Information about Tsinhua entrance examination??

[sebast]

Hi I’m planning to study in Tsinghua University an undergraduate program of civil engineering, but I don’t know how difficult is the entrance examination and which topics it contains, I mean the maths and physics topics. Please can anybody help me because I really don’t know how difficult is for a foreign student approve that exam???

My Chinese is very good, so I don’t think it’s a problem. I’ve been studying in Ocean University of China in Qingdao for over a year and I want to apply to go study in Beijing in Tsinghua because I’ve heard it’s the best in engineering isn’t it?

[DrWatson]

Tsinhua...civil engineering...are you trying to work you way into the top of the CCP?

[gougou]

I want to apply to go study in Beijing in Tsinghua because I’ve heard it’s the best in engineering

I had a couple of friend's from Aachen's RWTH, which is one of the most famous schools for engineering in Germany who were at Tsinghua for half a year or so (that was for Mechanical Engineering). They said that the grades for group work always correlated to the number of Germans in the group. Apparently, the Chinese students are very theoretical and lack practical experience (I think the way they put it was: "They can give you all the specifications of a screw driver, but they can't tighten a screw.")

[renzhe]

I don't think that this is very different with any other university in China. It is the way that engineering subjects are approached in Chinese universities in general. On the other hand, Tsinghua has by far the highest number of representatives in top European and US universities. When I meet a Chinese PhD student from Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Cambridge, etc, I always ask them if they studied at Tsinghua. Most of the time, they say "Yes, but how did you know?"

And the really funny thing is that this is exactly the same impression I had of German students when I first came to Germany from England, where education is even more practical. Guys who can derive equations and name all the lemmas and theorems and do maths all night, but you give them a concrete problem, and they're confused. This is why work experience is an extremely important hiring criterion in Germany ;)