China roots out its ‘gaokao migrants’ as university entrance exam nears
- Crackdown on students registering to take the exam in a different province to improve their prospects, sometimes by faking residency status
- Competition is less fierce in sparsely populated regions
With only a month to go until China’s gaokao university entrance exam, education authorities have vowed to crack down on cheating candidates.
On Sunday, the education bureau in the southern province of Guangdong ordered an investigation into the credentials of all students who had transferred to senior high schools there from elsewhere in the country, in a crackdown on so-called gaokao migrants.
These “migrants” – students who register to take the exam in a different province to boost their chances of scoring higher – are a widely recognised phenomenon in China.
For example, some students move to more sparsely populated regions such as Xinjiang and Ningxia, where competition is less fierce and universities have relatively higher student quotas to fill. In the past, some students have faked their household registration documents to sit the exam in a less competitive region.
The crackdown in Guangdong was prompted by an investigation last week by Shenzhen education authorities into the private Fuyuan School, which found that more than a tenth of the top 100 students in a recent citywide mock exam had transferred from Hengshui Middle School, in Hebei province, to study at Fuyuan, the Xinhua Daily Dispatch reported on Tuesday.