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70 Students In Shanghai Caught Using Stand-ins To Take Their CET English Exams

Posted: 12/24/2014 9:00 am

cheating school test exam

Technology has certainly made cheating on school work easier. Once upon a time, students had to write answers on their hands; now, they can input answers on their cellphones, or in dictionaries used to hide a cellphone.

Another option, of course, is to just hire someone to take the test for you, like the 70 students caught in Shanghai using substitutes to write their CET English exams.

Current regulations regarding the use of fake identification prevent any of the substitutes from being penalized. Instead, the students that hired their stand-ins could face a one-to-three year ban on taking the test. They may also be identified to their employers with a “recommended punishment”.

Photo: hujiang

Haohao

Chinese Students Hiding Cell Phones in Oxford Dictionary Covers

Posted: 09/24/2014 3:45 pm

oxford faux dictionary cellphone coverGenerations of counterfeit culture have culminated in this.

China has come up with the perfect way to disguise a cellphone for use during class: use a faux cell phone cover that looks exactly like an Oxford pocket dictionary, reports Southern Daily.

oxford faux dictionary cellphone cover

What’s lost on these students is… does anyone use an actual printed dictionary anymore?

oxford faux dictionary cellphone cover

Netizens provide their comments on this new product:

Qian–touch-soul:
This can only be used during English class.

刷个檀木:
Do you take your teacher for an idiot? While the teacher is giving his lesson on the podium, you’ve got either a cell phone or a dictionary in your hands. It’s so obvious at with one glance.

那是一个疯狂的年代:
Gosh, now I want one too!

北京交通大学海滨学院校园微博:
Not a bad idea.

黄老吉修远路漫漫:
Hee hee, and now I know. [nefarious.emoji]

陈长飞1976:
Young people will be ruined by cell phones! It’s like a drug!

Joann叮叮:
Bad influence

开心木木段小兵:
Whatever the motivation was of the people that designed this, this remains a disappointment.

Magic_by_design:
Previously, student would have to dig out a hole in a real dictionary to hide their phones in. [laugh.emoji]

oxford faux dictionary cellphone coveroxford faux dictionary cellphone coverUnfortunately, using a dictionary cover to wrap around your phone will make it much harder to take selfies in mirrors, so it could be that carrying around a fabrication of a dictionary may prove to be a good influence in the end.

oxford faux dictionary cellphone coverPhotos: Southern Daily, Guangzhou Daily

Haohao

Foreigner Charged RMB 2,700 for a Ride in a Fake Taxi in Beijing

Posted: 06/22/2014 8:00 am

fake taxiA foreigner new to China was charged RMB 2,700 ($434 US) for a taxi ride from Beijing International Airport to Tanggu, Tianjin, reports the Beijing Evening Report.

A US citizen identified only as “Nick” revealed in an interview that he thinks he has been taken advantage of by a “black cab“, a common local term for an unlicensed taxi.

Described as a “laowai” by China Daily, Nick said this was his first time in China, and that he doesn’t speak Chinese. As there was no one to pick him up at the Beijing airport, Nick decided that he would make the trip to Tanggu by himself.

READ: Dongguan Taxi Driver Takes to Weibo To
Teach You How to Spot a Fake Taxi

After getting off the plane and into the airport terminal, Nick was approached by a man who offered to give him a ride. This man spoke English, and was able to gain Nick’s trust. As Nick was doubtful that other taxi drivers would be able to speak English, Nick enlisted the help of this man and gave him the address.

Upon entering the vehicle, Nick thought that the car was an authentic taxi except for not having a meter. Nick can’t remember the brand of the taxi, but it may have been sporting a Dazhong license.

READ: Taxi Driver Violently Attacked By Foreigner in Shanghai 

Upon arriving, however, Nick realized the car wasn’t a real taxi, but paid the fare all the same without bartering. He also received a bill marked as being from the Beijing Shouqi Joint Limited Taxi Company, but looks to be a fake.

A RMB 400 tip was included in the RMB 2,700 fare.

The distance between Beijing International Airport and Tanggu, Tianjin is less than 200 km. If taken in a regulation taxi, the trip should cost no more than RMB 1000 ($161 US).

Related:

Photo: Hebei News

Haohao

Shenzhen Student Pays for Gaokao Answers, Given Wrong Ones

Posted: 06/11/2014 8:00 am

shenzhen gaokao cheaterA Shenzhen high school student identified as “Wu Lili” paid RMB 4,000 for answers to the gaokao exam which turned out to be wrong, reports Sina News Video.

Lili said she had found a person online who claimed to have official access to the answers on the math portion to the national university entrance exam. Lili admitted she was infatuated with this online person, and agreed to send him the requested RMB 4,000 payment.

