This article aims to examine the employment prospects of graduates from Sino-foreign cooperative universities (SFCUs) compared with those from local Chinese universities. Drawing on the annual employment quality reports released by six SFCUs, the findings indicated that SFCU graduates had distinct advantages in terms of both further study and…

High-stakes testing (HST) is critical in the educational system of East-Asian countries like China, and the ongoing standards-based reform in many Western countries like the USA. HST has been criticized for corrupting an educational system through means like disengaging students from authentic learning. It seems that students' affective learning…

The calibration of test materials generally involves the interaction between empirical analysis and expert judgement. This paper explores the extent to which scale familiarity might affect expert judgement as a component of test validation in the calibration process. It forms part of a larger study that investigates the alignment of the…

This paper aims to map the landscape of higher education transformation in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations while exploring the status of BRICS nations in some of the global university rankings and analysing their potential to give new meaning to notions such as excellent and world-class universities. The study…

This four-country study compares business students concentrating in marketing, accounting and finance (AF), and management with respect to five motives: lifestyle aspirations, reputational effects, relative ease of completion, career outcomes, and developmental skills. We find that, except for the developmental skills motive, the importance of…

In a globalized world, universities face challenges adapting to changing environmental pressures and expectations of legitimacy. Studies on the topic have tended to focus on universities in North America and Europe, while Chinese universities have received less attention, perhaps due to their status as latecomers to global higher education. Based…

The outcome of university ranking is of much interest and concern to the many stakeholders, including university's sponsors, administrators, staff, current and prospective students, and the public. The results of rankings presented in the form of league tables, analogous to football league tables, attract more attention than do the processes by…

This study examined the vocational aspirations and parental vocational expectations of high school students and their parents (1067 parent-child dyads). Participants completed a demographic questionnaire and an Occupations List. The Occupations List consisted of 126 occupational titles evenly distributed across the six Holland types. Parents were…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to investigate the applicability of the synergistic leadership theory (SLT) (Irby, Brown, & Duffy, 1999; Irby, Brown, Duffy, & Trautman, 2002) to Chinese and American educational leaders in 50 high-ranking public Chinese universities and 50 high-ranking public U.S. universities. Methods: This study…

This paper is concerned with young people's perceptions and reported use of the two language varieties that co-exist in the urban centre of Guangzhou in southern China, Putonghua (P) and Cantonese (C). P is a typical H-variety, promoted by the government and used as a lingua franca throughout China; C is the local L-variety but it also has some…