China, the land where for thousands of years, intellectual excellence was sought out and rewarded by a system of state sponsored examinations, is once again reverting to a similar practice for encouraging its young scholars. Academic and scholastic examinations were degraded and finally abolished in the wake of anti-intellectualism spawned by the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Since the death of Mao Tse-tung, the excesses of the Cultural Revolution have been officially denounced and its leaders, the notorious 'Gang of Four' [ 1 ], publicly repudiated. In attempting to rectify the damage done to their country's national development by the reforms of the Cultural Revolution, China's leaders have proclaimed a national campaign to promote the 'four modernizations': modernization of agriculture, industry, national defence and science and technology and thereby advance their nation along the road of industrialization and technological self-sufficiency. Basic to the success of this campaign is an acknowledged need to improve the climate of scientific investigation and education, particularly mathematics education. In recent months, many reforms intended for this purpose have taken place and while many of these are fairly dramatic in the light of recent Chinese educational history, none have had so great an impact on China's youth as the resumption of systems of selective examinations. University entrance examinations were reinstituted in December of 1977 [2]. The examination process is highly competitive and the examinations, themselves, quite rigorous. All prospective university candidates must sit for examinations in mathematics.