THOSE fourth-year students who left Beijing because of SARS will be called back and graduation will go ahead as scheduled, the Beijing Education Commission said last week.
Punctual graduation may appear to be good, but many of them find they have trouble with their graduation paper, which was disrupted by SARS, and that could be a real problem.
Computer major Shen Qigang at Northern Jiaotong University left Beijing in late April. He took along some reference works and photocopied library materials to his home in northern Guizhou Province.
For the past month, he has read and worked on his paper.
"I was stuck at home, and most of the work was theoretical. That's not enough for a complete graduation paper," Shen says.
He explains that there are no library resources or computers down in the countryside. And, the nearest Internet bar is miles away.
"My greatest desire now is to return to school to finish my programme writing and testing on the computer," he told 21st Century.
Many people who left Beijing in late April are in the same boat. Science and engineering majors have particular problems since their papers involve experiments or fieldwork. Back home, lab experiments and fieldwork are out of the question.
For those who remained on campus, writing was less troublesome since libraries, computers and the Internet were still available. A few SARS-hit schools including Northern Jiaotong, closed libraries for a while but reopened last week.
"Also in some cases, experiments could still go on, but only in small groups," said Zhou Yuehong, at Tsinghua University's news centre.
Universities are helping students with their papers and teachers are giving advice no matter where the students are.
Yu Shuangyuan, an assistant professor at Northern Jiaotong who supervises graduation papers for six students, says that two of them are on campus and she meets with them. "The other four left Beijing and I give them tips over the phone, usually once a week," Yu says.
Although some teachers fear a slight decline in the outcome, "academic requirements for graduation will not be lowered." That according to Wang Hui, deputy head of the teaching affairs office at Tsinghua. She says that teachers can consider putting more emphasis on theory and less on experiments during the paper's defense.
At Northern Jiaotong, some students can make changes in the research topic.
Universities in Beijing will start calling students back by June 10. The defense of papers is planned for late June. And graduates are expected to leave school in early July.