A Level Playing Field? China's All-or-Nothing Gaokao Test is the SAT on Steroids

If you were perusing the headlines early last summer, you most likely saw something about the Gaokao (gāokǎo, 高考), China’s national college entrance examination and the closest Chinese equivalent to the American SAT (or ACT for our Midwestern readers!).

It’s the all-important, multi-day examination administered every June to the nation’s high schoolers (usually just seniors, though at present there are no age limits in place) that is essentially the sole determining factor in the university admissions process.

It’s strenuous, exacting and exceptionally difficult, and the result determines much of the course of a Chinese person’s life.

But is the gaokao damaging to students overall wellness? And, above all, is it ultimately a good idea?

What is the Gaokao?

First, let’s get all linguistic about it.

The full name of the examination is (deep breath) “Zhōnghuá Rénmín Gònghéguó pǔtōng gāoděng xuéxiào zhāoshēng quánguó tǒngyī kǎoshì” (中华人民共和国普通高等学校招生全国统一考试).  

Literally it’s “The People’s Republic of China Common College and University National Unified Enrollment Examination.”

So, you can see why everyone just calls it the Gaokao! Gaokao literally means “high test,” though here “gāo” refers to “gāoděng xuéxiào” (高等学校) (colleges and universities) and also indirectly refers to the “gāozhōng” (高中), or high school, students that take the test.

When I said the Gaokao is like China’s SAT, I meant that it’s like the SAT on highly-illegal, Barry Bondsian steroids.

Each year, millions of students block out two days to sit through the famously arduous exam – over 9 million ambitious youngsters took it this year, according to the Global Post, fewer than the 10.5 million who did so in 2008 but still far more than the 1.7 million US students who took the SAT this spring, according the the College Board.

It’s hardly just a two day endeavor, however: most students begin Gaokao preparations years before the test, and the 8-12 months leading up to exam day is often the most intensive and rigorous period these students will ever experience.

Why is it so hard?

Universal Suffering

Well, it all starts with the university system.

Universities in China are, in a way, the opposite of universities in the United States and Canada: they’re very difficult to get into but often not all that difficult to graduate from once you’ve been admitted.

With a gigantic population and rising incomes, competition for limited higher education spots is remarkably fierce, but within the universities themselves, corruption, shortsighted management and plain old apathy often lead to light work and class loads.

I spent a year in a Chinese language program at a university here in Shanghai, and saw first-hand how many of the local students took it relatively easy, sometimes spending whole days in their dorm rooms playing video games or on the campus basketball courts rather than in class (in their defense, I may or may not have done that once in a while as an undergrad as well!).

For a lot of students, their majors and careers are essentially already determined before they set foot on a university campus, leading to fairly breezy academic lives.

According to OECD survey data, the university student drop-out rate in the US, for instance, is 54%, while 32% of students in the UK end up dropping out and just 11% of Japanese students drop out, one of the world’s lowest rates.

In China, however, estimates from the Ministry of Education suggest that anywhere from 3% to just .75% of students drop out of school.

This is really a combination of strict oversight on the part of university administrators to ensure high graduation rates and lax enforcement on classwork quality and attendance, but the fact remains that “after the years of toil and stress needed to pass the gaokao, some [students] feel inclined to relax after they’ve conquered what they see as their life’s biggest hurdle. This is an attitude teachers tend to accommodate.”

Nothing Else Matters

Obviously this varies from school to school and student to student, and China certainly has many exceptional-quality globally-acclaimed institutions (Tsinghua in Beijing and Fudan here in Shanghai, to name a few) that push their students to succeed at the highest level, but the fact remains: “in China, there is a time-honored career domino effect: good Gaokao score, top university spot, communist Party membership, job in the government bureaucracy.”

These days you can replace the last two parts with “job at state-owned enterprise or foreign MNC (Multi-National Corporation),” but the principle is the same: acing the Gaokao, in many ways, sets you up for life!

The test itself actually varies from province to province; though a standardized nationwide Gaokao was in place until 2001, reports emerged of lower-scoring students from Beijing being given preference over higher-scoring students from rural areas, prompting a policy change.

Math, Chinese and English (occasionally another foreign language, but English for about 90% of students) are mandatory for all provinces, but beyond that, the test can vary, sometimes widely. Additional subjects include sciences like Physics, Chemistry and Biology as well as History, Geography, and Political Science.

Students interested in certain academic and career tracks can customize their Gaokao to a certain degree, but in most provinces they are only permitted to choose one subject outside of the three mandatory areas.

This results in extremely intense studying focused on these core subjects, often at the expense of broader educational enrichment.

Students tend to have mixed opinions on the Gaokao. While many regard it as a fair and even way to up one’s standing in life, others are not so confident.

