A major piece of news about reforming the Gaokao, China’s national college entrance examination, has stirred up another round of discussion. The proposal puts forward three possible models, all aimed at moving away from the idea that a single exam should determine a student’s entire future.
The three plans can be summarized like this:
Plan 1: Passing the high school academic proficiency exams would be a prerequisite for taking the Gaokao, and students could pass those through multiple attempts. The Gaokao itself would test only three subjects: Chinese, mathematics, and a foreign language, with no division between arts and sciences. Universities would admit students based on Gaokao scores, while also taking into account high school academic proficiency results and overall performance.
Plan 2: Passing the high school academic proficiency exams would also be a prerequisite, again with multiple chances to pass. The Gaokao would test five subjects by academic cluster: Chinese, mathematics, a foreign language, one experimental-science subject related to the intended major, and one humanities subject related to the intended major, again without dividing students into arts or science tracks. Universities would make admissions decisions based on Gaokao scores while also considering high school academic proficiency results and overall performance. They could also use weighted average scores depending on training goals and program requirements, with different majors applying different weights.
Plan 3: Admissions exams for higher vocational institutions and regular universities would be separated. The exam content would reflect different educational goals, without implying that one path is superior to the other. Model vocational colleges and provinces or cities with mature conditions would be encouraged to explore admissions methods better suited to the nature and training objectives of vocational education. Students admitted to higher vocational colleges should also be regarded as successful.
Complaints about the Gaokao have never really stopped. Some people even argue that it should simply be abolished. On that point, I tend to agree with something a high school English teacher once said: children today often have too little hardship or real testing in their lives, and the Gaokao is one of the few experiences that truly forces them to toughen up. That may sound harsh, but there is some truth in it. The exam does push people to grow up mentally.
At the same time, it is impossible to deny that the current system has serious flaws. Too many capable students are written off because of one bad performance, while others see their lives completely transformed because they happened to succeed in that one decisive moment. People say the Gaokao is unfair; others say it is deeply problematic. But however dissatisfied people may be, no easy alternative has ever appeared, which is why the system has largely remained in place.
Looking across these three proposals, my first impression is that the Gaokao would start to resemble the graduate school entrance exam more and more. Their common feature is that regular academic performance would matter: your results over the full three years of high school would no longer be just background information, but part of the admissions equation. That has one obvious advantage: it reduces the chance that students who rely on cheating in a single exam will be favored in admissions. Of course, exceptional outliers are another matter.
But this shift also has a cost. If everyday performance becomes part of the final outcome, students may face even greater long-term psychological pressure rather than a single burst of pressure at exam time. In that sense, all three plans come with both benefits and drawbacks. The benefit is that students might gradually build stronger mental resilience. The problem is fairness in measurement. Once high school performance begins to carry weight, differences between schools become impossible to ignore. Are exams at one school easier than those at another? How would scores be normalized? And if a unified exam were introduced to solve that problem, should it be organized at the city level or the provincial level? Once weighting enters the discussion, the entire issue becomes much more complicated.
Plan 2, in particular, immediately gave me the feeling of a postgraduate-style entrance exam. To be honest, even the technical wording of the proposal is not entirely easy to grasp. More importantly, bringing major-specific selection so directly into the Gaokao stage feels questionable to me. It seems too early to tie students so tightly to specialized directions in a national entrance examination.
As for Plan 3, it almost sounds like a form of psychological reassurance: an effort to emphasize that vocational admission is also success. That sentiment is understandable, but the practical side still feels vague. If the examinations for vocational colleges and regular universities are separated, how exactly would the screening process work? Would students first take the university entrance exam and then the vocational one? Or would the systems run in parallel under some other arrangement? That part clearly needs much more careful thought.
In the end, all three proposals are still only broad frameworks. The crucial details remain blurry, and without those details it is hard to judge what these plans really mean in practice, let alone say with confidence which one is better or worse.
One more thing is worth saying: when it comes to education policy, stability matters. Constant change may look energetic on paper, but not everyone can absorb the consequences of a system that keeps shifting from one day to the next.