College students have been made to compulsorily drink hard liquor as a prerequisite to passing their tests.
Gu Ming, a college professor in China has been suspended after giving his students a rather controversial test during their final exam.
According to the man, in a bid to prepare them for real life, he asked his students to gulp down glasses of baijiu, a Chinese liquor, grading them based on how much they were able consume.
“You’re all going to do sales jobs after graduation, drinking baijiu is the thing you must learn!” Gu Ming told the students of his Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) class at Guizhou Anshun Vocational Institute.
He had poured the alcohol into dozens of plastic cups and laid them out on the desk in his office, asking his students to drink up.
“Those who ‘ganbeied’ (finished) a full glass of liquor get a full 100 mark for their exam, half glass gets 90 marks, and a sip gets 60,” one of Gu Ming’s students later posted on Chinese social media website Weibo. “Those who do not drink at all will fail.”
It sounds like the easiest exam ever, but it was actually quite difficult – baijiu is a rather potent beverage made from grain, with an alcohol content of 40 to 60 percent. But Gu Ming apparently decided to give it to his students anyway, because it happens to be the beverage of choice in the Chinese business world.
Photographs uploaded to social media showed that most of the students passed the test with flying colors, having managed to down their glasses of baijiu. Several students were later reported to have been found in an inebriated state on campus.
If the test was intended to be a joke, the institute’s deputy director Fu Guisheng did not see the humor in it, suspending Gu Ming over the issue.
The incident also did not go down well with others outside the institute – it sparked an intense online debate with many lashing out against the professor. Only a few sympathized with him, stating that he was trying to help his students.