Exam cheats are criminals

China should amend the criminal law to make large-scale cheating in exams a crime and crack down more firmly on the rampant practice, says an article in the Beijing Times. Excerpts:

The investigation into this year's national college examination cheating case in Songyuan, Jilin province, has made progress: A female teacher was arrested for buying a set of cheating facilities for her daughter and selling 27 sets of cheating facilities to other examinees.

Recently several similar cases have come to light with the police arresting 34 suspects and seizing 683 items, such as radio and camera, used for cheating.

As the police said, many of the suspects are well educated, and yet most claimed they didn't know that buying and selling gadgets for cheating is a crime. In their eyes, only buying and selling test papers of the national college entrance examination is a crime.

As the law stands, cheating in tests per se is not a crime, but buying and using the cheating facilities to aid the examinees is a crime.

Leaking test contents or acquiring them beforehand is violation of official secrets; and, using electronic equipment to aid and abet cheating is illegal. Mass cheating would face the charge of dereliction of duty by those in charge of invigilation. Until now, China has no criminal penality for those cheating in exams.

The Ministry of Education had promulgated an administrative order on penalties for those caught cheating in the national college entrance exams in 2004. But the punishments proposed, such as cancellation of the cheat's scores, can be applied only within the academic system, and not to those outside the system, who facilitate cheating.

Should we really penalize test cheats?

In recent years, cheating in national tests such as Certificate of English Test or the national college entrance examination has become an organized racket involving use of technology and skilled help.

This large-scale organized cheating is different from sporadic instances of copying. It severely harms the interests of other students and violates fairness and equality in the nation's selection of talent. The practice of cheating in exams today has all the elements of both conspiracy and crime. It can be ignored only at our peril. Loopholes in the criminal law should be plugged for dealing with this offence.

(China Daily 06/18/2009 page8)