A student in Wuhan, Hubei Province, was disqualified for using a mobile phone to search for answers during China's national college entrance exam, or gaokao, triggering waves of questions from the public over the invigilation system at the examination site.
Authorities responded on Tuesday that the 5G signal the student used might have broken the school's signal shielding, thus enabling the network connection.
The student, surnamed Wu, was caught cheating in a math exam on Monday by taking and uploading pictures of part of the test paper onto an online education application where users can search for answers to questions in its database.
The local education bureau in Huangpi district of Wuhan on Tuesday confirmed Wu's act in a surveillance video playback and announced that all of Wu's test results had been invalidated.
The company behind the app said in a Tuesday statement on Sina Weibo that the app had detected the student's suspected behavior of searching for gaokao test answers on Monday afternoon, but it did not provide any results to the user.
The picture of Wu's test paper was also not displayed on the app's front end and was not disclosed to public in any form, it said.
The invigilators and other relevant personnel at Wu's exam site had all been disqualified, according to the Huangpi education bureau.
