Chinese kids prepare for ‘mother of all exams’

In a small-town high school classroom in Anhui, one of China’s poorest provinces, students fight with pillows before ripping them apart in a hail of cotton.

In a Beijing classroom, students administer head massages to one another. And in Shandong province, the rigours of academia are set aside momentarily as students do some deep breathing in the lotus position.

The curious goings-on in schools across China are easily explained. These are all efforts aimed at easing students’ mental pressure in the days running up to the “world’s biggest and most intense exam”, due next week, when an estimated 10 million high school students sit for the high-stakes university entrance examination.

For these millions of students in China, the annual ‘gao kao’ (Big Test), which this year will take place for three days from June 7, is the ultimate life-defining make-or-break moment. Top performers, who are feted like celebrities in the media, can waltz into China’s premier universities, including Beida (Peking University) and Tsinghua University, and secure a passport to the good life.

For most others, the path to social mobility will be considerably harder. Given such high stakes, the competitive pressure on China’s high school students is enormous, but even parents aren’t immune to it.

And every year, stressed-out parents go to absurd lengths to motivate their wards — or give them an edge. Two years ago, in Tianjin, for instance, parents of female students had doctors prescribe birth control pills to regulate the menstrual cycle so it wouldn’t interfere with or distract from the exam schedule.

To avoid the intense traffic jams on exam day, and the stress of not making it to the exam hall in time, parents have this year begun checking into hotels near the exam centres, where their children are confined to their rooms. 

Even city administrators across China join in the academic frenzy, shutting down Internet bars — so that students may not be distracted by Internet games — and “banning” noisy commercial activities in the days leading up to the exam, so as not to interfere with the students’ cramming. 

The entire mechanics of preparing test papers is shrouded in secrecy; in fact, the sealed test papers are considered ‘top secret’ — the highest category of state secrets. Exam administrators jam electronic signals around the exam centres — to mess with potential cheats.

Yet, cheating has taken on rather more sophisticated forms. Every year, there are thousands of Internet posts by hawkers selling electronic gadgets and services that, the vendors claim, will help students “beat the system”. 

Cheating also finds other interesting, off-classroom expression. Sportsperson who acquit themselves creditably get a few additional points in the gaokao exam, and so earlier this year, a marathon race in Xiamen in eastern China saw student-runners cheating by hiring speedy imposters to run on their behalf or by completing part of the race in cars.

Nearly a third of the runners were disqualified for cheating. In the rat race of life in China, where competition is fierce, students will go that extra mile, sometimes dishonestly, to come up trumps.