What China’s most famous ‘gaokao factory’ reveals about the limits of its exam-driven education model

BEIJING – When the alarm rang at 5.30am, Mr Alan Wang and his same-grade cohort of some 4,000 students had exactly eight minutes to get up, make their dormitory beds and assemble on the field for their daily 1.6km morning run, which began at 5.38am.

What followed was a gruelling 16-hour study day that rarely ended before 10pm. By 10.10pm, the dorm lights were out and everyone was expected to sleep.

That was Mr Wang’s life, seven days a week, throughout his three years of studies, save for public holidays and monthly rest days, at Hengshui No. 2 High School in Hebei province starting from 2017 when he was 15 years old.

“The quilts had to be folded into a perfect rectangle and the sheets couldn’t have a single wrinkle. We had 15 minutes to eat breakfast and dinner, and 20 minutes for lunch. All the other hours were spent studying,” the 23-year-old, who graduated in 2020, told The Straits Times.

The objective of the ultra-strict scheduling:

to do well enough in the gaokao

, China’s national university entrance examination, to secure a place at one of the nation’s most prestigious universities – chief among them, Tsinghua University and Peking University.

The “Hengshui model”, as it is famously known in China, returned to the spotlight in recent weeks after Chinese netizens discovered that Hengshui High School in Hebei province, the originator of the rigid regime, sent just 45 students to Tsinghua University and Peking University in 2025, far below its peak of 275 in 2019.

Netizen-generated charts circulating online showed that the number of Hengshui students admitted to the top two universities has been falling steadily since 2021.

The Hengshui model rose to national prominence in the 2000s and 2010s as the school consistently sent an unusually large number of students to China’s top universities year after year, earning it a reputation as a gaokao “factory”.

By 2017, Hengshui High School had set up 18 branches across the nation. Its success also spawned imitators across the country as schools sought to replicate its exam results through similarly strict routines.

Online, netizens were split over the perceived “decline” of the Hengshui model’s ability to produce top students. One wrote: “After going through the Hengshui model, you will lose your enthusiasm for further studies.”

Another defended the system, saying: “My sister has colourful after-school activities and enough hours of sleep. Compared with other high schools, Hengshui High School is the most humane.”

But analysts said the renewed debate is about more than one school’s shrinking tally.

The Hengshui model has come to symbolise the pressures baked into China’s exam-centred education system, where a single, high-stakes test remains the clearest pathway to upward mobility.

Those pressures are compounded by China’s demographic shifts, as many families who raised only one child under the country’s former one-child policy have placed their expectations and anxieties squarely on a single offspring.

Professor Sang Guoyuan from Beijing Normal University’s faculty of education said the gaokao continues to function as China’s most efficient large-scale selection mechanism, despite limitations such as its inability to accurately measure students’ broader competencies, including creativity and other “soft skills”.

“Given the enormous number of exam candidates in China, it is difficult to imagine a viable alternative that could replace it without undermining perceptions of fairness. So the only option is to carry out continuous internal reforms within the gaokao system,” said Prof Sang, who has published research on Chinese students’ perspectives on the gaokao.

Approximately 13.35 million students sat the gaokao in 2025. Typically, about 80 per cent go on to some form of higher education, including regular undergraduate universities and vocational colleges, although only less than 0.5 per cent enter Tsinghua and Peking universities combined.

Prof Sang said that an exam-based system can be life-changing, especially for students from low-income, rural or ethnic minority backgrounds who may have fewer alternative pathways to upward mobility.

He noted that he himself was a beneficiary of the system, having gone to school in a rural area of Qinghai province in western China as an ethnic minority student. Prof Sang said he was admitted to a top university in Beijing through the gaokao, and eventually became an education researcher and professor at a leading university.

Held every June over several days, the gaokao is taken by millions of final-year senior high school students nationwide. Outside exam halls, measures are often put in place to minimise disruption, with traffic diverted, car horns silenced and, in some cases, flights rerouted to reduce noise.

China’s highly competitive education system places intense pressure on students, families and schools alike, rewarding those willing, or able, to push the hardest.

Policymakers, however, increasingly acknowledge the strain and are attempting to manage it.

On Dec 17, China’s Ministry of Education issued new rules

tightening the management of routine exams

in primary, junior high and senior high schools, including stricter limits on exam frequency, as part of broader efforts to ease students’ academic burden. It comes on top of the “double reduction” policy rolled out by Beijing in 2021, which is aimed at easing academic pressure on students by reducing excessive homework and curbing for-profit after-school tutoring.

But even among China’s high schools, many of which are known for their heavy study loads and high-pressure environment, Hengshui’s rigid schedule stood out.

Professor Xiong Bingqi, director of the Beijing-based 21st Century Education Research Institute think-tank, said that many schools’ attempts to copy the Hengshui model have largely failed because they misunderstood the source of its success.

For years, Hengshui High School had been recruiting top-performing students from across the province, a practice that was illegal but condoned by the local government until it was forcibly curtailed by the authorities from around 2017 onwards, said Prof Xiong.

“It was not that Hengshui’s teaching quality was uniquely superior, it was because it concentrated the province’s highest-scoring students. Without cross-regional recruitment and skimming the cream of the crop, it was impossible to achieve the same university admission outcomes,” he added.

At the same time, Hengshui’s military-style management has long attracted criticism from sections of society, with detractors accusing it of treating students as exam machines and exacting an excessive psychological toll.

Wild claims such as allegations that the school fitted iron grilles on classroom windows to prevent students from jumping out have at times roiled Chinese social media. Though later debunked by education experts and former students, the allegations highlighted how Hengshui has become a symbol onto which anxieties about China’s education system are projected.

Some parents who chose Hengshui for their children have also pushed back against what they see as an overly one-dimensional portrayal. Mother-of-two Wang Luan, whose elder son attended Hengshui High School and has since graduated, told ST that the school has been “demonised” online. While she acknowledged that its management was strict, she said it was not inhumane.

“The teachers were responsible and kind to my son, and provided a positive study environment. Students get days off on public holidays as they rightfully should, even in their gaokao year, unlike in some schools I know,” said Ms Wang, who hopes to send her younger son to the same school.

Beyond individual schools and parental choices, analysts said that any meaningful improvement in reducing excessive pressure on students hinges on changes higher up the system.

Beijing Normal University’s Prof Sang said pressures filter down the education system in large part because of how schools are evaluated.

“If provincial education authorities stopped imposing ranking and performance pressure on schools based on exam results, China’s education ecosystem would improve significantly,” he said.

In many places, Prof Sang noted, reward mechanisms, and even principals’ promotion pathways, are linked to the number of students a school sends to top universities.

Calls for deeper reform have grown louder among Chinese education scholars. At an education forum on Dec 13, a group of prominent academics warned that China’s intensely competitive system is failing the majority of students while fuelling a youth mental-health crisis marked by widespread academic burnout and rising rates of depression, according to Chinese media outlet Caixin.

At the same forum, they also called for reforms that move beyond test scores to recognise diverse talents and development paths.

For Mr Wang, the former Hengshui No. 2 High School student, the experience remains complicated. He still keeps in touch with a handful of teachers who were patient and gentle and made those years more bearable.

“There was a popular saying among students back then,” he recalled. “Once you have endured the bitterness of Hengshui, every hardship that comes after tastes sweet.”