"We've bribed the exam supervisors, paying each one 20,000 yuan. They will make everything go smooth during the exams," Li Feng, a teacher from No.2 High School in Dancheng, Henan Province, told undercover reporters from China Central Television (CCTV), the country's largest state-owned TV station.

After paying off the supervisors, Li was busy finding doubles among college students in Beijing for two students due to take the NCEE two months later in June 2007. One of the students was the son of the vice president of No.2 High School and the other was the daughter of a local government official.

"It's 100 percent safe," Li confided to the two undercover reporters who were pretending to be the doubles. Li had gotten access to the exam taker profile system and switched the pictures of the two students with those of the reporters. "It costs 8,000 yuan to switch one picture," he added.

"If you score high enough for a regular university you will get 10,000 yuan each, and you will get more if your scores are enough to send them to the country's leading universities," said Li.

But Li failed at the last step to "success." The media exposed the scandal before the big exam, and Li and the vice president of the No.2 High School were turned over to the police. Justice on this occasion was done, but the case stirred a nationwide dispute over the country's controversial college entrance examination system.

Exam that matters

This year a record 10.1 million Chinese students applied to take the exam, of whom 5.67 million will be able to enter college, according to the Ministry of Education of China.

The entrance exam, commonly known as "gaokao" in Chinese, is credited as the backbone of China's remarkable reform-era growth over the past three decades since it was restored in 1977 after the 10-year frenzy of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76).

Regarded as one of the most important life events for test participants, the exam has turned people's lives around, for better or worse, over generations.

"The logic is simple," wrote an anonymous 18-year-old grade-3 high school student from Hubei's Huanggang City, a place best known for its high admission rate to college, on his blog, "You achieve good scores, then you can attend a better university, then you can find a better job after graduation, and then make more money, with which I don't know what to do so far."

Based on China's current education system the results of the exam can have a great impact. For students coming from rural areas, gaokao is the best chance to climb the social ladder in an increasingly stratified society with widening rich-poor gaps. There is a long-standing saying "Gaokao reshapes one's fate" that is rooted in the minds of many students and parents.

"I have a love-hate feeling toward the college entrance exam," said 45-year-old Yu Minhong, Chairman and CEO of the Beijing-based New Oriental Education Group, which offers intensive training for the TOEFL and GRE exams for students planning to go abroad.

As the son of a farmer in east China's Jiangsu Province, Yu had failed two consecutive national college entrance exams before he was finally accepted to the English Department of the prestigious Peking University. "I hated it because I failed twice. But it offered a ladder for me to get out of the countryside at last. I might have been working on the farm for my entire life if it hadn't been for the exam," Yu noted.

In the eyes of many, the exam is not only a fight for the candidates themselves, but also has an impact on their families and even society as a whole.

In Beijing, special traffic controls are implemented on 20 sections of road during the examination to make it easier for students to arrive at the exam venues on time. Parents can be seen anxiously sweating outside exam venues in Beijing's hot summer weather.

In Huangshan City, in east China's Anhui Province, an aircraft was required to change route on June 7, the first day of the exam, as parents worried the noise could affect their children's listening comprehension in the English test. Nutritionists recommended diets that can help students keep energetic, and psychologists offered advice on how to relax.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the restoration of the national college entrance examination. Over the past three decades, almost 60 million Chinese have taken part in gaokao, with 10 million enrolled in universities, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

Psychological pressure

Selecting talent through exams is an age-old tradition in China, dating back to the Sui Dynasty (581-681). As the system has evolved, equality has remained an issue, with many wondering if gaokao is really fair.

Chu Zhaohui, an education expert who believes that the exam is unfair to some extent, said, "We have not found a better alternative. Gaokao is the least bad method we have had to date."

The gaokao system has come under mounting criticism on the grounds that it encourages rote learning and puts too much pressure on overburdened adolescents. There've been several cases in recent years of students committing suicide or killing other people just before or after the exam, due to psychological pressure and worries about what will happen if they fail.

"For the last three months in our dormitory we would rise at 5:30 a.m. for exercises, then study until 11 at night," recalled 22-year-old Zhang Shuping, now a student at the Capital Medical University in Beijing. "Then we would close the curtains so our teachers would not see, and we would study by flashlight until midnight."

The limited seats in college classrooms and increasing number of test-takers have given rise to fierce competition among examinees. Cheating and scandals have dogged the annual rite of passage. In 2006 alone there were 3,000 examinees caught cheating during the exam.

"Regional discrimination" is another aspect that has drawn wide criticism. Universities usually set a fixed admission quota for each province, with the number and quality of colleges available varying greatly across China.

For example, Hunan Province has fewer colleges per capita than Beijing. Therefore an applicant in Hunan needs a significantly higher score than his or her Beijing counterpart to get into the same college.

With this in mind, some families go as far as relocating for the sole purpose of gaining a lower threshold for college entrance.

In 2005, a competitive candidate from Hainan Province was turned down by the prestigious Tsinghua University, sparking widespread discussion over migrating college candidates. Li Yang, a Hubei native, moved to Hainan because he believed there was less competition in the national college entrance exam there, but he still failed to get a college place as he had violated certain exam application rules. His particular case made it into the Chinese media and as a result migrating examinees were banned nationwide.

Reforms

In March, Fan Yi, a National People's Congress deputy from Ningbo University proposed that the gaokao system be abolished. Though a little imprudent, the proposal reflects an urgency to reform the gaokao system.

"For a society that was once overly zealous in abolishing the exam system to the detriment of a whole generation of youth, we should now cherish this hard-won exam system and make continuous efforts for its improvement," said Hong Kezhu of Wuhan University in Hubei Province.

"If China wants to modernize, if it wants to become a developed country and not to fall behind, then one of the most important things it must do is to allow people equal access to education-especially higher education," noted Hong, who wants to see more investment in educational resources around the country. He wants less emphasis on gaokao, and more on students' extra-curricular activities and personalities.

Liu Changming, Principal of Beijing No. 4 High School, one of China's top secondary schools, doesn't want to see gaokao abolished. "Not at all," said Liu. "Without this established set of standards, even greater social problems could arise, problems far more serious than the one we face now concerning gaokao."

But he does want to see gaokao reformed, gradually, supplementing test scores with expert evaluations of individual students by their schools. In that way, he believes, the nation could cultivate an even better crop of students.