Don’t wealthier families hire tutors to prepare their children?

That’s what happens in the US with the SAT/ACT.

I think you’d need free, universal SAT tutoring available to everyone in order to be more meritocratic.

I strongly disagree. I've gone through a similar education system and it's soul crushing to not perform well in those singular events that define your career and identity.

Chinese education is also extremely constrained by the practice of "teaching to the test" to the point that the Gaokao indirectly stands in the way of innovation and reform in education. Schools doing interesting things to improve the quality of education are historically not very competitive on the Gaokao anyway (e.g., some unusual rural schools where students historically have bad prospects anyway and parents are overburdened or indifferent) or explicitly trying to carve something out outside the college track (e.g., private tech/entrepreneurship schools created by big tech companies).

There may be some good things about the Gaokao but having spoken to some (Chinese) teachers in China, it's also a limiting factor for education prior to university in a lot of ways, limiting the freedom of teachers and driving up risk aversion in parents.

(It's also effectively graded on a regional curve, which might be a good thing but isn't meritocratic in the straightforward way you suggest.)

I don't know this specific exam, but most of these can be gamed in the sense of learning to the test. So depending on what training resources someone has available (e.g. rich parents who can afford tutors), I'd consider them only partially meritocratic.

Taiwan and Korea have even "fairer" systems. In China different provinces got different test problems. Especially students from Beijing, Shanghai and Tianjin get completely different ones. In Taiwan/Korea everyone takes the exact same test.

However I've never met anyone from these countries who have a high opinion of their systems. Personally I do think our standardized exams cause massive 'overfitting' issue (borrowed from machine learning). The exam is not as brutal as Korean one though.

YMMV.

>is the Gaokao entrance exams for universities.

The road to hell is built on good intentions.

Having worked in with Chinese people, they always say it's meaningless.

Oh honey

And a side note from me as a Pole - online I see many Americans speaking about how cruel Gaokao is, but... It's America that's outlier. I had the same style of exam in Poland to get to uni, and it's the same in the entire EU, and rest of the world. So I have no idea why Gaokao is singled out.

As the other user posted, practicing for tests are extremely important. I grew up middle class, got an average score on my tests (but I did really well in math)

My wife, upper middle class, took entire weeks of courses and scored higher than me on everything. But I am better than her at math for sure.

Another day, another leftie glazing China on HN again :)

This site is turning into Reddit