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China news tagged with: college entrance exam (27)

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China’s College Entry Test Is an Obsession
The annual national college entrance examination, known as the gaokao, took place over three days last week. From New York Times:
For the past year, Liu Qichao has focused on one thing, and only one thing: the gao kao, or the high test.
Fourteen to 16 hours a day, he studied for the college entrance examination, which this year will determine the fate of more than 10 million Chinese students. He took one day off every three weeks.
He was still carrying his textbook from room to room last Sunday morning before leaving for the exam site, still reviewing materials during the lunch break, still hard at work Sunday night, preparing for Part 2 of the exam that Monday.
“I want to study until the last minute,” he said. “I really hope to be successful.”
James Fallows has also written extensively on the gaokao and the education in system more generally. Several of his posts can be seen here.
Lastly, read about the essay topics and more, via CDT.
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- June 13, 2009 9:04 PM
2009’s College Entrance Exam Essay Questions
Xinhua has published a list of national and regional essay questions for the recently-concluded 2009 college entrance exams.
Aside from determining the fates of millions of young Chinese students aspiring to university, these essay questions also signal the tone and direction of China’s higher education system. Mirror (Chinese) asked several famous authors to weigh in on the essay question given to test-takers in Beijing, and Danwei.org has translated:
In Beijing, the prompt students were given was I have a pair of invisible wings (我有一双隐形的翅膀), a line that comes from a popular song sung by Angela Chang (张韶涵). Students were required to write at least 800 characters in any form of writing apart from poetry.
Yesterday’s evening Mirror asked five well-known authors born in four different decades for their impressions of the topic:
Zheng Yuanjie (郑渊洁, 1955)
For several years now, the gaokao essay topic has become increasingly connected to imagination. I think this is a good topic that students have a lot of room to develop.
A few days ago a reporter asked me, “You’ve written King of Fairy Tales for twenty-four years all by yourself. Where do you get the inspiration?” My answer was very much like this prompt: “Because I have a pair of invisible wings.” If I was given this topic to write about, I probably wouldn’t stop even at 8,000 characters. I’d write an essay about my experiences and feelings over several decades.
In the end, for this year’s topic, the better imagination a student has, the more points they will score.
See Danwei also for a translation of the national and regional prompts published by Xinhua.
ChinaGeeks has translated the full versions of the two national essay questions, along with netizen comments:
Question 1: The Rabbit from the Sporting Event
Choose the correct perspective, firmly establish your point, choose your own style and heading, don’t write anything outside the scope of the provided material, don’t interplant or plagiarize.
The rabbit is the sprinting champion of the small animal sporting games, but he cannot swim. Once, the rabbit was chased by the wolf to the riverside, and nearly caught. For the sake of developing the animals, the management enrolled the rabbit in swim training. He was in the same class as the cat, the tortoise, the squirrel, etc. The cat and the tortoise learned to swim, and having acquired another skill, were very happy, but the rabbit and the squirrel still couldn’t swim even after spending a long time studying, and were very worried. Class instructor Duck said: “We, with our two legs, can swim, and you, with four legs, still can’t? 90% of success comes from effort! Come on! Quack quack!”
Critic frog sighed: “What rabbit is good at is running! Why are you only training the weaknesses and not developing the strengths? Thinker Crane said, “Life requires more than just one skill! If the rabbit can’t learn swimming he should learn burrowing, if the squirrel can’t learn swimming he should study tree climbing.”
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- June 9, 2009 9:34 AM
Chinese Pupils Feel Exam Pressure
From BBC News:
The narrow road outside Beijing’s No 55 Middle School is usually crowded just before morning lessons, but this week it was busier than usual.
Traffic wardens blocked off the road to normal vehicles; a police car and an ambulance were on standby. It was exam day.
More than 10 million students from across the country are taking the university entrance exams, being held over three days.
It is the biggest exam process in the world, taking place at more than 8,000 test centres.
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- June 9, 2009 12:31 AM
chinaSMACK: Gaokao University Entrance Exam Stress Relief in China
Papers and books rained like confetti on Thursday as Chinese high school seniors preparing for the high-pressure university entrance exam celebrated their last day of school. chinaSMACK has pictures and a video:
From NetEase:
It is almost time for the “gaokao” [university entrance exam] and yesterday morning and the third years [final year of high school in China] at our school had a pledge ceremony. Afterward, the third year students began to throw their exam papers, their books. At first people tore them into pieces, later they were throwing entire sheets and sheets, and even later they were throwing bundles and bundles. It was spectacular. It was a release from the stress of the third year.
I am just a first year. If our our school’s seniors can get a better score, then they would have done so many exam papers justice.
Chinese high school seniors preparing for the gaokao toss their books and papers on the last day of school.
