‘Be fearless, this is the start of your bright future’: Stephen Hawking to China’s 9 million students taking entrance exams
British scientist Stephen Hawking, who has a huge following on China’s social media, has sent his best wishes to more than nine million mainland students who will start taking their university entrance examinations on Tuesday.
“As many of you prepare to take the National Higher Education Entrance Examination, I want to wish you, the next generation of scientific minds, success in your academic endeavours,” Hawking said in a post on his Weibo account on Monday.
I want to wish you, the next generation of scientific minds, success in your academic endeavours. This culmination of your hard work marks just the beginning of your very bright futures
Results of the national exam, commonly known as gaokao, generate a score for each candidate, which will determine whether a high school graduate can enter a college or university. The higher the score, the better the university.
The gaokao, which lasts three days, assesses a student’s proficiency in various disciplines, such as Chinese language, mathematics, English and physics for future science-based studies, and the political dogma of the Chinese Communist Party for those who will pursue studies in social science.
“This culmination of your hard work marks just the beginning of your very bright futures,” added Hawking, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge.
However, the “hard work” might not all be academic endeavours.
China’s higher education resources are limited and the competition to enter a good university is tough.
So in recent years, some students had come up with ingenious methods to cheat – with some caught using professional spying devices while sitting their gaokao to try to obtain a higher score, mainland media has reported.
Whether you aim to be a doctor, teacher, scientist, musician, engineer, or a writer - be fearless in the pursuit of your aspirations. You are the next generation of big thinkers and thought leaders that will shape the future for generations to come
Other spying hardware that has been used has included an earpiece smaller than a grain of rice, and “pencil rubber” with a tiny screen, which can display numbers and characters.
More than 80 organisations or individuals have gone on trial charged with cheating in the university entrance exams between 2012 and 2015, according to the Shanghai based news website Thepaper.cn.
Therefore, the gaokao this year has been dubbed by mainland media as “the most highly guarded ever in history”, with the authorities tightening up security measures to unprecedented levels.
In many cities, officials have sent armed and counter-espionage troops to every place where the examination is being held.
Lawmakers in Beijing have also amended the criminal law so that anyone caught cheating in the exam will be put behind bars for a period that can range between days and years.
However, most students participating in this year’s gaokao will be doing so fairly.
Their efforts, in the eyes of Hawking, will help shape the future of China.
“Whether you aim to be a doctor, teacher, scientist, musician, engineer, or a writer - be fearless in the pursuit of your aspirations,” he wrote on Weibo.
The British academic – who for 30 years held Cambridge University’s Lucasian Chair of Mathematics once held by Isaac Newton – is confined to a wheelchair because of a degenerative motor neuron disease and communicates via a sensor on his cheek muscle to drive to a speech-generating device.
