Principal clarifies meal times allowed for students

Hebei's Hengshui High School has denied its students are given only four minutes to eat their meals, Yangtze Evening News reported on Tuesday.

A timetable from the school previously uploaded to the Internet showed that Senior One students were scheduled to have supper at 6:15 pm, Senior Two at 6:19 and Senior Three at 6:23.

The timetable was controversial because many netizens believed the students only had four minutes for their meals.

Kang Xinjiang, vice-principal of the school, told the newspaper that precision is a characteristic of their school’s time management.

"When we say Senior One students should have meals at 6:15 pm and Senior Two at 6:19 pm, it doesn't mean that students should finish eating within four minutes," Kang, who was on a visit to high schools in Nanjing, Jiangsu province, was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

"Instead, it means that Senior One students should leave the classroom to have meals at 6:15 and Senior Two should leave at 6:19."

The report said 104 students of the school were accepted to Tsinghua University and Peking University after this year's gaokao, China's college entrance examination, amounting to 80 percent of all students admitted by the two universities from Hebei province this year. More than 98 percent of the school's students who took the gaokao this year were accepted to good colleges.

The school was called a "magical school" because of its students' good performances in the gaokao, the report said.