ACCLAIMED LEARNING AID-       Photos showing students casually lighting up cigarettes in what looks like a college classroom have been making the rounds online, leaving everyone puzzled as to what is going on.

The controversial photos originally went viral on Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, but have been making the rounds on other major platforms.

Young students can be seen lighting cigarettes and casually smoking them, while others take their photos with smartphones and the teacher casually observes the spectacle.

Teen smoking is frowned upon in China, as it is pretty much everywhere else, so the photos caused quite a stir online even after the dean of the school where the event happened offered an explanation.

The Dean of Yunan Agricultural University, Zhao Zhengxiong, said the controversial photos were taken during a class on tobacco, a report by odditycentral.com said.

According to Zhengxiong, the teacher brought various brands of cigarettes into the classroom and invited the pupils to try them as a way to better understand tobacco, its flavours, the irritation it causes to the throat, the aftertaste it leaves in the mouth, and the post-combustion ash.

Although the man emphasised that the pupils were not required to smoke, most of them did it anyway.

Pupils of the institution took to the Internet to defend the course and their teacher, saying that this sort of “sensory evaluation” of tobacco is an important part of their “Cigarette Technology” class, adding that such doesn’t take place every day.

“This is not really smoking, we are learning this profession, sensory evaluation is necessary,” one pupil commented.