The assessment power of Gaokao English: washback, regulatory mediation, and educational inequality in the context of China's Double Reduction Policy

This conceptual analysis examines the assessment power of Gaokao English in contemporary China, focusing on how high-stakes foreign-language assessment influences teaching, learning, family investment, supplementary education, and educational inequality. Drawing on selected policy documents and published research on assessment washback, test impact, assessment as language policy, and linguistic capital, it develops a conceptual model of assessment power and regulatory mediation. Assessment power captures the capacity of a consequential assessment to organise expectations, preparation, and resource allocation, while regulatory mediation describes how policies governing the conditions of preparation reshape actors’ responses to assessment incentives. The analysis argues that Gaokao English exerts influence beyond the test event through anticipatory washback and broader test impact. The Double Reduction Policy illustrates how regulation can reshape the conditions and channels of preparation without removing the underlying incentives generated by high-stakes assessment. Students, schools, and families differ in the resources and opportunities available to them, and regulatory change may therefore shape differentiated forms of adaptation and reconfigure how educational advantage is pursued. By integrating the established distinction between washback and broader test impact and theorising regulatory mediation, the article offers a conceptual model for examining how consequential language assessment interacts with education policy and inequality. It concludes that assessment fairness depends not only on test design but also on the distribution of opportunities to develop the competence being assessed.