The past two days are special for the 7.23 million examinees and their parents. It is the National College Entrance Examination (Gaokao in Chinese). Based on the current education system in China, the result of the two day exam greatly impacts the future of any students in China. The score will decide whether you can receive college education. For most places in China, only half of the students are eligible for college education (only 3.40 million will be admitted to colleges in 2003) and the rest has to start work after high-school. In cities like Beijing and Shanghai, students are lucky enough to have a much higher ratio (more than 70%) to enter colleges.

Tsinghua, Peking University, Fudan University and Shanghai Jiao Tong University are among the first class in China. But only very few people can go there.

To enter a college or not, or to enter a good college or not directly impact the first offer they can get after graduate and impact their career. So it is the most critical time for students.

Isaac recorded the “No Honking During Gaokao” sign. I saw the same sign near Henan Rd. and Zhaojiabang Rd.. Not only honking is not allowed. All construction sites around schools were ordered to work in limited time in the recent 10 days. Thousands of policemen are working around schools to make sure there is no noise or traffic jam during the two important days. Taxi drivers even offer free ride to transport examinees and their family.

My Gaokao

My experience with the College Entrance Examination was in 1995. It was sunny. I remember those two days clearly because there were stories. I remember I did very bad in the first exam – Chinese. I am not good at composing articles and reciting the poems. I even didn’t completed the article in the composing part :-( I felt blue when I stepped out of the classroom. The sunny day was not sunny for me. I didn’t go to my parents who were waiting form me outside the gate of the school. Instead, I rushed to the play field to adjust my mood. It helped.

Fortunately, I recovered from the negative impact of the first session. I performed pretty well in the following 4 sessions. The exam result came out. As I expected, I got only around 560 in the 100 – 900 point system in Chinese – it is a little bit better than the average. That is the reason I always feel uncomfortable to write Chinese content till now.

However, the other four exam results went super high. Each of them are near the full score. For English exam, I even got the highest score (900 in standard scoring system) among all the 500,000 examinees. The overall score is 825 point. According to the Stand Scoring System, it means, my score in that exam was higher than 99.942303% of other examinees. So I can say I was the among top 0.057697% of the 500,000 million candidate. :-D If I didn’t fail too badly in Chinese exam, maybe I can got higher overall score. It is a pity that I didn’t put Tsinghua, the best university in my mind, onto my application form, although the score turned out to be 60 point higher than their cutoff score.

I am still lucky to have chose Shanghai Jiao Tong University, since Wendy entered the school the same year. She also did excellent job in that exam. The China Southern Airlines offered three tickets to Shanghai to top 3 students to SJTU. Wendy also got the ticket.

Appendix

Here is the table to convert a standard score, like 825, to a position in all examinees.

The table was quoted from ChinaSchool

P.S. Yesterday, for the first time, I saw the page view for this site goes up to 8000+ hits/day. It is nice.