Gaokao. The World's most deadly exam!

A few days ago I was walking cycling down the street on my way to work. To my surprise I saw a mass of people, at least  thousand camped outside the school complete with corporate tents handing out free drinks and dozens of TV cameras. The people were mostly middle aged and older folks. Sitting, squatting and standing nervously wherever they could find space. As I got closer I could see that many of them had their hands clenched together and their eyes closed. A few of them were even crying.

Book Mountain, High School students in China study for their final exams, the Gaokao

I cycled on to find three more high schools had been mobbed by the grieving parents. It looked as though there had been a terrorist attack and they were all out the mourn the victims, such was the sombre atmosphere.

I found out later that they were the parents of high school students taking their final high school exams, the dreaded Gaokao. 11 years of education comes down to one, four part mega exam. The students have been preparing for their Gaokao since the age of 8. Repeating and reciting the answers, the methods, reading until 3am only to begin school at 6am the next day.

A Gaokao cartoon, the father's sign reads "only four days to go until the Gaokao" and the mother saying "You Go Girl!"

There's good reason to study hard, the Gaokao is the only exam taken in China where cheating is not tolerated. Students have to pass on merit alone, and their entire future is decided on the results of this one exam.

A woman prays for her Child during the Gaokao.

A high score means scholarships to the top universities and a white collar life as a top professional. A low score means failure, embarrassment for parents and a life of hard graft for the failed student unless daddy can buy them a nice stable job. The pressure is so great that some even kill themselves.

Schools motivate their students with fascist style rallies to get them to keep marching on despite the terrible burden relentless study takes on their bodies and minds.

This is the one chance kids from a poor family get to break through the social barriers which dictate the lives of most people in the "communist" country. No wonder parents spend hours sitting on the wall outside the exam hall like nervous wrecks, just praying their kids do well.

Crowds of parents wait for their children to finish their exam

There is something fundamentally unfair about the Gaokao, despite sounding meritocratic. Each province has a quota for how many students are allowed to pass. In provinces like Hainan, Tibet, Xinjiang and Beijing, provinces with tiny populations, the Gaokao is an easy exam with high pass rates and a good chance of going to top university. In Henan however, the province in which I live, the pass rates are exceptionally high due to a population of over 100 million.

More Parents expectantly waiting for their kids after a Gaokao exam.

I've heard a story about two boys taking the Gaokao, one from Zhengzhou, Henan and the other from Beijing. The student from Zhengzhou got a score of 600, but failed to get a place at a good university or any scholarships. The boy from Beijing got 490 on the same test, getting a place at QingHua, China's most prestigious university. The Zhengzhou lad went on to become a migrant worker, scraping a living building luxury apartments. The Beijinger became an architect, designing the very same buildings.

Parents waiting for hours outside the exam halls during the Chinese University Entrance Exams or Gaokao.

Students taking their A levels or SAT's don't have any concept of pressure. I consider myself lucky to be born in the UK, if I was Chinese I wouldn’t stand a chance.
 

Rant of the Day: I Before E Except After C

I sometimes teach English for money (note - I am not an English Teacher), so occasionally I come to lament my pathetic spelling. I am incapable of spelling any word which is not phonetic or has a collection of similar sounding vowels in sequence.

Especially, words like Wierd, Thier or Sceince.

Then I realized something, I spell these words wrong because of being made to recite "I before E except after C", like a sacred mantra at school. With these words I follow the rule and get it wrong.

Here is a list of words which don't follow the rule:

• absenteeism
• agreeing
• albeit
• atheist
• beige
• being
• caffeine
• canoeing
• codeine
• counterfeit
• deign
• deity
• edelweiss
• eiderdown
• eight
• either
• fahrenheit
• feign
• feint
• feisty
• foreign
• forfeit
• freight
• gneiss
• heifer
• height
• heir
• herein
• leisure
• leitmotif
• madeira
• neigh
• neighbour
• neither
• oleic
• pein
• plebeian
• pleiades
• protein
• seize
• reign
• rein
• reinstate etc
• reveille
• seeing
• sheik
• skein
• sleigh
• sleight
• sovereign
• spontaneity
• surfeit
• surveillance
• their
• therein
• veil
• vein
• weigh
• weight
• weir
• weird
• wherein
• ancient
• co-efficient
• concierge
• conscience
• deficient
• efficient
• fancied
• financier
• glacier
• hacienda
• inscient
• omniscient
• policies
• prescient
• prima facie
• proficient
• science
• society
• species
• sufficient

In fact there are more words which break the rule than obey it. So, thank you for ruining my spelling "I before E except after C"!

