For an exhausted Anthony eager to have some rest, winter break didn’t start immediately after the semester exam. Instead, he was enrolled in his school’s latest mandatory offering: the Beijing Culture Exploration Project. His teachers propped the Project as a great way to enhance the extracurricular activities part of his college application. Plus, they believed that students gearing up for international studies like Anthony had an inherent disinterest in Chinese culture, and the Project would be a great way to make students “rooted” in China.
Anthony was just about to finish the first semester of his sophomore year. He couldn’t care less about Chinese culture. However, gearing up for international studies in the US, he “[feels] like [he’s] very lacking in extracurricular activities, and [the Project] seemed to be a great choice.” This year, the school offered three topics for students to choose from: “The Grand Canal,” “The Central Axis,” and “Chinese New Year.” The project supervisors presented the project as a great way to enhance Anthony’s college application. “Many of us are lacking in project-based learning activities on our college applications. The Project is the best way to check ‘passion project’ off your college applications checklist!” That was exactly what appealed to Anthony.
The Project is the best way to check “passion project” off your college applications checklist!
Pre-project Announcement
Anthony had no choice in the project that he could do under the given topics. He chose the “Chinese New Year” topic, in which students are asked to create stickers related to the upcoming Year of the Snake. He didn’t know how to draw, so he opted to generate all stickers with AI, which was the method his instructor recommended. As Anthony submitted his AI-generated masterpieces, he couldn’t help but marvel at how effortlessly technology could connect him to centuries of Chinese tradition without him having to actually understand any of it. (He acknowledged that he probably should have worked more to “connect” to Chinese culture.) After all, nothing screams “rooted in Chinese culture” more than generating AI stickers. With his AI-generated stickers in hand, Anthony felt confident that admissions officers would be impressed by his profound engagement with Chinese culture—one snake at a time.
Project-based learning (PBL) has picked up steam in the past decade around the world. In the United States, PBL has received an extra push from the Common Core State Standards and the Next Generation Science Standards. The same is happening in China. The Chinese education system was purely teach-to-the-test. Students work twelve years for the ultimate challenge: the gaokao, which is the sole determinant of the universities students will enter and, quite possibly, their futures. Because of the incredible importance of the gaokao, students spend almost 16 hours per day repeatedly doing questions again and again. With China’s opening to the world, however, educators began to reflect on China’s education system. The exam-based system was criticized as detrimental to students’ well-being and failing to improve students’ actual abilities. Project-based learning was propped as exactly the solution to all these problems.
Anthony’s school is one of the leaders in the education reform field. Founded in 2013, the school was a rebel against the traditional teach-to-the-test education system. The school’s principal, now a celebrity in the education field, often attended television shows to share his understandings of PBL and the incredible results that his students’ PBL projects have accomplished. The school’s international department, in which Anthony studies, offers three PBL activities, and the Beijing Culture Exploration Project was one of them. The consequence has been a profusion of PBL projects.
Despite the mass publicity stunts, most of the projects that came out of these PBL activities are of dubious quality. Two of the three PBL activities offered at Anthony’s school last only one week, and that includes the Beijing Culture Exploration Project. Yields of this project include AI-generated stickers, hastily written “papers” that regurgitate Wikipedia facts, and presentations so generic they could double as templates for any cultural topic. One instructor declined to comment on the quality of students’ projects. Another instructor said that the project only lasted for one week, and she “did not expect” any quality in the results of the project. “There’s nothing much you can do in a week. The important thing is learning in the process,” the instructor said.
Yet in most instances, students didn’t learn anything at all. Part of the learning process in the latest iteration of the Beijing Culture Exploration Project included having students copy Chinese New Year traditions from Wikipedia into a presentation to their fellow classmates, all within thirty minutes. In another part, students spent a day aimlessly roaming around Beijing’s city center to “explore” the elements in traditional buildings. In one incident, the school invited an illustrator to teach students how to design sticker packs. Before the lecture began, project instructors asked students to present their AI-generated work to the illustrator. The illustrator is visibly unimpressed. It seems as if the project designers forgot that artificial intelligence is threatening the job of illustrators.
And hardly anyone actually takes an interest in the project’s offerings. One of Anthony’s classmates, Gabriel, said he was only doing the project because it was mandatory. The purported benefits of such projects on college admissions are also questionable. These projects are one-off, low-quality, not driven by true personal interests, and have no impact and no learning outcomes. In a time when criteria for gaining entry to colleges are consistently growing, the project offerings are strikingly stuck to the past.
Fulfilling projects almost never stem from the one-off offerings like that of Anthony’s school. Instead, they are impelled by students’ real curiosity and real abilities. Alaa Aboelkhair, whose father works for the government in Egypt, had been captivated by the shifting positions of stars since childhood. “The fact that we only understand 5% of the universe inspired me to learn more,” she said. “That is my passion.”
Guided by her mentor, Christian Ferko, Alaa explored whether hypothetical particles called axions could be identified by converting them into light. Ferko spent an extended amount of time with Alaa, and Alaa sought additional resources independently, working late to finish her paper.
In March 2022, a Princeton admissions officer called Ferko to ask about Alaa. Ferko compared her to a first-year graduate student and said she showed the potential to make new discoveries. “I did my best to advocate for her without overstating,” Ferko said.
Princeton accepted only 3.3% of international applicants for the class of 2026, and Alaa was among them. She shared that she received a full scholarship.
The Beijing Culture Exploration Project doesn’t work precisely because of its properties. For college applications, such “projects” have already been completely over-inundated in the past few years. As a project, it is not driven by real passion. One week is way too short to build anything meaningful. And it’s mandatory, meaning that students will approach it as just another task to complete. Soon, people will realize that and begin to search for the next path towards education reform.
Then, the social media posts about incredible reform ideals of project-based learning can stop.
(January 19, 2025)