When Deng Xiaoping announced the restoration of the gaokao in October 1977, the exam was scheduled for December. Candidates had two months to prepare, and many had not studied academically in a decade.
The cohort included former Red Guards, sent-down youth returning from the countryside, factory workers, and teenagers straight from high school. There was no age limit that first year.
The pass rate was brutally low, but for those who succeeded, the transformation was total. This cohort — 77级 — filled Chinese universities in a period of great intellectual openness and went on to disproportionately shape the country's academic, political, and business elites of the 1990s and 2000s.
The subsequent 78级 sat their exam in the summer of 1978, restoring the traditional summer schedule. Together, 77 and 78 are treated as a single historical cohort in Chinese cultural memory.
Films, memoirs, and novels about this period are numerous. It remains one of the most-referenced moments in the country's post-Mao history.