The CSCA, explained
The China Scholastic Competency Assessment (CSCA) is the standardized entrance exam run by the China Scholarship Council for international students applying to undergraduate programs in China. From 2026 most universities and scholarships accept (and increasingly require) a CSCA score. This guide covers the format, the scores you need, and how to prepare, based on our question-by-question analysis of every released paper.
Exam schedule at a glance
Dates csca.cn has not announced yet show the month only, and times marked (estimated) come from the previous sitting. All times are Beijing time, and csca.cn has the final word.
Why we built this on the Chinese curriculum
We tagged every released CSCA paper, question by question, against both the official syllabus and the Chinese school curriculum. The pattern is consistent: the exam stays within what Chinese students learn by Year 11, and it uses far less than the syllabus lists. Nearly half of the syllabus topics have never appeared.
So instead of paraphrasing the syllabus, we rebuilt our question bank on the Chinese secondary-school knowledge system itself: every question in our bank maps to the textbook chapter it comes from.
That matters most if you came through IB, A-Levels or another system. Your gap is not "maths": it is a handful of specific chapters that Chinese students met in a different order. Because our bank knows the chapter behind every question, it can name your missing prerequisites and drill exactly those.
Exam format at a glance
The official syllabus doesn't faithfully reflect what the papers actually test, so we measured the real 2025-2026 papers instead.
Scoring: each subject is marked 0 to 100 and comes with a global percentile. No official per-question mark scheme is published. With no penalty for wrong answers, treat every question as equal weight and answer them all. Universities read subjects separately; some sum them (e.g. out of 300 across three subjects).
Chinese Language
Eighty single-choice questions in 90 minutes: vocabulary in context, character knowledge and reading. This is academic Chinese for the first-year classroom, not HSK-style daily language. Includes question groups sharing one option pool, a format worth practising in advance.
More →Mathematics
Functions, sets and algebra carry roughly half of every paper. Stems are short and symbol-dense (the median is under 90 characters) and word problems are rare. About half of each sitting is fundamentals; only a handful of questions are genuinely hard. At 75 seconds per question, speed is the skill.
More →Physics
The friendliest paper in our tagging: roughly two thirds of questions are fundamentals, and genuinely hard ones are rare. Mechanics and electrostatics dominate, and a quarter to a third of questions come with a figure, so reading a setup fast is a scoring skill.
More →Chemistry
Broad but shallow, with the heaviest reading load of the three sciences: over half the questions sit at standard textbook level, and about four in ten are "which of the following statements is correct". Precise reading earns as many marks as chemistry knowledge.
More →Exam-day timetable
Next sitting: …
| Beijing time (UTC+8) | Your local time | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 1 | Chinese Language | 14:00–15:30 | …–… |
| Day 1 | Mathematics | 17:00–18:00 | …–… |
| Day 2 | Physics | 14:00–15:00 | …–… |
| Day 2 | Chemistry | 16:30–17:30 | …–… |
Every sitting in your time zone (first paper)
| Sitting | Beijing time (UTC+8) | Your local time | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-11 | 14:00 | … | |
| 2026-12 | 08:00 | … | |
| 2027-01 | 14:00 | … | |
| 2027-03 | 14:00 | … | |
| 2027-04 | 14:00 | … | |
| 2027-06 | 08:00 | … |
Converted to your device time zone (…) on the actual exam dates. The official schedule is published in Beijing time, so check your admission ticket before exam day. Since November 2026 every sitting runs over two days. The first paper starts at 14:00 Beijing time, except in December and June, when it starts at 08:00.
Home-proctored candidates need two devices: the exam computer plus a phone or tablet as a second camera. On exam day, have your passport, a printed admission ticket and scratch paper ready.
How to prepare, and what we give you at each step
Four steps. Each one tells you what you get out of it, and what this site hands you along the way.
Sit one real paper first
Take a real past exam under real timing. You get an honest baseline and the feel of the 75-second rhythm. We give you a per-topic score breakdown, so you can see exactly where the marks leaked.
Drill the leaks, not everything
Filter the question bank to your weak topics: nearly half the syllabus never appears, so drilling everything wastes weeks. We give you a full worked solution on every question, so every wrong answer turns into a lesson.
Keep your misses in one place
Star every question you miss. You get a personal error list in your account; members also get similar-question drilling, up to five same-pattern variations per question, so a weakness gets hammered, not noted.
Finish under exam conditions
In the final weeks, run full-length mocks in our recreation of the official exam interface: same timer, question grid and mark-for-review flow. You get an exam day with zero interface surprises.
This page is compiled from public information and our own analysis of real papers as of 2026. Policies, sittings and university requirements change; for registration and final requirements always rely on the official platform csca.cn and your target universities.