But as technology changes the education landscape, new ways to cheat have emerged.
This year, AI companies joined in, adding a new layer to the ring of walls and moats around the exam.
The gaokao almost singularly determines university admission for China’s high school seniors. The nine-hour test covers maths, language and foreign language. Many students study for years.
The ruling Communist Party argues that the standardised test is a social equaliser for the country of some 1.4 billion people.
This week, as students sat for their make-or-break exams, some major Chinese AI companies appeared to freeze certain functions during testing hours, with at least one – Shenzhen-headquartered tech giant Tencent – explicitly citing the integrity of the test to explain why certain features were unavailable.
“Dear user, to ensure the fairness of gaokao, this function is unavailable during gaokao hours. Tencent Yunbao wishes gaokao sitters all success in the exams.
“[Unavailable: 08:00-12:30, 14:30-18:15 on June 9 and 08:00-12:30, 15:00-17:00 on June 10],” Tencent’s chatbot Yuanbao said in response to attempts to upload photos of generic test papers during the exam window.
Chinese AI model DeepSeek did not allow users to upload photos of test papers during the same period.
Asked if photo recognition was suspended because of the exam, the chatbot answered: “yes. Deepseek Chat could temporarily suspend photo recognition for test question search during gaokao and other important exams,” to prevent the technology from being used to cheat.
It added that “China’s Ministry of Education and other relevant departments usually orders the restriction of snap for answer search functions during important exams”.
It said relevant functions usually “return to normal after gaokao”, and asked users to try again later.
AI tool Kimi allowed photo recognition on Tuesday, but uploading failed when it detected a test exam or paper.
Doubao, the AI app owned by TikTok’s parent company ByteDance, appeared to suspend the uploading of test paper photos or screenshots, though other photos worked fine.
A spokeswoman for ByteDance said the company did not want to comment immediately. The other companies in question did not respond to requests for comment.
This year, some schools in China used real-time AI patrol and surveillance systems to check for suspicious behaviour in the exam room: whispering, peeking, passing objects, answering early or using prohibited tools, Chinese state media outlets reported.
It can detect the behaviour during the exam and with a “post-exam intelligent search”, a Global Times article said.
Discovered instances of cheating on the exam have stoked past controversies.
One high-profile case involved 120 university students allegedly using fake fingerprint membranes to enter the test rooms on behalf of high-paying high-schoolers in Henan province in 2014, South China Morning Post reported.
Chinese law enforcement arrested more than “50 criminal suspects from 12 criminal gangs” and seized more than 100,000 sets of wireless equipment designed to facilitate gaokao cheating in 2018, the Government announced that year.
Many tens of millions of dollars were involved in the cheating ring.
In 2016, six teachers were imprisoned for “illegally obtaining state secrets”, after they were convicted for helping their students cheat on the gaokao.
State-run network CGTN once broadcast a video of a huddle of parents helping one student remove his pants zippers – a piece of metal dinged by the security detectors that nearly made him miss the test.
After finally removing the metal pull tabs, he sprinted into a school building just in time.
This year’s multiday testing period ended on Tuesday. The state-affiliated Chinese outlet Global Times published photos of lines of parents waiting to greet the students with flower bouquets and high-fives.
Christian Shepherd contributed to this report.
