Parents and relatives see off students as they leave to sit their gaokao exam. Photo: Reuters
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https://scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3009234/china-roots-out-its-gaokao-migrants-university-entrance-exam People & Culture
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
Chinese high school students study late at night for the annual gaokao exam. Photo: EPA-EFE
With only a month to go until China’s gaokao university entrance exam, education authorities have vowed to crack down on cheating candidates.
More than 10 million students had registered to take the notoriously competitive exam this year, state news agency Xinhua reported. The standardised nationwide test is widely viewed as a key to social mobility that can determine a student’s future prospects for better or worse.
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.
“The Hebei students will show up one or two days before the exam and return to Hebei after taking it,” one Fuyuan student was quoted as saying.
Fuyuan is one of the top four high schools in Shenzhen, with its students regularly receiving the best scores in the city. In 2018, nine students from the school were admitted to Tsinghua and Peking universities, the Chinese equivalents of Oxford and Cambridge, according to a Dute News report last week.
Shenzhen’s Jing Bao newspaper said Fuyuan School had formed a partnership with Hengshui Middle School since 2016 to swap teaching expertise.
As part of that arrangement, several Hengshui pupils studied at Fuyuan through an exchange programme and were then able to take the gaokao in Shenzhen while using a local household registration status, the Southern Metropolis News reported last week.
Guangdong exam regulations state that all gaokao candidates with non-Guangdong household registrations must provide proof of residence in the province for the previous three years, as well as proof of their parents’ long-term employment status in the area. But those with Guangdong household registrations do not need to provide any proof of length of residence.
Shenzhen’s education bureau announced on Monday last week that it had checked all the household registration documents of students at Fuyuan School, and that they complied with gaokao registration requirements.
Fuyuan School in Shenzhen, where some of the top-performing students had transferred from a school in the northern Hebei province. Photo: Guancha.cn
A day later, the examination authority in Guizhou province in the country’s south released a statement saying that three students who had faked attendance at local high schools to take the gaokao last year had been expelled from their universities, which included Tsinghua in Beijing and Fudan University in Shanghai. Guizhou is one of China’s poorest and least populated regions.
An earlier version of this story incorrectly cited the Xinhua Daily Dispatch as saying about a tenth of Fuyuan’s top 100 students had transferred from Hengshui.