Flooding adds to gaokao stress
As if the stress of preparing for the national college entrance exam, or gaokao, was not enough, flooded roads in parts of eastern China on Tuesday made it impossible for thousands of students to get to their testing sites.
The government of Shexian county in Anhui province said on Tuesday that the downpour, which began before dawn, was the heaviest in 50 years.
A student in the county told China Youth Daily that a bus had been sent to collect some students, but “half of the vehicle’s body was underwater and it couldn’t move”.
Videos from local residents showed many roads in the county blocked by floodwaters. Some students tried to press ahead in boats offered by rescuers.
The county has 2,769 students aiming to take this year’s gaokao, but only around 500 had arrived at the examination sites by 10 am, according to Wang Tianping, head of the county’s education bureau.
Because a gaokao score can determine what college a student may attend, examinees carry their family’s hopes for the future.
The county was forced to cancel the first day’s two exams — for Chinese language and mathematics — as most local students failed to reach the two examination sites on time because of flooding.
Large parts of seven provinces and two municipalities along the Yangtze River have had heavy rainfall since July 4, according to the National Meteorological Center.
Rain was heaviest in Hubei province, with more than 600 millimeters. Some areas in neighboring Anhui, Hunan and Guizhou provinces saw between 250 and 480 millimeters of precipitation.
The student interviewed by China Youth Daily, who was not named, said the rain had come unexpectedly, and she and her parents had received no warning.
“It has been quite rainy this season, so we and the school didn’t regard it as a big deal. I can’t blame the school,” she said.
She said that it had rained all night and she woke up early in the morning only to find her community was badly flooded. She and some other students were trapped in a bus on a flooded road until after 10 am, when she received a WeChat message that the Chinese language exam, scheduled to begin at 9 am, had been canceled and would be rescheduled.
Meanwhile, the attempt to move the students by bus failed.
An announcement from the local government, at around 10 am, conveyed the message that the first exam had been canceled, but said the other three would go ahead as scheduled.
Then, shortly before 2 pm, an announcement from the provincial education authorities said the mathematics exam had also been canceled because the waters had not receded. The two canceled exams are scheduled to take place on Thursday, the authorities said around 10 pm on Tuesday.
Wang said the students had been provided with psychological counseling to alleviate their stress at the most important moment of their education to date.
To guarantee that the second day’s exams would go forward, the authorities said they had prepared a backup site and would decide whether to switch to that location early on Wednesday.
The National Meteorological Center issued an orange alert — the second-highest of the four-tier alert system — for rainstorms along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River, with heavy downpours expected to hit the region from 8 pm on Tuesday to 8 pm on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, exams went ahead smoothly on Tuesday in Wuhan, Hubei, which was also affected by torrential rain. Teams of more than 2,000 rescuers and some 500 disaster relief vehicles were sent to assist the students. At a news conference it was announced that no students were late for their exams.
Previously, the annual gaokao has taken place on June 7 and 8, but the Ministry of Education decided to delay the exam this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
With parents, teachers and friends lining up outside test centers to cheer them on, a record 10.71 million students around China began taking the all-important national college entrance exam, or
amid the COVID-19 pandemic on Tuesday, after it had been delayed by a month due to the outbreak.
Students in most parts of the country will take the exam on Tuesday and Wednesday, while in some places that have undertaken reforms, such as Beijing, the exam will be held until Friday.
Measures are in place to avoid the spread of the novel coronavirus during the which will be the largest organized gathering of people since the start of the outbreak.
Students are required to have their temperatures checked before they can enter the test centers, and only those with temperatures below 37.3 C are allowed in.
Quarantine test rooms are available for students if they show symptoms on exam day, with each room hosting no more than four students, and each test center has at least three quarantine rooms.
Students and the 945,000 monitors are required to wear masks, though students in low-risk areas of infection can take them off during the test.
In Beijing, where a new wave of cases have been reported since last month, the number of students allowed in each test room has been reduced from 30 to 20 this year so that students can be kept at least 2 meters apart.
The test centers are using air conditioners to keep the rooms cool while also keeping windows open to make sure the rooms are ventilated.
Outside the test center at the Chaoyang School of the High School Affiliated to Renmin University of China, parents dropped off their children early in the morning, wished them good luck and waited outside the test center during the first 2.5-hour exam on the Chinese language.
Wearing masks and standing under trees or umbrellas, they seemed more nervous than their children as they chatted with each other to pass the time and exchanged tips about how to make sure their children can eat and rest properly during the four-day exam.
One of the parents, Wang Jiao, said she wanted her daughter to see her as soon as she walked out of the test room.
“I am very proud of her for all the effort she put into preparing for the exam, especially during the epidemic,” she said. “No matter how the results go, the is a valuable experience.”
“The final year of high school is filled with challenges, and it is more stressful this year as the exam has been delayed due to the COVID-19 epidemic,” said a teacher surnamed Shi from the Shanghai Experimental School.
“We’ve been focused on psychological counseling for students, and so far, they are in a stable mood,” Shi told local media ThePaper.cn.
Yan Jie, a student from Beijing Zhongguancun Foreign Language School who took the on Tuesday at Zhongguancun High School, the largest testing center in Beijing this year, said the college entrance tests are much easier than what she expected as the COVID-19 epidemic had lowered the difficulty of the exams.
“There were some blind spots during the Chinese test, but mostly I answered those questions smoothly,” the 19-year-old said.
Yan’s classmate, Wu Tong, 18, said the test-takers at the high school had plenty of room.
“Around 20 students sat in
aclassroom, which previously held about 30 students tightly,” she said, adding that taking the nucleic acid test is necessary to enter the test center for the exam.
Some parents have made extra efforts to bestow good fortune upon their children.
Jia Ling, mother of a high school student in Beijing, told China Daily that she wore a red, tailor-made traditional or cheongsam, to the test center for good luck.
Red is traditionally associated with good fortune in China, and
shares a character that is used in the Chinese phrase “success at first attempt”, or
She also drove her son to the test center in a BMW, as the Chinese translation of the brand’s name
shares a character used in the Chinese phrase “success on arrival”, or
She wore Nike shoes for the resemblance between the company’s “swoosh” logo and the universal symbol of success, the tick.
“My son had a good laugh about such superstitions, but I am serious,” she said. “That’s the least I can do.”