Education authorities in Shanghai have ordered two private primary schools to apologize after it was revealed that one gave parents grueling IQ tests and another grilled students over the profession of their grandparents.
The move comes amid public uproar triggered by one parent’s social media tirade about how he was forced to take a sophisticated IQ test – on par with ones used to recruit civil servants – when he took his daughter for an interview at the city’s Yangpu Primary School.
It prompted thousands of comments over the growing inequality of access to quality education in China, arguing that better-resourced private schools increasingly favored children from privileged backgrounds.