GuShiio.com Wen| Slightly larger reference, author| Xiao Yao, Xiao Kui, Editor| wilderness
01 When examiners embrace AI
If the AI model has not yet been widely used due to various problems before, DeepSeek suddenly became the top-notch during the Spring Festival of 2025, no matter how sluggish people are, they cannot ignore the current development level of artificial intelligence.
Using AI to answer questions, conduct literary creation, and even engage in metaphysics has become the first popular fortune-telling in the New Year and has become a major use of DeepSeek. It has also been posted on Weibo hot searches.
Not only leisure and entertainment, many people are using AI big model applications to do business. After receiving help, they call DeepSeek, Doubao, ChatGPT and other products DS Teacher Bean Teacher GPT Teacher.
Among them is the examination of public officials.
From formulating test preparation plans and counseling psychological problems, to seeking answers and analysis of specific questions, and forming interview manuscripts, the AI model has become their test preparation tool.
Some young people are already interested in the field of artificial intelligence.
At the end of 2023, when DeepSeek has not yet become the focus of public attention, Daijin, who is a junior, came into contact with products such as bean buns and Wenxinyan in the first domestic model craze, and used them to complete several course assignments. After deciding to take the public exam, due to the high cost of applying for training classes, he chose to study by himself and used large models to do questions and correct answers. Although some statements are not accurate enough, Daikin is generally satisfied. After all, the goal of reducing costs has been achieved.
For more people, using AI to help prepare for exams is influenced by the outside world.
Xiao Yue, who started the on-the-job exam last year, spent a day studying how to use DeepSeek after its popularity, and finally determined two use scenarios: sorting out hot materials and generating interview verbatim manuscripts. This was her workload for the previous night, but now the large model only takes 20 minutes to complete.
Public examinations may become the first batch of industries to be hit by the AI model. In early February, Lao Xia, who is famous for teaching interview experience, published an article “The Death Kell for the Public Examination Industry”, encouraging candidates to actively embrace AI. The public account quickly read 100,000, and the number of likes in Xiaohongshu’s notes also reached 12,000. The mainstream voice in the comments was to agree.
Youyou, who has been preparing for the exam full-time for three years, started using AI to practice interviews after seeing Lao Xia’s tweets. After comparing multiple large models on the market, she finally chose Doubao and DeepSeek to realize voice interaction, while the latter can express ideas through the deep thinking function. The most important thing is that they have one thing in common, clear ideas, Comprehensive, and standardized expressions for reference.
But these tools are not perfect.
There are many problems encountered during use: DeepSeek is always busy in service, the database does not seem to have updated content after 2023, and the content cannot be displayed when sensitive topics are involved; the level of generated content of bean bags is unstable and highly dependent on instructions.
Searching in Xiaohongshu, she found that these questions are very common. As for the solution, most people’s answer is: compare and use several large models to filter out the essence to form the final answer.
Photo source: Xiaohongshu @ Summer Night Listening Wind
However, judging from feedback from many users, no one has given up using AI and returned to the original human-dominated model.
02 Life-saving straw
Not only young people in public examinations are grasping AI, but the same is true for public examination institutions.
Take the three giants of public examinations: Zhonggong Education, Huatu Education, and Chalk Technology as examples. Chalk Technology and Zhonggong Education will connect their large models to DeepSeek at the end of 2024 and February 2025 respectively.
In fact, they embraced AI earlier. Starting from 2023, all three companies have highlighted increasing investment and application of AI technology in their financial reports. Among them, Zhang Xiaolong, chairman of the board of directors of Chalk Technology, emphasized that year that Chalk’s investment in AI was not to follow the trend. Before the advent of ChatGPT, the company had always had a team of high-level artificial intelligence algorithms.
As of 2025, all three companies have tried and released at least two AI-related products.
Among them, the role played by AI is mainly concentrated in lectures, answering questions and interview reviews:
In 2023, Zhonggong launched an AI digital intelligence system class that is taught and answered questions by virtual digital lecturers, and Huatu launched a thousand-face interview AI interview template class that combines manual and AI;
In 2024, Chalk will launch the AI teacher model chalk head and the AI review function for high-quality interviews in the APP. Huatu Education has released the AI interview review product, and Zhonggong Education has established a sub-brand of Zhonggong AI employment and launched the AI employment model., and AI employment direct card and AI employment learning machine two physical products.
Latecomers are also catching up with the trend: Companies with public examination training services such as Gordon and Palm Gardener have also launched their own AI products, mainly one on the spot.
For public examiners, AI may not be the whole part of preparing for exams, but for public examiners, AI is placed with hope for survival.
Pressure has been the key word for survival in the public examination industry in the past few years. Although college students ‘enthusiasm for taking public exams has continued to rise in the years after the epidemic, the public exam track is not a sunny day.
To some extent, they are paying off their debts.
This involves a keyword: agreement class, that is, candidates who apply for this class type. If they fail to pass the exam, the institution will refund different degrees. Of course, they also need to pay five times the tuition fee for ordinary classes, which is basically more than 10,000 yuan.
Zhonggong Education pioneered this model in 2010, and Huatu Education and Chalk Technology followed up in 2011 and 2018 respectively. Similar to Lianjia’s breakthrough in competition through services, Zhonggong Education has also benefited. For many years, it has ranked first in the industry in terms of market share, revenue, net profit and other financial data, and has significantly widened the gap with second place.
By 2017, the proportion of such contract classes in face-to-face courses has increased from 59.02% to 73.75%. That year, Zhonggong Education’s revenue and net profit increased by 56% and 60.55% year-on-year.
