Average Students Have Been Abandoned

@mhyzzp Pingping: This year's Gaokao math exam sent a cruel signal: average students have been abandoned.
On the day the Gaokao math exam finished, I scrolled through my social media feed.
Several friends with children taking the exam posted strikingly consistent updates—not complaining about the difficulty, but silence. That kind of "don't know what to say" silence.
Later, I looked around in several parent and student groups, and slowly pieced together an uncomfortable picture:
The exam structure has changed.
Most questions were so simple you couldn't believe it—just apply a formula, do two steps of calculation, and the answer appears. A small portion was so hard you'd question your existence—no idea where to even start. And that middle tier of "you can solve it with some effort" has almost disappeared.
The kids who spent a whole year drilling the "Five-Year Past Papers" came out crying.
Ask them why they're crying? It's not that they couldn't do it, but that what they could do was too simple, and what they couldn't was too hard. Those "above-average" comprehensive problems they spent a year practicing—none of them appeared on the exam.
It feels like you trained in boxing for a year, only to get on stage and find out the competition has changed to swimming.
The Gaokao math exam wasn't like this before.
Past exam papers were like climbing stairs. First floor, free points. Second floor, use your brain a bit. Third floor, need some technique. Fourth floor, separate the pack. Fifth floor, for the top students.
Whichever floor you climbed to, that's where your score landed.
The subtext of this design was clear: if you work hard, you can climb higher.
If you solve enough problems and summarize enough question types, you can go from "average" to "pretty good." From "pretty good" to "excellent." Every step was visible and tangible.
So for the past twenty years, the Gaokao has supported a large number of "problem-drilling athletes."
They might not be geniuses, but they have grit. Do a problem three times, summarize a question type five times, grind through mock exam after mock exam. They believe—as long as I work hard enough, I can get the score I deserve.
This logic was broken this year.
This year's paper structure is roughly divided like this:
Basic questions make up about 70%. Textbook variants, direct formula application—if you listened carefully in class, you can get them right.
Difficult questions make up about 25%. Cross-chapter, cross-module, requiring you to find your own solution path in completely unfamiliar contexts. Not any question type you've drilled before.
The middle tier—almost gone.
Do you see it?
70% of the questions, you don't need to drill to get right. 25% of the questions, drilling may not help you solve them.
Those medium-level questions you spent a year practicing—the exam doesn't test them anymore.
You thought your accumulation on medium-level questions was your advantage—only to find that there's no one else on this track, because the track was simply cancelled.
Now it only comes down to two things:
First, is your foundation solid enough? Will you make calculation errors? Will you misread questions? Do you truly understand the concepts?
Second, is your mind flexible enough? Facing a question type you've never seen, can you figure out how to solve it on the spot?
These two things really don't have much to do with how many problems you've drilled.
No matter how much you drill, if your foundation is unstable, you'll still lose points on simple questions. No matter how much you drill, if your thinking is rigid, you still won't solve new question types.
The problems that drilling can solve are exactly the parts the exam no longer wants to test.
The cruelest part of this is—who gets hurt the most?
Not those who never studied much to begin with.
It's precisely those who work the hardest.
The problem-drilling athletes spent a year practicing medium-level questions, all in vain. The science-focused hard workers who made up for math through diligence now find diligence isn't enough. The small-town test-takers, taught since childhood that "drilling enough problems leads to success"—now the road is cut off.
They are not lazy. They are the people who most believe in the principle that "effort brings rewards."
Then the exam committee simply pulled out the underlying logic of this principle.
If you ask me, why this change?
I don't think the examiners went crazy. They are genuinely thinking about a question: What kind of people should the Gaokao screen for?
The society of the past needed a large number of "medium-level talents." Know a bit of technology, willing to work by the book, able to be a qualified cog. Skilled factory workers, mid-level corporate executors, clerks in the system—these positions supported the operation of society for the past twenty years.
But society has changed now.
AI is here. Medium-skill jobs are being eaten up by servers one by one. Accountants don't need to do bookkeeping, junior programmers don't need to write CRUD, translators don't need to translate sentence by sentence—AI does these things better than humans, and without a salary.
What society truly needs now are two types of people:
One is those who can do basic work that AI cannot replace—requiring face-to-face service, human judgment, and a human touch.
The other is those who can solve complex problems—people who can design systems, integrate resources, and find direction in ambiguity.
That middle layer—"people who can do medium-difficulty work"—is slowly disappearing.
Whether the Gaokao questions have become harder isn't the point. The point is, it has started screening people according to new social needs.
If you ask me, what should we do now?
I just want to say two things.
First, master the basics thoroughly.
Sounds empty, but hard to do. Basic questions being easy doesn't mean you won't make mistakes. Calculation errors, misreading questions, confusing concepts—these problems can't be solved by drilling; you have to overcome them through genuine understanding.
You don't need to drill ten thousand problems. You need to thoroughly understand one problem. Understand every step, the origin and logic of every formula.
Second, stop just doing problems.
Look at things beyond the textbook. Read math history, mathematical thinking methods, do open-ended problems—things you used to think "won't be tested" are now the direction of the exam.
Transform from a "problem-solving machine" to a "thinking person."
This used to be a slogan.
Now, the exam questions are shouting it for you.
This year's Gaokao math exam is just one signal.
If you keep studying the old way, you might be left behind by the future.
Not because you don't work hard, but because that old "effort" formula has expired.
I know this is hard to accept.
But the sooner you understand this, the sooner you stop losing out.
Personal opinion, for reference only!