Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Students' Cheating Techniques - Don't Try at Home
corbettw writes "According to a wire report on Yahoo! news, competition for university admissions in China are so intense that people are coming up with new, and sometimes dangerous, ways to cheat. The methods include microscopic earphones and wireless devices. In some cases, students are required surgery to recover from their cheating attempts. If there are that many people that desperate to get into a university, the obvious question would be, why don't they just open more schools?"
This LA Times article from the weekend has a more in-depth look at the grueling process of Chinese university entrance exams, and shows a bit more of the motivation to go to such lengths to cheat.
For example:
hinese college admissions officers don't look at your high school grades, personal interviews, recommendations or essays in making their decisions. They don't make allowances if you don't test well. They won't even cut you slack if your mother died the day before. Everything, countless years of sacrifice and hard work, boils down to this one test. Those who perform miserably have to wait another year to take the exam.
Not a great system from any point of view. Encourages cheating. Discourages creativity, not particularly fair to the students .... -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
Trust me.. there is nothing socialistic about the current chinese society, least of all their health care.
First, education in a top school is VERY different from education in a recently opened school with no reputation. I know because I teach in a public university. Our classes are dumbed down because the students won't get it otherwise. Most of the classes that I took in junior and senior level in my undergrad can never be taught here.
Second, education is only a small part of the value of university. Creating life-long contacts with people who will be in your field and those who are already successful in your field is almost as (if not a bigger) part.
Third, Ph.D. is awarded for discovering something new in a field. Try discovering something new in Math... And without a Ph.D., you can't teach in a university. This limits the number of university teachers in technical disciplines.
And lastly, since I am compareing China to my American experience, they can't "just" open a university. It takes more than a guy with money willing to build a building. A university degree there is an official governtment document. So all programs must come with official government approval and certification.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The problem is not always getting into any school but top schools. Last week there were riots over what school name was going on some graduates diplomas in China. I think I say it on cnn.
My wife spent two years teaching English in China. The way she described her experiences, it sounded as if cheating were an accepted norm. Some teachers, rather than ask their students to refrain from cheating, instead ask them to not make it so obvious that the teacher loses face. It's just a given that many of them will cheat. And some of my wife's students explained to her that it's quite an insult to refuse another student's request to help him or her cheat; it could ruin an otherwise lengthy friendship.
Granted, though, this was not at a top university. It was a smaller, almost trade-school atmosphere.
Actually, there are diminishing marginal returns on the value of college degrees in China since there is a high-end job shortage. It is already the case that many students can't garner jobs comensurate with their degrees. Adding more students with degrees will only lower their expected value. Given that in the short-run, the demand for high-end labor is essentially fixed, there is a fixed amount of "value" so to speak for college degrees. Adding degrees, like printing more paper money, only lowers the expected value of a degree. China's problem is not a lack of higher education, it's a lack of high-end industry demand for advanced degrees. Hence the printing money analogy is pretty good.
That's funny (not ha ha funny), because in the UK, the government has raised tuition fees in order to increase the number of students going to University.
The "Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy" explanation of the logic follows something like this:
Universities are strapped for cash and can't accept any more students. So to increase the number of students, Universities require more funding. As the tax-payer is reluctant to subsidise rich kids getting Media Studies degress, the burden for paying for all these extra students must be carried by the students themselves. Hence, Universities may charge huge fees. Ah, but you say, "What about all the poor people who want to go to University to get degrees so that they can become teachers?". Well, the solution there is to provide cost effective loans, which only need to be paid back, if the student starts employement with a job which pays more £15000 p.a. Ah, but you say, "But teachers earn more than £15000 p.a.!" Good point. We'll drop teachers' pay to less than £15000 so that they don't have to pay thier loans back! It's a Win-win situation.
Student numbers have gone up a little, and then down a little. Oh, well.
Stangely, the National debt continues to go up. After-all what's a £4000 credit-card bill next to a £20000 student loan? Peanuts!
I'm just glad I did my studies when there weren't any fees (or rather they were paid for me).
P.S. Please exscuse my Grammar. I did a Chemistry degree rather than media studies.
return 0; }
Education in China is primarily publicly funded -- just like in the US. In the US we have similar problems: cartels of licensed industries (Engineers, Architects, Doctors, Dentists, Teachers, anything licensed) control the number of slots of available future workers. More workers in a given licensed industry means more competition which means lower prices ("wages") for that cartelized industry.
