Millions of Chinese students sat for notoriously tough college entrance exams yesterday, the first since the country lifted zero-COVID rules that forced classes online for months on end.
China’s education ministry says nearly 13 million students, a record, are registered to take the gaokao exams — billed by state media as the “world’s toughest” — this year.
“I’ve been waking up at 4am every day, except on Sundays, to study for the past four years,” said Jesse Rao, a 17-year-old high school senior in Shenzhen.
Photo: AFP
“I’ve done everything I can, but I still feel a bit nervous.”
In Beijing, anxious parents gathered around exam halls as their children knuckled down, many wearing red for good luck.
Zhang Jing, a mother in her forties, compared herself to Bai Suzhen, a character in Chinese folklore who is locked in a tower until her son passes an important test.
“My son is quite relaxed, I think I am more nervous than him,” said Zhang, wearing a red qipao, a traditional Chinese dress.
“I have been accompanying my son and instructing his study from the first grade of elementary school to the first year of high school,” she said.
Another mother, Fang Hong, said she had prepared a simple breakfast of bread and eggs for her son.
“My son is a bit nervous, I told him we can accept any results of the gaokao and not put any pressure on him,” she said.
‘I STRUGGLED’
Testing high school students on their Chinese, English, mathematics and other science or humanities subjects of their choice, the exams are critical to landing coveted spots at China’s top universities.
Many parents shell out hundreds of dollars a month on cram schools or hire graduate students to sit with their children while they study late into the night.
Exams are notorious for testing the ability to compose essays in response to oblique prompts, with sample questions published yesterday by the People’s Daily newspaper requiring students to contemplate the effect of technology on time management and the impact of a good story.
Another sample question asked them to muse on two aphorisms by President Xi Jinping (習近平), adding that they would be marked in part on whether they write from the “correct angle.”
Adding to the stress, this year’s exam-takers have spent the bulk of their high school years under pandemic restrictions, which ended abruptly in December.
“I struggled to follow online lessons last year,” said Katherina Wang, a high school student from Shanghai who has been through two snap lockdowns in the past two years.
“Our teachers held extra classes in the evenings and on the weekend.” The high stakes have led to elaborate attempts at cheating.
Several provinces this year have installed scanners with facial-recognition capabilities to ensure that candidates do not hire proxies to take the test on their behalf, the state-run Global Times reported.
‘I WILL TRY AGAIN’
Exams can last up to four days, depending on the province, taking between an hour and 150 minutes per subject.
The maximum score is 750, with over 600 required for a place at top-tier universities — for years a ticket to personal and professional success in China.
Very few make the cut. Last year, only three percent of exam-takers in Guangdong, China’s most populous province, scored over 600.
And for students with more modest ambitions, scores still play a critical role in securing spots in universities and what subjects can be taken.
For those that do not get the results they need, there is always next year. In 2021, 17 percent of students nationwide retook their gaokao.
“If I don’t get the results I want, I will try again,” said Benjamin Zhu, a high school senior from Guangzhou.
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) — the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda — he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration. Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law.” The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people. In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the
Six weeks before I embarked on a research mission in Kyoto, I was sitting alone at a bar counter in Melbourne. Next to me, a woman was bragging loudly to a friend: She, too, was heading to Kyoto, I quickly discerned. Except her trip was in four months. And she’d just pulled an all-nighter booking restaurant reservations. As I snooped on the conversation, I broke out in a sweat, panicking because I’d yet to secure a single table. Then I remembered: Eating well in Japan is absolutely not something to lose sleep over. It’s true that the best-known institutions book up faster