A Small Town Has Become A Studying 'Factory' For China's Impossible College Entrance Exam

From June to August, the small town of Maotanchang in Eastern China is a ghost town. Come the end of August, the town swells from 5,000 residents to more than 50,000. Nearly 10,000 of those are students studying for China’s notoriously difficult college entrance exam, known as the “gaokao," Want China Times reports.

The Gaokao exam, or “high test” in Mandarin, is a grueling standardized test that all Chinese students must take if they plan on going to college. The Gaokao lasts for nine hours over the course of two days and tests students in math, science, English, physics, chemistry, geography, history and Chinese.

The test is considered so grueling that, according to GlobalPost, many students hook themselves up to IV bags of amino acids to fuel marathon study sessions and exam sites ban nearly anything that could be used for cheating. Because the exam is nearly the sole factor in college application decisions and the test is only given once a year, the pressure on students in enormous.

"The gaokao is about the most pressure-packed examination in the world given the numbers, the repercussions, and the stress involved,"Ari Wolfe, an English teacher in Guangzhou who tutors students for the exam, told Time in 2007.



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