable ways to manage the challenge, and go forward toward their learning objective.

DEEPER LEARNING ASIA