The exam room, decorated with flowers and Chinese knots, helped the teenage girl to keep a relaxed mood. As her mother had contact with SARS patients, Zhang Cun's family is required to stay at home and watch for signs of the disease. To ensure Zhang Cun's exam still went ahead, the education authority in Haidian District opened a special examination room for her.

The exams, which have attracted some 6.13 million applicants this year, a record high, got under way throughout the country in an orderly manner.

The national exams for college admission have traditionally been held every July. However, beginning this year, the exams will be held in June to avoid the mid-summer heat.

But due to the outbreak of SARS, many high schools across the country were closed in late April, and high school senior students were forced to prepare for the exams at home. Many students appear to have learned a great deal from the unanticipated epidemic disease and have developed the ability to remain calm.

"I have confidence in the sanitation measures that have been taken by schools," said Zhao Xuesong, 18, a male student at Shunyi No 3 High School in Beijing. "It's natural to feel pressure when taking such an important test at such a critical moment but it also provides an opportunity to improve ourselves both psychologically and physically."

He said they would be more capable of handling difficulties and dealing with setbacks.

Moreover, both exam takers and their parents have adopted a healthy attitude with regard to the national college entrance exam. The traditional phenomenon, which featured applicants taking tests inside classrooms while large crowds of relatives waited outside the school gates under the scorching heat, did not occur this year. Instead, dozens of reporters surrounded the examination places.

In Beijing, one of the areas worst hit by SARS, all the exam entrants assigned to 213 exam centres across the city entered the well-disinfected, spacious rooms after showing proof of identity and good health.

All students had undergone temperature screening by infrared thermometers.

In southern China's Guangdong Province, a computer monitoring system was adopted by a six member supervising team which supervised more than 400 examination rooms in six cities.

In the exam room for Braille-based exams in Changning Community College in eastern China's Shanghai, nine blind but talented senior students were concentrating on the Chinese language exam during the morning. They will also take the maths, English and history exams.

Taking blind people's special circumstances into consideration, the blind exams allow half an hour more time to answer the questions, said a local official in charge of affairs related to blind applicants.

In northwestern China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, one of the few Chinese regions where no SARS cases have been found, 93,000 students participated in the annual national college entrance exam at the region's 135 exam centres, answering questions in five languages including Chinese and Uygur.

More ethnic minority students all over the country have taken part in the test this year, an increase of 18 per cent from the previous year. Statistics showed that by the end of 2002, there were a total of 540,000 ethnic minority students studying in the country's colleges and universities.

(China Daily June 9, 2003)