Beijing's 2015 Gaokao top scorer Liu Zhixin. (Photo/People's Daily Online)
(ECNS) - Among the top scorers on China's all-important college entrance exam, known as the Gaokao, female high school students are performing increasingly better than male students, the Beijing Times reported.
The top scorer on the Goakao is commonly called a zhuangyuan, a title previously given to the scholar with the highest score on the Imperial Exams. In China's current education system, high school graduates choose either a liberal arts-based Gaokao or a science-based one. This also means there are at least two zhuangyuan at the county, city, province and national levels.
An analysis of zhuangyuan in China's 31 provincial-level regions from 2000-2014 shows that female champion students accounted for 52.65 percent. Prior to 1999, male students dominated the top scorers.
More importantly, in the past four years, female students snatched more top positions from male students each year. In 2014, it increased to 59.57 percent, 4.69 percentage points more than 2013. In China's economic powerhouse of Shanghai, 60 percent of zhuangyuan from 2000 to 2012 were girls.
The trend is also true in Beijing. For the second year, girls took top scores in both the liberal arts and science Gaokao. In a further analysis of Beijing's six districts, nine zhuangyuan were girls and only four were boys. In Beijing's Haidian district, a boy and a girl tied for first place.
According to conventional wisdom, boys perform better than girls in the sciences. But in Beijing's six districts, four out of the six top science scorers were girls.
Experts say this gender difference is mainly due to the structure of the Gaokao.
Wei Yong, a teacher of history at Beijing National Day School, says boys have lost their advantage on the Gaokao since the difficulty of the mathematics was lowered after 1999.
Chu Chaohui, a researcher at the National Institute of Education Sciences, says Beijing's Gaokao is getting relatively easier.
