University entrance exams monitored with drones in China

Published June 9, 2015
Beijing: Parents wait for their children at a high school as students take the countrywide college entrance exams on Sunday.—AFP
Beijing: Parents wait for their children at a high school as students take the countrywide college entrance exams on Sunday.—AFP

BEIJING: Chinese students sat the annual make-or-break university entrance exams on Monday, with officials deploying drones or high-tech radio surveillance trucks at schools across the country to try and curb increasingly sophisticated cheating methods.

Nearly 10 million students will sit the crucially important two-day exam, known as the gaokao — or “high test”.

Authorities have become increasingly concerned about the risk of students using devices such as smart phones — some of which have become smaller and easier to hide — as an illicit aid during tests.

Beijing deployed 17,000 police officers to redirect traffic and increase security at the testing sites, and also set up service stations to treat anxious parents should any suffer heart attacks, the city government said in a statement.

The exam is the only method used to gain entry to the nation’s universities which for poorer children can mean the difference between a white-collar office job and a life as a migrant labourer.

Officials in Luoyang, in Henan province purchased a drone designed to search for radio signals that could indicate cheating students, according to the Dahe News, the official provincial newspaper.

It will monitor signals from 500 metres above the test site, the paper said.

Photos on the website of the government-run China Daily showed radio engineering technicians using computers and scanning devices to search for signals that could be used to transmit answers to students.

Published in Dawn, June 9th, 2015

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