Comparison Of Undergraduate Curriculum Between The Research Universities Of China And The United States

Along with the realization of China's mass higher education ,the qulity of higher education is given much attention once again. The cultivation of high-quality talents is becoming the fundamental goal of many first-class Universities in China. How to cultivate such talents is the profound issue we must face in the future. The emergence of Research Universities is the inevitable choice of the development of China's higher education. Research Universities have excellent hardware and software environments, which create conditions for the successful implementation of quality undergraduate education, but China's long neglect of undergraduate education has caused a waste of both hardware and software environments. The success of undergraduate education of American Research Universities needs to be learnt, while ,their deficiencies also begin to appear in today's Research Universities of China, such as giving too much emphasis on scientific research, neglecting the positon of undergraduate teaching. However,the two countries' research universities have different developing paths, and they grow up in different environments, so, we must explore the unique talents training roads of our own to cater for the needs of China's education.Undergraduate curricular are the directest vector to train high-quality talents.The series curricular activities such as the establishment of curriculum objectives, the choice of curriculum contents, the arrangement of curriculum structure , the implementation of specific activities and the evaluation of curriculum, the vacancy of each link will cause the decline of the quality of undergraduate teaching. Therefore, there is close connection between the quality of undergraduate education and curriculum system. The construction of complete, mature system of undergraduate curriculum is an important task of China's research universities in the future.This paper uses methods of documents analysis, comparison and history, and firstly gives an overall introduction to China and the United States' research universities, then, it gives detailed analysis to the two countries' research universities in aspects of curriculum objectives, the setting of curriculum, curriculum teaching and curriculum evaluation, and then , it gives a simple comparison to each part, in the last, it raises some conclutions and recommendations.