The AMA in America has lobbied Congress to reduce the number of medical students. The long term effect? Higher medical prices.
State licensing is the reason why China doesn't allow more schools to be opened. It is also the reason why the U.S. has such huge subsidies for college (easy State loans, etc) and why many licensed jobs bring in so much money even though they may not necessarily be more difficult than lower paying unlicensed jobs.
The problem is not that there isn't enough schools, the students don't want to go to ust jANY university. The students want to get into the TOP brand name universities, there-in lies the problem. It's a matter of employment, there are literally millions of unemployed university graduates in china, a university degree is the foot in the door for ANY white collar position.
Having a degree from a brand name university if almost the only ticket to a well paying job for most chinese. I mean you go to any office and the LOWEST most UNDERPAID person, usually the office boy will almost certinaly have a bachelors degree. University graduates are so common in china there is just not enough work for all of them. That's why you have to get into a brand name one.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Unlike the USA, most of the world doesn't see colleges as just some business, and the more you can serve, the merrier.
Especially in the Soviet block -- which I assume to be the model that China copied -- education was free at all levels (and if you were really good, they actually paid you to study there), _but_ you had to prove that you have the brains and the will to learn. I.e., you couldn't just have daddy save up a few tens of grand and buy you a place at a college. You had to go through exams and prove that you've learned and can apply the maths/physics/biology/whatever that you've learned in high school.
(And let me also say that high-school classes included stuff that was well in the realm of colleges in the USA. E.g., quantum physics.)
The same applied between semesters _and_ at the end. To stay in college you had to prove that you have a damn good grasp of everything they taught you in that year.
This wasn't just to save state money, but also to _guarantee_ a certain high level of intelligence, competence and ability to learn, if you had a college diploma.
So what these students are doing with their cheating is go though university _without_ proving that. E.g., to end up with a diploma that says "electrical engineer" without having the knowledge, intelligence or will to learn.
And letting them just do that does devalue what that diploma means for everyone else. It's like saying, "ah, let's let every dog owner just buy a bogus pedigree certifficate for their mut, if they want one that much." Well, yes, it may sound like a supply-and-demand kind of solution, but that devalues it for those whose diploma_isn't_ a bogus bought piece of paper.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It's free market, desperation drives up prices and margins!
Likewise the students are taking a calculated risk by cheating! It's the free market! There's no ethics it's all risk vs reward!
A few days ago I remember reading an article from a magazine (Helsingin Sanomat, if I remember corretly), where an expert on China, said that about 1/3 of graduating students wont find jobs, and academic unemployment is a growing issue. Also in the same article he said that many universities make up or fix their graduate employment statistics to lure better students. So fixing the problem of students cheating by opening up more schools, isn't the answer.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
Sounds like incompetence.
Its very easy to rig up a computer so that it can only be used for test-taking, and has
no ability to send IM's or otherwise help the test-taker cheat.
If you allow a student access to a general purpose computer with network access of any kind,
then you are basically allowing them full access to all information on the internet. (for many
things, this degrades the test into a test of their search skills)
For some subjects, there is nothing wrong with that type of "cheating": if you can find the answer than you
can do the job. (in the real world you'll have a desktop and google available to you, so have at it)
That does not apply to all subjects however.
Another way to discourage cheating is to have the students compete against one another.
(the downside is that curves punish the brightest and reward mediocrity in many cases)
I wouldnt advise curves, standards should be objective.
Yet another way is to make each student take a unique test: Even simple shuffling the order of the
questions around, while making sure that the test-taker cannot view more than one question at a time
and cannot backtrack, effectively squelches many forms of synchronized or low-bandwidth cheating.
More subtle techniques involve giving similar questions that have slight differences, so that cheaters
who assume two questions are the same without looking too closely will be misled to choose the wrong answer.
Another technique is to "camouflage" questions by changing trivial details such as proper nouns/advectives/contants
and other details that do not affect the answer to the question.
In reality, a minimal effort should be able to prevent 99% of cheating attempts, and this should not be a big problem.
Lack of effort on part of the test administrators, or simple lack of confidience are to blame when cheating is high.
In any case, you cannot blame the students: they need to score high compared to their peers, or it will have a negative
impact on their lives. If they don't take advantage of every tool at their disposal, then they will do poorly.
It's not that you cannot understand the Chinese TA's English, but their ability to solve the problem themself. Why is that?
