The Guangdong Provincial Education Department released a circular Sunday, requesting that special working groups be set up across the province to carry out a special action against student migration for the national college entrance exams (NCEE), which is also known as the “gaokao,” news outlet Nanfang Plus reported Sunday.
The circular points out that an investigation should be launched before Friday to look into the legitimacy of the status and household registration of students who have transferred to senior high schools in Guangdong from other provinces.
The circular is a response to the heated discussion among Shenzhen parents recently, which was triggered by the results of a mock exam for the city’s students who are expecting to sit the gaokao in about a month.
According to the exam results circulated online, students from Shenzhen Fuyuan School have occupied six spots among the top 10 students in science and engineering, while students from the city’s four traditionally strong high schools only took four places, according to a news report from sznews.com.
Although 16 of the top 100 students are from Fuyuan School, no more than 30 students have reached the top 500.
A comparison showed that 144 students from Shenzhen Middle School alone have made it into the top 500, according to sznews.com.
Some parents claimed that the admissions scores of Fuyuan School for senior high school students were about 100 points lower than those of the four famous schools in 2016, which indicated that Fuyuan School had no advantages in recruiting top students.
A parent has also pointed out that nine students from Fuyuan School had been enrolled at Tsinghua University and Peking University in 2018, but five of them had studied at Hengshui High School in Hebei Province. The school is known for its high university enrollment rate and strict discipline.
One parent said these students might have acquired a Shenzhen hukou and transferred to local schools before their sophomore or senior year. But the students themselves had actually been studying at Hengshui High School until they sat the gaokao in Shenzhen.
According to the current gaokao system, there are certain restrictions on the enrollment plan of colleges and universities in various provinces. Thus, these parents believe that speculative “gaokao migration” will greatly affect the university enrollment of Shenzhen students if it does exist.