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?"

Comments

another good idea.

[sjwt]

" 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?"

And why dont we just print more money to solve poverty?

Re:another good idea.

[nelsonal]

With schools you can open as many as you want but without professors it's just going to be babysitting for college students.

Re:another good idea.

[virg_mattes]

Printing money (what you really mean is inventing monetary value, since physically printing money doesn't do anything to the economy) requires that you devalue the monetary value you currently have, since the money supply represents a "set amount" of value, and forcing it around to more people cuts into the value of what each unit holds. The same is not true of univeristies. That is, we're very far from the situation where opening another univeristy will so crowd the market for higher education that the value of an education will decline due to the presence of more of them. Therefore, your analogy is false, because it's based on a bad assumption about marginal value. They should consider opening more schools so more of their people can get a higher education without resorting to cheating.

Virg

Re:another good idea.

[sjwt]

and where do they find the stafff for trippling there university system overnight? they either overcrowed the calsses, or they higher underqulified staff, which devalues the education that the studentes recive.

Re:another good idea.

[CastrTroy]

Exactly, because in China, I'm sure the schools are all state run (they are communist). They open as many as they can. They also maintain high standards so that people graduating with be worth something. If you give everyone a degree, a degree is no longer worth anything. On a side note, they may just be better off studying. Most of the time when I was in university, I saw many people trying to cheat, and thinking up these elaborate schemes, or spending hours typing notes into their programmable calculator. If they spend half the time they did cheating on just doing the work, the probably could have gotten at least a B average. People would spend hours running around the engineering building looking for answers to an assignment that could be completed in 45 minutes.

Re:another good idea.

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

now if only we could print senses of humor in the same way the GP joked about printing money. . .

Re:another good idea.

[miskatonic alumnus]

Since schools also produce professors, I don't see the problem.

Re:another good idea.

[Lord Apathy]

" 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?"

Because you need someone to dig the ditches.

Re:another good idea.

[Caffeinated Geek]

Just because you train someone and slap the title professor on them doesn't mean they can teach. I think everyone has had at least one teacher that they could not guess how they managed to keep a job. If they rush the production of teachers just to open schools, the problem becomes worse.

Re:another good idea.

[Catbeller]

"And why dont we just print more money to solve poverty?"

Thanks, Bill O'Reilly, for the neocon view. Never invest in a better world, 'cause it's useless and a crutch to the poor. Let, say, McDonalds open private academies to train the proles for their true place in life. Are there no workhouses?

And by the way, we're taking back all those highways we built with public monies to move the big asses of university graduates around for free. After all, why not print money and give it to them, if free roads work sooo well?

And BTW, Bush is printing and borrowing money, the biggest amounts in history, not to solve poverty, but to finance tax cuts for the wealthy and build a police state around the world. It apparently is okay to print money to solve wealth?!

Re:another good idea.

[Austerity Empowers]

If you print more dollars, all dollars become worthless. Education increases in value as more people have it. There may be a threshold where building another school would only appeal to those whose commitments to education are so low that they wouldn't receive any benefit, but clearly that's not the case in China if people are hurting themselves just to get admission.

Some may just be cheating for a free ride, but I clearly remember the SATs here. The ones I remember trying to come up with the most exotic cheating methods were the ones religiously doing the "1600 SAT questions" guides and were the people that would already have scored better than 90% of their peers. The difference between a 1600 and a 1500, in their minds, was going to mean the difference between MIT and a serving fries at Micky D's.

Re:another good idea.

[Pirogoeth]

It's kind of like overexpansion in baseball. There's too many teams right now and there are over a hundred players on major league rosters who would have been only good enough for the minors before.

You could suddenly fund a hundred new schools, but the staff you'd get for them would have to come from a pool that was never good enough to teach at the current schools, lowering the quality of education.

I'm sure that over time, quality professors could be developed, but "build more schools!" won't work as well.

Re:another good idea.

[Tiro]

There is DEFINITELY such a thing as academic credential inflation. There was no such thing as an MBA fifty years ago, yet people managed to run very large companies.

Re:another good idea.

