BEIJING, Aug. 12 (Xinhua) -- About 40 percent of the Chinese undergraduates who had scored the highest marks at college entrance examinations chose to study abroad, according to a latest survey.

Most of them settled down in foreign countries after they finished studies there, said the survey tracking 130 top winners at college entrance exams from 1977 to 1998.

Dubbed as "zhuangyuan", which literally referred to the top contestants in the imperial examinations in feudal China, these students were once lauded by the media as national heroes and as examples for their younger peers.

The survey, released by the website of the China Alumni Association, found it worrying that many of the top-notch students would not stay in China for advanced studies despite the country's rapid development in the past decades.

Cai Yanhou, a professor with the Central South University based in Changsha, capital of central China's Hunan Province, said the government should find better ways to attract the talented students to stay.

Statistics from the UNESCO show that Chinese students have made up 14 percent of the global international students, ranking the top in the world. The United States, Britain and Japan are their most popular destinations for higher education.

Handsome scholarships, better employment prospects and more opportunities to pursue further studies in other countries are the main attractive factors of foreign universities, experts say.

But Cai Yanhou, also leader of the survey team, also pointed out that "top in exams" did not equal to "top in career", as the survey found none of the top winners at college entrance exams later turned to be China's top experts or academicians.

The entrance exam is just one of the numerous exams a person will go through in his life and can't foretell his future achievements in other aspects, said Wang Xuming, spokesman of the Ministry of Education while criticizing the media's hype on these "zhuangyuans".

Some of them were just more adaptable to the testing system of examination-oriented education than their peers, experts say.

The media flood their pages with their "success" stories to gain a wider readership, high schools proudly promote these ex-pupils to attract more new students and universities want to show their superior status by recruiting these laureates, they say.

Wang Xuming hoped that future reforms would discard the score-oriented method so that students can be judged from various aspects and education can develop in a more comprehensive way.