Standardized Testing for College Entrance: Evidence from a Major Examination Reform in China

We study the impact of the reform of China’s unified college entrance examination on the admission opportunities of better-performing students. In 2010, China started to transform the province-designed National College Entrance Examinations into a unified system. In the new system, besides the admission vacancies conventionally fixed in each province, colleges can refer to an across-province comparison of students’ grades to allocate a small number of bonus admission vacancies among the in-reform provinces. Ideally, this may incentivize students from a province to make extra efforts to compete with students from other provinces, and reward a better-performing province with more bonus admission vacancies. We reveal a fact that colleges avoided allocating bonus admission vacancies, but propose that students would always take the across-province comparison as true and make extra but useless efforts. Drawing on a sample including the observations of 13 provinces in two subjects from 2010 to 2020, we conduct a difference-in-differences analysis to evaluate the effect of the examination reform on the proportion of high-grade students in an in-reform province. We also use triple difference estimators to evaluate how the treatment effect is contingent on the number of fixed admission vacancies in a province. We find that students in the provinces with fewer fixed admission vacancies would make more extra efforts to perform well in an across-province comparison, while students in the provinces with more fixed admission vacancies had less incentive to compete for bonus admission vacancies that were trivial to them. This implies that the examination reform reinforced rather than decreased the inequality rooted in colleges’ non-transparent fixed admission vacancy allocations.