Gaokao week
A few days ago, this official notice appeared in the hallways of our apartment complex.
The notice reminded all residents that the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, known in Chinese simply as 高考 gāo kǎo, was fast approaching. I would guess that most people in our building were already well aware that June 7 and June 8 were the scheduled dates, but the letter further requested all neighbors to support the students sitting for Gaokao by refraining from making noise in the common areas during these few days, not have any loud family gatherings in our apartments, and keep the volume on the television down. One entreaty that did happen to delight me was the ban on noisy renovation work on the apartments until Gaokao was finished. Two whole spring days without morning-til-night banging and drilling!
There has already been a lot written out there about Gaokao--the high stress, high stakes, make-or-break college admissions test. It is, for high school students who choose or must remain in China for university, the one number that can determine the direction of their lives.
One aspect of the Gaokao phenomenon that has consistently surprised me was how the test varies from province to province, and then also how the test scores any given university would accept would also vary from province to province. Peking University, for instance, maintains preferred admission for Beijing hùkǒu-holders, so the threshold for the 100,000ish Beijing test-takers is much lower than the one for the almost 1,000,000 test-takers in Henan Province. That highest-ranked institution of higher learning in China holds somewhere between 250 and 300 spots for Beijing residents in the first year class, and less than 100 for students from Henan. In order to stratify the students even further in Henan, the Gaokao is harder there. The Henan students must score higher on a more difficult test than their future Beijing classmates.
In his excellent book The Street of Eternal Happiness, Rob Schmitz introduces the reader to one family who experienced this particular Gaokao inequity first-hand. Zhao Shiling, a flower shop owner on the Shanghai street Schmitz features in his book, has two sons, both named Sun. The elder son, Big Sun, leaves his elementary school in their rural hometown Zaozhuang and joins his mother in Shanghai. This, at the time, is considered a golden opportunity for Big Sun, the chance to attend the highly reputable public schools in Shanghai, and then test into college as a preferred Shanghai student. Big Sun is recruited by a very good middle school as a champion athlete and completes ninth grade a prize-winning student as well. He has earned a place at a top Shanghai high school. That is, until the high school director contacts Zhao and asks about Big Sun's hùkǒu just before school starts. In Schmitz's telling, Big Sun is not dismissed from the high school because of his registration, but he leaves because, as the school director tells Zhao, "He'll have to return [to Zaozhuang] if he ever wants to attend college." Big Sun will not be permitted to sit the Gaokao in Shanghai even if he stays, and (I'm guessing) everyone already knows the Shanghai education, envy of the world that it is, will not prepare him for the version of the Gaokao he will have to take at home.
Another great book, Little Soldiers by Lenora Chu, is primarily about her own experience as an American parent with a child in a Chinese public school. She also follows several other students and teachers as they also navigate the educational waters of China. One of her subjects, a high school boy who goes by Darcy, has a very promising future, if only he scores high enough on the Shanghai Gaokao to enroll at Jiaotong University (spoiler: he does). Darcy is originally from Hubei, his parents migrant workers in Shanghai, and he quietly slips to Chu how he has avoided the fate described above of Big Sun of Schmitz's book.
Just last week, Randy was at a meeting near Hangzhou, and the subject of Gaokao came up at lunch. Attending this meeting with him were one of his coworkers who is working very hard to get her family's Hebei hùkǒu transferred to Beijing before her preschool-aged son starts grade school, another coworker based out of Hangzhou, and some guests, at least one of whom had Guangzhou residence. Several of those at lunch talked about parents trying to pursue whatever hùkǒu can give their children that perfect storm of an easier Gaokao than their hometowns' and a lower required score for admittance to a better university. One way to achieve this, they said, was to relocate to the West and South-west of China. Ethnic minority regions like Tibet and Gansu, they said, were drawing in Han Chinese families who hoped to game the affirmative action system in those provinces. All of the Chinese people at lunch with Randy knew someone who had already made that move or was considering it. Usually, little in China favors migrants, but in the case of the educational policies in these particular provinces, transplants can have some advantage. In these areas, their children can sit for the Gaokao with the local children (possibly because of the ease of transferring hùkǒu), and score into the same (supposedly) generous university quotas as the Tibetans. I don't know if this really works; this was just what they were discussing.
For a taste of Gaokao, Sixth Tone has this online quiz. Before you take it, please keep in mind that the questions are often phrased in ways unfamiliar to Westerners. Every time I take one of these "Try the Gaokao" tests online, I realize I would fail English as it is taught in China. I get tripped up on Marxist interpretations of Shakespeare in particular, but also some of the grammar and word-selection questions are not what I expect. Chinese students take tests like these for their entire educational careers, so they can breeze through questions that disorient this American adult.
The notice reminded all residents that the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, known in Chinese simply as 高考 gāo kǎo, was fast approaching. I would guess that most people in our building were already well aware that June 7 and June 8 were the scheduled dates, but the letter further requested all neighbors to support the students sitting for Gaokao by refraining from making noise in the common areas during these few days, not have any loud family gatherings in our apartments, and keep the volume on the television down. One entreaty that did happen to delight me was the ban on noisy renovation work on the apartments until Gaokao was finished. Two whole spring days without morning-til-night banging and drilling!
There has already been a lot written out there about Gaokao--the high stress, high stakes, make-or-break college admissions test. It is, for high school students who choose or must remain in China for university, the one number that can determine the direction of their lives.
