> the same way large numbers of South Korean and Chinese students try and opt out of their similarly hard exams.
Chinese university entrance exams can be hard or easy, but in either case it doesn't really matter because admissions are done on a quota system. When I was looking at score data a few years ago, the threshold for being admitted to a second-tier (δΊζ¬) university was around the 40th percentile, which is to say that if 55% of people in your province are better than you, you're still comfortably going to get into a university.
Individual schools may of course apply much higher thresholds (for example, there's also a first tier!), but at that point you really have to admit that the difficulty of the standardized test is irrelevant. What matters is how you score relative to everyone else. The point of the test is to have a high enough ceiling ("be difficult enough") that you can tell the difference between someone at the 99.9th percentile and someone at the much higher 99.98th. The optimal test for that purpose is infinitely difficult, but you need to balance against time requirements, testees getting demoralized and giving up, etc.
The difficulty is not necessarily just the test but its structure.
Gaokao et. al. are held once a year, if you want to retry you need to wait a full calendar year, and the single-time test covers all subjects simultaneously. To compare to SATs, those can be retaken multiple times a year, and the non-core subjects are separate, so any individual sitting is much lower stakes.
It is not exactly a secret that a big push factor for Chinese and South Korean university students is how competitive their local systems are.
> Gaokao et. al. are held once a year, if you want to retry you need to wait a full calendar year, and the single-time test covers all subjects simultaneously. To compare to SATs, those can be retaken multiple times a year, and the non-core subjects are separate, so any individual sitting is much lower stakes.
You don't get to know your gaokao score when you apply to schools.
But you do know what your score is likely to be; that's how people choose what school to apply to. It's not very difficult to predict your score in advance of taking the test.
Given that, why do we think the annual frequency makes the test "high-stakes"? The normal case is that you go in expecting a certain score and get something close to it. If you wanted to take it again the same year, you'd expect a similar score. If you wanted to spread it out over several days... you'd expect a similar score. There just isn't a large population of people who perform one way on practice gaokaos that are very similar to the real gaokao, and markedly differently on real gaokaos that are very similar to practice ones.
Chinese university entrance exams can be hard or easy, but in either case it doesn't really matter because admissions are done on a quota system. When I was looking at score data a few years ago, the threshold for being admitted to a second-tier (δΊζ¬) university was around the 40th percentile, which is to say that if 55% of people in your province are better than you, you're still comfortably going to get into a university.
Individual schools may of course apply much higher thresholds (for example, there's also a first tier!), but at that point you really have to admit that the difficulty of the standardized test is irrelevant. What matters is how you score relative to everyone else. The point of the test is to have a high enough ceiling ("be difficult enough") that you can tell the difference between someone at the 99.9th percentile and someone at the much higher 99.98th. The optimal test for that purpose is infinitely difficult, but you need to balance against time requirements, testees getting demoralized and giving up, etc.