Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2014, and reports news from that month, when the gaokao, China’s university entrance exam, took place. The Google Glass comparison is also of its time.
The skills of Chinese students are simply spectacular when they look for ways to cheat in their university entrance exams. Perhaps getting past China’s anti-cheating security measures simply takes more creativity than anywhere else in the world.
During this weekend’s exams, police showed some of the devices confiscated from 40 students in Shanghai. These gadgets were not bought; the students built them themselves to make sure of their future at a university.
Of course, after seeing how sophisticated these systems are, many of these students ought to be working as government spies. These are some of the devices students used to cheat in the exams, as reported by some local media.
The first invention is a coin that acts as a remote control to switch on a camera hidden in a pair of glasses. The glasses send a photo of the exam question to someone sitting at a computer at home, who then sends back the answers, apparently to an earpiece built into the glasses. In short, if Google Glass didn’t already exist, this student would have invented it.
Another is an undershirt connected to a mobile phone, which in turn is linked to an earpiece. It is as if this student had experience as an FBI agent.
The third is a pen with a micro-camera that sends the questions to a third person, whose answers arrive through the earpiece. On top of that, the pen actually writes, which makes it the hardest of them all to detect.
During these exams, Chinese students are playing for their future, and the tension is palpable. Families pay for cram schools where students board for months, with just one day off in the whole month.
These academies have a strong reputation thanks to the high share of their students who pass the exams, and in many cases they are tougher than the army: they wake their students at 5:30 in the morning and keep them studying until 10 at night, with only 15-minute breaks for lunch and dinner.
That is precisely why other students, who cannot afford these expensive boarding schools, turn to these devices to supposedly level the playing field.
Many Chinese people say they don’t like cheaters, while others consider cheating a right, going as far as to say: “We want fairness, and there is no fairness if you don’t let us cheat.” We will file it as another of those crazy things that only happen in China.
Further reading
Featured image: Gary Todd from Xinzheng, China, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
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