中国留学生为何不能取得好成绩

For Yali Liu, the hardest thing about UK higher education is having to go to the pub. "It's how much you need to invest socially with other students," she says. "I don't like going to a pub or club, but people just keep going out and I feel the pressure to go out too." This is because, unlike in China, she says, there is so much emphasis during the course on teamwork and group projects, so socialising with other students is crucial. "It's not about what you know and how you work, it's really about working with other people – especially British people," she says. "I find that so difficult." Then there's what to talk about when she does go out. Why do her fellow students spend so much time analysing the TV programme First Dates, for example?
据英国《卫报》4月15日报道，对刘雅丽（音）来说，在英国上大学最难的是必须泡酒吧。“你得在和其他同学交际上大量投入，”她说。“我不喜欢上酒吧或者俱乐部，但其他人都去，我就觉得不得不去。”因为和中国不同，这里课程很强调团队合作和团队项目，因此和其他同学搞交际是很关键的。“重要的不是你自己知道什么或者你怎么做，真正重要的是与其他人合作——尤其是英国本地人。”她说“这对我来说太难了。”另外一个问题就是社交场合又该说些什么。为何她的同学花那么多时间讨论电视节目，比如《第一次约会》？

Liu, 23, who is in her final year of a BSc in business administration at the University of Bath's school of management, is one of more than 80,000 Chinese students studying in UK universities. They make up the largest group of international students – there are now nearly as many Chinese as UK full-time postgraduate studentsand over 38,000 undergraduates – and their numbers are growing fast. As a result, they are responsible for a large proportion of the more than ￡10bn a year that international students contribute to the UK economy.
刘今年23岁，是英国巴斯大学管理学院工商管理专业的大四学生。她说在英国大学学习的8万名中国学生之一。中国留学生是英国留学生最大的群体——目前中国留学生人数接近英国全日制研究生数目，并且超过了英国3.8万本科生的人数。而且这个数字一直在快速增长。中国留学生贡献了大部分英国每年100多亿英镑的留学生收入。

But while the numbers of Chinese students attending UK universities is a success story, new research shows that where their academic attainment is concerned, the picture is not so good. While nearly 68% of all students – and 52% of overseas students from outside the European Union – graduated with a first or 2.1 last year, this was true of only 42% of students from China, according to the latest figures from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (Hesa).
有这么多中国学生在英国留学，虽然这很是鼓舞人心，新的研究表明，从他们的学习成绩来看，情况并不乐观。英国高等教育统计局（HESA）的最新数据表明，去年全体毕业生中，得到一级荣誉学位和二级甲等荣誉学位的毕业生比例为68%，欧盟国家以外的留学生中比例为52%，而中国留学生中比例仅为42%。

This undermines the traditional stereotype of the hard-working, high-achieving Chinese student. "There is all this talk – almost propaganda – about how brilliant the Chinese education system is, so when they come to the UK you would expect them to do really well," says Zhiqi Wang, senior lecturer in accounting and finance at Bath Spa University and one of the authors of the new research. Wang says the reason for Chinese students' low academic attainment is unknown. "We could clearly see the poor performance of Chinese students at UK universities but we had no idea why it was." So to find an explanation, Wang and Ian Crawford, a teaching fellow in accounting and finance at the University of Bath, decided to compare the performance of Chinese and British undergraduates in each year of their degree. Taking a sample of just over 100 British and Chinese accounting and finance first-degree students who enrolled in 2008, and comparing their average marks and final degree classification, they found a dramatic drop in performance among the Chinese students between year one, when they performed better than their UK counterparts, and year two, when they performed worse. This did not seem to be explained by their previous academic qualifications.
这颠覆了中国学生勤奋努力、成绩优秀的传统形象。巴斯斯巴大学会计与金融专业的高级讲师王志奇（音）是这个最新研究的作者之一，他说，“人们一直在大谈中国教育体系多么优秀，简直就是在鼓吹，于是中国学生到英国留学，你就觉得他们会表现出色。”王说，中国留学生学习成绩不佳原因还不清楚。“中国留学生表现不佳，情况很明显，但我们不知道原因在哪。”为了找出原因，王和他的同事伊恩·克劳福特决定对中国学生和英国本科生每一学年的成绩进行比较研究。他们选取了100名2008年入学的中国和英国会计与金融专业学生作为研究样本，对他们的平均分数和最终学位等级作了比较研究，发现一年级时中国学生比英国学生表现更好，二年级时表现更差，两年之间落差很大。他们之前的获得的学历证明并不能解释其中的原因。

Crawford and Wang believe the slump in attainment can be put down to two factors. First, Chinese students fail to adapt their approaches to learning and so their performance declines in the later years of a degree when the complexity of the work increases. And, second, while the UK and Chinese education systems are not that different, the strong focus in China on study and achieving qualifications means many young people enrol in higher education due to pressure from family or the jobs market rather than their own motivation.
克劳福特和王认为，学习成绩的倒退可以归结为两个因素。首先，中国学生没有学会调整学习方法，所以一年级以后随着学业难度的增加，他们成绩就开始下滑。其次，尽管中国和英国教育体系差别并不是那么大，但中国特别强调通过学习获得学历，这就意味着很多年轻人上大学是迫于家庭和就业的压力，而不是源自内心的动力。