How to Prepare for Gaokao Math: Structure, Scoring, and a 12-Week Plan

The Gaokao mathematics paper is 19 questions worth 150 points, sat in 120 minutes with no calculator. That much has been stable since the New Curriculum Standard format arrived in 2024. What changed more recently is the character of the questions, and it changes how you should prepare: the 2026 national paper was built specifically to stop students scoring through memorised procedure.

This article covers what the paper actually contains, where the marks sit, the one scoring rule that quietly costs candidates the most, and a 12-week plan that matches the way the exam is now written.

What the Paper Actually Looks Like

The New Curriculum Standard paper has four sections:

Section	Questions	Marks each	Total
Single-answer multiple choice	8	5	40
Multi-select multiple choice	3	6	18
Fill-in-the-blank	3	5	15
Free response	5	varies	77
Total	19		150

One detail worth checking before you spend money: a lot of prep material still describes a paper with 12 multiple choice, 4 fill-in-the-blank and 6 free-response questions. That was the pre-2024 structure. If a practice book opens with 12 multiple choice questions, it is describing an exam you are not going to sit.

Most provinces now use a New Curriculum Standard paper, and the old split between the harder science-track paper and the easier liberal-arts-track paper has been retired. A few municipalities, Beijing and Shanghai among them, still set their own papers. Confirm which applies to you before buying past papers, because the question style differs more than the syllabus does.

The 2026 Shift: Think More, Calculate Less

The exam authority summarised the current design philosophy as "think more, calculate less." That is not marketing language, and it has direct consequences for how you revise.

Three things were done deliberately. The computational load was compressed, so questions that used to reward grinding through algebra now have a shorter path available. More open-ended and exploratory problems were added. And the paper leans on structural features, the shape of the data, symmetry in a figure, the geometric meaning of a vector expression, so that a student who notices the structure finishes in a third of the time.

The stated goal was to prevent candidates from scoring by matching a question to a memorised formula template or by guessing. Read that as a warning about a specific revision habit: working through hundreds of near-identical problems until the procedure is automatic. That approach used to be efficient. Against the current paper it is much weaker, because the questions are written to look unlike the templates.

What replaces it is not less practice. It is practice with a different exit condition. Instead of "can I get the answer," the test is "can I say why this method works here, and would I still recognise it if the numbers and the framing changed." If you cannot explain the step, you have not learned it, you have cached it.

Where the Marks Actually Are

The five free-response questions are worth 77 points. That is 51 percent of the paper sitting in five questions, against 73 points spread across the 14 objective questions.

Almost everyone over-invests in the objective section, for an understandable reason: it is easier to practise. You can do forty multiple choice questions in an evening and feel productive, and marking them takes seconds. A single free-response question with a full written proof takes twenty minutes to attempt and longer to mark honestly.

Adjust for that bias deliberately. If your revision time is not roughly half spent on written solutions, you are practising the smaller half of the paper.

The free-response questions are also where partial credit lives. Each one is typically split into parts, and part (1) is usually accessible even when part (2) is not. Banking every part (1) across all five questions is worth far more than a heroic complete solution to one hard question, and it is a much more reliable way to spend the last thirty minutes.

The Multi-Select Question Is a Scoring Trap

The three multi-select questions carry 18 points and are scored differently from anything else on the paper:

• Select every correct option and nothing else: full 6 points.
• Select some of the correct options and no incorrect ones: partial credit, typically 3 points each when the question has 2 correct options and 2 points each when it has 3.
• Select any incorrect option: zero, no matter how many correct options you also chose.

Work through what that means. Suppose you are confident about two options and genuinely unsure about a third. Staying with the two banks a guaranteed partial score. Adding the third gains you at most a couple of points and risks the entire question if you are wrong. The scoring rule is asymmetric, and it is asymmetric against completeness.

