MCLC: Jail time for gaokao cheaters

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Jail time for gaokao cheaters
Source: Sinosphere, NYT (6/7/16)
China Threatens Jail Time for College Entrance Exam Cheaters
By JAVIER C. HERNÁNDEZ
BEIJING — A cheater in China used to have it easy: His family might be subjected to a harsh scolding, and his exam results might be thrown out. Now, a student caught cheating could face a prison sentence.
As more than nine million students filed into testing centers on Tuesday to take the gaokao, the life-defining college entrance exam, officials made clear that they planned to enforce a new law making it a crime to cheat, punishable by up to seven years in jail.
Officials said the law, approved last fall, was necessary to preserve fairness in the exam, widely regarded as the most important test of a Chinese citizen’s life. A high score can mean a ticket to a renowned university and a high-paying profession, while a low score can bring shame and a future confined to menial jobs.
Many students and parents praised the effort to impose severe punishments on cheaters, saying it would serve as a powerful deterrent. But several were less certain of the law’s merits, saying it was too harsh.
Wang Yiran, 19, a freshman at Yangtze University in central China, said the law might discourage students from reporting incidents of cheating because they feared sending another student to jail.
“It’s simply too strict,” Ms. Wang said. “Because the punishment is so severe, no one will want to say anything.”
Bella Hou, 19, a freshman at the Beijing Institute of Technology, said she thought imposing a severe penalty was the only way to stop students from cheating.
“It’s really necessary to eliminate cheating on the gaokao,” she said. “Cheating affects everyone.”
On Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, the reaction was mixed. One user wrote that a seven-year sentence was too harsh, saying, “That’s almost the same as the punishment for a hit and run.”
Global Times, a nationalistic Chinese newspaper, described the law as important to upholding a sense of “social justice” in Chinese society, given the gaokao’s role as a path to economic mobility for poorer families.
Because of the importance of the gaokao, some families are willing to go to unseemly lengths to ensure their children ace it. Some parents hire companies to surreptitiously transmit answers to their children on exam day. Others bribe local officials to get a peek at the test before it is administered.
Officials in many provinces have tried to crack down on cheating in recent years, going so far as to install fingerprint scanners in schools and ban bras with a metal underwire, worried that they might hide transmission devices. Last year in the city of Luoyang, in central China, the authorities used drones to catch people using radios to broadcast answers.
But the ranks of cheaters have only grown, and they have excelled at finding ways around the government’s restrictions, creating products like pens equipped with cameras and tank tops outfitted with audio receivers.
On Tuesday, the first day of the gaokao, officials in Beijing said they had deployed eight police officers to each of the city’s 96 exam sites to monitor for cheating, according to news reports.
Education officials said they hoped the threat of jail time would deter cheaters once and for all.
“Do not believe any kind of group or individual offering false ‘test help’ and be tricked, and risk suffering a lifetime of regret,” the Ministry of Education warned in a recent statement.
The law, enacted in November, states that people caught cheating or facilitating cheating on national exams could face up to three years in prison and a fine for minor cases, or up to seven years in prison for more serious cases. Those people would also be banned from taking national exams for three years.
Legal experts said that the law would probably be used to go after leaders of cheating rings and that students might not be a primary target.
Still, human rights experts said it was worrisome that China would threaten to impose severe penalties on teenagers for cheating.
“If it is true that students found guilty of cheating end up receiving seven-year criminal sentences, this would be fairly disproportionate compared with the gravity of the ‘crime,’ ” William Nee, a China researcher at Amnesty International, wrote in an email.
On Monday, the Chinese news media reported the details of the first case to be subject to the new law, which involved cheating on a postgraduate entrance examination in December. Officials said they had shut down 11 educational organizations in connection with the case. Officials did not announce penalties for those named in the investigation, including a former worker at a printing house that produced test materials.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 7, 2016
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