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Updated: 2007-06-11 11:37

Many would not be where they are today without the resumption of the college entrance examinations 30 years ago.

China, too, would not be where it is today without the millions of talented individuals that graduated from universities over the past three decades.

University as a form of higher learning was imported from the West early last century. But the examination system can be traced back more than 1,000 years.

It is because of the examination system that, up until "cultural revolution" (1966-76), the well-educated were held in high-esteem in both rural and urban areas.

Unified exams were kept as a threshold for entering university after New China was founded in 1949, but political background checks (such as family background) were also added as an enrolment consideration.

One of my cousins, who was a top student at a well known Beijing high school in the early 1960s, received high scores on his entrance examinations, but his father had been stigmatized as a "rightist" in 1957.

As a result, my cousin was denied university education.

Determining whether or not a student could be admitted to university based on irrelevant standards denied many talented youth from receiving the higher education they deserved, but the exams were otherwise fair.

During the political upheaval of the "cultural revolution" , the college entrance exam was replaced with a recommendation scheme, which placed irrelevancies, such as a student's family's political background, before the applicant's academic ability.

Applicants still took part in exams, but the results did not count as much as other considerations.

The scheme reached an extreme in 1973 when a man named Zhang Tiesheng, who could not answer a single question on the exam, wrote an essay arguing for the abolition of the exams. He said the exams were deliberately designed to deprive peasants and workers of the right to study in a university.

Zhang, who earned himself the nickname Mr Blank Examination Sheet (Baijuan Xiansheng), was arrested in 1976 as a follower of the "gang of four".

The film "Breakup" was typical of values underlying the recommendation scheme. Some professors who buried themselves in their studies were described in the film as teaching students theoretical trash that they would never use. They were portrayed as deliberately denying working people university education.

It is matter of values. The film was trying to undermine the value of education and convey the message that the well-educated should not be revered, even though they had been for hundreds of years.

During the recommendation scheme, many people in powerful positions used connections to get their children or relatives into university.

It was not necessarily because they deemed higher learning a worthy endeavour, but because a university diploma opened doors to the upper-echelons of the bureaucratic system.

The irony of the recommendation system is that while trying to break an unfair exam system, which blocked many rural students from a university education, it created an even more unjust scheme, which deprived many youth the education they were entitled to.

Because of ideology, the consecration of learning as a traditional value was undermined by the recommendation system. University students had a new name as worker-peasant-and-soldier-turned university students (gongnongbing xueyuan). But in reality, university turned out to be place where someone pulled strings to turn workers, peasants and soldiers into government officials.

The resumption of the college entrance examinations in 1977 was not simply the restoration of the old mechanism. With family background checks abolished, universities became open to anyone who could pass the exams.

Not only have traditional values about learning been re-established, but the examination system is now fairer than before. Over the past 30 years, changes have been made to the contents of the exams to better reflect how well a senior high school student has digested what he or she has learned.

The resumed entry examination has changed the fate of many bright students who passed the exam because of their own determination.

The exams remain the fairest mechanism for institutions of higher learning to select the best possible candidates, and for students from the bottom of the social stratum to realize their potential.

In this sense, the exams are worth celebrating.