Zainah
Gadoui 711 ELA
Imagine having to spend all of your
senior year in high school studying. No watching TV or video games, no dating,
nothing to do but study. It would be terrible, and the only thing that would make
it worse would be to have that test be the only thing that matters in your life
after high school. Well, that’s what happens to the millions of high school
students in China who have to take the gaokao. The gaokao is basically the
Chinese version of the SAT’s or ACT’s but with much more riding on it. It’s
absolutely not fair that so much is riding on a single test.
If they don’t do well on the gaokao, that’s
it. They wont get to go to college, and they’ll have to go into manual labor.
You can see this with the quote “The boys knew that manual labor would be their
fate too, if they failed to do well on the gaokao.” This shows that it’s normal
to have everything be in the hands of a single test. They cant afford to do
anything besides manual labor, and their fathers spent a year away working 12
hour days every day, and now that their fate.
Spending your entire senior year of
high school studying intensely is the norm for the millions of the Chinese high
school students that take the gaokao test. Having your entire future lying on a
test is utterly unfair to students and teachers.
