One of China's top higher education institutions, Peking University,  Monday released a list of 39 high school principals nationwide recognized to recommend students to be enrolled without taking college entrance examinations.

Recommended students could be given offers to the university after interviews rather than taking exams.

According to an announcement issued by Peking University, it received more than 400 applications to receive qualifications for the enrollment recommendations.

The university said 3 percent of undergraduate admissions were scheduled to be enrolled through the recommendation method in which the university's experts would evaluate the recommended students' abilities and specialities.

The new admission measure has received 70 percent opposition on the Internet.

A survey, conducted by Chinese leading Web portal sina.com, showed that as of yesterday 10,046 out of 14,227 people opposed the measure and believed the recommendation by high schools is unfair to the rest of students.

Penalties query

Peking University promised to abolish qualifications of both the principals and the recommended students if falsification and abuse of authority was detected.

But Netizens thought the penalties were too weak compared with huge attraction of admission without exams.

A Netizen on the Website of Phoenix TV said administrators should not intervene in education departments.

Professor Xia Xueluan, of the department of sociology, Institute of Sociology and Anthropology of Peking University, said yesterday that recommendations from high school principals were an experiment in reform.

"The experiment and original college entrance exam provide us two divisions to find out a more reasonable measure in college student enrollment," Xia said.

"Three percent is a small part compared with huge amount of high school graduates in our country."

The college entrance exam was restored in 1977. A total of 273,000 people were enrolled nationwide that year.

Compared with the total number of college applicants, it has been regarded by high school students as a single-plank bridge to universities.

(Xinhua News Agency November 17, 2009)