How China's innovative cheats tap hi-tech to beat exams
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The gaokao – China’s make-or-break college entrance exams – start on Thursday and will take place across the mainland through Saturday.
And while thousands of students will cope with the most important exam in their life – an assessment that can set the course for their future – by studying, studying and studying some more, there always seem to be others who will try to get better scores by cheating.
Even though cheating carries a punishment of up to seven years in jail under Chinese law, there is no end to the schemes some will use to try to gain an edge over the millions of Chinese youth competing fiercely for admission into the country’s top universities.
But even as methods of cheating change fast, authorities, too, are updating their technologies and tactics, to keep up with the cheaters.
This year in Inner Mongolia, education authorities will use a finger vein recognition system instead of the traditional method of finger print verification to confirm that the people sitting for gaokao are the bona fide candidates.
Parents see off students travelling to attend gaokao from Maotanchang Middle School in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui. The school is known for training students to obtain high scores in the annual college entrance examinations. Photo: CNS
Meanwhile, in central China’s Hubei province, police will inspect all property around school areas.
They will take an especially close look at short-term rental spaces near schools, where someone receiving test questions via a wireless device ostensibly could send answers back to a test taker in the examination room, China National Radio reported on Monday.
Commonly deployed as well will be facial and fingerprint recognition systems, metal detectors that keep mobile phones and other electronic devices out of the exam room, detectors that can find wireless earphones, vehicles and drones that block signals around a school, and location monitoring that determines the whereabouts of test papers.
Chinese vice-premier Sun Chunlan goes over preparations for the annual national college entrance exam at the National Education Examinations Authority in Beijing. Photo: Xinhua
During the examination period, in areas such as the north-central autonomous region of Ningxia, universities will ban students from leaving campus without an instructor’s permission, to prevent them from working as surrogates for gaokao candidates.
Students who are allowed to leave must report their location while off campus.
But the gaokao is not the only exam that cheaters have targeted in China. Innovative cheating tools have been found in other important tests across the country.
Here is a look at some of the most notorious cases:
Students have been known to use fingerprint membranes to cheat on China’s notorious college entrance examination. Photo: CCTV
Fake fingerprints
In one of the biggest organised cheating cases in China’s history, more than 120 university students used fake fingerprints to get into the test room and take the gaokao for high school graduates who had paid thousands of yuan for the service in the central province of Henan in June 2014.
The organisers bribed invigilators to help the university students, who wore membranes with the candidate’s fingerprints on their fingers, enter the examination room and take the exams for the candidates, according to an investigative report by China Central Television.
The substitutes each received 5,000 yuan (US$782) as a down payment and were promised tens of thousands of yuan more if they got good test scores.
Henan authorities later found that 127 college students had been involved. The Ministry of Education, which soon took over the case, eventually punished 58 teachers, 21 students and three agents.
The substitutes were all expelled from their universities, and the high school students were suspended from taking any major national exam for three years.
An eraser containing a signal transmitter helped 27 people get the right answers on a pharmacist licensing exam in Jiangsu province. Photo: CCTV
Electronic ‘erasers’
An eraser containing a signal transmitter helped 27 people get the right answers on a pharmacist licensing exam in Jiangsu province in November.
Inside a rubber case that resembled an eraser, an integrated circuit allowed the exam takers to send the questions to people outside the test rooms and receive answers from them, China Central Television reported.
A patrolling invigilator who was a police officer suspected the eraser might be part of an effort to cheat on the exam after noticing that a woman taking the test was frequently staring at her eraser, according to the report.
Police later detained 10 people for selling cheating tools and seized more than 100 electronic devices designed for cheating.
Singlets wired to mobile phones helped people cheat on the national examination for supervising engineer qualifications in Sichuan. Photo: Xinhua
Wiretap singlet
More than 40 people were found to have worn singlets wired to mobile phones on their waists to get correct answers on the national examination for supervising engineer qualifications in Sichuan in 2014, Xinhua reported.
The test-takers used a pen with a micro camera to send the questions to partners outside the test rooms, and received answers by listening to a teleconference via micro earphones, Sichuan authorities said.
Wallets connected to electronic devices help cheaters get through exams dishonestly. Photo: Southern Metropolis Daily
Hi-tech wallet
A man attempted to cheat on the written test for a driving licence in Shenzhen in January 2016 by using a micro camera attached to his arm to send questions to a coach, the Southern Metropolis Daily reported.
The coach had been promised a payment of 3,500 yuan for sending answers to the man through a transmitter in the man’s wallet. When the man realised he had left his wallet behind after the test, he returned to fetch it.
But the anxiety he displayed raised suspicions among security staff at the test centre.
The man, the coach and three others who provided assistance ultimately were detained.
Super small earphones that can be hidden in the ear canal are a favourite tool of China’s exam cheaters. Photo: sohu
Super small earphones
Micro earphones hidden in the ear canal are a popular cheating tool; so much so that doctors at two major hospitals in Wuhan, Hubei province, removed the devices from the ears of 16 students on the very same day as a national English proficiency test.
But the earphones have become a health hazard by becoming smaller and harder to find by the human eye, a doctor was quoted as saying by Chutian Metropolis Daily in 2006.
One of the devices he removed on the same day as the College English Test, Band Four, was just 3 millimetres wide and 1 millimetre thick.
In one case, he only found the object by asking the student to take an X-ray and removed it with the help of a microscope.
Students have used a pen containing hidden notes to cheat on the gaokao. Photo: tech.163.com
Hidden notes in pen
A resident of Xiangfan, Hubei province, said he managed to buy a cheating pen which provided important mathematical formulas from a local shop in November 2004, Xinhua reported.
The instrument looked like a normal pen, but had a metal edge that could be pulled out and connected with a piece of paper about 6 centimetres wide and 18 centimetres long that contained all the key formulas needed in the tests.
Source: South China Morning Post
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2149613/fake-fingerprints-and-electronic-erasers-how-chinas-innovative
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