[YoumuChan]

It is not how it works. Depending on the province, student submits a list of preferred universities with majors before taking the test, after taking the test, or after knowing the score. The list is divided in groups, and also depending on the province, the universities in each group may or may not be ordered.

In a province where the universities are ordered, students with the same first choice are grouped together and the said university gets the result and admits top scores within quota. If there are more quota than students, university looks at students putting it as second choice AND not admitted by another university yet. Never figured out how unordered group works so I won't explain that.

There are also nuances if students could submit list after knowing their scores, because universities can approach top students in private and negotiate terms with them to lure them into putting the universities as first choice.

Hence Beijing University only gets results if it is on the list of a student. And it is not always a good idea to put Beijing U as the first choice since in a province with ordered group, not getting admitted by first choice hugely decreases the chance of getting into second choice university.

[NhanH]

Same thing here in Vietnam. But I don’t think it detracts from the point (standardized testing is good for social mobility).

Normally almost everyone know roughly how competitive your own self is, so only people at the margin of admission has to care. There are some majors where everyone is at the margin (sometimes it get to 29.75 out of 30 as the cutoff), but at that point, it really doesn’t matter who you would get among all those people, and the effect is roughly the school pick a subset of very talented and hardworking student at random. Again, doesn’t affect the mobility issue

[lordnacho]

And you have one bad day and you lose your lottery ticket...

You catch a flu, your grandma dies, maybe you menstruate...

[cuteboy19]

Can't you try next year?

[lordnacho]

Why can't you try in 3 months? Everyone who had some unforeseen event must find money to live another year?

[cuteboy19]

With the Indian JEE you just rank all your choices (major, university). The system then allocates the highest available choice for the student sorted by the student rank. This avoids all the guesswork and game theory that you describe. There are also well defined quotas for lower caste/disabled/state locals etc

[thaumasiotes]

> There are also nuances if students could submit list after knowing their scores, because universities can approach top students in private and negotiate terms with them to lure them into putting the universities as first choice.

That seems unnecessary? I asked several students at 复旦大学 and 上海财经大学 how they got into those schools, and about half of them told me they'd gone through the normal process of "take the gaokao, apply to the school, and be admitted based on exceeding the 分数线".

Other responses:

- "I took 财大's own entrance exam, so I didn't need to take the gaokao."

- "I went to the high school affiliated with 复旦, and they recommended me to 复旦. I had a meeting with an admissions officer and he liked me, which meant that I could be admitted with a lower gaokao score [than would otherwise have been required]."

If admissions has this much leeway, I don't really see why they'd need to lure students into listing their school first. Surely the student who didn't bother taking the gaokao at all also didn't need to submit a ranked list of school preferences with the gaokao she didn't take?

> In a province where the universities are ordered, students with the same first choice are grouped together and the said university gets the result and admits top scores within quota. If there are more quota than students, university looks at students putting it as second choice AND not admitted by another university yet. Never figured out how unordered group works so I won't explain that.

I've heard about the rank ordering, but I wasn't able to understand how the system works. As I understand things, the first thing that happens in an admissions year is that the school publishes their 招生计划, the schedule of how many students they plan to admit from each province. Then, aspiring students take the gaokao for that year and submit their ranked school preferences. Then, each school looks at the students that picked them first, and admits them in top down order of score. Then, if they haven't filled out the 招生计划, they look at the students that picked them second, and so on...

Finally, the school publishes their 分数线 for each province (and major) that year, the lowest score that resulted in being admitted from that province in that major.

The thing I don't understand is that the 分数线 appears to be fully discretionary. I am not aware of a rule that tells the school when to stop looking at students that ranked it first and start looking at students that ranked it second. How is that decision made? It will always be possible to scrape the bottom of the first-choice barrel a little harder, so that you have more first-choice students and a lower 分数线, or to maintain a higher standard, reject the first-choice student with a terrible score, and move on to the second-choice group, where you can start over from the top scorer in that group. That will be good for your 分数线. Why not do it?

(The other problem is that the first set of students you're looking at is well-defined, but the second set is not - they might be admitted by their first-choice school. Do you know how the system handles this? When can a school learn what their second-choice students look like?)