Cheating in China

No it is not only in China. It is happening all over the world. And nowhere is it acceptable.

The anti-cheating campaign is part of a larger effort to clean up China's academic community amidst a spate of high-profile plagiarism and fake research cases. In recent months academics were caught lying about their credentials or faking research.

A dean at Shanghai Jiaotong University, one of China's top science schools, was dismissed after investigators found he had faked research.

Similarly Shanghai University dismissed a scientist who had lied about his academic record.

A professor at Tsinghua University was fired in Beijing.

These scandals have been embarrassing to communist leaders especially at a time when they are seriously engaged in spending more efforts on scientific research in hopes of developing profitable technologies.

When such is the state of professors, what can anyone comment on students who are over anxious to perform well in order to enter the universities.

More disheartening it is that Chinese parents have been arrested because their children were caught cheating in exams. Strangely the parents are taken to task along with their sons.

Naturally enough they had to be put in jail for using high – tech communications equipment, including mobile phones and wireless earpieces, to help their children cheat at university entrance exams

Eight parents fought together in 2007 to plan how to help their children in the exams since the achievements of their children were not ideal

One of the parents hired university students to provide answers which were sent to the examinees via wireless earphones while they were writing their exams in the exam hall.

Unluckily for them the police detected abnormal radio signals near the college and discovered the ruse of the culprits.

The parents were sentenced to six months to three years for illegally obtaining state secrets. What punishment was meted out to the children is not revealed.

Chinese college entrance exams called gaolao are fiercely competitive tests.

. But despite all penalties, cheating surfaces every year. Students pay for leaked exam papers, smuggle in mobile phones and electronic dictionaries or pay others to take the exam for them.

In a highly competitive world with increasing shortage of job offers there are shortcuts aplenty invented to secure a stability in life.