On the Graduate Entrance Exam
Many people take the graduate entrance exam not because they truly want to keep digging deeper into a field they like, but because they hope to first get into graduate school and then use that to find a job. At least in computer science, this is roughly what I have seen. As for other majors, I do not know enough to judge casually.
In fact, if a computer science undergraduate truly wants to find a decent job by graduation, their undergraduate years will certainly be quite substantial. As long as the direction is clear and the investment is enough, they will probably end with a pretty good offer.
Graduate entrance exam scores have already come out, and the next group of candidates has begun preparing. Thinking of many students starting to prepare from March or April, I was actually touched quite a bit and thought a lot. I could not help asking myself: is all of this really worth it?
Take 11408, the common subject combination for computer science graduate exams, as an example. Preparation often requires relearning advanced mathematics, linear algebra, and probability theory from the beginning. Many people did not truly understand these subjects in their first year of university, so preparing for the exam is almost equivalent to learning them again. Studying nearly 8 hours a day, mostly listening to lectures, reading books, and doing problems, requires considerable time and energy.
After mathematics, there is the huge amount of knowledge in 408, including computer networks, computer organization, operating systems, and data structures.
In addition, there are politics and English. These two subjects are different from the previous ones and require more patience and long-term accumulation, since they are largely humanities-oriented and rely more on memory and understanding.
Note that I am saying the amount of knowledge is large, not that they are terribly difficult. Basically, as long as a person maintains more than 8 hours of high-quality study every day for 9 months, scoring 380 is not a low-probability event. Of course, many people in reality cannot reach this result, because the exam is affected by too many factors: self-discipline, efficiency, mental state, information channels. A problem in any link can affect the final score.
Graduate entrance exam questions are also different from gaokao questions. The gaokao focuses more on selection and often designs routine problems and traps; graduate exam questions usually have fewer twists and turns, mainly testing understanding and application of knowledge. As long as you truly understand the required knowledge, your score generally will not be too bad.
But the problem is that the risk of the graduate entrance exam is not low. Taking the computer science major at my university as an example, about 60% of students choose to take the exam. In the end, roughly 15% get in, and among those who get in, about 60% go to our own university. In other words, in a major of 200 people, about 120 choose the exam, about 30 get in, and around 20 of them still go to our own university.
This risk is even higher than opening a 100x leveraged all-in position in the cryptocurrency market.
The Challenges of the Exam
There are many challenges during exam preparation. The first is schedule.
Many candidates sleep at 2 a.m., wake up at 10:30 a.m., and then eat brunch, meaning breakfast plus lunch. Around 2 p.m. they start reviewing, study for a while, look at their phone for a while, read for a while and get sleepy, then pick up the phone again. The afternoon passes quickly. After dinner they continue scrolling for a while, study until after 10 p.m., and when calculated, the truly effective study time in one day may only be 3 to 4 hours.
At that pace, even the first round of review for one mathematics subject may not be finished by summer vacation, let alone 408 afterward.
Of course, there are also people around me who can truly keep going for 9 months: starting study at 8 a.m. every day and leaving after 11 p.m. But such people are very rare.
The second challenge is psychological pressure.
Everyone preparing for the exam knows that it is almost an all-in bet. Once you fail, even if you then look for work, it is hard to have any advantage, because the knowledge reviewed for the exam does not help much in recruitment. Some students who fail the exam go to spring recruitment and are asked by HR right away whether they participated in the graduate entrance exam; if they did, they may be rejected directly. Our grade director also mentioned a similar situation: students who failed the exam almost did not get offers, because companies clearly did not want people who might try the exam again.
Therefore, the psychological pressure brought by going all in must not be underestimated.
What is even more painful is that when classmates around you gradually get internships or autumn recruitment offers, while you are still solving problems that have almost no real meaning beyond the exam, strong self-doubt can easily arise. Especially in September and October, this contrast is magnified and can even cause serious anxiety.
The main challenges are probably these two. As for courses, school affairs, and other issues, they are comparatively minor.
Risks and Returns
Some risks have already been mentioned: failing often means preparing for a second attempt. In the current environment, the probability of finding a good job after failing the exam is not high.
A second attempt brings new challenges. For example, you need to rent a room and a study space; these can at least be solved with money. What is truly harder to solve is the deep loneliness, more severe self-doubt, and the mental consumption of seeing no results for a long time. Some people compare this process to a phoenix being reborn from fire. Just hearing the metaphor is enough to feel the pain inside it.
So what return does the graduate entrance exam bring? An admission letter that lets you continue studying for three years.
But after receiving the admission letter, what then? If the school is ordinary, such as a regular first-tier university, the next three years may only be an extension of the undergraduate years. Taking my university as an example, first-year graduate students in the OS direction spend their days sitting at their desks studying the Linux kernel and reading ancient Linux source code. Only a minority can truly produce results. Most graduate students eventually still go into Java backend, C++ backend, civil service exams, public institution exams, or even switch to frontend.
In other words, graduate education at ordinary schools is often essentially an extension of undergraduate education. Before candidates actually get in, it is generally overestimated.
By ordinary schools, I include a small number of 211 and 985 universities, and most non-Double-First-Class schools. Even some highly ranked 211 and 985 universities have very backward graduate education. I once talked with a PhD student from Xidian University. He mentioned some situations: the school selects a few topics that look impressive and assigns them directly to graduate students who do not even understand Linux and only know 408. After muddling through one or two years, many still go into Java or take public sector exams.
At this point, you may already understand: the risks, costs, and returns of the graduate entrance exam are not proportional.
Then why do many candidates still go all in before truly getting admitted?
The answer is simple: information asymmetry.
If you are an undergraduate planning to take the exam, you should seriously talk with graduate students at your target school who are close to your level. You can also actively seek information on various platforms and try to break this information gap as much as possible.
Many graduate students have said one sentence: graduate students are happy only at the moment they receive the admission letter. Because after getting in, they gradually see the truth, but they may not systematically summarize it, and may not clearly transmit that gap to later exam-preparing groups. So the kind of all-in described above keeps happening year after year.
In investing, all in is always an extremely dangerous strategy, unless you have very high certainty.