Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

Malcolm Moore:

Beijing: What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese students sitting their university entrance exams erupted into siege warfare after invigilators tried to stop them cheating.

The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China's tough ''gaokao'' exams, winning a disproportionate number of places at the country's elite universities.

We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.

Last year, the city was cautioned by the province's education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject.

This year, a pilot scheme was introduced to enforce the rules.

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When students at the No.3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams this month, they were dismayed to find that they would be supervised by 54 randomly selected external invigilators.

The invigilators used metal detectors to relieve students of mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers.

A team of female invigilators was on hand to intimately search female examinees, the Southern Weekend newspaper reported.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at June 26, 2013 12:42 AM
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