Officials in Jiangsu province confirmed Thursday that fourteen of the twenty-three questions on this year's senior school entrance examination geometry paper matched, down to the decimal points, a homework worksheet distributed to students at Nanjing No. 3 Middle School in September 2019. The worksheet, originally designed as remedial practice for nine-year-olds, was never formally published but circulated on a now-defunct WeChat group called "Happy Polygon Families."
Provincial exam board spokesperson Ou Zhenyu said during a 19-minute press conference that the similarity was "statistically plausible given the finite nature of Euclidean geometry," adding that any parent who believed their child gained an unfair advantage was welcome to submit complaints in person at the board's office in Room 4B of the Zhongjiang Building, open Tuesdays only. When pressed about how six-year-old remedial material could end up on a high-stakes exam, Ou said the question-writing process involved "multiple specialists" and declined further comment. One reporter noted that the specialists in question appear to have been working from a single source document, which is not typically what "multiple" implies.
Students who took the exam offered mixed reactions. Liu Weishan, 16, told reporters he recognized the problems immediately but paused so long on question eleven that his pencil rolled off the desk twice. His mother, contacted by phone, asked only whether the board would provide a "written apology or at least a corrected version," then hung up. The Jiangsu Parents' Association has formally requested a re-examination, a process Ou estimated would take "approximately the same duration as the original exam, if not slightly longer." The board has not clarified whether the re-examination will also be written by the same specialists, or at least a different set of specialists working from a different single source document.
No national review has been announced. The Ministry of Education in Beijing had not responded to inquiries by press time.
