Yep I’m sure that their universities have no concept of letting in children of a major donor or political figure with influence.
But the concept of granting admission based on such status, as opposed to extending special treatment to an admitted student, is very much muted.
There are ways of getting in to a university without passing the gaokao threshold that would ordinarily be required. But those generally involve receiving a point boost that the college has the official discretion to offer, or doing well on an alternative test -- someone scoring 303 out of 750 would obviously not pass a lower discretionary threshold either.
Note that when "officials in Shandong say new processes are now in place to make sure such incidents will not happen again", they are correct -- it's already possible to look up both your gaokao score (this girl's score wasn't falsified; rather, her identity was stolen) and the 分数线 that applied to you when you applied to a school. The problem would be instantly detected[1] by anyone who felt bitter about what happened -- and this is quite likely, since you have a strong idea of what your gaokao score will be before you actually take the test. (You have to, because you apply to colleges before you get your official result.)
[1] Well, detected with probably a one-year lag.
Cheating may exist but in terms of valuing meritocracy China has it as deeply ingrained as the west.
An ancient Chinese source estimates that 20% to 30% participants of imperial exams are imposters.
Endless examples of high ranking officials pave way for their descendants to succeed as top performers. A renown prime minister invited the chief examiner to his library, where he had removed all reading materials except a copy of an essay his son would write for the upcoming exam. The chief examiner was left waiting forever, so he was forced to read the only reading material within reach. When he later read it again as part of national exam, he recognized it immediately and made the the son of the prime minister NO. 1. This only came out because the emperor did not want PM's family become too powerful, but merely demoted the son from NO. 1 to NO. 3.
Not unlike elite institutions in the West, publicly the imperial exam system was lauded but a system of "donation" co-existed to fill official posts. This is a legal way to buy one's way into officialdom. "Legacy" entry was also available, not unlike today's system in China or elsewhere. Human nature prevails everywhere.
Old history is one thing, but the whole country being run as a corporation for the past 70 years is another.
Hiring people to take a test for you is another popular way to cheat the system, and there is no single victim who can complain.
In the US, collages have more or less rigorous programs rather than simply letting people slide through.
I do not think your conclusion follows from your premise.
VIP students is a way to communicate across the university. Otherwise professors have no way of knowing who they need to give extra leniency to. I know collage professors at several schools and we really have nothing widespread like that.
Not to be a jerk, I just saw you make the same spelling mistake a couple times
* Minority race
* Very poor areas
* People with certain disability but not affecting learning capability
The hidden official VIP:
* Descents and relatives of people with power
From one study of three selective private research universities
African Americans: +230
Hispanics: +185
Recruited athletes: +200
Legacies (children of alumni): +160
George W. Bush was a longtime legacy at Yale, yes, but he performed about as well as Kerry did at Yale and Gore did at Harvard. With no family connections to Harvard he applied to HBS without telling his father, who had by then served as a one-term Texas congressman and UN ambassador, and was serving as the head of the Republican National Committee. To show how little "pull" the Bush name had despite all that, Bush was turned down by the University of Texas law school before getting in at HBS.