China’s gaokao exam fraud: victims learn the worst after cheats steal their grades and university places
- Students denied college admission after seemingly doing poorly in the entrance test learn that others used their identities to gain degrees
- Investigation last year revealed 242 instances of such cheating in eight academic years in one province alone
Gou Jing wondered whether something was amiss when she took China’s university entrance exam, or gaokao , in 1997 and got a surprisingly low mark.
A student from a peasant family in the town of Jiezhuang, in the eastern province of Shandong, Gou sat the test again the next year and – despite having been ranked fourth out of tens of thousands of students in a mock test not long before – she again did mysteriously poorly, and was sent to study at a tertiary technical college in Hubei, in central China.
It remained a mystery until 2003, when Gou’s former form teacher sent her a letter in which he admitted tampering with the marks and asked for Gou’s forgiveness, news portal ifeng.com reported on Wednesday.
The teacher, surnamed Qiu, had arranged for his own daughter to be given Gou’s mark so that she could go to university in Beijing, the report said. It was not clear whether Gou’s result or identity was used to gain admission for someone else in the second year.
Gou decided to go public about it on Chinese social media platform Weibo after reading a recent trending news article about a woman who had the same thing happen to her.