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)