Six-winged drone raises stakes in China’s exam cheating obsession

Irish Leaving Cert students are no strangers to pressure, but it may be some comfort to hear of the stress that 9.4 million candidates taking China's arduous college entrance exams, known as gaokao, are under.

It’s an incredibly tense time. Before the exams, many families book hotel rooms near examination centres so their children can study and rest. Anxious parents wait outside, many having spent weeks making offerings at temples to ensure success.

Traffic cops patrol the area outside the exam centres to make sure no one beeps their horn or otherwise disturbs the exam.

Monitors inside the halls are not allowed to wear high heels or perfume for fear of distracting the students.

In the central province of Henan, where some 772,000 students sat the exam, education officials in Luoyang City placed an unmanned, six-winged drone outside the exam halls, designed to detect radio and electromagnetic signals from people wearing tiny earphones to get answers by radio.

And in a major dragnet, police in Jianxi province have arrested the alleged leader of a ring of university students hired to take the gaokao in place of genuine candidates.

The 48-year-old man, surnamed Zhao, was arrested on a train heading to Jinan in Shandong, news agency Xinhua reported, after the test fraud was exposed.

Police also arrested a 20-year-old suspected member of the ring, surnamed Peng, a student at a well-known university in Wuhan, who confessed and gave the names of five other substitute exam takers.

Debate about cheating rages in every country but in China, the integrity of the exam is an obsession, an inheritance of the educationalist and philosopher Confucius.

Getting a child an education in one of China’s top universities is often a family’s primary aim from the time the child is born, especially under the One Child Policy, where families are restricted to a single offspring.

With the stakes so high, it's no surprise that some cheating takes place. After last year's exams in Hubei province, in central China, more than 80 education officials, teachers, invigilators, students and even parents received punishments ranging from warnings to dismissals.

The suspect Zhao gave the exam-takers fake IDs and admission cards for the exam, and paid them handsomely for their trouble.

He charged clients up to 50,000 yuan (€7,160) to get into a regular college, but if the student got into a famous university, the charge was more than one million yuan (€143,000).

"We thoroughly investigate illegal behavior during the tests, including organising others to take the tests for monetary gain," Xu Mei, an education ministry spokeswoman, told the China Daily newspaper.