Ministry of Education officials told a Beijing
press conference Tuesday that students planning to get married will
no longer need permission to do so from their university.
But Sun Xiaobing, director of the ministry's Legal
Office, said, "Students should properly handle the issues of
studies, marriage and family. They aren't yet financially prepared
for marriage."
Sun stressed that the change does not mean the
government encourages students to wed, but was to bring campus
regulations in line with the new Marriage Law, which went into
force in 2003.
This said that people no longer needed to get the
consent of their employer for marriage registration, and from this
autumn, students over the legal marriage age won't have to ask for
equivalent approval anymore.
Currently, a university can expel regular program
students if they marry during their studies, though since 2003 more
than 70 universities on the Chinese mainland have waived the ban.
But sources said only one in every 10,000 students has since
registered for marriage.
The revised regulations also offer university
officials more say in punishing students who are caught cheating in
an exam or plagiarizing.
A university will be able to kick a student out
if?he or she?takes an exam for another candidate, hires a
proxy to take an exam, organizes exam cheating, cheats through
devices like mobile phones or steals ideas from a published
research paper.
On March 3, a district court in Henan
Province ordered Zhengzhou University
to revoke its order to sack a student who had been caught cheating
in an exam. The court said that, according to campus rules, the
punishment was too harsh.
To better protect students' rights, the new
guidelines allow students to appeal to a department of their school
or even the provincial education authority if they are unhappy with
a punishment.
(Eastday.com March 30, 2005)