A 17-year-old girl in China hailed as a genius in a mathematics contest cheated, competition organisers have said – ending months of scepticism over her stellar results.
Jiang Ping, a fashion design student from a rural town in Jiangsu province, made headlines in June when she came 12th in the qualifiers of an international maths contest run by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.
She was the first finalist since the competition began in 2018 to have come from a lowly vocational school, Chinese media reported. The vast majority of the 800 finalists came from elite universities.
Jiang’s results turned her into an overnight sensation, and she was labelled a “prodigy” in the press and on social media.
Under China’s notoriously cut-throat education system, academic excellence is lauded. Many people online were encouraged by Jiang’s results, seeing them as proof that students from vocational institutes could still excel academically.
However, as doubt surrounding her abilities snowballed, competition organisers said last Sunday that Jiang had violated competition rules in the preliminary round, by receiving help from her teacher, who was also a contestant himself.
“This has exposed problems like inadequacies in the competition format and the lack of rigour in supervision. We sincerely apologise,” organisers said in a statement.
According to the final results announced on Sunday, neither Jiang nor her teacher was among 86 winners in the competition.
