Every June, ten million students sit China's highest-stakes exam, in rooms already sealed and signal-jammed. So when AI platforms switch off their answer functions, it changes nothing for cheating. What they are really guarding against is not students. It is themselves.
Very interesting reflection! I often see something similar to the 'security theatre' - maybe a close cousin? - when I see companies rolling out change initiatives.
Not long ago a client asked me why their culture change initiative didn't seem to produce much change.
It didn't take long to figure out what went wrong: They selected a few senior leaders, and someone facilitated a 'culture reboot' workshop. They produced some very clever wording [the usual suspects: values, mission, ways of working, etc).
But then, the system these new artifacts were brought in remained the same. Rewards, incentives, decision making and authority did not change.
So a nice 'leadership theatre' that made the people involved feel like they did their part, but was in fact just a cosmetic activity. And, possibly, a waste of time. But everyone felt great about it.
I see the same pattern here: Fix the PR stuff, and ignore the root cause. If you're afraid of students resorting to cheating with AI, wouldn't this concern warrant some deeper reflection on the education system - or at least, the gaokao itself?
This is a perfect cousin, and honestly closer to my home turf than the exam case. What you describe is the purest form of it: a culture is never the words on the wall, it's what the organization actually rewards and punishes. You can produce a beautiful set of values in an afternoon, but the moment those values have to be honored, you have to change who gets promoted, who gets paid, who gets to decide. That part is hard, so it gets skipped. And employees always read the real incentives, not the poster. Once the two diverge, the poster becomes theater that everyone privately recognizes.
On your last point: I'd actually push back gently. I'm not one of the people who thinks the gaokao needs fixing. For all its flaws, it's one of the few mechanisms that gives an ordinary kid from anywhere a single, clean, merit-based shot, and I think that's worth protecting. But that's a separate conversation. The point of this piece is narrower: whether or not the exam is sound, what actually protects it is the sealed room and the criminal law, not a cosmetic gesture from the platforms. That gesture didn't protect the exam. It just blurred who's responsible for what. The pattern is the same one you saw with your client: reach for the visible thing, leave the hard thing untouched.
Very interesting reflection! I often see something similar to the 'security theatre' - maybe a close cousin? - when I see companies rolling out change initiatives.
Not long ago a client asked me why their culture change initiative didn't seem to produce much change.
It didn't take long to figure out what went wrong: They selected a few senior leaders, and someone facilitated a 'culture reboot' workshop. They produced some very clever wording [the usual suspects: values, mission, ways of working, etc).
But then, the system these new artifacts were brought in remained the same. Rewards, incentives, decision making and authority did not change.
So a nice 'leadership theatre' that made the people involved feel like they did their part, but was in fact just a cosmetic activity. And, possibly, a waste of time. But everyone felt great about it.
I see the same pattern here: Fix the PR stuff, and ignore the root cause. If you're afraid of students resorting to cheating with AI, wouldn't this concern warrant some deeper reflection on the education system - or at least, the gaokao itself?
This is a perfect cousin, and honestly closer to my home turf than the exam case. What you describe is the purest form of it: a culture is never the words on the wall, it's what the organization actually rewards and punishes. You can produce a beautiful set of values in an afternoon, but the moment those values have to be honored, you have to change who gets promoted, who gets paid, who gets to decide. That part is hard, so it gets skipped. And employees always read the real incentives, not the poster. Once the two diverge, the poster becomes theater that everyone privately recognizes.
On your last point: I'd actually push back gently. I'm not one of the people who thinks the gaokao needs fixing. For all its flaws, it's one of the few mechanisms that gives an ordinary kid from anywhere a single, clean, merit-based shot, and I think that's worth protecting. But that's a separate conversation. The point of this piece is narrower: whether or not the exam is sound, what actually protects it is the sealed room and the criminal law, not a cosmetic gesture from the platforms. That gesture didn't protect the exam. It just blurred who's responsible for what. The pattern is the same one you saw with your client: reach for the visible thing, leave the hard thing untouched.