Lili had memorized all the answers provided for her, but was completely shocked when she discovered while taking the test that none of the answers matched up. Lili didn’t tell anyone at first of her personal tragedy for fear of getting caught.

But Lili did eventually tell someone. Lili was interviewed by a police officer, and was also filmed on camera (as seen in the photo above).

Without the slightest betrayal of her own role as a cheater, Lili told the law enforcement official what she thought of the people who cheated her:

My future is now in doubt; this swindler is simply too heartless. Not only did he take my money, but he also destroyed my future.

And if there was any doubt at all to the moral of the story, Lili also said:

I sincerely hope that my younger classmates will be able to learn a lesson from my experience. Never, ever allow yourself to be tricked the way that I was and have your future taken away from you.

As brave as it was for Lili to come forward and serve as an example to others, the report did not mention the punishment Lili would face by confessing to a police officer that she had cheated on a national examination.

Photo: Shenzhen Evening Report via Weibo

Haohao

China Insider: Everything you need to know about the Wen Zhang scandal

Posted: 04/3/2014 7:31 pm

The most viral post made in Weibo history; a battle of privacy rights; the death of traditional media by new media — these terms are currently buzzing the Chinese internet, but you may still find yourself at odds with the hottest celebrity scandal currently being discussed by your co-workers or students.

Here then is everything you need to know about the Wen Zhang love triangle scandal. In simple terms, it’s sex, betrayal and typecasting, but to fully understand why China has gone collectively bonkers over this story, we’ll present this information in (mostly) chronological fashion:

wen zhangMeet Wen Zhang. He’s a B-list actor. He’s made a name for himself acting in roles in which he serves as the mild-mannered milquetoast. He’s basically an emasculated James Marsden who keeps losing his women to Ryan Gosling in the Notebook, Superman himself, and the Dark Phoenix.

ma yili

This is Ma Yili. She’s also a relatively successful actor. The two worked together on the 2007 Beijing TV drama about Gen-X’ers in angst, “Struggle” (奋斗, watch online here). Wen and Ma got married in 2008, and the two become a celebrity couple that are ranked somewhere on the same tier as Courtney Cox and David Arquette.

Here’s Yao Di. Yao worked with Wen on a television show called “The Era of Naked Marriage” (裸婚时代) in 2011 (watch online here). The show makes waves by exploring the taboo practice of getting married without having first purchasing a house and car for your new family, thereby being “naked”. Yao portrays a strong-willed woman who gets knocked up by her boyfriend Wen, a man who isn’t manly enough to buy a house before engaging in coitus.

wen zhang

Wen Zhang confronts his being typecast in luckless roles as the mild-mannered milquetoast (or in Chinese parlance, 小男人, which literally means “little man”) by stating in a 2011 promotional interview that he takes “no offense” to the term and in fact hopes to become China’s “#1 milquetoast” in celluloid form.

wen zhang yao di affair scandal ma yili weibo

Rumors have long circulated about Wen Zhang’s infidelity with actress Yao Di. Celebrity photographers have known about the rumor for half a year, but have yet to provide any substantial “evidence” for a judging public. Two photographers from Southern Entertainment Weekly, Chen Chaohua and Xie Xiao, tracked down Wen and Yao in Shenzhen, Guangdong. Yao was shooting a movie on location here, and was also about to celebrate her birthday.

wen zhang yao di affair scandal ma yili weibo

The photographs show two people that appear to be in love, but can not be positively identified due to the pains they have gone to to disguise their identities. Southern Entertainment Weekly teases their readers by hyping the release of the photos with the hashtag, #SeeYouMonday. However, the secret is known to industry insiders, and the company is put under enormous pressure. For that reason, Southern Entertainment Weekly does not wait until Monday for its print edition, but instead publishes the photos online using its social media networks.

wen zhang yao di affair scandal ma yili weibo

China loses its collective conservatism and is outraged in undignified ways. The most common sentiment concerns Ma, the wife who is currently taking care of Wen’s two children, one of whom was just born a month ago. Furthermore, the typecasting of Wen as China’s Steve Buschemi if he had more romantic roles leads to universal disbelief that such an inferior man could cheat on his wife, an act only alpha-males are deigned worthy of performing.

wen zhang apology weibo ma yili yaodi affair

Because apologies are much more effective on the internet, Wen makes an apology to his wife on Weibo from Guangdong by posting to the #SeeYouMonday hashtag. It becomes the biggest thing on Weibo since always, forever and ever, totes real. Sent in the early morning of March 31, it currently has 824K likes, 1.2 million forwards, and 1.8 million comments. Conspiracy theorists believe Wen did not write the apology letter himself on the basis that both Simplified and Traditional Chinese script appear in the apology, and that only a joint cross-strait alliance is able to express how sorry he is for cheating on his family. Furthermore, other analysis point out that Ma is eight years older than Wen, and that such an age discrepancy was doomed to failure.

