Student punished for tampering with classmate's exam data

A student in Jingzhou, Hubei province, received five days' administrative detention after he tampered with a female classmate's college admission applications, according to local police.

On Sunday, a woman reported her applications for the college entrance examination, or gaokao, had been changed and the deadline for online application had already passed.

After receiving the report, the police immediately launched an investigation.

On Monday afternoon, the offender, a classmate of the woman surnamed Xiang, turned himself in.

It was found that Xiang, due to a poor relationship with the woman, had taken a photo of her admission ticket number.

Xiang then repeatedly attempted passwords on the gaokao admission portal until successfully accessing her account and illegally modifying her preferences.

The provincial admissions office said it would allow the woman to submit her application again and affirmed her admission process would not be affected.

According to a report by cctv.com, in 2019 two incidents of malicious tampering and falsification of gaokao application forms occurred in Zhejiang and Henan provinces that year. Both incidents were committed by classmates.

In the Zhejiang case, applications of three students were tampered with by a mutual acquaintance surnamed Chen because Chen feared mockery after finding his own exam scores not as good as his friends'. Chen was detained for 10 days.

In the Henan case, a student's application was changed by his classmate due to previous personal conflicts.

Legal expert Yue Shenshan explained tampering with gaokao applications is a situation which the law does not specifically regulate. Since the crime is committed through damaging a computer information system, criminal culpability should be determined on that basis.