Improving the life-changing national college entrance exam is crucial, yet educators say challenges remain.
Reform of the national college entrance exam became one of the most heated topics covered during the annual session of the country's top legislature in March.
Deputies of the National People's Congress gathered in Beijing to discuss the progress of the reform. They also expressed their hopes and concerns for the measures that would affect young Chinese people across the country.
The national college entrance exam, also called the gaokao, was launched in 1952 and resumed in 1977 after being suspended during the "cultural revolution" (1966-76). It has been a crucial, life-changing event for most Chinese high school students for decades.
The standardized exam aims to provide fair access to universities to all high school graduates, rich or poor. Universities also use it to help them select potential talent.
But there has also been criticism of the system, including concerns about corruption, regional discrimination and the huge psychological pressure that students suffer from the exams. These have helped fuel calls for more reform.
The education sector rolled out measures for change following a comprehensive plan for reform launched by the State Council in September.
"In 2015, universities will allocate another 20,000 seats for provinces in the middle and western areas to narrow the gap between provinces and regions with the lowest college enrollment rate and the national average," said Education Minister Yuan Guiren, adding that the reform will help ensure nationwide equality in higher education.
The ministry is working on policies to ensure equality and increase flexibility, he said.
Li Yuanyuan, president of Jilin University, saw the reform in a positive and optimistic way.
He believed that fairness is the essence of gaokao.
"Fairness is the bottom line of the reform, which will fail if the bottom line is ignored," he said, adding that universities are eager for the change because it provides more autonomy for them to choose suitable talent.
Under the current system, universities have less power to recruit students. They rely on one examination, unlike many universities in the West that have complete autonomy in choosing students.
Li also saw university self-discipline as an issue to address in the reform.
The plans for reform included a three-year transition and preparation for education authorities, changes in content and forms, and a reduction in all kinds of special recruitment such as enrolling students with artistic and athletic talent at lower scores and giving preferential policies to rural areas.
Pilot programs were launched last year in Zhejiang province and Shanghai. Comprehensive reform will begin in 2017.The reform should ideally be carried out by 2020.
But Ge Jianxiong, a history professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, firmly opposes the reform plan and "completely disagrees "with it.
"Our compulsory education is not about sending all students to universities. Instead, it is essential to guide the distribution of students, training 60 percent of them to be ordinary members of the labor force," he said, adding that without the appropriate distribution, students, parents and society will still hold the old view of making gaokao as the only way to success.
"Any reform would fail under such pressure. The core conflict in gaokao is not the examination itself, but the pressure added by the whole of society," he said, adding that the gross admission rate of Chinese universities is 40 percent, but the education authorities do not provide acceptable alternative plans for the remainder.
"That's why all students still rush to gaokao."
Gong Ke, president of Tianjin's Nankai University, which is rated as one of the top 10 universities in China, said the challenge of the gaokao system is the shortage of good higher education resources.
"It is an unbalanced demand and supply relationship in education resources ... there are only about 30 'good' universities in people's view, and about 10 million examinees, but these schools only admit 150,000 students, about 1.5 percent of the total," he said.
The key is to increase investment in education, he said.
"In Tianjin, if a student is not able to go to Nankai, people will be fine with other options," he said.
Calls for gaokao reform were made more than a decade ago.
Slight reform of examination content began in 2003, when a number of provinces and cities, including Jiangsu, Beijing and Tianjin, were allowed to take individual examinations rather than standardized tests.
Last year, 15 provinces and regions adopted the national unified examination papers and 16 took individual tests.
Subjects varied in different provinces and regions. Generally, science students did not need to take humanity subjects, while art students did not need to take science subjects such as physics and chemistry.
The new reform did away with the labeling of "science or art" students, requiring all students to take three subjects in standardized tests: Chinese, mathematics and a second language, mostly English, with two opportunities to take the foreign test.
Students are allowed to choose other subjects, including political science, history, geography, physics, chemistry and biology, depending on personal interests and school requirements. Scores in these subjects are added to the total for the national entrance exam.
The reform is also encouraging more provinces to join the standardized examination.
The Education Ministry has also asked all provincial education authorities to implement reform plans before June.
Li Zhen, the director of the Jilin Education Examination Authority, sees gaokao reform as necessary.
"The country's economic conditions have changed and the need for talent is different from before," she said, adding that the country now needs talent with innovative ability.
"Using one single paper and one examination can be hard to gauge a student's potential for innovation," she said.
Li Yuanyuan, the president of Jilin University, which is the top-ranked university in the country's northeast and one of the top 10 nationwide, said the reform needs time to prove itself, and he urged society to be patient with it.
"We should be patient and confident in the reform. If everyone believed it is something that must be done, it should be allowed to take the first step," he said, adding that the reform can be adjusted accordingly.
