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From NPR

In India, The Pressure Cooker Of College Admissions

Heard on All Things Considered

January 10, 2012 - MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I'm Audie Cornish. This can be a harrowing痛苦的(因為被折磨所導致的) time for high school seniors and their parents waiting for responses to college applications, but it hardly compares to what high school students in India go through.

NPR's Corey Flintoff reports that admission to India's top colleges is much tougher than it is even for Ivy League schools here.

COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: Many of the candidates for India's top colleges come from exclusive private high schools like this one, the Delhi Public School. On the playing fields, girls and boys in white shirts and neckties play fierce games of cricket 板球and badminton羽毛球. It's a sort of warm-up for the intensity they'll have to put in to applying for universities.

The school graduated about 1,000 seniors last year, virtually all of whom went on to college. Mamta Sharma, the director of international admissions at the school, says that more than 400 of her graduates qualified for top foreign universities, including prestigious colleges名校 in the United States. She says they fall into two categories.

MAMTA SHARMA: Some who are planning to go abroad, irrespective of不論/不管 Indian university criteria, et cetera. And the other group - they try for India and, if they don't get in, they go abroad.

FLINTOFF: Sharma says some very good students weren't able to get into the Indian colleges of their choice. India is a country of 1.2 billion people and, like most things in life here, getting one of the limited places at the best schools is incredibly competitive.

DINESH SINGH: So it's a very difficult game, given the numbers.

FLINTOFF: That's Dinesh Singh, the vice chancellor校長(請看註釋) of Delhi University, an amalgam混合(組合) of 80 top colleges in the capitol city. It's India's equivalent to Oxford, Cambridge and the American Ivy League. All told, Singh has about 50,000 slots to fill with incoming students each year, but that's a drop in the bucket杯水車薪(僧多粥少) compared with the more than three million students who are trying to get into colleges throughout the country.

The numbers are so large that most college admissions are based not on a student's performance in high school, but on their scores on a single set of exams. Some colleges expect those scores to be in the high 90s or even 100 percent. Singh says there's simply no other way.

SINGH: There's no way you could interview all of them. Given the diversity, it's very difficult to give weightage(ph) to other aspects of a student's career, and so you largely rely on the test scores.

FLINTOFF: Students complain that making college admissions dependent on a single set of test results is like gambling your career on a single throw of the dice丟一次骰子就定生死. Saumya Swaroop is one of a growing number of students who are sidestepping規避 the Indian system. She didn't even apply to India's top universities, aiming instead for American schools. She's now on a scholarship at Princeton.

SAUMYA SWAROOP: You could say that the system never really made any sense to me, to be frank. It is - how can they exactly judge the merit of a student on the basis of what happens in a six-hour long exam?

FLINTOFF: Swaroop says India's top schools may be missing talented students who have a lot to offer but simply can't make the cut達到標準(高爾夫球術語，球員一定要達到某個分數才能繼續比賽，不然則被淘汰). The problem's not going to get any easier. More than 120 million Indians will reach college age in the next few years. One way to ease the demand for top flight education排名名列前茅的學校 might be to allow foreign universities to establish branches in India. The government is considering legislation that could make that possible.

Corey Flintoff, NPR News.

關於Vice-chancellor的解釋

Vice在英語中是“副”的意思，vice-president是副總統，vice-chairman是副主席，所以vice-chancellor自然而然地被理解為是副校長，而chancellor則按字面意思被翻譯成校長。其實，vice-chancellor才是真正意義上的校長，chancellor並不是學校員工，僅僅是個象徵性的人物，傳統上由知名人士擔任。按規定，任何人都可擔任chancellor。在牛津大學，獲得校友會提名的人，均有機會擔任chancellor。人選不必是英國人，也不必是牛津大學畢業生，甚至在校學生也可以擔任chancellor。這一職位是終身的，但無職權範圍，大學不支付薪水，也不為其配備助理。因此，chancellor沒有實權，主要職責是學生畢業時為學生頒發畢業證書、主持校董事會、為學校募集資金等。由此可見，chancellor一詞不應翻譯為校長，而應翻譯為名譽校長。香港等地的翻譯應該更容易被人接受：校監。一所大學只能有一個校長，但一個人可以同時兼任數所大學的chancellor，比如英國女王的丈夫菲利蒲親王就同時擔任愛丁堡大學和劍橋大學的校監。彭定康除了擔任牛津大學的校監外，還是紐卡斯爾大學的校監。

President 和 vice-chancellor 都是國外大學裡的特定稱謂，都是校長，唯一區別在於英國和其它聯邦共和國叫"vice-chancellor”而在美國叫"president”（The only difference is: you call that person vice-chancellor in the UK and other Commonwealth countries while president in the US. ）。該職位一般由社會公開招聘，任職終身。Vice－Chancellor是大學的首席執政官，主持參議會的工作。Vice－Chancellor下面一般會設有三四位“副校長”，英文為Pro－Vice－Chancellor。他們通常是校內任命的學者，專門負責教學、科研、資產等，任期多為三四年。

導致對英國大學體制和職稱誤解的原因之一，是Vice－Chancellor一詞中的
Vice常被通譯為“副”，但實際上在這裡的意思是其拉丁文的原義，既“代表某人執行”。英國各大學往往會邀請社會名人，包括國王或皇室人員、著名政治家、文化界人士等，擔任Chancellor。這一職位主要是象徵性的，沒有管理學校日常工作的責任。他們可以一人兼任幾個大學的Chancellor，應當譯為“名譽校長”。而Vice－Chancellor是代表Chancellor的最高執政官，也就是“校長”。香港、臺灣、新加坡均採用以上譯法。

chancellor 校監

dean 系主任

Pro-Vice-Chancellor 副校長

Deputy Vice-Chancellor 首席副校長