College entrance exam reforms give students more choices

A total of 29 provincial regions have started or made plans to reform the national college entrance exam, or gaokao, offering more options to students taking the critical test, the Ministry of Education said on Thursday.

Wang Hui, director of the ministry's department of college students affairs, said 14 provincial regions have already implemented gaokao reforms. Seven regions will officially implement them in 2024, while eight others will do so in 2025.

Before the reforms, high school students were divided into liberal arts and sciences categories, in which the former needed to answer questions related to politics, history and geography on the gaokao while the latter concentrated on physics, chemistry and biology. Now, students can choose any three of these six subjects to be tested on.

According to third-party surveys, students welcomed the reforms, and high school and university officials said they think the changes encourage students to learn more about the different subjects and that education officials have made progress in testing students based on their aptitudes, Wang said at a news conference on achievements in exam reforms since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2012.

That year, a special project was launched to enroll students in rural and formerly impoverished regions to study at key universities with lower gaokao scores.

The number of students enrolled under the project jumped from 10,000 in 2012 to 131,000 last year, with total enrollment reaching more than 950,000 students over the past decade, he said.

Moreover, the ministry launched a pilot enrollment project at top universities in 2020 focusing on students with special talents in basic disciplines including math, physics, chemistry, biology, history, philosophy and ancient Chinese characters.

More than 18,000 students have been enrolled to 39 top universities under the project, Wang added.