Keeping up with the pace of international doctoral education reform: China implements the application-assessment system.

As graduate tutors, we realise the importance of strengthening the training of medical doctors after graduation by reading the article ‘Standardized training system for specialists in China: a new opportunity and challenge for doctors’.1 At the same time, it also makes us turn our attention to the starting point of the cultivation of medical doctors, that is, the enrollment and selection of medical doctors. For a long time, the main way of enrolling medical doctors in China has been based on written test scores, with reference to interview performance and academic achievements. However, there are some problems in this way, such as rigid system, excessive weight of written test scores, and a mere formality of reexamination, which leads to low efficiency of doctoral enrollment. In order to change this situation, the Chinese government issued a document in 2020 calling for speeding up the construction of the ‘application-assessment’ system (AAS).2 Specifically, AAS is an interview-based recruitment method, in which doctoral candidates submit authentic materials that can prove their academic ability, innovation potential and comprehensive quality, and then the admissions unit makes a comprehensive evaluation according to these materials.2 By the end of 2020, all 42 first-class universities in China have started to implement AAS.3 Optimising the entrance examination system and selecting the most innovative doctoral students are important topics in the global graduate education reform. From the current practical experience of North American universities, it is of vital importance to comprehensively evaluate applicants’ cognitive ability, non-cognitive ability and individual characteristics for …