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- June 6, 2009 12:33 PM
China’s Hi-tech Answer To Cheats
From BBC News:
In China, video cameras are being installed in almost 60,000 examination halls to prevent cheating in next week’s national college entrance exams.
In the past, some students have been caught using hi-tech equipment, including tiny radio receivers, to get help with exam questions.
For three days next week, more than 10 million Chinese students will sit exams to determine their college entrance.
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- June 5, 2009 9:35 PM
China Expects a Sharp Drop in Number Seeking College Degree
Chinese education officials expect a nationwide drop in the number of students sitting for the college entrance exams this year. From Xinhua:
China expects fewer students to participate in the upcoming three-day annual college entrance exam this year, according to Sunday version of China Daily.
[...]Minister of Education Zhou Ji had predicted that the overall number of applicants would exceed 10 million — last year’s total was 10.5 million — but figures from local governments suggest the number of students taking part may be far fewer, the newspaper said.
[...]“Since the financial crisis last year, the grim employment situation has broken the ‘employment myth’ for those with a college degree. Some students changed their minds about getting a good job through higher education. They simply quit (from taking the exam),” an anonymous recruitment officer with the Beijing Institute of Technology was quoted as saying.
Mark at Mark’s China Blog is unsurprised by this phenomenon, and points out that a similar disenchantment with higher education is underway in the U.S.:
This kind of news isn’t surprising. I hear all the time from young people in Xi’an about graduates from last year’s university class who still can’t find work. There are about to be several more million fresh graduates entering the job market in a few weeks also looking for jobs. Times are looking bleak for educated Chinese young people trying to find work doing what they studied at university.
This phenomenon of people questioning the value of high-level education is not limited to China. America is currently undergoing a similar debate.
An article from last week’s New York Times’ Magazine – “The Case for Working With Your Hands” – does a great job talking about the more academic life young Americans have been molded for and the more labor intensive jobs that they are told to avoid.

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- May 31, 2009 5:02 PM
Video: China Prep
A PBS documentary aired this summer looks at the college admissions process in China:
“China Prep” follows five Chinese students through their final high-pressure year at an elite high school in Sichuan Province. Eighteen hundred students vie for spots in Beijing’s top two universities. Last year only 59 made it.
Studying seven days a week, the students’ lives are regimented almost every minute of the day as they prepare for the end-of-year exam that can determine their fate. For many students from poor or rural backgrounds, a strong performance on the test is the only way to climb the social ladder and excel without connections. Competition is fierce and the majority of high school seniors will be relegated to vocational schools.
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- September 29, 2008 9:58 PM
Documentary: Senior Year
The annual two day National College Entrance Examination (高考) is the ultimate competitive exam for nearly all high school graduates in China. This exam is almost always required for college admission. In 2007, more than 9.5 million Chinese students took this exam. According to Xinhua:
The exam is regarded as one of the most important events for the participants, and could change their lives in a fiercely competitive society.
The examination will last for two days for students in 26 provincial areas, and three or four days in Shanghai, Shandong, Guangdong, Hainan and Jiangsu.
The Ministry of Education said earlier that a record 10.1 million people had applied to take the exam, and 5.67 million would be able to enter college.
It is not only a fight for the candidates, but also an impact on their families and the whole society.
The following film was made by independent documentary filmmaker Zhou Hao (周浩), and focuses on the life of students in an ordinary high school in the last year before the national exam, in a small county in Fujian Province. This film won the best documentary award at The 30th Hong Kong International Film Festival in 2006.
Study Hard! Move Ahead! Be Patriotic! These slogans are drilled into the minds of Chinese boarding school students as they prepare for their college entrance exams. Since most of these teens come from impoverished rural areas, their tuition is paid for by the blood, sweat and tears of their peasant parents, most of whom never made it past junior high, so the pressure to succeed is stifling. To keep up their marks the students must study from dawn until dusk, waking up before the sun to memorize everything from math formulas to propagandist passages. Their desks are piled high with books from every subject and teachers roam between rows to keep these exhausted and diligent kids on task. We glimpse this hectic world through the eyes of a select group of senior students who try to assert their personalities and live out a few teenaged whims like shopping and dating in a strictly controlled environment that doesn’t bolster personal space and freedom. As the battle for success rages on, this intense film provides a harrowing portrait of the new direction of Chinese education, one that aims to mass produce focused, result-oriented over-achievers.
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- April 26, 2008 10:29 PM
1977 Exam Opened Escape Route Into China’s Elite – David Lague
The New York Times profiles the generation of Chinese who became the first to enter university after the Cultural Revolution when entrance exams were reinstated in 1977:
The 4.7 percent of test-takers who won admission to universities — 273,000 people — became known as the class of ‘77, widely regarded in China as the best and brightest of their time. By comparison, 58 percent of the nine million exam-takers in 2007 won admission to universities, as educational opportunities have greatly expanded.
