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Involution: Gaokao’s challenges in the 21st Century

Chinese National College Entrance Examination (NCEE), also known as gaokao, is not only a standardized test, but also a nightmare, a challenge, and a life-changing opportunity for Chinese high school students. It gives millions of Chinese students from various regions and cultural backgrounds an access to higher education and platform. However, many people point out that gaokao is no longer a suitable standard for college admission. To face gaokao’s challenges in the 21st Century, I believe actions are needed to relieve the involution in China.

As the result of the contradiction between the increasing large number of gaokao participants each year and the limited resources of higher education in China, gaokao is highly competitive and difficult. During the first two decades in the 21st century, the number of gaokao attendants increases almost 3 times. In 2000, only 3.75 million students attended gaokao. (Gao 4) However, due to the dramatic increase of Chinese population and the popularization of the nine-year compulsory education, there were 10.71 million gaokao registered attendants in 2020. I am not saying that it is harder to get into universities in 2020 than in 2000 because of the great increase in competitor. According to Zhangshang gaokao database, the ratio of students admitted college increase from 59% in 2000 to 79.92% in 2020. This means that many higher education institutes were established to fulfil the need for the millions of students who want to pursue higher education.

However, it becomes harder and harder for Chinese students to get into good university because the number of world class universities in China remains the same. This can be proved by the number of universities in the list of Project 985. Project 985 is the ivy league in China and aims to “promote the development and reputation of the Chinese higher education system by founding world-class universities in the 21st century”. (Wu 43) In other word, any university that satisfy world-class standards in academic fields can receive the funds. Unfortunately, no universities were added to the list of Project 985 after 2003. This leads to the statement that no universities were established or became world-class universities after 2003, which is reasonable because the formation of a world-class universities require not only great amount of fundings but a long period of accumulation and development. In 2017, only 1.66% of gaokao participants are admitted by the universities on the list of Project 985. This means that testers must get extremely high scores on gaokao to enter their dream schools. There is an old saying about gaokao “A point can throw away a sports field of people.” It is not an exaggeration. A point less can make the tester’s rank decreases by more than 100. As the most competitive test in the world, gaokao is always referred to “an army of thousands of men trying to cross a single-log bridge.”

The difficulty of gaokao reflects on its high admission criteria instead of its content. Gaokao only tests knowledge that is listed on the high school knowledge outline that the Ministry of Education published and refuses methods that used higher knowledge to prevent students previewing college knowledge to get advantage in gaokao. Take math as an example, a tester will receive no credit on his derivative question if he uses Bernoulli’s rule, which is beyond the high school knowledge outline. And compared with the high school knowledge outline in 2000, the 2020 outline does not change much. For Anhui Province Chinese outline, the education administers only switched a few ancient articles that required recital, like exchanging Pipaxing to Dengyueyanglou Diary, and did not change anything on modern Chinese reading comprehension. As we can see, the content of gaokao is limited. In fact, almost all high schools teach the content in two years, although Chinese high schools are three-year education. So why does gaokao become harder and harder? Involution. As Chinese people’s material life improved, they invested more on their children’s education. All middle-class families would send their kids to the best high school and various extracurricular courses. In Hefei, my hometown, the buildings near 45th junior high school has the highest house price because they are in the school district. Even the oldest buildings that have leaking roofs can sell higher than the fancy apartment in the city center. Parents would do anything to ensure their kids’ education, including buying houses. So many elite high schools appeared in 21st century. As a result of this trend, students acquire higher and higher score on gaokao, pushing the admission score for high-ranked universities higher and higher. This forms a cycle of involution: to get into good universities, the students must study even harder and make no mistakes on gaokao in order to compete with his peers who also receive the best education resources, and this forces other students to study harder as well. In fact, most Chinese high schools adopt “2+1” education method: teach two years of he contents and model gaokao for a whole year. Gaokao no longer test the students’ understanding of knowledge and learning ability but their test techniques and ability.

The harsh training of test techniques results to students’ depression, both physical and mental illness. In my senior high school in China, all students must get up at 6 o’clock, take nine classes from 7:20 to 17:50 with only 1-hour noon rest, and then take 3-hour self-study courses after dinner. What is more, most students can not finish their homework until 12 am. As each teacher assign one-hour homework, a student needs to complete five subjects’ homework with at least 5-hour amount of work. With an average sleep time less than 5 hours, it is common to see Chinese high school students, especially senior 3 students, with depression and other mental illness. Also, many students take retaliatory actions after they enter college: play video games all day and never go to class. Many students lose their goal and become lost after they finish gaokao: they do not know what to do and how to fulfil their time without gaokao exercises. To deal with these kinds of problems, Chinese ministry of education enacted a series of policies to ban extracurricular organizations and makeup courses in public high schools. Even though the policies aim to relieve students’ pressure and involution, they do not solve the roots. As many big education organizations, like Xindongfang closed, parents start recruiting personal tutor and ask their kids to do more exercise. The result is that kids from rich families can still access to more education resources, while middle class or poor families can not send their kids to organizations with fair tutoring prices. This aggravates the solidification of class as kids from higher class tend to perform better than other kids because they can receive better education before college and enter better universities.

To solve the problem of Involution, we must dive into Chinese traditions and Chinese cultural core, which is Confucianism. Confucius once said that: “Everything is inferior, only reading is superior.” Under his influence, China has a social hierarchy of “士农工商”, which ranks jobs from high to low: scholar, farmer, artisan, and merchant. Even though merchants are rich and can enjoy so many privileges with their wealth, they are discriminated and sidelined by the upper class. From Sui Dynasty, millions of men want to become government official and achieve their ambition to contribute to the country. For many of them, the only access to become government officials is through Imperial Examination, which Gaokao is derived from. Examination (Keju) is a test to elect government officials. Keju has a long history and started in Sui Dynasty around the sixth century. It is the fairest form of talented selection for feudalism societies: people from all classes can have an equal opportunity to prove themselves and become government officials. With one local level test, and two tests held by the central government, Keju helps the country absorb talented from different classes and different regions in China, constantly providing new blood and energy to the bureaucracy system. Many talented people from poor families in ancient China took Keju to change their lives and contributed to the development of China. However, more and more people focused not to read more books and learn more things but to research on how to get higher scores on Keju after Song Dynasty. As a result of this trend, many testers apply similar forms for Keju without any creativity. Studying the techniques to get high scores, many mediocre people were selected to become government officials. Gaokao has the same issue. More and more students, teachers, and parents focus on making the students get high scores in Gaokao instead of educating them with knowledge and eyesight that can enable them to chase their dreams or contribute to the country. With limited education resources and few good universities, millions of high school graduates had to compete for good colleges by Gaokao: only one test would determine their college.

Almost every job in China requires a diploma due to the popularization of college education. This is also a reflection of involution. So many college students compete for a job that do not require college knowledge. As the companies do not need to offer higher salaries, they are willing to recruit college students even though the jobs do not require that high degree. The supply is much higher than the demands. Even in the army, becoming an official always require a degree higher than bachelor. This condition hinders the young generation’s career development and forces them to take gaokao.

How can we solve the problems? Universities in Hongkong adopt independent recruitment, the same as that in the US. Students would take the standardized test and submit their application to the colleges. The college has the right to admit this student based on both his standardized test performances and other activities. However, I do not think this fit Chinese domestic condition. Poor families without education resources would lose their only chance to higher education, and this encourages corruption and other issues which cause inequity. The rich and powerful families can send their kids to the best universities while their kids no longer need to study hard and perform well on gaokao.

Involution needs to be relieved to overcome the challenges that gaokao faces in the 21st Century.