The main difference is that China's system is largely determined by the high-stakes, two-to-three-day Gaokao (National College Entrance Examination), which decides university placement and future career paths, fostering intense preparation and a focus on test scores. In contrast, the U.S. uses a holistic admissions process that considers a broader range of factors, including high school transcripts, extracurriculars, essays, and recommendation letters, valuing consistent performance and well-roundedness over a single exam result.
China's Gaokao System
High-Stakes Exam:
The Gaokao is a single, critical national exam that determines which universities a student can attend and what major they can pursue.
Intensive Preparation:
Students and their families often invest heavily in tutoring and preparation, with some even repeating the final year of high school to improve their Gaokao scores.
Focus on Scores:
The system prioritizes test scores above all else, leading to a rigorous, discipline-focused learning environment that can stifle creativity and place undue stress on students.
Meritocratic, But Limited:
While intended to be a meritocratic tool, the system limits flexibility and can lead to a narrow view of a student's potential.
U.S. Holistic Admissions
Comprehensive Review:
Admissions offices evaluate multiple factors, including academic achievement in high school, standardized test scores (SAT/ACT, which are less determinative than the Gaokao), essays, recommendation letters, and extracurricular activities.
Emphasis on Well-Roundedness:
The U.S. system seeks to identify students with consistent performance and potential, fostering creativity, critical thinking, and well-rounded development.
Decentralized Approach:
This approach is more decentralized and emphasizes diversity, though it faces its own challenges, such as inconsistencies in grading and disparities in access to quality resources.
Encourages Individualism:
The broader evaluation of students aligns with a more individualistic societal value system, fostering unique personalities and growth.
By Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, with Claire Cousineau
Belknap, 256 pages, $29.95
Parents in China often start thinking about college admissions long before their children enter first grade. They might stretch the family finances to buy an apartment in a well-ranked school district so they can send their offspring to one of the area's best primary schools. A good elementary education, they believe, will prepare students for the middle-school entrance exams; the right middle school, in turn, will increase their chances of testing into an elite high school. In high school, students will spend four years intensely focused on a single endpoint: the two-day college-entrance exam known as the gaokao. A student's score on that test is the only factor that matters in university admissions. Everything parents do and sacrifice is in service of success on the gaokao.
Both Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li scored well on the gaokao and attended highly ranked universities in Beijing. They now teach in the United States; Ms. Jia is a professor of economics at the University of California San Diego and Mr. Li is a co-director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions. The two understand that the Chinese obsession with the gaokao will seem strange to most foreigners. In "The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China," Ms. Jia and Mr. Li (with their contributing author, Claire Cousineau) explain why the test so dominates China's education system and society. The authors direct this lively and informative volume at foreign readers who want to learn about gaokao culture, elements of which might appear in local American schools as large numbers of Chinese students go abroad to study.
The gaokao-focused education system, we are told, is "a centralized hierarchical tournament" that promotes fewer and fewer students with each round. It is the epitome of a zero-sum game, children competing against their neighbors for one of the quota-allocated spots at the next level. By high school, those students most intent on achieving a high gaokao score will dedicate endless days to practice tests, training their minds for the marathon exam looming at the end of their secondary education. More than 10 million students take the gaokao each year, with only 500,000 entry spots available at the country's officially ranked 100 most-elite universities. A single point in either direction can seal a student's fate.
This obsessive preparation, as Ms. Jia and Mr. Li explain, can pay off immensely for those students who don't come from privileged backgrounds but succeed on the gaokao. Admission to an elite university is a signal of achievement, and future employers will understand that the successful students have proved themselves in the country's most grueling arena.
The authors note that Chinese college graduates, on average, earn incomes 40% higher than those who do not attend college; a degree from an elite institution brings with it an additional 40% increase in earning potential.
Success on the gaokao is one of the most clear-cut ways for individuals to leap class boundaries; if the test is an obsession, it's an economically rational one.
These economic returns on education are important, but they're not the only result the authors see. Respect and influence are also significant outcomes, and they begin accumulating as soon as gaokao scores are released and the highest achievers are identified (although in some provinces, we learn, "legal measures now shield the identity of the highest scorers to protect them from overexposure"). A university degree might lead to a secure government job, which brings its own intangible benefits. Students who come from poor provinces or underprivileged backgrounds and score well on the exam have, in the eyes of many, transcended their origins and proved their mettle.
The Chinese government and media hold up such stories as evidence of the gaokao's objective, meritocratic nature. In theory, any student in the country can -- with hard work and conscientious preparation -- take her place among the high scorers. In reality, the authors note, wealthier students and those in urban areas have more access to the intensive preparation they need to do well. The exam is graded, and university seats allocated, on a provincial level, which puts rural students at an unfair disadvantage. Those who still overcome these incredible odds (both Ms. Jia and Mr. Li among them) bolster the fiction of the gaokao's objectivity.
For all of the gaokao's stresses and shortcomings, Ms. Jia and Mr. Li admit that they have difficulty imagining a better system for Chinese college admissions. In a country often plagued by weak institutions and widespread corruption, an American-style holistic approach to admissions would likely be far too vulnerable to interference and bribery. Abolishing an institution in which so many have invested their family's time, money, hopes and dreams would also require a wholesale restructuring of the education system at all levels and could lead to social unrest. The gaokao may not be perfect, but it's still the best and fairest system China has to distribute its university seats.
Parents brought up in the test-obsessed Chinese education environment often have difficulty adjusting when they encounter different systems overseas. Hundreds of thousands of China-born students attend high school and college in the U.S., where they must reckon with evaluation and admissions processes far more complicated and subjective than the centralized hierarchical tournament of their home country. Year after year, students learn that a perfect GPA and a high SAT score are no guarantees of Ivy League admission. Families do not always handle such uncertainty well, leading to dissatisfaction with the American system and even, in some cases, lawsuits against universities.
In "The Highest Exam," Ms. Jia and Mr. Li blend empirical data with observations about the gaokao that they have developed as both students and educators. Their own successes on the exam do not blind them to the problems with an education system in which families pin all their resources and expectations on teenage students who understand everything that's riding on their gaokao performance. "You too can change your future life path," the authors write. "You simply need to pass."
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Ms. Cunningham is a historian and writer in Ann Arbor, Mich., and the co-author of the third edition of "China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know."” [1]
1. REVIEW --- Books: China's Big Test. Cunningham, Maura Elizabeth. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 06 Sep 2025: C9.
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