Chinese college students in America are the worst cheaters. Period. That's a blanket generalization, but well founded in factual evidence at every Engineering class I took. In my Calculus III class, two Chinese students went so far as to sit next to eachother at a final exam and switch papers when the prof had his back turned while updating the time remaining at the chalkboard. That prof was my friend, and I promplty notified him about it over a beer at a local bar across the street afterwards. In all my Electrical Engineering classes, and I mean all, I was approached by many Asians (of various descent) to copy my homework and/or get old test papers from prior classes not currently enrolled in. In my Computer Science classes, it was pretty much a combination of the prior two. Yeah, I was pissed. I busted my ass learning this stuff 10 years ago, and they had the nerve to ask me for help?
That was over 10 years ago, so I can only imagine it getting worse. Also, I remember some such SAT or GRE controversy a few years back when it was uncovered that Asian countries were selling those admission tests (which were verbatim and not practice sheets). In my Computer Science graduate studies, it showed too. Not cheating, since there's really no such thing at that level, but their comprehension. It caught up to them. I saw them struggle and had several long discussions with profs about it. Profs aren't naive either. Most of them know.
Either way, it's a sad reality, but nonetheless, a market truth - do whatever it takes to compete and get ahead. I think it's ingrained in their culture. I'm going back to Shanghai this October on a business trip, and every time I do, I feel a little smug and wear a smile on my face as I stare down at my college ring while walking off the plane. It can be done the old fashioned way. It's unfortunate some countries don't place such a high standard on pride and individual growth. It's more like a communal fire ant mound intent on protecting the hive. Their competitive future is secure and their mound well weathered to temper any world storm. I grant them that. What I pity is their individual sense of pride and accomplishment. Yes, blanket generalisms, I know. But very true, and most likely, an ideological truth of a communist hive competing in a global market.
What a load of bullshit. Graduates may not get the jobs they'd like, but they are certainly NOT common. See these Unesco figures for the number of students enrolled in tertiary education as a proportion of the tertiary school-age population. In 2002, China's ratio was 16%, compared to 83% for the US, 51% for Japan, for example. Whatever offices you're visiting (Fortune 500 branches?) are extremely untypical of China as a whole.
Graduates may not get the jobs they'd like, but they are certainly NOT common. See these Unesco figures for the number of students enrolled in tertiary education as a proportion of the tertiary school-age population. In 2002, China's ratio was 16%, compared to 83% for the US, 51% for Japan, for example
Read your own figures, ratios are all very nice and pretty, however multiply those ratios by their repespective countries populations.
ooo, China has 1.3 BILLION people, and it's economy is smaller than that of the UK, where are all the jobs?
American economy is 5 times the size of the chinese one and Japan is twice the size.
American population is 1/5 the size of China, and Japan's is about 1/9.
Is if this ultra-hard nosed approach found in some of teh eastren bloc countries is the right way to do it, why are there so many great minds produced in Western European and American universities? Why do so many of the best and brightest from other countries come to study there?
The answer is that this idea that being super elitest, super competitive and making test scores reign supreme does not foster free thinking and that's really the thing of value that can come out of a higher education. Memorizing tons of facts and formulas really isn't that useful. My computer can do that, and far better than you can. What's useful is the ability to take knowledge like that and apply it to the real world in new and novel ways, to develop new tools to attack problems, and so on.
Perhaps American universities are too lax on admissions, but over all it seems to work pretty well. We seem to be able to produce lots of bright people and have no lack of applicants from other countries that want to come study here.
Something I do notice is that many people who come from these ultra-competitive environments to do grad work cannot think indedpendantly to nearly any degree. If you ask them a question in terms of formulas you they know, they'll solve it in a flash. If you ask them the very same question in terms of real world interactions, they stare blankly. They've basically been trained to be little hard working computers. They study like mad and such, but all their knowledge is fragile, as it exists only in theories, not in applications.
Richard Feynman talks about this phenomena at some length in his biography and it's a worthwhile read.
It is you who seem to be missing the point. There are only roughly about 1/5 as many "white collar" jobs in China as there are in the U.S. So, even though the percentage of Chinese workers with college degrees is much lower, once you take the massive differences in population into account there are far fewer white-collar jobs per degree-holding worker than in the U.S..
In the last eight years China has quadrupled the number of universities they have. They see the dominance of the west in the higher education arena as a strategic (economic) threat and are trying hard to compete. Too bad that here in the USA we don't see the poor performance of our government-run K-12 educational system as a strategic weakness.