[Ryan Amos]

All of your points are totally correct. However, none of it means anything when trying to get a job where they care about a degree. What a college diploma seems to mean these days is "I was able to keep my life from falling apart for 4 years, I'm a stable person!" Of course, 7 year graduation rates for college freshmen are around the 50% mark at most schools, so that may be more of an achievement than it sounds.

And we need the American university system, if only for the reason that our public school system doesn't teach people enough. I had never had a history class that said anything bad about America (they were taught from the textbooks purchased by the state government, what do you expect?) I never had a chemistry or physics class that taught more than the most elementary calculations.

Our public school systems are not producing adults who can compete in a global work force, so we need the exact kind of university system we have: a couple really prestigious places, and a whole lot of "teaching colleges." Last I heard, only about 25% of Americans had a 4-year college degree, so it's not quite so ubiquitous to be meaningless. If anything, we need MORE universities that cater to the lowest common denominator: not everyone can go to Yale, but everyone should be able to get an education, even if it is from community college.

Re:another good idea.

[iminplaya]

Ah, the old "Without poverty, who will do the work?" theory. Nothing more natural than using starvation to motivate people. Very successful it is, all over the world. We have to convince everybody that there is not enough. To think that some believe that knowledge is a limited resource, to be metered out only to those that are worthy. Pretty freaky I think. So far, the only unrenewable resource I have figured out is time. Everything else recycles. Funny that we actually choose to live that way as it becomes more obvious that we could all live like kings. I mean, it IS why we build machines, right? So we don't have to subjugate people any longer? Yes, I know. There are some who would feel naked without that power over others. What can I say? Power is a chick magnet. That "alpha male" thing works just as good with humans as it does with other animals. So let's all muzzle up and see if that power rubs off on us.

Re:another good idea.

[smokeslikeapoet]

You have it completely wrong. People say that we will always need ditch diggers and toilet cleaners. With technology we've invented backhoes and ditch witches, toilet cleaning additives and tank drop-ins that keep toilets clean much longer.

The economic issue in play is the Chinese Government that is rationing education for their own benefit. Privatizing and deregulating the educational process will introduce economic competition that will spur growth in the education industry and increase the supply.

A private system would be detrimental to the totalitarian state that is the Peoples Republic of China. Keeping people dumb keeps them under your thumb. America's elementary and secondary educational system is run in much the same way. Privatization of education is the only real solution.

Re:another good idea.

[climberkid]

I believe the parent was being sarcastic...

Re:another good idea.

[gfxguy]

Right, because when we all have college degrees, the robots will do the manual labor anyway. Plumbing will become self-healing, roofs and roads will be self-repairing, buildings will build and paint themselves! Robot tractors will simply pull containers through the fields while fruit and vegetables just leap into it.

Interestingly, many people take jobs to do these things because they feel obligated to work because they can, not because someone is threatening them with starvation; they feel obligated to not leech off society if they don't have to. Some people actually feel guilty taking money from others because they are not pulling their own weight. They are not doing it to feed someone elses power trip.

Re:another good idea.

[nasor]

In U.S. universities there is basically zero effort put into preparing people to teach college classes. One day a new grad student shows up to start their graduate school career and a week later they're standing in front of 40 undergrads trying to explain the difference between a joule and a watt. It's about the same with the actual professors; they generally just look at what sorts of research you've done and what school you got your PhD from, and as long as you can speak reasonably fluent english they don't worry about your teaching ability. It's certainly not a perfect system, but it seems to work well enough. There's no obvious reason why China's current universities couldn't produce more than enough professors to double or tipple their number of universities in a few years.

Re:another good idea.

[Kelev]

Section 1:
"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..."

Section 2:
"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."

Section 3:
"Read your own figures, ratios are all very nice and pretty, however multiply those ratios by their repespective countries populations.
You seem not to understand what a ratio is. Anyway, the point is that being a graduate in China is VERY rare still, (proprtionally, though in absolute terms there are millions of them; amongst the 1.3 BILLION population) your personal experience notwithstanding."

With all due respect, it would seem that the idea of a ratio is perfectly understood by the person who posted. As stated with, "...the number of students enrolled in tertiary education as a proportion of the tertiary school-age population..."

