Online application for the national postgraduate entrance examination for the 2020 academic year officially started Thursday.

Applicants can sign up online to take the exam from 9 am to 10 pm every day from Thursday to Oct 30 at yz.chsi.com.cn or yz.chsi.cn, according to a notice issued by the Ministry of Education.

The notice said the preliminary written exam will take place on Dec 21-22. The time, place, content and ways of conducting and calculating the follow-up re-examination will be decided by recruiting institutions. The re-examination is scheduled to finish by the end of April.

China has seen a craze for postgraduate studies in recent years. With millions applying for graduate studies, China has expanded enrollment for postgraduate programs.

According to a report from www.eol.cn, an education information service provider, the annual growth rate of China's postgraduate enrollment figures has averaged about 4 percent and reached 5.6 percent in 2018.

But the number of postgraduate applicants has been rising far faster. A total of 2.9 million people signed up to take the national postgraduate entrance examination for the 2019 academic year, registering a growth of 21.8 percent, according to data from the report.

Wu Rui from Haitian Education, a popular private training center for postgraduate entrance examinations, said he thinks the continuing postgraduate craze is partly driven by employers' higher requirement for talents. This pushes more people to pursue postgraduate studies to become more competitive in their ideal professions, Wu said.

At the same time, a considerable number of part-time postgraduate exam takers are counted in the total, contributing to the rise in the number of applicants, Wu added. Part-time postgraduate study programs were incorporated in the national entrance exam system in 2017.