Now, three decades later, the powerful combination of intellect and determination has taken many in this elite group to the top in politics, education, art and business. Last October, one successful applicant who had gone on to study law and economics at Peking University, Li Keqiang, was brought into the Chinese Communist Party’s decision-making Politburo Standing Committee, where he is being watched as a possible successor to President Hu Jintao or Prime Minister Wen Jiabao. [Full text]

[Images: Fan Haoyi, left, and in 1976, right: his success in business began with a university entrance exam, via the New York Times]
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- January 6, 2008 3:41 PM
What College Entrance Exams Meant To Us – Jin Liqun (ÈáëÁ´ãÁæ§)
From China Daily:
“I shouldn’t have pulled the plug.” So lamented many high school graduates, the so-called “young intellectuals”, upon hearing the news that the national college entrance examination would resume after more than a decade’s suspension.
The year was 1977.
Nine years earlier, in 1968, those teenagers whose education had been abruptly disrupted when the “cultural revolution” broke out were settling down in rural areas or on State farms to “receive reeducation”. Many of them tried to continue their academic pursuits, mostly on their own, while working on the land. Unfortunately, except for a few, most gave up as nothing changed year in, year out. [Full Text]
Jin Liqun (ÈáëÁ´ãÁæ§) is the former vice minister of finance and current vice-president of the Asian Development Bank.
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- September 28, 2007 8:12 AM
China Breaks Up Fake University Entrance Scam – Reuters
From Reuters via SignOnSanDiego:
Chinese police have detained eight people for selling fake university enrolment certificates to around 1,000 unwitting students for a total 10 million yuan ($1.32 million), Xinhua news agency said on Friday.
A gang of 11 travelled throughout the country, promising students in 17 provinces places at university, according to the public security bureau of Haikou, capital of the southernmost island province of Hainan . ‘They forged stamps and matriculation certificates of many universities, hired hackers to falsify computer enrolment records and pretended to be recruitment staff,’ the report said. [Full Text]
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- August 3, 2007 12:54 PM
Stressful Times for Chinese Students – Benjamin Siegel
From Time:
For Huang Zhimin, a senior at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, there was only one way out of the small town in Guangxi where he was raised: three days in the summer of 2004 in a stuffy city testing center, sweating over China’s National College Entrance Examination ” or gaokao, as the test is known. “I’m the first in my entire family to go to college,” says Huang, “and the gaokao was incredibly high-pressure.”
This year, close to ten million Chinese students sat for the gaokao (“big test” in Mandarin), starting June 8. Students who perform superlatively can expect to be courted by the nation’s top schools; the rest find spots in provincial universities or two- and three-year colleges. For the forty percent of test-takers who fail, there’s always next year ” or enrollment at one of China’s less-selective private institutions. As China’s economy booms, job competition has become ferocious ” and the pressure to land a prestigious degree can be unbearable. Every year, Chinese newspapers fill up with tragic tales of exam-time suicides. “The gaokao is about the most pressure-packed examination in the world,” says Ari Wolfe, an English teacher in Guangzhou who tutored students for last weekend’s exam, “given the numbers, the repercussions, and the stress involved.” [Full Text]
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- June 12, 2007 6:11 AM
Students are sweating: It’s test time in China – Reuters and AP
From The Seattle Times:
Millions of students across China picked up their pens Thursday to start national university entrance exams amid concerns about sweltering temperatures and high-tech cheating.
A record 10 million high-school students are taking the National College Entrance Exam, commonly known in China as gaokao, for up to four days, competing for about half that number of university places. [Full Text]
See also Exams pick the few to escape poverty by Guo Shipeng. Danwei translates the not uninteresting essay prompts found in this year’s gaokao. Reuters, via the Washington Post, reports Three detained for high-tech exam cheating.
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- June 8, 2007 5:51 PM
College Entrance Exams Make or Break in China – Guo Shipeng
From Reuters:
Cui Weiping had become an adept cotton farmer and tractor driver in a bleak east China village in 1977 when college entrance exams were restored after the 10-year frenzy of the Cultural Revolution .
“It was a profound turning point in my life,” said 51-year-old Cui, now a professor at the Beijing Film Academy .
Underground reading on the farm helped make Cui one of the 220,000 lucky ones — out of a staggering backlog of 5.7 million candidates — to get through that year’s hastily held exams.
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- June 6, 2007 6:40 PM
High School Graduates Try to Let Off Steam – China Daily
Taking the National College Entrance Examination is described as “thousands of soldiers and horses go across a single-plank bridge”ÔºàÂçÉÂÜõ‰∏áÈ©¨ËøáÁã¨Êú®Ê°•Ôºâin China. This year there are over 10 million Chinese high school students competing with each other to enter college. Everyone is wondering who is going to win, and everyone is under stress. See photos from Xinhua, showing how these students release their stress before the exam:

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- May 31, 2007 5:22 AM