Dislocation Between Institutional Design And Practical Operation Of Admission Exam Exemption System For Recommended Postgraduate Candidates

Since 2014,the policy on further improving the recommendation of outstanding fresh graduates to get a master's degree without admission exam issued by the National Department of Education has brought about the new scene of institutional practice.The original expressions of the admission exam exemption system for recommended postgraduate candidates aimed at standardizing the order of admission in universities and insuring the rights of students have deviated from real practical orders as the result of universities' flexible strategies to the formal rules and the interactive games with students.Based on the data gathering from semi-structured interviews on the graduating students together with admission officers both majored in sociology and literature about new recommendation system published in 2014,this paper conducts an in-depth investigation of the stakeholders' behavior logic in the process of postgraduate recommendation.Then it explores the reasons for the dislocation between the system targets and operation effects in order to reflect the realistic problems of the deviation practice in educational field.The study finds that the most prominent feature of this new policy on postgraduate recommendation has been transformed from political embeddedness to educational autonomy,highlighting the institutional expression of fair competition and open communication.However,on the basis of self-interest and local knowledge,universities have adopted alternative measures including target substitution,weakening authority,colluding the avail and softening formal rules with the suspension of national institution,so that an informal system for recommended postgraduate enrollment has been set up,which has aggravated the divisions in the interscholastic competition.In addition,seeking for the leeway in the crevice between national recommendation system and college admission system,students have been involved in continuous games with universities in pursuit of self-interest maximization,which has revealed a complicated and contending practical order.In general,there has existed the dislocation between practice and institution on postgraduate recommendation,which has been manifested in the consolidation of status succession rather than mobility and the stratification of universities in educational field,as well as the increase of the workload.This paradox can be explained by taking the design of institution,the logic of practice and the educational ecology in which both system and practice are embedded into consideration.The contradiction between the unified and simply system design and the flexible and regional practice is the root cause.Moreover,this system distortion in practice can attribute to universities' and students' pursuit of famous brand combined with unbalanced development of universities,influenced by elite consciousness in the educational field.