So the correct instinct on multi-select is the opposite of the one most students have. Select only what you can justify. An incomplete answer is a scoring position; a wrong answer is a zero. Candidates lose more on these three questions than on any other part of the objective section, and almost always by reaching.

Step 1: Diagnose Before You Drill

Before starting any plan, sit one recent paper cold: 120 minutes, no calculator, no notes, no pausing. Then score it by section rather than as a single number.

Now classify every lost mark into one of four buckets:

• Concept not understood. You did not know what the question was really asking.
• Method not known. You understood the question but had no route to an answer.
• Method known, execution wrong. You knew what to do and made an error doing it.
• Ran out of time. You never attempted it.

These four require different responses, and conflating them is the most common reason revision plateaus. Concept gaps need reading and explanation, not repetition. Method gaps need worked examples. Execution errors need slow, deliberate practice with checking habits. Time problems need pacing work, not more content. If you drill harder at a concept gap, you will get faster at being confused.

The 12-Week Plan

Two weeks per strand, then two weeks of full papers. Adjust the order so your weakest strand comes first, because the earliest material gets the most total review time.

Weeks 1 to 2: functions and derivatives. Properties, transformations, monotonicity, extrema, and differentiation rules. Function analysis appears in every question type on the paper, so this is the highest-leverage fortnight. If the intuition behind differentiation is shaky, the derivatives article is a faster fix than more practice questions.

Weeks 3 to 4: trigonometry and vectors. Identities, graph transformations, the sine and cosine rules, vector operations and projections. Spend real time on what vector expressions mean geometrically. The current paper repeatedly rewards students who see a vector statement as a picture rather than as coordinates to expand. The trigonometry article covers the underlying relationships if the identities feel arbitrary.

Weeks 5 to 6: sequences and inequalities. Arithmetic and geometric sequences, recursive definitions, summation techniques, and standard inequality methods. This strand supplies a predictable mid-paper free-response question, which makes it good value.

Weeks 7 to 8: solid geometry and analytic geometry. Both are proof-heavy, and both are marked on the argument rather than the answer. Practise writing out complete solutions, including the steps that feel obvious. A correct final line under a gap in the reasoning does not score full marks.

Weeks 9 to 10: probability and statistics. Distributions, expected value, conditional probability, and reading data presentations. This is often the most recoverable weak area on the paper, because the content is finite and the question styles are stable.

Weeks 11 to 12: full timed papers. One complete paper a week under exam conditions, with the following day spent entirely on review. Do not sit a second paper before you have understood the first.

Across all twelve weeks, keep revisiting earlier strands rather than finishing a topic and abandoning it. Spacing the review is what makes week 2 material still available in week 12, and it is the single highest-return change most students can make to a revision schedule. The spaced repetition article covers how to schedule it without a complicated system.

Exam-Day Pacing

Budget roughly 40 to 45 minutes for the 14 objective questions, which leaves just over 70 minutes for the free-response section. Almost every candidate who runs out of time did so on the front half of the paper.

A few habits that protect the budget:

• If an objective question has taken three minutes with no clear route, mark it and move on. It is worth the same 5 or 6 points as one you can do in forty seconds.
• Read all five free-response questions before starting any of them, and do the accessible parts across all five before attempting anything hard. Marks are marks regardless of which question they come from.
• Reserve the last ten minutes for part (1) answers you skipped, not for finishing a difficult part (2).
• Write out reasoning even when you cannot complete the question. Free-response marking follows the argument, and a partial argument scores partial marks.

The Bottom Line

The Gaokao maths paper has become harder to game and easier to prepare for honestly. Nineteen questions, 150 points, 120 minutes, no calculator, and a design brief that explicitly targets reasoning over recall.

Three things carry most of the improvement. Spend revision time in proportion to where the marks are, which means over half of it on written solutions. Stop reaching on multi-select questions, where the scoring punishes completeness. And change the exit condition on every practice problem from getting the answer to being able to explain the method, because that is precisely the difference the current paper is built to detect.