China's College Entrance Exam--A Good Business?

So the final scores of the college entrance exam in China is out. Assisted with computerized scoring system, many college junior and senior students, as well as graduate students, helped with tens of thousands of teachers nationwide on evaluating the tests in different subjects.

9.63 million exam takers, means 9.33 million students* 4 subjects (Chinese, English, Math, Sciences/ Humanities) per student * 20 min on evaluating each exam book = 12.32 Million working hours needed to grade the tests.

12.32 million hours, if teachers and test grader assistants are paid on average $3 per hour, the total cost of just on graders, is $37 million.

As far as I know from my family relatives and friends' personal experiences of helping with the grading, the pay is most of the time on the range of 30RMB to 50 RMB per hour, which equals to $4.62 to $7.7, with really sweet subsidies on hotel accommodations, food, snacks, etc.

That is just the manpower part. The cost of forces focused on security for the grading process is another big expense item. During the grading, all test graders, whether you are a high school teacher or part-time assistant, everyone is "quarantined" in buildings that serves as both working zone and accommodation zone. Existing and reentering will be like passing the security of CIA building (my assumptions from these spy movies!), several rounds of checks to be done and paper work to sign.

Let us give a "facility overhead multiplier" of 0.15 to the man power part, which will make the total cost of grading the CEE so far reaching $37/3*5 * 1.15 = $71 million.

I searched and found that on average the fees paid by exam takers per person is roughly 130RMB, or, $20. So the total fees collected from students are $ 186.6 million.

I know that making student final test score/results available online and via telephone system also costs a lot, but whether it can justify the $110million surplus?

It seems that running a test business is really a sweet business, no doubt ETS, College Board, IB, etc. are all spending so extravagantly on advertising. Don't know who will be the first ice-breaking dealer and get a share from the National Edu Board ministered CEE in China?

The Next Step of the 9.33 Million Fighters

The Hechinger Report followed up with me after the China Scope NYC Conference in March 2011, and they produced a chart of better quality than my own ppt illustrations to demonstrate the hours Chinese students spend on studying by stages of a student when s/he is climbing up along the school system.

And then the big days came for the 9.33 million fighters on Jun 7th to 9th: Gao Kao-- the college entrance exam. This year, according to the Chinese Education Ministry's University Recruiting Plan, 72% of the exam takes, or, 6.72 million freshmen students will enroll to college in September. Would the exam-kungfu-warriors be expecting that a lot of them will spend a significant amount of their precious college years "meditating" in classrooms like this?



Especially when the graduates from college this year hits a historical peak 7.58 million, with a 89% employment rate after 6 months of searching , I hope the class of 2011 will not have to fight again as how they did through their K-12 years when they will go to the labor market in 2015. After all, a scene like the one below is not encouraging to anyone who believes that "education makes a difference" when they know the crowds are fighting for jobs which pays less than $300/month.