CTV Kitchener

A 20-year-old woman and 21-year-old man face charges in connection with an alleged unusual bout of cheating at the University of Waterloo.

The woman, Kaiwen Qian, is a student at the school.

She appeared Wednesday in a Kitchener court on charges of personation and uttering a forged document, and was released on $3,000 bail.

She is accused of getting the man – Longhua Wang, a student at York University – to write an exam for her.

Nick Manning, a spokesperson for the school, says staff were alerted to the possibility one or more students would be cheating during a specific math exam.

“(We) put measures in place to detect that cheating, and we discovered that a male student from a different university had been paid to come and take an exam for one of our students,” he told CTV News.

Wang, Manning said, somehow came into possession of a fake Waterloo student ID containing his picture and Qian’s name.

It’s alleged that Wang was paid more than $900 to write the exam.

Qian returns to court in January.

School officials say they continue to investigate the fake student ID, and whether any others were issued.

“We know that students are under immense pressure to pass exams … and inevitably some will find ways to cheat, which is a great shame,” Manning said.

“We … expect them to uphold very high standards of integrity, which means not cheating.”