Students angry at US test changes

Chinese students claim they have been branded cheats after changes to the test needed to enter US universities.

From this week, the US-based Educational Testing Service (ETS) is switching to paper-based exams in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea, because it suspects students had been scoring well on the computer-based version by memorising questions given to them by their peers.

In the Graduate Record Exam's (GRE) paper-based test, no questions will be repeated.

'Most people study for themselves, so the percentage of cheats is not especially big,' said Lu Jie, a graduate of Tsinghua University in Beijing who took the GRE in March and hopes to study international relations at the University of Pittsburgh. 'There was no convincing evidence of problems.'

The changes have sparked frustrated discussion on campuses and in Internet forums.

'The sudden change in ETS' policy makes many students, who have prepared for the computer-based test for a long time and planned to take it in September or October, take the paper-based exam in November without adequate preparation,' a fourth-year Beijing Broadcasting Institute student said. 'What's worse, they have no time to prepare the materials for [college] application this year and will have to postpone the application to 2003.'