P.S. The Travel Articles will resume shortly. 

This is hell. Standing on a slow train for 11 hours between Beijing and Zhengzhou.

Usually, if you can't book a sleeper ticket before your journey in China, you can just upgrade to sleeper class when you get on the train.

I was amongst the crowd at a busy Beijing railway station, fighting my way onto my train back to Zhengzhou. It was a Friday night, and all the lowly paid migrant workers were on their way back to Henan Provice for the weekend.I had at least got a seat, I was sure of that. My ticket had a seat number. Coach 9, seat 12. Hard seat class.

Waiting to buy train tickets in China

They call it hard seat class but that's a misleading name. The seats are soft and relatively comfortable despite being packed rather closely together. I'd spent 6 happy hours playing poker with some policemen in the hard seat class of a train from Zhengzhou to Wuhan when I first arrived in China.

As I boarded the train, it was clearly packed. The migrant workers were busily shoving their sacks into any vacant nook or cranny they could find. There was the normal queue of people when you board a train but that would go away when everyone had sat down in their seats.

A man with a sack boarding a train in China

Then the doors shut.

Outside, dozens of people were still trying to get on, shouting at the guards who were struggling to hold them all back.

The train started to move and the chaotic queue still hadn’t gone away. I suddenly noticed that all the seats were taken. Including mine! There was no way I could move, we were packed in like sardines. At this point many of the migrant workers had begun sitting down on their sacks. Others had cracked open the snacks and were scoffing seeds, a few had even begun swigging Baijiu.

Standing room only, good luck finding a place to sit down here!

Within a minute, all of the floorspace had been taken by migrants sitting on sacks. What of, I hadn’t a clue. Maybe, rice, flour, random fluff, who knows. They were all brightly coloured but old, clearly faded sacks, they'd obviously been well used.

I was absolutely shattered, my eyes were heavy and my legs ached. I'd spent the whole day running around Beijing being a tourist, thinking to myself, "I can sleep on the train". There was nowhere to sit and I had nothing to lean on.

So I just stood.

For hours....

....and hours......

....and hours.

About four hours into our eleven hour journey, most of the migrant workers were asleep, safe and snug on their faded florescent plastic sacks. The fatigue had mutilated my sense of balance. I couldn’t stop wobbling all over the place. Convinced I would soon fall over, crushing a few migrant workers, I decided to attempt a trip to the toilet.

I crept quietly and carefully, placing my feet precisely between the little gaps between the sacks. I was only about 3 meters from the toilet but it took about 5 minutes of careful manoeuvring to get there. I mustered up all of my remaining strength to open the door just enough to be able to squeeze in.

How do I get to the toilet!?

To my astonishment, the cubicle was clean! Obviously no one had though the arduous task of getting to the toilet was possible and were simply holding it in. I was a pioneer, and for my exploration, I was awarded a great new land, with boundless space, "clean" running water and no pesky Indians to kill.

I hung up my bag and lent on the wall and took a well deserved rest.

I stayed in my little haven for about an hour before I decided to be selfless and let others use the amenities. But for my little bit of R&R in the toilet of the hard seated class of a cheap Chinese train, I felt refreshed and re-invigorated.

The feeling however, didn’t last long, a few hours later, I was in hell. I now know why sleep deprivation is considered torture. Your legs hurt, your eyes become sore, you get a headache, you start sweating profusely despite being freezing cold. I even started to feel sick for the movement and began to imagine that just outside the window there was a doppelgänger of me when I was 17 on roller-skates racing with the train. He wasn't very good, he kept on crashing into objects along the railway line.

The hallucination kept me entertained for a while, but not as much as clockwatching in the last 2 hours.

I started counting numbers, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,..............,1009,1010,...................,7890, 7891,7892,7893,

ANYTHING to pass the time. I tired to see how accurate my seconds were compared to real seconds.

Zhengzhou's beautiful train station!

By the time the train arrived in Zhengzhou, I was jelly. I staggered with my bag to the taxi rank, and went home, balls to the cost. It was now 8am, I'd got on the train at 7pm the previous night, the train was late and was delayed on the way, 2 extra hours of hell for leaves on the line, probably.

I got home, changed my clothes and had a shower.

Work started at 10.