It has already been dropped from graduation requirements at the country’s pre-eminent institutions, Tsinghua and Peking Universities, as well as the Chinese Academy of Sciences. And now there is pressure for campuses across the board to drop it.
Many academics agreed that closer supervision and more holistic assessment were a better option than effectively outsourcing a key graduation requirement to journal editors. “For students who made contributions to research projects with a long time horizon and extreme difficulty, especially the ones in basic theoretical research, there should be more flexible and comprehensive graduation assessments based on the students’ research areas and subjects”.
