Students in Huizhou, South China's Guangdong Province try to cheer up their peers who are going to take the gaokao. Photo: VCG

The discussion about the fairness of China's national college entrance exams (or gaokao) has been gaining the public's attention after a recent exam fraud scandal was revealed, in which a woman, named Gou Jing, claimed that her identity was stolen by an imposter who had used her result to get into a college in 1997. 

While the case strikes some people's confidence in the credibility of the exams, experts said that such cases are unlikely to happen now with more advanced technology in place to monitor illegal activities in exams. 

The Ministry of Public Security and the Ministry of Education jointly issued a statement on Saturday expressing their determination to crack down on illegal and criminal activities involving the exams, including helping with organizing students to cheat and selling cheating devices.

The statement came amid heated discussion about the fairness of  gaokao, dubbed China's most important exam, which plays a decisive role in shaping a student's future. According to public data, more than 10 million students were registered in 2020's gaokao, which will be first sat on Tuesday.

"Gaokao gives hope to many students and their families in China who want to build a good future with their bare hands. Those cheaters and imposters not only damage the exams' educational fairness, but also social justice to some degree," one netizen commented on China's social media Sina Weibo.

Gou is not the only victim of exam frauds. In her home province of Shandong, more than 260 people were found to have been replaced in their respective exams before 2006, according to the Shandong provincial government at a press conference on Friday. 

The Shandong government explained that the province's 260 imposter cases happened due to limited personal information identification capabilities alongside other technical restrictions, which gave the chance for people to take advantage of the exam's loopholes and obtain college admission.

Some netizens expressed their disappointment over the credibility of gaokao revealed in some cases.

"It really hits my confidence in gaokao. What's the point of working so hard for 12 years for an exam that doesn't guarantee fairness?" said another Weibo user.

However, experts pointed out that such cases mostly happened 15-20 years ago, and claim that today's students are much less likely to see such cases with increasingly advanced technologies.

Chu Zhaohui, a research fellow at the National Institute of Education Sciences, told the Global Times on Sunday that China has been strengthening its efforts to crack down on and prevent similar cases through building a more rigorous student-identity registration system and all-round monitoring system. 

"China established an online student information registration system in 2010, in which every student's registration number is unique during their entire school life, from primary school to university, greatly increasing the difficulty of stealing others' identities in an exam," said Chu.