Gaokao exam looks for wider acceptance

This weekend, close to 10 million Chinese high school students will take the grueling two-day gaokao - the college entrance exam that is the sole determinant in a student's higher-education placement. While the test has drawn criticism and calls for reform, China's Ministry of Education has called for more recognition of the gaokao by foreign universities, and some are responding.

About 60 percent of Australian universities now accept gaokao results. In the United States, only three schools accept them in lieu of SAT and ACT results - New York University, Suffolk University in Boston, and the Illinois Institute of Technology. The University of San Francisco (USF) announced in early May that it will begin considering gaokao scores under a pilot program for the academic year beginning in September.

"At USF, we receive applications from more than 100 countries each year, and we enroll students from over 80 different countries. Educational systems vary widely across many of these countries, and even across states within America. Thus we are continually examining our admission criteria to see how we can identify good students from each of these places," said Stanley Nel, vice-president of international relations at USF.

"For our purposes, the gaokao provides a school-independent external test of how well students have mastered their high-school curricula. It gives us a way to compare students from across the country, similar to various national exams. The exam has been criticized for placing too much emphasis on memorization, but rote learning alone is not nearly enough to secure a Tier 1 score," he told China Daily.

Nel said that USF is planning to admit only "a small number" of Chinese students after it starts accepting the gaokao results. The president of the school, Paul Fitzgerald, said that more than 50 students from China had contacted the school before taking the test this weekend.

"If, in the end, we enroll a dozen students via this pilot program, then we would have a big enough cohort to determine that this is indeed a wise and helpful avenue for admission into USF," he wrote in an e-mail to China Daily.

New York University, which opened a campus in Shanghai in August 2013, accepts gaokao results in lieu of the SAT and ACT for Chinese students seeking admission to the New York and Shanghai schools, the university admissions office said.

In addition to scoring at the top tier of the gaokao, admissions officers "will look beyond academic excellence to what applicants have contributed to life in their communities outside the classroom."

Unlike the SAT or ACT test, the gaokao taken in the last year of high school is the only metric that decides where a Chinese student will go to college. It also covers a much larger number of subjects taught in school. While Math, English, and Chinese are required by all test takers across the country, a student also chooses a varying number of test subjects according to his own interests. The number of additional test subjects may differ by province. Students who don't score well on the exam must repeat their last year of high school.

Education experts have said that using just one test to determine a student's college education means that the entirety of high school experience and knowledge gets condensed into a two-day exam, which is not an accurate assessment of a student's academic capabilities.

"Campbell's law says that anytime you base an important decision on a single measure of X - and let's say X in this case of the gaokao is college readiness - that measure will be corrupted and its ability to measure X will degrade, which is to say that it will become a less useful measure of actual college readiness," said Andrew Ho, an education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

"It will instead become a measure of how much you disproportionately focus on what happens to be measured. In this case, any subject that isn't tested in the gaokao is likely to be limited in the high school curriculum by this emphasis on tested content.

"In the States, we have anecdotal and empirical evidence that this ends up limiting anything that isn't tested," he said.

The gaokao was started in 1952 and can only be taken once a year, with no exceptions made for illness or personal emergencies. The importance of the test has led to problems such as cheating. Students have been hired to take the test for other students; teachers have been paid to turn a blind eye to cheating; content from the exams has been sold and purchased prior to the test day.

News reports this month said that officials in Luoyang will deploy drones over exam halls to detect transmissions that students may receive using tech devices hidden in pens, glasses and clothing.

Aria Zhang, a 30-year-old communications manager who took the exam 13 years ago, told China Daily that getting ready for the test was "like a 24/7 job". She began preparing during the last year of high school, but said "at that time, the norm was that as soon as students got in high school they were supposed to start preparing for the test, as that one single exam would decide your fate."

amyhe@chinadailyusa.com