Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown — and sometimes even a small one is more weight than most people can carry.
This started in August with a post on a Chinese social platform listing evidence that a school in Shenyang — Fly Jump International — had organized systematic A-Level exam cheating. As someone in the northeast of China with a child potentially starting school nearby, I saved the evidence and contacted the person who posted it.
"How did you find out about this?"
"I was one of the hired proxies, and I also recruited other proxies to complete the exam papers."
"Why so many different people?"
"Apparently A-Level checks for similarity between submitted papers, so different proxies were needed to complete the same exam in different ways, to avoid being flagged."
"Why are you making this public?"
"The exam site never paid me or the people I recruited — roughly 20,000 yuan outstanding. The middleman disappeared, so I used information that had come out during the arrangement to trace the exam site's location. I went to confront them. They denied everything, and then reported me to the police afterward for extortion, claiming I had set them up."
I wished them luck — I genuinely did not know what to say about an international school in my region operating this way. I had no words.
About a month later, when the school year started and my child arrived in Beijing, I went back to look at the post. It was gone.
"Why did you delete everything?"
"The school sent a message through the middleman threatening me personally. I handed over the materials I had and took everything down. I hadn't expected the school to operate like organized crime — the phrase they used was 'breaking arms and legs.' They also said that even if the school itself left me alone, the affected families would come after me with worse consequences."
"Is that real?"
"Because I had given real information when contacting the exam site, I was genuinely scared. I gave them everything — including the materials I'd prepared for reporting to CAIE, the email addresses — and deleted what I could."
"What is the situation now?"
"The exam site has never contacted me directly, only through middlemen — and those middlemen are all on the same side, trying to minimize trouble. Eventually they paid me what they owed. I decided to let it go."
"What are your plans going forward?"
"What can I do? I thought I was just helping someone work through an exam paper. I only gradually realized something was wrong, and by then I was already in trouble. The middleman says: cooperate with us, the school has hired expensive British lawyers, we can manage whatever you've reported, we won't bother you again."
"Can you send me what you have? I want to verify this myself — I'm also in the northeast, and my child could end up at a school nearby."
"I'll send you part of it. The whole thing is actually straightforward — anyone who looks at it carefully will understand what happened."
The proxy sent me a compressed file, several hundred megabytes. After reading it, I lost all remaining trust in A-Level and international education certification in China. I could not imagine a school-level operation exerting this kind of control over students' futures — domestic exam agencies, tutoring operators, and every link in the chain seemed to form one vast black hole swallowing integrity, hope, and futures together.
But this was also the moment I realized how useful it is to be a parent in the northeast of China. After years of national anti-organized-crime campaigns that never quite reached us, finding out this school had somehow produced a Princeton student was what finally gave me the confidence to speak.
I am left with a deep sense of helplessness and sadness.
The screenshots I saved — the student list and the exam subjects involved — are attached below. I will not interpret or annotate them. I was not there; much of what I could say would be speculation. If you are genuinely interested in pursuing this and maintaining some standard of educational fairness, I will do everything in my power to help.