The Lottery Ticket You Can Study For

Fan Xiran
Jul 18
4 min read

Updated: Jul 19

Inside China's Gaokao: the test that decides your future.

Senior high school students studying at night, Lianyungang (Photo via STR/AFP/Getty Images).

I want to do a task that feels impossible. I am going to convince you that GaoKao, the most brutal, difficult, and inhumane exam in the world is not actually bad at all.

My name is Fan Xiran. I am a 17 y/o Hungarian of Chinese descent and I’ve seen firsthand how the Gaokao system changes lives.

To Western audiences, Gaokao seems like an academic hunger-games: students study 16 hours a day, memorize entire textbooks, and collapse from stress. And yet, I believe it works. In fact, the traditional public education in China has many faces and is beautifully complicated. It brings unique opportunities, and challenges, across generations.

In China people are given the opportunity to change their life, but only once. One of my classmates said it best: “Gaokao is the lottery ticket you can study for.” A high score on the Gaokao could send you from a rural high school in Anhui to Tsinghua or Fudan. The Gaokao college-entry examination is ranked among the most difficult examinations across the globe, with high difficulty and selectivity. This is because the Gaokao exam determines one’s college acceptance, and to many, their future opportunities.

That said, one significant downside is that the Chinese Gaokao system doesn’t promote holistic (or well-rounded) education for the majority of students. A student who is an artist, an athlete, and a public speaker with a low score wouldn’t get admission because they are holistic; another student with a high score but no other skills has a higher odds of admission. I knew a girl who won national art competitions, but her math score pulled her below the cutoff. Another classmate, who never did much out of school but scored high, got into a top university. What does this phenomenon show?

Students completing Gaokao in a test center (Photo via Medium).

As my friends got closer to their Gaokao exam, I heard too many instances of one’s life path drastically altered because of the Gaokao examination, positively or negatively. However a Chinese idiom well-explained this phenomenon 存在即合理: what is real is rational, and what is rational is real. In this worldview, talent + effort = class leap for average people. After getting into a better college, they will enter a higher starting point upon graduation. This way, it’s not really about fairness, but about function. The system exists because it serves a purpose: to sort 10 million students using a single ruler.

But, is the Gaokao examination all about selecting the top-academic achievers? Unfortunately, this isn’t totally the case. There’s a line in my diary I want to share: I saw them working hard, trying their best to study, and like most students, with a 3-day exam at the end of 12th grade that terminated their 12 years of study. Actually, the examination is designed in such a way that nobody could tackle it without significant effort. People often sacrifice years preparing for the exam without proper exercise, nutrition, and sleep. So, it seems like the exam is selecting academic excellence, but it’s actually filtering people who are “lazy”, “attention deficient”, “immature”, and/or “not following orders”.

This leads me to think of the real problem. If everyone knows the fatal limitation of such a system, why didn’t anyone attempt to change it? The answer is short. According to the National Population Census of China, China’s population has reached a high point of 1,411,778,724 people in 2025, showing a significant 5.38% increase compared to 2010. There are, simply saying, too many people in the country, and doing holistic admission would result in chaos, not order. You can't do Harvard-style admissions for 10 million students per year. Imagine interviewing a quarter of Europe every summer. Plus, a national standardized exam is the most cost and time efficient way to select capable candidates. So, the situation never changed since the mid 20th century.

While the Gaokao examination is a brutal exam, it offers opportunities for those willing to take time and effort into study. It has become a national culture where people celebrate the graduation of high school students the second after the end of the exam. The exam is long, complicated and boring, but it’s the shortest, most basic and straightforward way to select those who can comply with rules and order.

The moment the last exam ends, students pour out of testing centers crying, screaming, hugging. To many students, the test is not just a score, but an experience of survival and release.