China's High Stakes "Gaokao" Test Under Scrutiny

ChadVene
Mon, 23 Jul 2012 04:43:57 +0000

From what I hear and have seen, it’s unbelievably stressful both psychologically and physically. And sadly, it’s a huge waste of time in terms of finding “talent” since the highest scorers are great at memorizing but naught else.

Just imagine taking a more comprehensive and harder version of the SAT, but instead of your GPA, ECs, and recs, the score you receive on your SATs determines what school you will attend, and due to the sheer number of applicants/students/graduates, that might very well define the rest of your life. Oh, and you only have one shot at taking the test.

Nearly every academic and extracurricular achievement that you ever had means diddily-squat compared to one test. And even one point lower means you’ll be ranked tens of thousands of places below others. Pressure, anyone?