56-year-old again falls short in gaokao after 27th attempt

A man who recently made his 27th attempt at passing the gaokao, China's national college entrance examination, has ended up falling short of his goal.

Liang Shi, 56, scored 424 points out of a total of 750, which was 34 points lower than the minimum threshold for being admitted into the second batch of universities in Sichuan province, Cover News reported.

China's university admission process comes in batches. In Sichuan province, for example, local education authorities set a threshold as the minimum requirement for students to participate in the admission for each batch. Top universities matriculate applicants in the first batch, followed by lower-tier universities and then vocational colleges.

Liang previously said that he would go to a satisfactory university and stop sitting the gaokao if he managed to meet the requirement for the second batch of universities. However, being unable to hit that line means Liang would not reach that target this year.

He told Cover News that he blundered in the liberal arts portion of this year's gaokao, which he believed contributed to the meager overall score.

"I tried to answer the first questions with better handwriting, which meant I ran out of time. I had two major questions unanswered when it was just minutes away from the end," he said.

The Sichuan native first took the gaokao in 1983. After the first few failed attempts, his parents persuaded him to enter a technical school, but he quit after a year, saying that he didn't want to work alongside loud machines.

He worked different jobs, got married and earned a small fortune, while retaking the test several times. Since 2010, he has sat the gaokao every year. For the last two years, he switched from science subjects in the gaokao to liberal arts.

Through all these years, he met the threshold for the second batch just a handful of times. But his mind was fixed on Sichuan University, which admits students in the first batch and has a score far higher than Liang's.

Some netizens have been critical of Liang's "unremitting" attitude, saying he is just putting on a show. But Liang insisted that getting a good score in the gaokao was the only way for him to realize his dream of becoming a college student, and that anything else wasn't a concern for him.

Regarding the future, Liang said that he hasn't considered next year too much, but would stick to liberal arts should he try again.