A Beijing student named Shirley Qian described how she feels "very bored, extremely exhausted, and stressed out. I hate the gaokao. If you don't take the gaokao, you can become a taxi driver.”

An increasing number of students are skipping the Gaokao altogether and choosing to attend school overseas, as well – the number of people taking the test has, in fact, dropped each year since 2008, according to research by FastCompany.com.

While the SAT is (in theory, at least) geared toward testing students on their critical reasoning and problem solving skills, the Gaokao is much more a test of memorization and raw knowledge regurgitation, though of late there have been efforts to expand the breadth of skills and knowledge tested in certain provinces.

As a result, students tend to orient their preparation around the test itself rather than sharpening their general skills – again, we're talking years or even a decade of preparation, so that's a pretty substantial amount of time to spend focusing on a few core areas, especially for young students.

But it's necessary, because for all intents and purposes, the Gaokao is really the only thing that matters when it comes to university admissions criteria.

In the US you might get credit for having played on sports teams (no time for teams for most Chinese students – too busy studying for the Gaokao!) or doing community service (not much infrastructure in place for that in China at present, though that is beginning to change for the better), but few Chinese students have those options.

So why is it like this? How did we get here?

How We Got Here - Imperial China

Way back in the Imperial China days (if only more of my stories started this way!), there were issues with bureaucratic power being concentrated too strongly within a handful of aristocratic families.

Combined with corruption and efficiency problems in government, this prompted the initiation of the kējǔ (科舉) , a (at times) universal civil service examination.

The idea behind the kējǔ was to ensure that only the most intelligent and morally upright citizens were granted coveted civil service and bureaucratic positions in order to improve overall governance.

Dating back to the 6th century's little-known Sui Dynasty (and arguably before), the kējǔ system had a gradual but profound effect on Chinese education and society. While it did see China through some of its highest cultural points, most scholars agree that standardized civil service exams also had some serious damaging effects.

In his book Demystifying the Chinese Economy, World Bank economist Justin Lin details the impact of widespread application of the kējǔ:   

“The civil service examination system, based on Confucian classics, repressed Chinese intellectuals’ incentives to learn mathematics and how to conduct controlled experiments, so a scientific and industrial revolution could not take place spontaneously in China. Within decades after the onset of the Industrial Revolution, China was no longer a leader in technological and economic development – but was instead left behind. After the Opium War in 1840 China suffered repeated humiliations by western powers, and its national sovereignty faced lethal challenges.”

A Fair and Equal Government through testing?

Many of the problems that plagued the kējǔ persist in its descendant, the Gaokao.

For instance, one of the primary goals of the Gaokao is to level the academic (and thus professional) playing field; in a country with enormous levels of income inequality, a standardized test should in theory be able to help qualified but underprivileged students gain admission to the nation's top schools, regardless of their location or income level. It is the ultimate enabler of social mobility.

In practice, however, the Gaokao is not as meritocratic as its organizers would claim.

Much as wealthier students in the US can afford expensive preparation classes and tutors, well-off Chinese students often hire personal tutors or enroll in prep classes that their rural peers simply cannot afford.

I have a few American friends here in Shanghai, in fact, that teach SAT prep and occasionally moonlight as tutors for the English portion of the Gaokao for some pretty astounding hourly rates.

As Tealeaf Nation reports, two-week long Gaokao cram courses cost around RMB5,000 (US$820), which is about half of what an average Beijinger makes in a month but is nearly a full year's income for a rural farmer.

With income disparities like this, the egalitarian dream of the Gaokao is beginning to fade, though there are still strict regulations in place to prevent cheating and favoritism (including blind grading).

Location Plays an Enormous Role in Success

Urban Chinese (with their often higher income levels) have vastly better odds at gaining admission to top schools.

Research suggests, for instance, that Beijingers are 30 times more likely to be admitted to the city's prestigious Tsinghua University  than residents of the coastal Shandong Province.

This is the equivalent of  “a Bostonian [being] 30 times more likely to get into Harvard than a kid from Vermont.”

So it the Gaokao really a great equalizer?

The answer, as you've seen, is complicated, but the fact remains that for a society with the size and income level of modern China, there are few better solutions to delegate precious spots within the higher education system.

Non-Gaokao options, including studying overseas and attending vocational training schools, are gradually gaining wider acceptance, but acing the Gaokao remains the best and simplest path to a better life for a vast majority of Chinese.

As one Weibo (China's enormously popular Twitter-esque microblog) famously put it, “Don’t wildly wish for this social system will be changed one day; no one else is your savior in this world but yourself. Study hard. Though the Gaokao is not the only way out, it is the safest and fastest way out of poverty.”

We'd love to hear what you all have to say about the Gaokao and/or standardized testing in China!

Is there a better solution, or is the Gaokao the best option for a level academic playing field in China? Should other criteria be considered? You gotta let us know!