Two Nations, Two Exams, One AI Reckoning

Average scores have fallen, too: fewer than 40% of SAT takers now meet the College Board's own readiness benchmarks - the level it defines as a 75% chance of earning at least a C in entry-level college courses. Grade inflation, the faculty wrote, has left transcripts“nearly meaningless.”

Here is the genuinely interesting part, and it has little to do with which system is better: AI is exposing the hidden assumptions beneath each model.

The American admissions essay was long prized as the humane counterweight to cold test scores. It has become the system's softest target.

A growing share of applicants now use AI to brainstorm, outline or draft their personal statements. Survey data cited by Inside Higher Ed indicates that about half use it to brainstorm and roughly one in five to produce a first draft. A small industry has sprung up to“humanize” chatbot prose.

The UC professors drew the obvious conclusion. In an era of AI-assisted essays and inflated transcripts, a standardized score is the closest thing colleges have to a signal that a machine cannot easily fake. The irony is sharp: the very subjectivity that made holistic admissions feel fairer is now its greatest weakness.

China faces the mirror image. Because everything rides on one sealed, synchronized event, the gaokao is comparatively easy to defend.

During last year's exam, the country's leading chatbots - ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen, Tencent's Yuanbao, Moonshot's Kimi and DeepSeek - temporarily switched off image recognition and question-answering during testing hours, citing fairness, as Bloomberg and The Guardian reported.

A tightly proctored, synchronized exam is structurally more resistant to AI-assisted fraud than any take-home application file.

Standardization, the feature critics call rigid, turns out to be a powerful integrity firewall. But that same rigidity is a limit. A system built to be cheat-proof and uniform is poorly suited to measuring the creativity and judgment an AI-saturated economy will increasingly reward.

Strip away the national rivalry and a counterintuitive lesson emerges. AI is not pushing assessment toward something more human and open-ended, as many predicted. For now, it is pushing the other way - toward measures that are harder to automate and easier to verify.

America is rediscovering the standardized test out of necessity, not nostalgia, because AI eroded the alternatives faster than anyone expected. China's exam-centric model, long mocked in the West as a pressure cooker, happens to be resilient to the same threat.