He Gave Up Peking University to Retake the Gaokao — and Got In Again
Lu Yuandi scored 693 on last year's gaokao and was admitted to Peking University, then threw it away because he disliked his assigned major. A year of retake later he scored 714 — second in Zhejiang — and entered the university's elite Turing Class in computer science.
Most Chinese students who clear the gaokao's bar for Peking University go. Lu Yuandi, a young man from Haining in Zhejiang province, did not. Last year he scored 693 — comfortably enough for Peking University Health Science Center, where he was offered a place studying preventive medicine. He decided the major was wrong for him, declined the offer, and spent another year in the retake cycle that Chinese education calls fudu (复读). This summer he scored 714, the second-highest in Zhejiang, and was admitted to the university's Turing Class — the elite computer-science program Peking University reserves for its strongest STEM entrants.
The story had circulated on Chinese social media since score day in June, but it reignited over the weekend when the boy's father gave interviews about the decision. He told Da Wan News that at the time "the whole family was 100 percent against it" (全家100个反对): parents and relatives argued that a Peking University place was already the ceiling of what anyone could hope for, that a retake meant a year of risk — illness, a bad exam day, a worse score — for a gain nobody could promise. The son, by all accounts, was immovable. His father's phrase: "Nine oxen couldn't drag him back" (九头牛都拉不回).
What happened next is the part that turned a family anecdote into a national argument. Chinese gaokao culture treats the exam as close to deterministic — score first, then choose from what the score can buy — and the "first degree" (第一学历) — the institution that admits you at eighteen — is famously held to define a graduate's prospects for life. To throw away a confirmed offer at the country's most prestigious university, for a major one dislikes, reads to many as either admirable clarity or staggering recklessness. On Weibo the two camps lined up: some praised a young man who refused to "make do" (将就) with a prestigious wrong major; others noted that he had bet a year of his life on a good exam day, and simply won the bet.
One widely shared post put the caveat plainly: this was never a triumph-of-the-will story but "a contest between ideal and reality," one that takes "extraordinary strength, and the psychological readiness to accept the worst result." Not everyone, the post concluded, has the capital to start over — admiration need not mean imitation.
The specifics of Lu's gamble are worth spelling out, because they explain why the second attempt worked. He went from 693 to 714 — a 21-point gain in a system where the difference between second in Zhejiang and a merely excellent score is measured in single digits. He also changed tracks entirely: from a medical-adjacent program to computer science, the discipline Chinese families currently rank as the most reliable path into a good job. As one explainer post put it, the Turing Class is Peking University's long-established experimental program for top computing talent, with a threshold that filters out all but the strongest students — the destination that made the year of risk legible.
The father, for his part, has settled on the detail other parents seem to take from it: the family opposed the retake, he said, but never blocked it, and quietly absorbed the uncertainty alongside their son.