4 1 year-old was born around 80 years, and the exam should be in the late 1990s. At that time, I could infer the length of my education, because I was born in the late 1990s, and my teacher should have taken the exam at that time, because there are many teachers in my university, usually in their forties, who also talk a lot in class.
In the early 1990s, the college entrance examination was not as simple as it is now. Now you can take the college entrance examination if you meet the requirements. What are the conditions? You can take the college entrance examination when you are old, but not at that time. At that time, the college entrance examination was to be selected from within the school. Not everyone has the opportunity to take the college entrance examination, that is to say, an examination must be organized within the school to reach a certain standard. Only in this way can we enter the local areas qualified for the college entrance examination and participate in the college entrance examination. At that time, it was a great thing to take the college entrance examination, not to mention being admitted to a technical secondary school or an undergraduate course after taking the college entrance examination.
By the year 2000, the college entrance examination will not be as difficult as it was in the 1970s, 1980s or early 1990s, but it will still be, because there are not so many people now, but there are fewer places. The probability of being admitted to the undergraduate course may be 10%, and the probability of being admitted to the junior college may not be 50%, because I didn't have so many educational resources at that time. Since 1977, China resumed the college entrance examination. To train teachers, teachers must have the knowledge to teach college students, which takes about 20 years. So in 2000, China's educational resources were not so rich, and secondary schools were definitely different from the current ones. That degree is at least equivalent to what it is now.
The educational environment is different in different times. You can't tell what it was like by the difficulty of the test questions. If you are interested, you can find some papers on the Internet when the college entrance examination was just resumed in the 1970s and 1980s. You look simple, but you don't know how difficult it was to go to school at that time. What you may learn in grade one now, they may not learn until grade three or even high school, because the development of education is different, and now they are admitted one by one.