wen zhang yao di affair scandal ma yili weibo

Ma proves that celebrities are as attached to their phones as we commoners by posting a reply to Wen’s apology not three minutes later his initial post. Also an extremely popular Weibo post itself, Ma’s response includes the ambiguous yet poetic line, “Love is easy, marriage is not; cherish what you’ve got right now.” This quote becomes a meme in itself because TV and movies are not as good at conveying poetry as Weibo is.

Wen is not finished with breaking out of the mold. Wen sends another Weibo, this time directly at the two photographers who caught him cheating. Wen takes the unbecoming yet manly stance of accepting all responsibility for his actions, and urges the two not to implicate others. He states that he himself is fair game, and that he will accommodate the two if they want to keep up the fight. This is the internet equivalent of taking off your shirt and revealing your wife-beater, again a non-typical Wen Zhang move. (It doesn’t count when it’s a promo shot.)

Throughout this ordeal, Yao Di has not made any statements. She may be still into snail mail for all we know. Scented pages, you know.

wen zhang yao di affair scandal ma yili weibo

Recently, Wen was photographed returning to Beijing. The lawyer for Wen and Ma state that rumors the couple are to divorce are false.

Photos: Weibo, meilishuo, tvsou, taopic, nipic, ilitu, dreamgoing, 7808, hsw, mszz, edu-hb, usportsnews

Haohao

Hacker breaks into Guangdong exam website, offers to digitally change test scores

Posted: 08/7/2012 7:00 am

If hacking were an Olympic Sport, then China would be a sure thing for the gold medal. Late last year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce fell victim to Chinese hackers, the latest in a line of sensitive websites that Chinese hackers are thought to have gained access to, leading Hillary Clinton to call it a very serious threat.

The latest attack was turned inward though, and theoretically had a very creative business purpose.  A youth was able to hack into the official website of the Personnel Examinations Bureau of Guangdong Province on August 1. On the navigation bar of the website, the hacker changed the “consultation” link to an advertisement which offered to digitally change people’s exam scores for RMB500 .  Despite the hacker’s claims, he only gained the ability to change the “consultation” bar and had no way to access the scores database, according to the Southern Metropolis Daily.

Visitors to the website found that all answers to questions given after clicking on “consultation” had been changed to “the spirit of hacking has never disappeared, but our beliefs have become slightly vague”, then a QQ number appeared saying “I will solve all problems for you.” Everything the hacker wrote has now been deleted.

The hacker claims that he still can alter the web data, but he refused to show reporters the process or explain how he could change exam scores.

Tampering with exam scores is common in China. Last week an official in Zhongshan lost his job and will face further punishment after it emerged that he had tampered with his son’s exam result to give him a better chance of becoming a government official.

Haohao

Police raid hotels and casinos in Macau after spate of attacks on guests, some fatal

Posted: 08/6/2012 9:00 am

Macau saw a huge police sting on August 3 and 4 that harkened back to the triad days in the late 1990s when the enclave was still a Portuguese territory.

Bloomberg has reported that Macau police orchestrated a series of raids on casinos and hotels in a joint-operation with law enforcement officials in the mainland and Hong Kong after a spate of attacks on guests, some with fatal consequences.

Nevertheless, the mass crackdown is part of a wider operation known as “Thunderbolt,” which has seen police quiz over 1,300 people and detain 149.

Au Kam-sun, a Macau lawmaker, told Bloomberg:

“Crime comes inevitably with casinos… The police make a clean-up every now-and-then to keep the triads in check.”

That may be so, but the last few months have seen violent crime return to pre-handover days.  Bloomberg sums up the recent incidents:

Ng Man-sun, the largest shareholder of Amax Holdings Ltd. (959), was beaten in a restaurant at a casino operated by his company, the New York Times reported on June 28. The Macau New Century Hotel stopped accepting guests after the assault because “certain unidentified persons” had been staying there for a long time, according to the South China Morning Post on July 3.

Ng, also known by his nickname “Market Wai,” requested that eight of the nine directors of Amax’s board be removed and replaced by five new directors, according to a company statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange on July 16.

The attack on him was followed by the killing of a Chinese woman in a neighborhood near the Venetian Macau casino, and the murder of two men at the Grand Lapa Hotel, which is operated by Mandarin Oriental International Ltd. (MAND), according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post.

The question now is whether the cleanup will be effective.

Haohao
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