Parents in east China worried about their children's college entrance exam this week managed to get a flight diverted from the local airport.

The teenagers sitting the nationwide exam in a school close to Huangshan airport, in Anhui Province, were among more than 9.5 million Chinese starting the world's largest examination on Thursday.

The national college entrance examination, or "gaokao" in Chinese, will last for two days for students in 26 provinces, and three or four days in Shanghai, Shandong, Guangdong, Hainan and Jiangsu.

Parents of students sitting the exam less than 10 kilometers from Huangshan airport worried that the noise from an aircraft climbing after takeoff might affect the listening comprehension during the English test on Friday afternoon.

After they complained to the local education department, the city airport decided to divert the aircraft.

China is in the grips of summer "gaokao" madness. Success in the gaokao can change a candidate's life in this fiercely competitive society.

The Ministry of Education said earlier that a record 10.1 million people had applied to take the exam this year, but only 5.67 million would be able to enter college.

A new monitoring system was launched on Thursday to ensure the exam runs smoothly and prevent cheating. All exam venues in more than 15 provinces and regions can be monitored and viewed via a huge screen, said an official of the Ministry of Education.

In Beijing, the nation's capital, traffic was filtered to ensure students could arrive at venues on time.

Their anxious parents waited nervously outside the exam venues in temperatures expected to exceed 35 degrees Celsius.

In Xuzhou, a city in east China's Jiangsu Province, the father of a candidate tried to drive the cicadas from the trees outside the school to keep the venue quiet.

Nutritionists are recommending diets that help students maintain their energy levels, and psychologists offering advice on how to relax.

Zhu Junye stood outside No. 35 Middle School in downtown Beijing waiting for his son. He said he had reserved a table at a nearby restaurant and a room in a hotel so that his son could have lunch and then take a nap.

"My son has been overwrought these last few days. The pressure is terrible," said Zhu.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the restoration of the national college entrance examination. Chinese universities stopped enrolling students from 1966 to 1976, due to the political turmoil of the Cultural Revolution.

Over the past three decades, almost 60 million Chinese have taken part in gaokao, with 10 million enrolled at universities.

During the decade of the Cultural Revolution, many young Chinese lost the chance to study. When Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping reinstated the gaokao in 1977, about 5.7 million Chinese competed for the 270,000 university places that year.

Chinese people describe gaokao as "thousands of troops on a single-log bridge" because of the low enrollment rate. For students in poverty-stricken rural areas, the tough exam is their only opportunity to escape the rigors of country life.

Forty-year-old Wen Xinnian, who was born in one of the poorest villages in central China's Henan Province and now works in a state-owned institution in Beijing, recalled that a flood destroyed almost all his family's possessions a few days before the exam.

"We were so poor that we couldn't afford the three yuan registration fee for the exam. My mother spent the whole day trying to borrow the money," said Wen, who passed the exam and was enrolled by a university in Shanghai.

"Getting into college was not just my dream, it was the dream of our whole family. Without the gaokao, I would have been a farmer like my brother and lived in a poor village," he added.

Thirty-nine-year-old Cao Xiangfan, who lives in central China's Hunan Province, became famous for his perseverance in the gaokao despite many failures. This year is his 13th attempt.

"This is maybe my last time. I just can't let go of my dream of getting into university," Cao said before the exam.

For many gaokao participants, the exam remains a bitter memory.

"There was nothing crueler than gaokao when I was young. We sacrificed so much fun and freedom preparing for it," said Miao Jie, a pop singer in Beijing.

"Many years have past since I graduated from university, but I still sometimes wake up in the middle of the night in the grip of a nightmare -- in my dream the gaokao has started but I haven't finished reading the books and I am desperate," Miao said.

Zuo Chengyi, an assistant professor in Hunan Normal College, said: "The gaokao is the gateway to college. There are many criticisms of the exam but, in today's China, the gaokao is still the fairest way to select talent."

A recent survey showed that 95 percent of respondees support the gaokao system, but 92.8 percent believe the examination should be reformed, according to Dai Jiagan, director of the examination center of the Ministry of Education.

People say that a person's ability should not be based on his or her performance in one examination. Others argue that the obsessive focus on examinations in China's education system has deprived students of their originality.

"The gaokao is a 'single-log bridge' that is terribly difficult to cross... there should be other roads to success on the map that people can choose from," said Zuo Chengyi.

Source: Xinhua