Exams are the worst part of attending any level of school. In China, people are figuring out a way to earn a living, becoming “career exam takers” by taking a specific test multiple years in a row.
There are several people who have started making a living from this bizarre job and earning hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from a loophole in the system.
The Gaokao is an extremely hard university entrance exam that many people struggle to pass. Some try for years to study to take the exam, only to fail in the end. That’s where the career exam takers come into play, earning huge amounts of cash to ace the world’s toughest university exam each and every year.
You can earn a nice chunk of change for getting into the country’s top-rated universities. The great part of the Gaokao is that there isn’t a limit to how many times a student can take the test so some students earn a nice living by simply acing the exam years in a row.
A student with the surname Quan has recently been investigated by authorities for acing the Gaokao exam three times in three years. Quan got into Peking University in 2020, 2021 and 2022 and because students can accept or deny attending, he was invited multiple years in a row. For this ruse, he earned a total of 2 million yuan or almost $300,000 in prizes.
“These students see retaking the Gaokao as a way to make money. For both students and institutions, it’s short-sighted and mercenary,” director of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, Xiong Bingqi, said. He also added that most students do take the Gaokao exam in hopes of getting into a good university but some people more recently have been taking the test solely for profit.
Not sure if I’d enjoy having to take exams just for fun but the cash prize seems almost worth it.