Should we settle on the current Gaokao system?

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Editor's note: Wang Yan is a senior specialist at the National Institute of Educational Sciences of China. The article reflects the author's opinion, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Today, 9.75 million senior high school students will take the two-day test known as the Gaokao and it's the most significant event in the education sector in China.

On a national level, it secures a high degree of fairness in the allocation of educational opportunities and selects talents into next phase of education.

On an individual level, it largely determines the students’ opportunities in the future in terms of access to universities and a potential job after graduating.

The Gaokao is oftentimes compared with ancient civil examinations, which could potentially lead to a position in the senior ranks of the civil service.

The civil examination has a large impact upon many countries in the world as a means of moving society from an aristocratic basis to a meritocratic one, in order to regulate access to many professions and to open up opportunities for people in all walks of society.

However, the life-changing nature of the exam has also been translated into a value that attaches education and culture to celebrating the glory of winners.

Partly influenced by such culture, the “top scorer” (also called Zhuang yuan in Chinese) in the examination draws a great deal of attention to associating with anti-educational practices and lucrative sponsorship deals in some cases.

June 7, 2018: Students walk ouside of an exam center./ VCG Photo

The Ministry of Education recently issued a rule to ban commercially exploiting the top scorer this year. As it is believed that if they follow this path it will remove the attention from respectably gaining a good education.

In spite of criticism around the Gaokao system over the past decade, it cannot be denied that it has made contributions to social mobility and has promoted enhanced education.

Since reinstitution of the Gaokao in 1978, an array of policy reforms have been undertaken to improve examination system.

A crucial step to reforming the Gaokao was to diversify the high-stakes examination toward multiple pathways to higher education institutions and to allow more choices among examinations.

It reads "Reform of College Entrance Examination." / VCG Photo

To cater for a variety of aptitudes, abilities and interests as well as greater numbers of candidates, apart from traditional mandatory subjects (Chinese, mathematics, and foreign language), students can choose three subjects that fit their interests and abilities from a range of subjects.

To moderate the high stakes attached to the examination and to strengthen “quality” – based assessment, the “comprehensive quality evaluation” was mandated as part of the new college entrance examination.

The evaluation attempts to capture qualities that cannot easily be assessed through written examination, such as moral values, citizenship, learning abilities, communication, collaboration abilities, sports and health, aesthetics, and behavior.

The most recent reform scheme of the Gaokao highlights a strategy of equity by prioritizing disadvantaged areas and disadvantaged students.

The government has been committed to maintaining the fairness of competition by allocating higher quotas for university admissions for students from poverty-stricken and rural areas.

June 7, 2018: Students are ready for the exam./ VCG Photo

In 2017, through a special scheme that involves the central government, local governments and higher education institutions 100,000 students were enrolled from rural and poverty-stricken areas, an increase of 8,500 more compared with 2016.

Overall, the Gaokao is shifting from a knowledge-based to competency based test with different choices in testing and more pathways to universities and colleges.

Though the results from the reform are promising, the challenge of developing a quality examination as the cornerstone of a quality education system is formidable, involving assuring integrity of assessments, further reducing examination pressures, catering for an expanding and more diverse array of students' as well as assessing a wider range of curricular objectives.

In particular, with the new curriculum being introduced into schools, the examination needs to be further upgraded to include complex and authentic assessment tasks to measure cognitive competencies, self-development and community participation with a high degree of validity.

In the meanwhile, it is crucial to keep the task structures simple to ensure scoring with a high degree of reliability. These are also issues that are faced by education systems in many parts of the world.

Hopefully these challenges can be addressed as access to higher education, and examination systems become more robust through research, experimentation and communication among different countries.