It has been 47 years since the restoration of the college entrance examination in December 1977. I found the college entrance examination papers from Sichuan back then, feeling like cultural relics. The language, politics, and mathematics papers for liberal arts and sciences were the same. Liberal arts students chose history and geography, while science students chose physics and chemistry, with no foreign language exam. I took the liberal arts.
If this set of exam papers were given to today's middle school students, it would be extremely simple. However, from 1966 to 1979, students basically did not study. From the political, language, and history papers, it can be seen that the content was primarily political, memorizing Mao's quotations and poems. Mathematics and geography/physics/chemistry were relatively unaffected by political influence. Still, it was common to see students scoring very low or even 0 in mathematics. The total score was 400, and the admission line was around 190 points.
At that time, 14 grades of students nationwide participated in the college entrance examination, with 200,000 students admitted to universities, later supplemented by 70,000, totaling 270,000. Despite the simple exam questions and low admission scores, those who were able to pass were generally those who liked to read, as there was less than two months from knowing about the college entrance examination to the final exam.
For a full 12 years, countless young people were thus abandoned and wasted, holding onto regrets and sadness into their later years.
In December 1977, I was an educated youth in the countryside, and it was through these exam papers that I got into university. In the first batch of my county, only 11 people were admitted, and not a single candidate from my county passed, illustrating how poor the education level was at that time.
I remember history very clearly. In the first part, the fourth question clearly asked about the Three Kingdoms period. The educated youth in our production team answered with a variety of responses, mentioning Li Hongzhang, Zheng He, and even Jiang Jieshi. 😄 I scored on this question.
In the geography section, there was a question explaining stars and planets. A fellow educated youth in the same examination room came out and said her answer was: 'The sun revolves around the star, and the moon revolves around the planet.' I burst out laughing on the spot, tears of laughter streaming down my face.
In those years, there were many jokes in the examination room. For example, what was the reason for the failure of the Paris Commune? Answer: Because there was no agricultural study in Dazhai. In a vocational school political exam, there was a question to fill in the names of the national zx and deputy zx. A Yi ethnic candidate from Liangshan, Sichuan, wrote the name 'Digging Things', referring to 'Wang Dongxing'. He actually answered correctly; he knew who it was. It seems that he was someone who cared about national affairs and listened to the news, just didn't know how to write the name. 😄
Source: Feng Li, Bahu II