Stand-in Test-taker Caught amid Ongoing Jiangxi Gaokao

The admission ticket which carries real personal information of the Gaokao candidate Li Shiyu (L), but a photo of the ghostwriter (R), is exposed on June 7, 2015 in east China’s Jiangxi Province. [Photo: oeeee.com]

A person taking the National College Entrance Exam, or Gaokao, using another person’s identity has been caught in east China’s Jiangxi Province on Sunday.

Provincial education authorities discovered the cheating incident and caught the stand-in test taker, often referred to as a ghostwriter in China, before the morning sessions of the exam concluded.

China’s Ministry of Education issued an immediate order to conduct a joint investigation with the local education authorities and local police in Jiangxi to investigate the case and cases of this nature.

The Jiangxi Provincial Education Department said during a press conference later in the day that the ghostwriter, who was taking the test under the identification as someone named Li Shiyu, pled guilty to cheating and is now under further investigation.

The suspect told police that he and other ghostwriters were given IDs with the real personal information of others, but photos of the ghostwriters. The fake IDs were reportedly produced by a local household registry bureau in east China’s Shandong Province.

The case was first exposed by a reporter from the Guangzhou-based newspaper, Southern Metropolis Daily, who has been working undercover in an illegal organization for ghostwriters in Jiangxi.

The reporter said that each ghostwriter would be paid as least 70,000 yuan (11,284 USD) if the candidates they are substituting for would be successfully admitted into China’s top universities.

The reporter also says that many college students from well-known universities in central China’s Hubei Province are earning money as ghostwriters.

Over the years, China has been trying to crack down on rampant cheating related to the Gaokao.

For instance, examinees from central China’s Henan province are banned from using their own stationery and are provided what they need by local education authorities.

In other cases, some exam sites in Henan Province, Sichuan Province and Liaoning Province have employed fingerprint and iris scanners to verify the identifications of test-takers and thwart attempts at ghostwriting.

However, China’s Education Ministry admits that advanced equipment has not yet become a compulsory requirement to cover all the exam sites around the country.