The rise and fall of China’s viral maths ‘prodigy’
Getty ImagesA 17-year-old Chinese woman who was hailed as a talent in a mathematics opposition cheated, according to the organizers, putting an end to months of skepticism over her impressive accomplishments.
Jiang Ping, a style design student from a remote Jiangsu state, made headlines in June when she placed 12th in the finals for an international math competition run by Taiwanese e-commerce large Alibaba.
According to Chinese media, she was the first winner to enter since the competition started in 2018 to come from a humble technical school. The vast majority of the 800 contenders came from elite institutions.
Jiang’s benefits turned her into an overnight experience, and she was labelled a “prodigy” in the media and on cultural advertising.
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, competition organizers claimed last Sunday that Jiang had broken contest rules by getting assistance from her instructor, who was also a participant himself, as doubts about her powers began to surface.
This has raised issues like the supervision’s lack of rigor and the inadequacies in the contest style. We honestly apologise”, organisers said in a speech.
No Jiang nor her tutor were among the 86 participants in the contest, according to the final results released on Sunday.
The increase of a maths experience
Candidates from all over the world can enter the monthly mathematics contest, which is held at the research facility of Alibaba’s Damo Academy.
This time, Jiang, a pupil at Jiangsu Lianshui Secondary Vocational School, outperformed various contenders from some of the world’s most prestigious organizations— including Peking University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Oxford.
According to local media sources, she had chosen to attend the vocational school because both she had a passion for fashion style and because her sister and friends were there.
Immediately, Jiang’s results and innovative educational qualifications attracted national interest. Her tale was featured in a Damo Academy film, and she received interviews from national media outlets.
” Learning mathematics is slippery, but every day I solve the problems I feel very happy”, she told the state-run People’s Daily. ” No matter what the future holds, I did stay learning”.
Jiang’s professor, Wang Runqiu, was likewise thrust into the spotlight, hailed as an educator who noticed and encouraged her love for mathematics. He described her as a diligent student who had already studied advanced mathematics in her own way when she spoke to the internet.
He claimed that his experience with learning math has caused him several failures. Therefore, I want to give my pupils every chance possible while also informing them that there might be other opportunities in the future.
The child’s story also sparked a debate about whether China’s educational system did much to help gifted students in less traditional scientific areas, especially those who may not have received the same acknowledgement from their teachers.
The” Gaokao,” the extremely challenging exam that students must take in order to enter college, accounts for the majority of China’s educational system’s solutions. Before a 2022 education reform offered technical college students an alternate university entrance examination, those in vocational schools had long faced restrictions on taking the syllabus and joining in ordinary universities.
An earlier op-ed in state-news media outlet Xinhua said that Jiang’s results “hint]ed ] at an awkward truth: even youths as talented as her may be easily buried without good education credentials”.
She was not the creator, she claimed.
But as Jiang’s popularity burgeoned, criticism and scepticism surrounding her knowledge also started to bubbles.
Difficulty another winners wrote to the competition organizing committee in a joint letter in June asking for an exploration into Jiang. Additionally, they demanded that her responses to the initial evaluation issues be made public.
The winners claimed that Jiang had written” some obvious errors in writing” in an online movie and that she” seemed uninterested in these mathematical expressions and images”
The final round of the competition was a closed-book exam, despite the competition’s preliminary round allowing contestants to use programming software. The results of the finals, which were initially set to be released in August, were postponed for several months.
When the results were finally made public on Sunday, Jiang was not one of the 86 participants who won the championship round.
Her school also confirmed in a statement released on Sunday that her teacher Wang had assisted Jiang, and that Wang had received a warning and was disqualified from receiving awards for teachers for the year. Additionally, the statement requested leniency and protection for the teenager.
Attempts by the BBC to contact Jiang’s family were unsuccessful. A phone number associated with her father has been deleted, and a social media account her mother once used is no longer active. Numerous BBC phone calls to Jiang’s school ended up going unanswered, and a village official, when contacted by the BBC, declined to speak with the BBC about Jiang.
Many social media users also expressed support for the teenager, claiming that the bigger responsibility lay with her school and teacher, despite the revelation from Sunday that sparked a wave of criticism for Jiang and her teacher.
” Jiang Ping is not innocent, that’s without question. However, who are the “worst” parties involved? reads a post on Weibo. ” The adults brought this child along to do a bad deed, and let her suffer all the consequences”.
Jiang Ping was not the mastermind behind the fake event, according to another Weibo user. She ought not to be burned at the stake.
