What if you had one shot one opportunity — to seize everything you ever wanted in one gruelling nine-hour exam?
Would you capture it, or curl up into a tiny ball and start crying?
That’s the situation millions of Chinese high school seniors face every June with the dreaded Gao Kao, a two-day test said to be the hardest in the world.
The comprehensive exam evaluates everything the students have ever learned in order to match them to a college and chart the rest of their lives.
It’s seen in Chinese society as an all-important step to attending a prestigious university and landing a high-paying job afterward. In some cases, it can even be a stepping stone to elevating one’s social status.
It’s also a ridiculously difficult test that students spend years preparing for.
China estimates 9.75 million students from its cohort of “millennium babies” will take the Gao Kao this year, making it the largest group to take the test in eight years, according to the state-run Xinhua News Agency.
Students taking the test face tremendous pressure not just from their students, but from all of Chinese society. Busy cities such as Beijing even shut down traffic to accommodate it.
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Test scores from the Gao Kao are used to gain entrance to universities around the world, including Canadian schools such as Western University and the University of British Columbia.
Don’t even try to cheat
With seemingly the rest of their lives on the line, many students have attempted to cheat the system over the years.
Some have been caught using cheating devices disguised as clothing or school supplies, while others have used earpieces to work with someone on the outside who can feed them answers.
But authorities don’t take cheating lightly, and have implemented a number of stringent measures to ensure it doesn’t happen.
SWAT teams are called in to stand guard for the tests, while metal detectors and biometric technology are used to make sure no one is smuggling in a study aide or enlisting a friend to write the test in their stead. Cellphone signals are also blocked at test sites, according to media reports.
Fifty-two people were arrested before the exams even started last year, according to Xinhua.
The test also helps chart the future for anyone caught cheating. Instead of heading off to a prestigious university, cheaters typically wind up spending their first seven years of their adult life in jail.
No pressure.
Around the world:
- Bad things happen when you bring a gun to a dance fight, as one FBI agent found out in Denver, Colo. The agent was busting a move on the dance floor when his weapon fell out of his pocket and went off, striking another nightclub patron. The victim was taken to hospital and treated for a minor injury. The nightclub also offered to grant the vicitm free drinks for life. I guess shots are on him.
- Swimming across the Pacific Ocean is difficult enough, but a Frenchman is taking it up a notch with a plan to swim through a 1,600-kilometre-wide patch of floating garbage. The journey from Tokyo to San Francisco is to raise awareness about plastic pollution. He’ll have a nine-person team following closely behind as he passes through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, just in case he gets tangled in a six-pack ring.
- U.S. President Donald Trump knows his history, OK? Canadians may seem friendly, but he’s pretty sure they did a bad thing one time. “Didn’t you guys burn down the White House?” he reportedly said to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, during a tense phone exchange over steel and aluminum tariffs on May 25. The remark came after Trudeau questioned Trump’s justification that the tariffs were for “national security.” And as historians were quick to point out, it wasn’t actually Canada that burned the White House during the War of 1812 — it was the British.
With files from Reuters