A massive case of cheating in the 2016 National Higher Education exams for self-taught adults was uncovered by police in Hengshui, Hebei Province, which involved 300 people connected to a "cheating gang" posing under the guise of a training agency.
The scheme employed by the training agency involved a team of ghostwriters who are given fake exam permits to sit in place of the real examinees they're representing. One of the ghostwriters, surnamed Li, came forward to the police and acted as a whistleblower.
Li provided valuable leads to the police, who later found a truck near the testing center, with 15 people and exam permits, both fake and real, inside it. The discovery enabled the police to arrest 20 people and the identification of a further 170 students and 100 ghostwriters as suspects, the Global Times reported.
Sun Huanlun, one of the Hengshui police officers involved in the arrests, the training agency involved is led by two of the suspects, surnamed Liu and Cheng. Both would charge prospective students for a fee within the region of 2,000 yuan and 3,000 yuan.
Cheng oversees online recruitment, and all those who are interested are asked to pay half of the fee as a down payment. If the students pass the exams, they are asked to pay the other half, but they are ensured of refunds in case they fail.
The training agency hires around 100 ghostwriters tasked to sit in for the students during the exams, and all of them are paid 500 yuan each per exam. Inside the training agency, the exam permits of students are forged to represent those of the ghostwriters so they can take the exams.
China's law against cheating in national exams imposes heavy penalties for those who will be caught, with those caught in mass cheating schemes or sit-ins set to face prison time amounting up to seven years, TIME reported. Students who are caught cheating will be banned from retaking exams.
Currently, the Hengshui police have yet to file charges against the captured suspects, while all others named for their involvement in the cheating scandal are the subjects of an ongoing manhunt.