But Tang Xiao'nan still had confidence in Howard Thorne. The national college entrance exam had only been reinstated the previous year. Because it had been suspended for ten years, the questions for the first few years were said to be very simple. Out of curiosity, she had once found the 1977 exam papers and tried them herself.
There were very few multiple-choice questions; it was mostly long-form problems, each worth twenty points. For the high school students of the future, the questions weren't difficult at all. That was the case in '77, and '78 wouldn't be much harder. It wasn't until after the 1980s that the exam gradually became standardized. As long as Howard Thorne studied diligently and worked through a sackful of practice problems, he had a very real chance of getting into a university.
