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It's brutal because the pressure is amazingly intense. Your test results, quite literally, will determine the rest of your life. College admission is entirely

It's brutal because the pressure is amazingly intense. Your test results, quite literally, will determine the rest of your life. College admission is entirely based on your GaoKao score, grades don't matter and extracurriculars don't exist. Due to the Hukou system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hukou_system), your college attendance decides where you can live and where you can work in the future. For a peasant, a good GaoKao score is the only real way out of poverty. To add to this, you don't get to pick your major in college. That's also decided by your GaoKao score, and your future career is decided by your major. So, imagine if your whole life hinged on your SAT scores. Wouldn't that make the test a little more difficult?

nailer 17y ago
I think it'd make the test just as easy, but more stressful. Since the questions are not difficult, I would worry that my answers are being interpreted as a test of what I think rather than how I think. Maybe this is just semantics, but I think difficulty of an exam is irrelevant of what it will be used for.
- megaduck 17y ago
  Actually, I think it's more than just semantics. Stress makes it harder in a quantifiable way. Stress impairs both memory and abstract reasoning. For the language composition portions it narrows your thinking, and strips out creativity. Something fun like a pub quiz is measurably easier than something like the GaoKao, even if the questions are the same.
  - electromagnetic 17y ago
    For the average person, stress seriously breaks down their ability to perform. However, there's a significant but smaller proportion of people who thrive on stress and these are the people you want at the top. When something decides your entire life, the ones who excel at the task are going to be the ones who thrive on stress. In China this ability probably ends up putting you through the best schools in the country and either into the top ranks of corporations or into the government. Despite the system being unfair, it is probably an ideal way to select out those who are needed to manage and run a 1.3 billion person country. Western countries either had higher education firmly established by the time the industrial and technological revolutions hit. Those that didn't, like the majority of North America, were able to grow slowly into the world with new technologies. However, China has essentially been shot from agricultural, through industrial and are now falling at terminal velocity through the technological era as they catch up with everyone else. The system in China seems amazingly stable, however the real question is what happens when they start getting bombarded by unions so big they can't quell.
    - megaduck 17y ago
      You've got the general shape of it, but I've got one minor clarification about your history. You make the GaoKao sound recent, when it's basically the modern version of the Imperial Examination. The Imperial Examination started in 605, and ran continuously until the early twentieth century, so this is how China has been selecting their administrators for centuries. We can debate the merits of Chinese higher education, but it's definitely not new.

nailer 17y ago

I think it'd make the test just as easy, but more stressful. Since the questions are not difficult, I would worry that my answers are being interpreted as a test of what I think rather than how I think. Maybe this is just semantics, but I think difficulty of an exam is irrelevant of what it will be used for.

megaduck 17y ago
Actually, I think it's more than just semantics. Stress makes it harder in a quantifiable way. Stress impairs both memory and abstract reasoning. For the language composition portions it narrows your thinking, and strips out creativity. Something fun like a pub quiz is measurably easier than something like the GaoKao, even if the questions are the same.
- electromagnetic 17y ago
  For the average person, stress seriously breaks down their ability to perform. However, there's a significant but smaller proportion of people who thrive on stress and these are the people you want at the top. When something decides your entire life, the ones who excel at the task are going to be the ones who thrive on stress. In China this ability probably ends up putting you through the best schools in the country and either into the top ranks of corporations or into the government. Despite the system being unfair, it is probably an ideal way to select out those who are needed to manage and run a 1.3 billion person country. Western countries either had higher education firmly established by the time the industrial and technological revolutions hit. Those that didn't, like the majority of North America, were able to grow slowly into the world with new technologies. However, China has essentially been shot from agricultural, through industrial and are now falling at terminal velocity through the technological era as they catch up with everyone else. The system in China seems amazingly stable, however the real question is what happens when they start getting bombarded by unions so big they can't quell.
  - megaduck 17y ago
    You've got the general shape of it, but I've got one minor clarification about your history. You make the GaoKao sound recent, when it's basically the modern version of the Imperial Examination. The Imperial Examination started in 605, and ran continuously until the early twentieth century, so this is how China has been selecting their administrators for centuries. We can debate the merits of Chinese higher education, but it's definitely not new.