One aspect of the Gaokao phenomenon that has consistently surprised me was how the test varies from province to province, and then also how the test scores any given university would accept would also vary from province to province. Peking University, for instance, maintains preferred admission for Beijing hùkǒu-holders, so the threshold for the 100,000ish Beijing test-takers is much lower than the one for the almost 1,000,000 test-takers in Henan Province. That highest-ranked institution of higher learning in China holds somewhere between 250 and 300 spots for Beijing residents in the first year class, and less than 100 for students from Henan. In order to stratify the students even further in Henan, the Gaokao is harder there. The Henan students must score higher on a more difficult test than their future Beijing classmates.
In his excellent book The Street of Eternal Happiness, Rob Schmitz introduces the reader to one family who experienced this particular Gaokao inequity first-hand. Zhao Shiling, a flower shop owner on the Shanghai street Schmitz features in his book, has two sons, both named Sun. The elder son, Big Sun, leaves his elementary school in their rural hometown Zaozhuang and joins his mother in Shanghai. This, at the time, is considered a golden opportunity for Big Sun, the chance to attend the highly reputable public schools in Shanghai, and then test into college as a preferred Shanghai student. Big Sun is recruited by a very good middle school as a champion athlete and completes ninth grade a prize-winning student as well. He has earned a place at a top Shanghai high school. That is, until the high school director contacts Zhao and asks about Big Sun's hùkǒu just before school starts. In Schmitz's telling, Big Sun is not dismissed from the high school because of his registration, but he leaves because, as the school director tells Zhao, "He'll have to return [to Zaozhuang] if he ever wants to attend college." Big Sun will not be permitted to sit the Gaokao in Shanghai even if he stays, and (I'm guessing) everyone already knows the Shanghai education, envy of the world that it is, will not prepare him for the version of the Gaokao he will have to take at home.
But on his first day of school, he panicked. His new classmates were years ahead of him He showed his instructor a physics textbook from Shanghai.In Zaozhuang, Big Sun, once the star recruit of a Shanghai middle school and soon-to-be student in a highly-ranked Shanghai high school, was now faced with two options. His high school teacher suggests to the then-sixteen-year-old that he could re-enroll in seventh grade and repeat middle school. The other option is the unspoken one that Big Sun chooses. No longer of compulsory age, he leaves school and joins the migrant workforce.
"My teacher paged through the book, [and] started to laugh...."
As his first day of school crawled by, he realized rural students used textbooks tailored to prepare them for a college entrance exam that was far more challenging than the one given in China's biggest cities. The exam was designed to be harder because there were simply more students to filter out (page 58)
Another great book, Little Soldiers by Lenora Chu, is primarily about her own experience as an American parent with a child in a Chinese public school. She also follows several other students and teachers as they also navigate the educational waters of China. One of her subjects, a high school boy who goes by Darcy, has a very promising future, if only he scores high enough on the Shanghai Gaokao to enroll at Jiaotong University (spoiler: he does). Darcy is originally from Hubei, his parents migrant workers in Shanghai, and he quietly slips to Chu how he has avoided the fate described above of Big Sun of Schmitz's book.
Darcy revealed an educational back door of his own one humid, rainy afternoon. "My father is not married to my mother, Darcy told me, voice subdued as we walked toward the subway station after a meeting. The revelation was an accident; I'd spotted an inconsistency in statements he'd made about a "stepmother" and asked him about it...
"When I was ten, my father took vows with another woman, I call the woman my step-mother. They are married in name only."
The step-mother is from Shanghai...His father had brokered and arrangement in secret and greased it with a pile of cash: his father took a new wife, the woman got financial security, and the boy obtained a parent with a Shanghai hùkǒu. (pages 198-9)
Just last week, Randy was at a meeting near Hangzhou, and the subject of Gaokao came up at lunch. Attending this meeting with him were one of his coworkers who is working very hard to get her family's Hebei hùkǒu transferred to Beijing before her preschool-aged son starts grade school, another coworker based out of Hangzhou, and some guests, at least one of whom had Guangzhou residence. Several of those at lunch talked about parents trying to pursue whatever hùkǒu can give their children that perfect storm of an easier Gaokao than their hometowns' and a lower required score for admittance to a better university. One way to achieve this, they said, was to relocate to the West and South-west of China. Ethnic minority regions like Tibet and Gansu, they said, were drawing in Han Chinese families who hoped to game the affirmative action system in those provinces. All of the Chinese people at lunch with Randy knew someone who had already made that move or was considering it. Usually, little in China favors migrants, but in the case of the educational policies in these particular provinces, transplants can have some advantage. In these areas, their children can sit for the Gaokao with the local children (possibly because of the ease of transferring hùkǒu), and score into the same (supposedly) generous university quotas as the Tibetans. I don't know if this really works; this was just what they were discussing.
For a taste of Gaokao, Sixth Tone has this online quiz. Before you take it, please keep in mind that the questions are often phrased in ways unfamiliar to Westerners. Every time I take one of these "Try the Gaokao" tests online, I realize I would fail English as it is taught in China. I get tripped up on Marxist interpretations of Shakespeare in particular, but also some of the grammar and word-selection questions are not what I expect. Chinese students take tests like these for their entire educational careers, so they can breeze through questions that disorient this American adult.
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