However, this is also a double-edged sword.
The contract class’s guaranteed compensation model requires higher cash flow. When the epidemic affects the offline training business of public examination institutions, it brings much more pressure than benefits. Take Zhonggong Education as an example: the refund rate has increased from 44.14% in 2019 to 68.46% in 2021, and the cash flow from operating activities has changed from an inflow of 2.474 billion yuan in 2019 to an outflow of 4.098 billion yuan in 2021.
However, due to factors such as the refund cycle, the positive effect of this move is not reflected in the financial data: Zhonggong Education’s asset-liability ratio increased from 81.67% in 2021 to 92.06% in 2023.
Therefore, when Huatu and Chalk gradually emerged from the impact of the epidemic in 2023, Zhonggong Education was still lying in the ICU. Its revenue in 2023 will be 3.086 billion yuan, less than one-third of that in 2020; it has not emerged from a loss for three years, and its annual losses starting from 2021 will reach 2.370 billion yuan, 1.101 billion yuan and 209 million yuan respectively.
By July 2024, the market value of Zhonggong Education will be only 8.573 billion yuan, which has dropped by 95% from the high of 265.815 billion yuan in November 2020.
Naturally, it has also lost its position as the industry leader. In terms of revenue, net profit and other data for the first half of 2024, it is inferior to Chalk Technology and Huatu Education.
03 Striving for students with AI
However, the other two families did not have a good time.
In the first half of 2024, Huatu Education’s asset-liability ratio was still 80.55%. Chalk Technology, which has become the new largest brother on the list, has suffered losses for three consecutive years since 2020, with two years of losses exceeding 2 billion yuan. It did not turn a profit until 2023, but its revenue is still far from the peak level in 2021. 400 million yuan.
In the first half of 2024, Chalk Technology’s revenue decreased by 3.1% year-on-year. In addition, the growth rate of monthly activity of Chalk APP is also slowing down: from 2019 to 2023, the number of monthly activity users of Chalk APP will increase by more than 1 million per year, but in the following six months, it only increased by less than 130,000.
Amid the quagmire, no one dares to ignore the new hope brought by AI. However, AI’s improvement in the operating conditions of public examination institutions is currently only reflected in reducing costs.
Even if the industry has earlier and more chalk on artificial intelligence, the only benefits brought by artificial intelligence applications reflected in the financial report are: reduced training service costs and improved profits.
The reason is that these AI products improve company efficiency more than improve student experience.
Take the data provided by Chalk at the launch conference of the self-developed large model as an example: the emergence of AI teachers has increased the number of people that a Chalk Quality Class tutor can serve during the same period from about 40 to 150, and the efficiency has increased by 275%.
Look at the student side again.
Among the three giants, Chalk has the strongest technological attributes. Its AI interview review function has received a lot of praise on social platforms. Its advantages include: objective and comprehensive evaluation dimensions, highly suitable ideas and content for public examination interviews, and can also be based on Students ‘answer ideas give optimization demonstrations.
But the shortcomings are equally obvious:
First of all, the price fee of 29 yuan is daunting to many people. Secondly, students optimize performance based on the suggestions given by the system. After reaching a certain level, it is difficult to improve. The most important thing is that AI can only measure standardized indicators, but cannot truly judge a person’s thinking ability and temperament, which is often the core goal of civil servant interviews.
As for the AI interview review product launched by Huatu Education, although the price is less than one-quarter of that of chalk, there are few users, and the current sales volume is less than 400, which does not have much discussion value.
However, Chalk Technology and Zhonggong Education have both been connected to DeepSeek, and some previous problems may be solved or optimized.
However, in the face of free DeepSeek, public examination institutions may need to work harder to retain students.
This is no longer the era when public examination institutions lie around and make money. For example, from 2003 to 2013, it was a decade when the public examination craze gradually took shape. During this period, the number of applicants for the national examination increased from 125,000 to 1.52 million, and the size of the public examination training market also increased from less than 1 billion yuan to 19 billion yuan.
In 2012 and 2014, Huatu Education’s revenue increased from 633 million yuan to 1.155 billion yuan, and its net profit increased from 49.6997 million yuan to 109 million yuan. Since 2011, Huatu has begun to invest in other companies, investing tens of millions to hundreds of millions of yuan in companies such as Yuanpei Translation and Davao Times.
At the end of 2013, marked by the putting into operation of a new integrated comprehensive office space of over 10,000 square meters and the purchase of hundreds of commercial vehicles, Zhonggong Education announced that the company had entered a new stage of development.
Later, the popularity of public examinations briefly slowed down or even declined, but leading institutions continued to grow by promoting agreed classes with higher customer unit prices, combining online and offline, and entering the sinking market. Among them, Zhonggong Education’s revenue has maintained a growth rate of more than 20% for five consecutive years since 2015. It was successfully listed in 2018, and in 2020, the number of directly operated institutions reached a peak of 1669.
The epidemic pressed the pause button, and many problems that had previously been concealed by rapid growth gradually emerged. Under the trend of consumption downgrades, more local institutions have emerged and successfully snatched business away from giants. In 2022, the CR3 of the public examination industry (referring to the total market share of the top three business scale companies) will drop from 47.9% in 2019 to 26.99%. The “Education Industry Investment Strategy for 2025” released by Guosen Securities shows that this data will decline further in 2023.
Old worries have not yet been solved, but new worries have arrived. AI products represented by DeepSeek may take away more business. For young people, if free AI tools are easy to use enough, there is no need to send money to public examination institutions.
