School & Exams

The vocabulary of student life, from kindergarten to grad school

School is the longest-running subroutine in most lives — roughly twenty years of daily standups, unit tests, and performance reviews. Chinese names every node of that pipeline with precision: the level you're at, the class you're in, the subject you're studying, the exam you're about to fail or pass. Learn this vocabulary and you can describe your entire academic history in two sentences, or help a Chinese colleague's kid with their homework.

This article is organized roughly by the school-day state machine: the institution (where), the people (who), the subjects (what), the verbs (how), and the exams (why you're panicking). It ends with the slang — 学霸, 内卷, 985 — that you'll hear from any Chinese speaker under forty.

// The academic pipeline.
enum Level { Kindergarten, Elementary, JuniorHigh, SeniorHigh, University, Grad, PhD }

interface Student {
    level: Level;
    grade: number;        // 一年级, 二年级, ...
    subjects: Subject[];
    schoolDay(): void;
    takeExam(subject: Subject): Grade;
}

1. School levels

Chinese education tiers follow a clean ladder: three years of kindergarten, six of elementary, three of junior high, three of senior high, then university. Each tier has its own name, and each year inside it has a numeric grade.

2. People

The cast of characters around a Chinese student. Titles attach to a surname the usual way — 李老师 (Teacher Li), 王教授 (Professor Wang).

3. Subjects

The canonical subject list. Note that "Chinese class" for native speakers is 语文 — never 中文. 中文 is the name of the language, 语文 is the name of the subject. Conflating them is a classic foreigner tell.

4. schoolDay()

The verbs that fill a student's day. They come in pairs (enter/exit) and triples (before/during/after), following the same clean logic as 上班/下班.

Arriving and leaving

Study verbs

Classroom verbs

5. takeExam()

Chinese school life is, famously, test-driven development. The vocabulary is correspondingly rich. 考 (kǎo) is the verbal root — "to test" — and it combines with almost every subject and scale.

The exams themselves

The verb pattern: 考 + subject

考 takes a subject as direct object. No preposition, no measure word — just glue them together.

Grading

The big ones

The bad outcomes

6. Achievements

The rewards column. Grades, degrees, and the pieces of paper that go on a CV.

7. Sample dialogs

8. Edge cases

学霸 vs 学渣 — the study tiers

Chinese internet slang divides students into a rigid caste system:

内卷 — involution

内卷 (nèi juǎn, "inward-rolling") is one of the most-used words in modern Chinese student vocabulary. It describes the phenomenon where everyone works harder and harder for the same shrinking pool of rewards — more hours studying, more tutoring, more exam prep, but the same number of university spots. The word originally came from anthropology; the internet adopted it around 2020 and it now colors every conversation about Chinese academic and work culture.

Usage: 太内卷了 (tài nèi juǎn le) — "it's too competitive, this is insane." 卷不动了 (juǎn bú dòng le) — "I can't keep competing anymore." The verb 卷 on its own has come to mean "compete aggressively."

Tutoring: 补课 and 家教

The state cracked down hard on the private tutoring industry in 2021 with the "double reduction" (双减, shuāng jiǎn) policy, but 补课 culture persists — the vocabulary isn't going away.

985 / 211 / 双一流 — university tiers

Chinese universities are stratified by government programs. The numbers come from the year the program was announced (May 1998, 211 = 21st century, 100 key universities).

Spoken usage: 他 是 985 毕业 的 ("he graduated from a 985") — the number is treated as a brand, not a rank number. Notice the digits are read one at a time: 九八五, not 九百八十五.

9. Next steps

• Related phrasebook: Daily Routines — for the verbs around 上学 and 放学
• Browse school vocabulary — filtered by tag
• Start a review session
• Module 5: The Standard Library — core vocabulary deep dive

Student life is the first real stress test of your Chinese vocabulary — it's the domain where a Chinese speaker in their twenties can talk nonstop for an hour. Once 学霸, 挂科, and 内卷 are all on autopilot, you can hold your own in almost any conversation about growing up in China.