A STONE'S throw from busy Nanjing Road W., Weihai Road in Shanghai is no less hectic, especially during rush hour, when traffic gets so tangled that the din of incessant, jarring car horns pervades the street.

But for the past three days, sections of the road have been appreciably quieter than usual. Although sporadic honking could still be heard, most motorists temporarily observed road manners as directed by two signs erected there. Written in large characters, the signs spelled out warning for horn-happy drivers: This is now a test zone. Horn blaring is strictly forbidden here.

The move was intended to insulate test-takers at the Minli High School on Weihai Road from noise that could distract them.

The test, known officially as the national college entrance exam and commonly as gaokao, is virtually the only way students in China can qualify for university admission. So thoughtful measures are needed to ensure nothing will spoil their concentration, least of all noise. The noise ban, enforced citywide every year, is as thoughtful as it is ironically redundant, for there already are regulations prohibiting horn honking in downtown areas within the Inner Ring Road.

This fact reflects the heightened, sometimes inordinate attention, authorities - and not just traffic police - have been giving to gaokao, as though it is an event that warrants a massive social mobilization.

Needless clamor

At the official level, gaokao is indeed treated as such. Days before this year's gaokao started on Tuesday, Beijing's Mayor Guo Jinlong inspected the city's exam venues, personally seeing to it that everything about gaokao was well in order.

Gaokao is also an occasion when parents, maybe grandparents as well, are more than willing to be ordered about, doing this or that for their still pampered "little emperors and empresses."

On my way to work on Wednesday, I stopped by Minli High School to gauge the prevailing mood among the parents waiting outside its closed gate while their children were "determining their own fates" inside. Their nervous looks betrayed anxiety, however hard some tried to look relaxed.

As a product of the gaokao system, I myself am often reminded of the moment when it was my turn. At that time, to relieve stress as well as lift brain performance, I resorted to inhaling from a pumped-up oxygen bag my mom went to great lengths to obtain from a doctor friend. Looking back, I laugh at myself for being a jerk, yet every Chinese student, no matter how sensible, was, is and will be a jerk during gaokao.

For many observers, gaokao is a test of endurance, not just for students, or parents and teachers, but also the society as a whole. That so much attention and social resources are lavished on a three-day test has raised the question as to whether we have needlessly overdone it to cause a clamor.

The bizarre phenomenon that college admission negates the need for more hard work has led renowned TV anchor Yang Lan to argue that gaokao is pathetically grueling to the point of being funny. She wrote in a recent microblog that gaokao's parochial focus on recruitment does little to encourage personal development.

Her words ring true at a time when China's universities, unlike their Western counterparts keenly interested in upholding the humanities, are churning out graduates programmed for a specific array of jobs. The institutions are reduced to little more than "diploma mills" or "thesis mills" where a lot of students are either slacking off or engaged in uninspired, trifling work.

Unbridled industrialization of the tertiary education sector, in particular the explosion of university enrollment, has hastened the fall from grace of the Chinese education establishment, as evidenced by employers' complaints that today's college grads often lack the skills and quality they require of job candidates.

Gaokao is widely blasted for its rigid one-size-fits-all approach. Its critics note that there ought to be more channels, like good vocational schools and community colleges, for talents to be scouted and nurtured. The exam is often compared to a single log bridge, with millions trying to squeeze through to reach the other river bank, only to discover things are no more promising over there.

While pilot schemes are being rolled out nationwide to revamp the gaokao system, the education authority's reluctance to relax its control of the process makes any meaningful reform seem like a joke of "one step forward, two steps back."

Against this background, the news that 45 students of the newly founded South University of Science and Technology of China (SUSTC) chose to sit out gaokao has wide-reaching implications.

The university is the first domestic institution to be allowed to administer itself independent of the Ministry of Education. Its inception last December in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, was construed as official approval of the ideal it embodies.

Non-orthodox path

Theoretically speaking, the school enjoys ample autonomy in enrolling students and doesn't confer degrees recognized by the ministry. It makes decisions by consent of the board of directors. Students are asked not to sit the gaokao to prove the viability of an alternative path to success.

Yet the ministry is backpedaling on its earlier decision to allow the college room to maneuver. In the lead-up to gaokao, education officials had repeatedly urged the 45 students to sit the exam, to no avail. In an online letter, students pledged support for their president, Zhu Qingshi, for experimenting with a non-orthodox substitute for gaokao.

Some pundits praise the students for this brave refusal, but also express concerns about their potential martyrdom in the course of what may well be ill-fated attempts at education reform - since the Ministry of Education no longer sees the initiative in a positive light, but as deviations from its desired roadmap.

So what's on its roadmap?

Education expert Xiong Bingqi wrote in Wednesday's Wenhui Daily that if a multitude of institutions styled after SUSTC spring up, it will render obsolete the dispensing of enrollment quotas - a privilege of the ministry - since individual schools have to demand greater freedom for recruiting talents. This will dilute the ministry's power, something it obviously has no stomach for, Xiong said.

There's the rub:

How can genuine reformers like Zhu and his 45 loyal students proceed with their experiment when officials vowing reforms are eviscerating the goal themselves?