Schools use phantom exam-sitters to look good
Zhong Hualei , a dropout from Shushan Central School in Wuwei county, Anhui , thought he would have nothing more to do with his former school.
Then he learned he had scored more than 500 marks in the senior middle school qualification exam.
There was just one problem: he had never sat the exam.
Puzzled at first, Zhong then suspected that the school had arranged for someone to sit the exam on his behalf to make the school look good. And he did not like the idea.
Zhong - who was a pupil at Huanggu Junior Middle School, which is affiliated with Shushan Central - took his anger to the internet and demanded an official probe.
An investigation by county education authorities confirmed Zhong's suspicion.
Mainland media quoted Shushan Central's principal as admitting that Huanggu Junior Middle had used a 'phantom exam-sitter' to push up the number of its pupils admitted to senior middle schools.
Zhoupu Middle School in the Xinzhou district of Wuhan , capital of Hubei , was found to have organised 32 pupils to sit senior middle school qualification exams in June on behalf of other pupils, most of whom had dropped out.
While investigators have yet to make public their findings, such scams have further damaged the country's educational system, which is increasingly susceptible to corruption and irregularities. And it is the students from underprivileged families who appear to suffer the most.
Professor Xiong Bingqi, vice-president of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, said such scams opened up a new dimension of irregularities.
But he said the schools had good reason to resort to such a scam: if the number of dropouts at the junior middle school level rose too high, the schools could be held accountable.
Xiong said another possible reason schools engaged in such tricks was so that they could siphon off government subsidies for vocational school pupils.
Those schools are entitled to 1,500 yuan (HK$1,716) a year for each pupil as part of the central government's job creation drive.
'The middle schools could collude with the vocational schools to swindle as much in subsidies as possible. This is just another possibility,' Xiong said.
He said that some middle schools often forced younger pupils with good academic results, to serve as 'phantom exam-sitters' to push up the schools' overall performance or the percentage of pupils who are actually admitted to senior schools, to make the schools look good.
But as a result, the 'phantom exam-sitters' deny other candidates the chance of admission to senior middle schools, Xiong said.
