The GAKAO exam (Chinese version of WAEC) , is about the most difficult exam in the world. Difficult and gruelling.
Also, the top 10 universities in China have very high cut-off marks for the exam that only the top 5% of students are able to qualify.
I think it’s also the one exam with the most candidates in one sitting. This year there were close to 14 million candidates who sat for it.
It’s gruelling because it has very ruthless time constraints.
Exam so difficult that the brightest students who don’t score high enough to make it into the best universities of their choice pick universities abroad as alternatives.
I mean, it’s very common for students who couldn’t meet the GAKAO cut-off for a particular Chinese university to half-heartedly board a plane and head off to America or UK to study in MIT or Harvard or Oxford as alternatives.
The best candidates in GAKAO don’t even think of leaving China.
Last year, a group of Chinese AI models plus ChatGPT 4o were put through the exams and the results were weird…
The models (especially the Chinese models , eg – Alibaba’s Qwen2-72B) scored pretty well in the language tests.
Achieving an average of 67% in Chinese and up to 81% in English .
But surprisingly , the AI models were flopping like mad in Maths. Which confirmed one thing –
AI models at this time are extremely powerful at looking for patterns in data and recognizing them, leading to efficient summarizations, and what would seem like deductive reasoning.
But fail seriously when tested with hardcore logical problems.
And mheen, GAKAO exams contain a whole of such.
On the effect of AI revolution on the exams, well… Let’s look at Nigeria’s statistics in WAEC and NECO.
Two exams that are known for their increasingly porous nature. A porous nature that has proven to be largely responsible for the abnormal increase in pass rate in the few years.
A phenomenon that has been possible with the increase in smartphone and internet penetration and of course ChatGPT.
Last year and this year, in China, every AI tech firm in China stood still during the exams and as millions of students fought for their future during the exams, they had to do it without any backing whatsoever.
Prior to the exams, AI tools providers cut off services , temporarily disabling features like chatbots, image recognition etc across their platforms.
Some who didn’t disable their tools, certainly blocked their models from touching anything that looked like an “academic question” throughout that time.
Cheating candidates who managed to upload questions to chatbots immediately got errors like “sorry, the image content is non compliant and process failed”.
It’s amazing that the integrity of the GAKAO exam is so high that the whole of China trusts it to be the sole decider of the future of their kids.
No alternative exams. Nothing like double sitting. You either get it once, or you wait till next year.
Any Chinese who has taken the exam will never use just one sentence to describe it’s importance. Gakao is war and preparation centers (lesson centers) are like concentration camps. Candidates are enrolled and remain there till the exams.
Parents bringing them food are forced to pass the food through cracks in the gates and fence.
Also, the whole country supports candidates during the exam. Security measures are put in place and strengthened to protect candidates travelling to their centers and candidates get free rides even in government cars.
The whole country practically grinds to a halt.
That exam isn’t just about gaining admission. The competitive, industrial and innovative spirit driving the wheels of China’s revolution? Na there the foundation dey.
It was under a thread where Gakao was being discussed I saw one overzealous Nigerian mother saying something like “please how can I register for this exam, I want my daughter to write it…”
Me: Ma, with all due respect, please shut up ????????
???? See people wey dey write “ordinary” SSCE, see as dem dress like ninjas ??
Hugo Blan
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