Bra Ban On Students Ahead Of Chinese University Entrance Exam

More than nine million students packed exam halls across
China for the opening day of the country's university
entrance exam on Friday – with attempts to stop cheating
even leading to bans on metal bra clasps.
Students in the northeastern province of Jilin were banned
from wearing clothing with metal parts and education
authorities installed metal detectors in exam centres to clamp
down on "wireless cheating devices", the state-run Global
Times reported.
Authorities have become increasingly concerned about the
risk of examinees using devices such as smartphones –
some of which have become smaller and easier to hide – as
an illicit aid during tests.
Around 9.12 million high-school students were registered
across China to sit the crucially important two-day exam,
known as the gaokao, an education ministry spokeswoman
said.
Officials aimed to crack down on "sales of high-tech gear for
cheating, and gaokao-related fraud", the Global Times said.
But users of China's Twitter-like weibos were scornful.
"Everyone is paying attention to the bras. What about
glasses?" said one.
There are more than seven million university places available
in China for the next academic year, so that most of those
who take the test will secure one, but where they will go is
hugely dependent on their results.
In Beijing, Chinese, mathematics and English are
compulsory subjects, with one other paper in either arts or
sciences, and the exam is scored out of a maximum 750
points.
China's top educational institutions such as Peking University
or Tsinghua, also in the capital, can demand scores of
around 600 or more.
The test has come under fierce criticism on China for putting
enormous pressure on students, and as a symbol of
educational inequality, with many low-income students
whose parents have migrated to cities barred from taking
the exam in their new homes.
Top institutions also generally demand higher entry
qualifications for applicants from other provinces.
Weibo poster Hu Qijun said: "They claim to aim for fairness,
but enrolment, education and employment have turned so
unfair we have entered an age where your fate is
determined by who your father is. So what's the point of
making one single exam fair?"
Questions can be bizarre. "If Thomas Edison returned to the
21st century, what would he think of cellphones?" one
province asked this year, requiring an 800-character
answer, according to the Sina web portal.
The central province of Hunan offered the single phrase
"Walk past" as the topic for a writing composition, the report
said.