All over the globe, national education systems address contradictory agenda. They must ensure fairness, help the weakest students, provide an environment in which the best students can excel, and encourage all students to learn to the best of their ability. In China, the contradictions faced by education policymakers are exacerbated by the intense competition for a seat in universities.

This competition creates several problems. First, to ensure fairness in selecting the best students, university administrators are forced to rely on examinations. Without exams, many students and their families would lose faith in the university selection process and accuse authorities of corruption. As a result of the reliance on exams, secondary education in China is entirely focused on exam preparations.

Some critics say that since Chinese secondary teachers focus on exam preparations, they do not have the time to encourage students to be creative, to develop their individual interests or to work on analytical skills that are not directly relevant to the exams. Besides, the focus on exam success alienates students who do not do well in exams. These students are likely to drop out of school altogether rather than face repeated failure in classes. The exam-centered nature of Chinese secondary education lets down the most elite as well as the most mediocre of Chinese students.

I have done research on education reform in Shandong province for over a decade and always found the competition intense. In 2006, I conducted a survey of households with a child in year six and found that all parents hoped that their children would attend university. Most were shocked that I could even ask such a question. "Of course" or "Doesn't everyone want that" were common replies. The intensity of this desire is unlikely to change soon, but there are better and worse ways of dealing with it.

One successful reform took place in a rural county that I visited during the mid-1990s. At that time, there was intense competition among junior middle school students, teachers and principals for success in the entrance exam to the top senior middle school in the county. Junior middle school principals were encouraging teachers to hold extra classes (after regular school hours and over the weekends), to assign extra homework, and to focus on drill and repetition during class hours. The county education bureau wanted to implement a more well-rounded junior middle school curriculum, as well as to give the students a bit more unstructured time away from the school.

To encourage the junior middle schools to comply with its recommendations, the county education bureau shifted from an exam to an exam plus quota system to determine admission to senior middle school. Each junior middle school was given a quota of seats in the senior middle school, but the exam determined which students in a given junior middle school would get the quota seats. In this way, individual students still had an incentive to study hard, but principals could gain nothing by forcing students at their school to work harder, as the quota already determined how many seats their students would get in the top senior middle school.

The new system allowed the county education bureau to threaten individual schools with quota reduction if they did not implement curricular reform. The education bureau also used the quotas to make sure that even students in the most impoverished junior middle school in the county had a chance of attending the best senior middle school. The reform was a success in the sense that it simultaneously enabled the best students to excel while creating greater opportunity for the most impoverished students.