Drones are circling college entrance exam centers in China this week in an effort to cut down on cheating by intercepting transmissions of test questions and answers.
About nine million students started taking college entrance exam test this week, with the scores possibly dictating where the students will attend school,
according to the Washington Post. China's education ministry has said the high tech drones are needed to combat high tech cheating.
Some students reportedly bring in writing instruments that can secretly take pictures of the exam and transmit them to someone outside the test area, noted the Post. The answers can then be researched and transmitted back to the students using a hidden ear piece.
The aerial drones, which started being used at two test sites on Sunday, are designed to pick up radio signals used to transmit test answers back to the students.
Want China Times.com said China's ministry of education issued a statement this week pressuring local educators to step up efforts to crack down on cheating.
"Local education officials directly related to the exam should understand that it's their duty to ensure discipline and will suffer the consequences should they be implicated in malpractice," the statement said.
More than 80 education officials, teachers, students and parents were punished for cheating last year. Some have complained that the high-stakes test have forced some into cheating to get good grades.
"Cheating is also another rampant response to the high-pressure entrance exam,"
wrote Raymond Wong of Mashable. "But unlike the old answers-written-on-the-inside-of-a-water-bottle-label tricks from back in the day, cheaters have used sophisticated equipment such as glasses with embedded cameras, pens paired with in-ear receivers and all kinds of crazy hacked-together solutions like T-shirts with hidden cellphone and radio transmitters."
China Daily last year said an annual report on China's education system, the Blue Book of Education, stated that most of the teenagers who killed themselves are in middle school and fell victim to "the pressure of the test-oriented education system." The study, released by the 21st Century Education Research Institute, is a nonprofit education research organization.
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