College Entrance Exams: China vs. the US
How do Chinese college entrance exams compare to the SAT/ACT?
With over 300,000 students from China currently studying in the United States, about a third of all international students, differences in Chinese and American education standards has become an increasingly important issue. What college education systems are these students leaving behind in their home country? To answer these questions, we must look at the college entrance exams for the US and China: the SAT/ACT and the Gaokao (高考).
Subject Matter
Though SAT and ACT are popular in different regions of the US (the coastlines and the Midwest, respectively), they are relatively similar in content. The major differences are that the ACT has a science section and the questions come in random difficulty order, not increasing difficulty like the SAT. Both the SAT and ACT are about four hours long with breaks.
The Gaokao, meanwhile, has little similarity with both of these exams. Nine hours long over two days, the test is the single deciding factor for college acceptance in China. Though the test subjects vary by province, students generally must take Chinese, mathematics, and a foreign language section, with one to three added topics depending on their chosen career path. For example, a student interested in the natural sciences could choose to test in Physics, Chemistry, or Biology on top of the main three subjects.
Difficulty
The Wall Street Journal recently called the Gaokao "the SAT on steroids."
While both the SAT and ACT are held as high-standard way to predict a student's abilities to succeed in college, they are not used as the be-all, end-all determinant of a student's future like the Gaokao. After receiving their scores, students in China will submit a ranking of their top college choices and then wait for a single response.
To make the pressure around this momentous test even higher, the Gaokao is only given once a year. Illness, emergency, or other excuses are not accepted. Over 9 million students took test examinations between June 7th-9th this year. In places like Xiahe, Gansu province, the streets around the schools closed for blocks during these days to ensure students could concentrate. Despite most communities best efforts, about 25% of students who take the Gaokao will not get into any Chinese colleges each year. The three-fourths of students who do get into college, however, face varying degrees of education quality depending on what colleges accept them, with lower-quality college graduates making less money than a non-graduate on average.
In the United States, meanwhile, GPA, essays, accomplishments, activities, and more are taken into consideration when admitting college students. Hundreds of schools in America now admit students with no test scores at all. The SAT is also administered seven times per year and the ACT held six. Many students in the US take the SAT more than once, and also can take a pre-SAT practice exam in their sophomore or junior year of high school.
Opting Out of the Gaokao
In order to be accepted to most schools the US, Chinese students need to take one of the American standardized exams. By doing so, they can opt out of the Gaokao. While students in the US complain that the SAT/ACT scores are too relied upon as a measurement of student potential, they are shorter, simpler, and less heavily weighted than the Gaokao in China. The comparatively ample supply of education in the United States and the low barrier to entry of the SAT/ACT has made coming to the US an easy choice for an increasing number of Chinese students.
