Didn’t watch the video, here’s my opinion of standardized testing:

Standardized tests provides two results, individual performance and group ranking. Besides academic tests seen mainly in school, other forms of tests like sports competitions are also standardized tests.

China’s Gaokao is very competitive due to scale (population) and limited resources (spots in universities).

1. Scale

In 2023, there were 12.91 million Gaokao applicants, but the total enrollment number for regular undergraduates was just 4.7816 million in total across 1242 regular undergraduate schools. (Source: http://www.moe.gov.cn/fbh/live/2024/55831/sfcl/202403/t20240301_1117517.html) An enrollment ratio of 1 in 3 applicants seems fine until you realize that most people want to get into a good university, not get into any university.

Looking at the total number of applicants nationwide isn’t enough, because enrollment through Gaokao is by province. The number of applicants by province vary widely across China, from as low as 58 thousand in Beijing, 54 thousand in Shanghai, 33 thousand in Xizang, to as high as 1.3 million in Henan, 800.73 thousand in Sichuan. The number of people who actually took the test is lesser than the number of applicants, but that’s basically the scale we’re looking at.

2. Limited resources

I’m going to look at Fudan University’s 2023 enrollment plan because it is Shanghai’s prestigious university and its enrollment website provides a handy table of figures by province: https://ao.fudan.edu.cn/af/c9/c36332a634825/page.htm, full-scale image: https://ao.fudan.edu.cn/_upload/article/images/57/f3/952bd7fd46a5a8df948d0c31dc97/d1a91020-e1c2-48ba-a27e-7b851495e4c8_d.jpg. As a university based in Shanghai, Fudan enrolled 97 students from Shanghai (54 thousand Gaokao applicants), 139 from Jiangsu (neighboring province with 445 thousand Gaokao applicants), 66 from Henan (province with most Gaokao applicants at 1.3 million). The ratio of Gaokao applicants to enrollment number in each province thus varies a lot, 557 for Shanghai, 3201 for Jiangsu, 19697 for Henan.

Although this is just one simplistic case study, you can see how this selection process can be unfair to students from different provinces.

Gaokao is mainly for students who went to regular high schools, as opposed to students who went to vocational schools, there are about half as many students in secondary vocational education (12.9846 million) as there are students in regular high schools (28.0363 million). Though Gaokao is the most common way to get into university, it is not the only way.

I’ve mentioned that Gaokao can be unfair due to scale and limited resources, it is also unfair to those who do not excel at this type of testing, but now I want to talk about selection in general. A holistic approach to selecting people would be interviewing and investigating each candidate, but this does not scale well, though with AI tools this type of selection is already happening in some workplaces (with questionable reliability).

I think the questions to ask are: What exactly are universities selecting students for? Is it to maximize profit from student tuition? Is it to increase quantity and quality of research output? Is it to provide better candidates for the job market? Is it to nurture talents for strategic national interests? Looking at it from a wider angle, when we talk about developing the productive forces for socialism, what kind of expertise and industries should the state prioritize? If certain areas are prioritized over others, overabundance may be an issue, which is one critic of planned economy, but we also know that market economy is not absent of overabundance.

Going back to the topic of Gaokao, it is highly regarded and stressful to all involved (students, teachers, parents, schools, society), there are definitely problems with the current system. But any reforms to college admission would most likely still require open and transparent standardized testing, as opposed to setting various arbitrary or ambiguous criteria that are more susceptible to underhanded practices.