BEIJING, June 8 (AP) -- More than 7 million high school students have signed honesty pledges when they take intensely competitive university entrance tests this week, state media reported Tuesday.

The tests, given in cities throughout China, can decide the course of a student's school career and job prospects. That has fueled the rise of both a huge private tutoring industry and attempts to buy questions or hire substitutes to take the exams.

Students who signed this year's anti-cheating pledges could learn an "important lesson in credibility," an asset in China's market-oriented economy, the China Daily quoted a Communist Party official as saying.

Such lessons "had been somewhat missing" in the former entirely state-run economy, Zhao Wen, deputy party secretary for Capital Normal University in Beijing, was paraphrased as saying.

The newspaper said students caught cheating would have their scores "immediately annulled," but did not elaborate further.

A university official and two employees of a private school in Bejing were sentenced to up to three years in prison last week for leaking questions on a national English test to students.

In other scandals, educators have been accused of leaking test questions or altering results in response to bribery or pressure to favor the children of influential people.

This week, some test centers are videotaping university exams to deter abuses, the China Daily said. It said local authorities in Beijing spent 3 million yuan (US$360,000) on anti-cheating measures.

The tests are being taken by 7.23 million students, according to the Education Ministry.

Rural students are 55 percent of the total, outnumbering urban students for the first time and coming close to matching figures that say China's population is 60 percent rural, the ministry said.

The bigger rural share reflects efforts to raise education standards in China's vast, poor countryside. Since last year, the government has required at least nine years of schooling in all areas.

"The change implies that the educational development between urban and rural China is becoming more balanced," said Wang Chunguang, an education researcher quoted by the official Xinhua News Agency. "The gap is becoming narrower."

The exams are being held one month earlier than in previous years to avoid the punishing July heat in many parts of the country.

Last year, testing was complicated by the country's outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome. Students were required to pass medical exams in advance and were checked for fever, a key SARS symptom, before being allowed into testing centers.