Student disqualified from gaokao for cheating

A student from Wuhan, capital of central China's Hubei Province, was disqualified from taking the gaokao, the country's annual college entrance examination, for violating the rule forbidding mobile phones in exam rooms and cheating on the math portion of the exam on Monday. 

After an investigation, the city's education bureau in Huangpi District announced it had decided that all of the student's grades on the exam are invalid.

The student surnamed Wu was caught photographing the test paper with a mobile phone, which the education bureau confirmed on video playback on Monday evening. According to the official statement, Wu uploaded the test paper onto an online test question pool search application for answers.

The supervisors of the exam were also suspended for dereliction of duty. An investigation is ongoing.

As The Paper reported on Monday, staff from the app reported the violation with screenshots as soon as the photo with the student's name and seat number was uploaded at 3:46pm on Monday – one hour and 14 minutes before the exam concluded.

The app's staff stated on Weibo that the platform didn't provide any search results, and the exam paper was never shown from the app's front end or disclosed in any way.

This year's exam is the biggest collectively organized event since the coronavirus outbreak, with millions of students in around 7,000 venues across the country. Last year, the gaokao was postponed by approximately a month due to the pandemic.