The Chinese Ministry of Education issued an emergent notice on
December 27, 2003 ordering high education institutions to curb
cheating in examinations.
Soon after, the ministry issued another writ early this month
asserting that any examinee caught bringing cell phones or other
communication equipment into exams in the National Entrance
Examination to Graduate Schools and the National Self-study Higher
Education Examination scheduled for January will be deemed to be
cheating.
College students in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region,
southwest China said cheating is out in the open and unsurprising
as in their school open plagiarism and mass cheating replaces
previous petty behaviour such as smuggling in notes and passing on
answers.
Xiao Yu, a woman college student, said, on condition of
anonymity, that she and her roommates had witnessed or at least
heard about a lot of cheating.
She went on to say that when she took an exam for an economics
course on December 12, 2003 she saw many students occupy “favorite”
seats and plant their “friends” around them to facilitate helping
each other before the exam.
Zhang, Xiao Yu’s roommate, said when she took an exam the week
before she saw examinees displaying what she called “special
skills.” They smuggled notes, books and cell phones into the exam.
A guy stunned her as he passed his test paper to a woman student in
the back row after he finished plagiarizing from answers
contributed by other examinees. And what seems more incredible is
that the invigilator seemed to turn a blind eye to the illicit
behavior.
An officer with the student affairs department of a Guangxi
university said that students have began to use “hi-tech” equipment
such as beepers, cell phones, electronic dictionaries and personal
digital assistants to help them cheat.
The officer also said he once seized thick, smuggled notes from
an examinee who confessed at last that he had spent a whole week
copying out the notes.
“It’s really baffling to me that a student would rather spend
that much time preparing to cheat than preparing for the exam,” he
said with a forced smile.
“Those who would rather fail exams than cheat are idiots,” said
Liu, a junior. “Today many student’s minds are just not on learning
and consequently know almost nothing teachers have taught them. How
can they memorize such an enormous amount of knowledge several days
before an exam? So, they have to cheat.”
Xiao Lu, a woman student, said that she cheated because she
wanted high scores to please her parents.
“So many people cheat in exams, I feel I would lose out if I
kept honest,” said Zhong, a foreign language student at a Guangxi
college. “In some classes everybody cheats and they would be called
hypocrites if they kept upright.”
And there are other students, men in particular, who cheat for
the sake of personal loyalty to their friends.
All in all, those interviewed said most students cheated and
those who are absolutely honest are small in number.
Some students blame the situation on the lenient attitudes of
teachers and school authorities.
They said not every teacher is strict and there are always some
teachers who like to “wink” at cheating.
Also, many schools give only small punishments to cheating
students, which actually encourages rather than deters
cheating.
Ms. Zhang, a college student who will graduate this summer, said
that she has a classmate who received a punishment of a one-year
graduation suspension for cheating when she was a freshman but will
now graduate like her classmates this summer. This happened because
the school authorities arranged an extra exam for her with the
excuse of “restudying the course.”
Sources with Ms. Zhang’s school said that the purpose of
punishment is to educate and a student’s future could really suffer
if they were actually suspended.
Some interviewed students said that they are not really afraid
of punishments from schools because their senior fellow students
tell that teachers eventually pardon everybody and cheating records
are never included in personnel files as is threatened in school
regulations.
In Xi’an, the city famous for its terracotta warriors and
horses, flyers for recruiting substitute examinees in the National
Entrance Examination appeared in local universities this month,
offering 2,000 yuan (US$241.92) for each course. It’s reported that
most imposters are current graduate students.
In 2003, disclosure of test papers happened at two national
examinations: the National College Entrance Examination in June and
the College English Test Band 4 in September.
In the wake of rampant cheating on campuses, some local
education authorities and universities also launched
crackdowns.
The Education Department of southeast China’s Jiangsu Province
said this month it would bring university heads to account for
serious cheating incidents.
In Chengdu, southwest China’s Sichuan Province, the University
of Electronic Science and Technology of China published the names
of 41 students, including an MBA student, who cheated in recent
examinations on its intranet and dismissed 17 of them.
(China.org.cn by Chen Chao and Daragh Moller, January 14,
2004)