In December, a township in Nanjing gamed a provincial prosperity and well-being telephone survey by issuing standard answers, offering cash prizes as an incentive for respondents to cooperate, and cutting off phone service to poorer and less harmonious households.

A resident of Henan writes in the current issue of Oriental Outlook magazine about another way of guaranteeing satisfactory survey results:

When the municipal education bureau launched a survey to gauge public satisfaction with the city's schools, my third-grade daughter came home one day with a form for me to fill out. I opened it up to take a look and discovered that my choices were "satisfied," "basically satisfied," and "don't really know."

School spirit isn't all that good at my daughter's school, and the teachers don't have the greatest sense of responsibility — I've told them this time after time without seeing any improvement. This time, I had the opportunity to convey my feelings directly to the educational authorities, so I decided to alter "don't really know" to "not really satisfied."

But my daughter made a point of instructing me, "Our teacher said that our parents must check the 'satisfied' column."

I was puzzled: "Why do teachers get to decide how parents should fill in the form?"

"Our teacher will check the forms one by one, and if it's not filled out right, I'll get in trouble." Realizing my daughter's difficulty, I was forced to claim I was "satisfied."

The next day I read in the paper that this was the third time the city had conducted a school satisfaction poll, and I noticed an interesting detail. In the previous two polls, lots of schools had faked their forms: rather than giving them to parents, they had gotten teachers to fill them out en masse. To prevent a recurrence, the education bureau insisted that schools distribute the forms to parents. Reading this depressed me even more: although the survey forms reached parents' hands, was the result really an expression of their opinions?