Candidates take the National Civil Servant Examination on Sunday, December 9, 2007. [File Photo: Xinhua]

After a rash of cheating on this year's civil service entrance exam, hundreds of scores were cancelled and 109 people were punished with life-long bans from taking the test, The People's Daily reports.

More than 1 million participants took the exam to compete for 15,000 positions in the central government and institutions directly under it, according to the National Civil Service Bureau. Once scoring was finished on December15, 2009, 561 participants were found to have cheated on the written portion of the 2010 civil service exam.

Most of the cheaters were fresh graduates of higher education institutions and used high-tech cheating methods. Some used cell phones with wireless earphones to pass along answers and some used false IDs to take the exam in place of the real examinee. Checkers also found some papers had nearly the exact same answers.

Of all the participants caught cheating, 300 had their transcripts for the written exam canceled, 152 had their transcripts for the whole exam canceled and were banned from taking the civil service exam for five years, and the remaining 109 got a life-long ban from taking the civil service exam.

The exam is responsible for choosing the talents that will manage the country, so cheating is completely unacceptable and competition for civil service jobs should be fair and transparent, said Wang Yukai, professor of the Chinese Academy of Governance.