Underwhelming conclusion to the article IMO: > What if the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a pupil’s career? If these exams truly test the know

Underwhelming conclusion to the article IMO: > What if the gaokao (and similar tests) were held earlier in a pupil’s career? If these exams truly test the knowledge required for university, they must be held just before university starts. But if such tests mostly serve as filters, sifting better students from worse, they need not be held so late. An aptitude test at 16 years of age, say, will probably generate a similar ranking as one held two years later. The tests would remain stressful. But an earlier gaokao would save families a year or two of costly cramming, shortening “the obstacle course”, as Hirsch put it, without much changing the results. Such tests will always have high stakes. But they need not require such high effort. I was somewhat "late" in terms of some aspects of my development, and so there's a chance I'd have been put on a particular track simply because my peers were more biologically mature. I won't pretend to know the solution here (though I'm interested in the research around "mastery-based" learning), but I do know that sometimes a system is in a deeper local optima than you expect, and making small changes like the one suggested here isn't enough to get it out. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#:~:text=Mastery%20learning%20is%20a%20set,they%20are%20given%20enough%20time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastery_learning#:~:text=Maste....