Ruixue Jia, a GPS faculty member, has co-authored a book examining the merits and shortcomings of China’s education system through the lens of the infamous gaokao exam
They say to write what you know. In the case of Ruixue Jia, a professor of economics at the UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy, what she knows is the Chinese gaokao, arguably the most difficult and highest-stakes test in the world — and one that she took as a teenager.
In Jia’s new book, “The Highest Exam: How the Gaokao Shapes China,” co-authored with Hongbin Li of Stanford University, she explores how the test continues to shape Chinese society, and also uses it as a jumping-off point for examining the country’s education system as a whole.
Jia said she and Li sought to write a book “written in plain English,” allowing people less familiar with economic and statistical concepts to understand the significance of the gaokao in China and the impact it has on the rest of the world, even as the authors ground their discussion in economic analysis, reviews of university records and historical archives.
Ultimately, Jia said that the book isn’t just about the gaokao itself but about the whole educational infrastructure that orbits around the monumental exam, like a solar system of learning.
As the most prominent part of the system, the exam certainly shapes the curriculum, she explained. But perhaps just as much, it serves merely to epitomize a much more deeply ingrained ethos of merit and fairness.
To illustrate the more subtle ways in which the gaokao permeates the student experience, Jia and Li draw on their own experiences growing up in China as they prepared for the exam starting at a young age. Jia grew up in a rural village, while Li was raised in a state-owned factory in the city, and together, their reflections offer a look into how the rigors and stress of being a student manifest in different parts of the massive country.
Jia said that she approached education as a topic in part because of how it lies at the nexus of power and ideas, two of the concepts that permeate her research: In China especially, academic success is a major factor in determining who gets elite status and power within a hierarchical society. And education — aside from its many apolitical aspects — is also the primary means for cultivating values and reinforcing state ideology and legitimacy.
[Read: Mass Education Was Designed to Quash Critical Thinking]
National Exam, Global Effects
But Jia made clear that the way China approaches education is significant for those outside of China’s borders, and in “The Highest Exam,” she and Li likewise address why people in the West ought to pay attention.
“China is an example where you rely almost exclusively on standardized tests,” she said. “I think by understanding the strengths and the problems of such a system, it can shed light on the debate in the U.S. over how much to weigh test scores in admissions.”
Learning about the Chinese education system is vital for understanding how China has become such a formidable geopolitical power in science and technology.
One example is the lawsuit filed against Harvard University by Students for Fair Admissions, an advocacy organization representing a group of Asian American parents whose children were rejected by the university. The plaintiffs argued that Harvard was unfairly excluding their children from attending, despite the fact that they scored higher on academic tests than other applicants. (Students for Fair Admissions was founded by a conservative activist, Edward Blum, with the express intention of ending affirmative action.)
In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the parents; affirmative action policies, which had been in place for decades, became illegal in an instant.
“Our book provides some answers as to why these Chinese parents were so obsessed with having a single metric for college admission,” Jia said.
Additionally, she noted that learning about the Chinese education system is vital for those looking to understand how China has become such a formidable geopolitical opponent when it comes to scientific and technological advances.
“It’s not that the Chinese are good at STEM by nature or something,” she said. “It’s more to do with the centralized system and the fact that the government has a lot to leverage if it wants to promote certain fields.”
The life-defining nature of the test might strike people in the U.S. as reductionist and a source of excessive pressure, but Jia pointed to the fact that it results in a certain degree of social mobility. The Chinese system minimizes the role of subjective judgments in admissions decisions, like those found in the U.S., which are often vulnerable to corruption.
To illustrate this, Jia and Li analyzed admissions statistics from the top 100 Chinese universities and the top 100 U.S. universities.
In China, the wealthiest 20% of students are three times more likely to get into an elite university than the poorest 20%. In the U.S., they’re 11 times more likely.
In China, she explained, students who come from families in the top 20th percentile of income are three times more likely to get into one of these elite institutions than a student in the bottom 20th percentile. In the U.S., the odds are significantly more skewed: The best-off students are 11 times more likely to be admitted to the top schools than those in the bottom income quintile.
Yet she said that while China’s exam system has many flaws and is unfair to rural students like herself, simply adopting the U.S. model is not the answer.
The goal of “The Highest Exam,” Jia said, is not to declare one educational philosophy superior to another. Rather, she and her co-author seek to present a portrait of China’s system of teaching, learning and measuring success, especially to readers who are unfamiliar with it.
“Education systems not only affect a society, but they also reflect a society,” she said.
