Ah. I was talking about the kind where they take an amount or percentage every month, for the duration of the contract.

I'm a bit more tolerant of the probation period schemes...but not much. A difference of 1000 RMB per month seems typical from what I've seen; I've seen as high as 3,000 per month! I've seen probation periods running 1-3 months.

I understand the reasoning the owners use to justify these things, but I don't really buy it.

If I take a teaching job, we're essentially assigning a monetary value to an hour of my time and teaching labors. I don't see how that hour is suddenly worth more on some arbitrary date than it was on, say, my eighth day there. Either I teach that hour satisfactorily and you pay me the agreed wage and retain me, or I suck and you pay me and fire me.

It is my opinion that these probation schemes are about 99.9% about getting us on the cheap, and maybe 0.1% about "proving ourselves."

I notice that none of these schools offer to return the difference in salary to you if you successfully run their little gauntlet. If they did, my objections to them would disappear.

Personally, I resist taking a probation period unless I am in a situation where I desperately need the job. There are still plenty of schools in China that don't play these little 2-bit games.

Raoul