A recent survey has found that parents of third, fourth and fifth graders in Shanghai suffer more anxiety than parents of junior high and senior high school students, local media reported Wednesday.

The survey found that about 55.4 percent of parents of students in the third, fourth and fifth grades worried about whether their children would get into an excellent junior high school, according to a report on the news website eastday.com. Junior high school starts in the sixth grade in Shanghai.

The Oriental Education Times, a newspaper that focuses on education issues in Shanghai, conducted the survey on behalf of the Shanghai Municipal Education Commission's Students Moral Education Development Center.

The survey took its results from the responses of 2,059 parents, whose children attended 46 schools in the city. The newspaper divided the responses into four groups: parents of first and second graders, parents of third through fifth graders, parents of sixth through ninth graders and parents of 10th through 12th graders, said Ye Bai'an, who oversaw the survey for the Oriental Education Times.

Parents of older primary school students were especially anxious about their children's futures because there is no uniform standard to determine which students get into the city's best junior high schools, said Bao Leiping, a researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences.

To get into high school in Shanghai, students have to pass a standardized test akin to the national college entrance examinations. But there is no such exam for students about to enter junior high school, Bao said.

"Most junior high schools in Shanghai recruit students based on interviews and refuse to consider awards or honors for extracurricular activities. So parents are worried because they don't know how to prepare their children to get into excellent schools," Bao said.