The rise and fall of China's viral math “prodigy”

A 17-year-old girl in China hailed as a genius was cheated in a math competition, competition organizers said – ending months of skepticism over her stellar results.

Jiang Ping, a fashion design student from a rural town in Jiangsu province, made headlines in June when she placed 12th in qualifying for an international math competition run by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba.

Chinese media reported that she was the first finalist to come from a low-level vocational school since the competition began in 2018. The vast majority of the 800 finalists came from elite universities.

Jiang's results made her an overnight sensation and she was dubbed a “prodigy” in the press and on social media.

Well known among Chinas breakneck education systemacademic excellence is praised. Many people online were encouraged by Jiang's results, viewing them as evidence that vocational school students can still excel academically.

But as doubts about her abilities grew, competition organizers said last Sunday that Jiang had broken competition rules in the preliminary round by receiving help from her teacher, who was also a competitor.

“This has exposed issues such as inadequacies in the competition format and lack of rigor in supervision. We sincerely apologize,” organizers said in a statement.

According to the final results announced Sunday, neither Jiang nor her teacher were among the 86 winners of the competition.

The annual mathematics competition is open to participants from institutions worldwide and is hosted by Damo Academy, Alibaba's research institute.

This year, Jiang, a student at Jiangsu Lianshui Secondary Vocational School, bested other finalists from some of the world's most prestigious institutions – including Peking University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Oxford.

She decided to study at the vocational school because she was interested in fashion design and because her sister and friends were there, local media reported.

Jiang's results and unconventional educational background soon attracted national attention. Her story was featured in a video produced by Damo Academy and she was interviewed by news outlets across the country.

“Learning math is bumpy, but every time I solve the problems I'm pretty happy,” she told the state-run People's Daily newspaper. “No matter what the future holds, I will continue to learn.”

Jiang's teacher, Wang Runqiu, was also thrust into the spotlight and celebrated as an educator who noticed and encouraged her passion for mathematics. Speaking to the media, he described her as an attentive student who had learned advanced mathematics herself.

“I experienced a lot of setbacks when learning math,” he said. “That’s why I want to do everything I can to help my students and let them know that there are other options in the future.”

But in addition to praise for Jiang and her teacher, the student's story also sparked discussion about whether China's education system has done enough to support bright students in less academic programs — particularly those who may not have received similar recognition from their teachers .

China's education system focuses much of its resources on those taking the “Gaokao” exam – the notoriously difficult exam that students must take to get into university. Vocational students have long faced restrictions on taking the gaokao and enrolling in regular universities until an education reform in 2022 offered vocational students an alternative college entrance exam.

An earlier commentary by state news agency Xinhua said Jiang's findings were “an indication of this[ed] to an unpleasant truth: even young people as talented as her can easily be buried without good educational credentials.”

But as Jiang's fame grew, so did criticism and skepticism about her abilities.

In June, dozens of other finalists released a joint letter to the competition's organizing committee calling for an investigation into Jiang. They also requested that their answers to the preliminary test questions be made public.

The finalists claimed that Jiang made “several obvious typographical errors” in an online video and that she “appeared to be unfamiliar with these mathematical expressions and symbols.”

While the preliminary round of the competition enabled participants to work with programming software, the final round was a non-public exam. The final round results, originally scheduled to be published in August, were postponed for several months.

When the results were finally released on Sunday, Jiang was not among the 86 winners of the final round.

Her school also confirmed in a statement on Sunday that Jiang had been helped by her teacher, Wang, and that Wang had received a warning and been banned from this year's teacher awards. The statement also called for leniency and protection for the teenager.

Attempts by the BBC to contact Jiang's family were unsuccessful. A social media account once used by her mother is no longer active and a phone number linked to her father has been deactivated. Several telephone calls from the BBC to Jiang's school went unanswered, and a village official declined to speak about Jiang when contacted by the BBC.

While Sunday's revelation sparked a wave of criticism against Jiang and her teacher, many social media users also spoke out in support of the teenager, arguing that the greater responsibility lies with her school and her teacher.

“Jiang Ping is not innocent, that is beyond question. But who are the worst parties here?” reads a post on Weibo. “The adults brought this child to do a bad deed and made him suffer all the consequences.”

“Even if the whole thing was fake, Jiang Ping was not the mastermind behind it,” another wrote on Weibo. “She shouldn’t be burned at the stake.”