alt Hacker NewsEveryone has a tendency to support the system they went through. I've done it numerous times for standardized tests and I went through them. I think the information value of a person who was certified capable by system X recommending system X is probably low.
After all, if you flipped the script and the US used standardized tests and you were then told that China uses a committee of experts that will certify incoming applicants' stated political positions, race, and cultural background in order to "craft a class" (as an admissions officer calls it in SAT Wars) with a carve-out for the children of those who have already attended, you would be informed of the need for meritocracy, the tendency towards nepotism, and the obvious racial biases that will affect individuals in such a system.
Likewise, you would doubtless be informed that the East's more holistic look at the total student is a superior form of student selection since it is driven by a Confucian focus on the gestalt human rather than on the reductive metrics of the West.
What is interesting to me is to hear from those who have succeeded in some system but nonetheless wish it were different.
There's millions of Chinese diaspora who went through relatively zero-sum gaokao and have their kids go through western systems. IMO general consensus will will tell you centralized test will produce superior results but it's so tough / high stakes they won't want to put their kids through it. Many of them are also gaokao flunkies who had alternate pathways in era where with more easy/shady opportunities that are now gated behind actual gaokao performance, and they know statistically their kids can't hack it. So course they want system to be different in the same way US system is different - some nebulous holistic system, aka one where there's ample opportunities for their money to corrupt/capture. TBH last 1000s of years of Chinese history is interrogation of monied merchant class trying to capture (more) merited scholar class, the lessons learned (repeatedly) is venturing away from standardized/merit is just opening up to deregulated corruption.