High school students may need masks to sit for ‘gaokao’
Students from moderate to high-risk regions of coronavirus infections should wear masks when taking the national college entrance exam, or gaokao, this year, says an official from the National Health Commission.
He Qinghua, inspector at the commission’s bureau of disease prevention and control, said students from low-risk regions should wear masks before they enter the test centres and they can decide whether to wear them during the exam. All monitors should wear masks throughout the exam, he said at a news conference.
Students and monitors should undergo 14-day health monitoring and temperature checks before the gaokao and their temperature will be checked before they enter the test centres, he said.
Quarantine test centres will be arranged for students who show symptoms of fever and cough during the exam. Each quarantine test centre should only have one student there, he said, but if there are not enough quarantine test centres, up to four students are allowed to sit at four corners of the centre.
Schools that have had confirmed infections cannot be used as test centres and all test centres should conduct strict sanitisation and sterilisation before the exam, he added.
More than 10.7 million high school students will take this year’s national college entrance exam on July 7-8, said Wang Hui, director of the Department of College Students Affairs at the Education Ministry.
There will be around 400,000 test centres across the country with 945,000 monitors supervising the test, he said.
“The gaokao will be the largest organised gathering in China since the start of the Covid-19 outbreak,” he added.
Gaokao is deemed one of the most important exams for Chinese students, as it determines which universities they will be able to apply to and potentially their future career prospects.