So, China has 16 out of ever 100 people who fit the above criteria going to college. All well and good. The United States is at 83 out fo those 100, so again, great news. Japan is at 51 out fo those 100. We all understand this, but what was introduced into the discussion is the question of how many college-enrolled people may be NEEDED in the current economy.

This is not a linear equation, and if you come up with a good one, you'll get an award from Sweden I'm sure, but let's take a quick and dirty look:

China's economy is 1/5 that of the US economy. The US is - for the most part - a tech and service industry with a great need for higher level education. China, while modernizing, is not modernized YET, and as such needs less people in the equiv. roles. For the sake of pure argument, let's assume a mirror image economy, but just smaller, and do easy math.

China econ x 5 = US econ
china college rate = 16%
16 x 5 = 80

That's very close, all things considered, to the US totals.
Reintroduce the idea that China is not modernized at this time, and the ECONOMIC need for more educated people becomes less... probably much less than the 3% our calculations show.

Of course, this data can also show someting else:

By keeping the supply lower (# of college spots), only the most deserving get in (# of applicants), and thus the quality fo the final product (graduates) is higher.

Who needs a degree to work a mine, work in a factory, or plow a field? When China's economy advances enough, there is little doubt that they'll increase the number of spots available.

Re:another good idea.

[tbannist]

Strangely enough, most the unveristy students with the least ability to reason have been liberal arts majors.

Seriously, I think science and the scientific method is a very important part of what makes people free from irrationality. The simple belief that you can try things to see what works and what doesn't often seems trivial and unimportant, but it's amazing how the lack of that simple concept can totally cripple someone's ability to live freely.

The American obssession with employment is a result of the Great Depression. It became the goal of the United States to prevent such a man-made catastrophe from ever happening again. It became the national goal to ensure that there would always be jobs for the people, and it shapes the major policies of the U.S. government. It's all about the economy because it's what produces the jobs. Every great empire has a mission, a goal, an ideal. For the United States as a whole it has been getting as close to 0% unemployment as feasible since the 1930s.

Re:another good idea.

[zCyl]

Keeping people dumb keeps them under your thumb. America's elementary and secondary educational system is run in much the same way. Privatization of education is the only real solution.

Yeah, private education will really help the oppressed in America to be able to climb out of their poverty and despair, with only a minimal expense of paying out several times their annual salary in tuition each year.

Re:another good idea.

[aevans]

Probably in larger part because practically the only thing you can do with a degree in math is teach math.

Re:another good idea.

[entropy123]

I just finished my PhD and find the whole notion of 'teaching' to be absurd. Before my PhD I thought a great deal of the notion...but after being in the system for awhile I see being a student in a whole new light. Students learn what they want to learn from who they want to learn it. In other words, good students are able to overcome bad teaching any day of the week. Trouble occurs when the teachers either do not know the students or have no contacts for advancing the good students to where they want to go. As far as 'learning', the important thing is that the process be sufficiently hard for the students to have achieved a minium competence level in the subject. I'd say the most important thing about a college or university is the social status and initial job contacts it entails; knowledge rarely matters in a position but your friends do. I say open up as many universities as the market will bear.

Re:another good idea.

[shimage]

It really seems like the problem isn't so much "universities not producing competent teachers" as it is rather "universities not producing enthusiastic subject-matter experts, given a sizeable pool of people who wanted to study that subject matter in the first place".

The problem isn't that the teachers aren't enthusiastic about doing science; they wouldn't be professors (or even grad students) otherwise. There are many reasons why an ethusiastic subject-matter expert might not be enthusiastic about teaching. E.g., just because physics in general excites me doesn't mean I want to explain units to an uninterested audience. It's boring material. If you really are interested in a field, what's exciting is areas of active research, not issues of nomenclature.

Furthermore, the distinction between an interested and a disinterested one is vitally important. I don't know a single professor that wouldn't jump at the chance to talk about their research to an interested party. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that the vast majority of teaching (at least in physics) involves first-year, pre-med/engineering type stuff. So you have a teacher that is totally bored with the material, and students interested in it simply because they need to maintain that magic 4.0 for med/grad school. I don't know about you, but I don't think (especially at that level) it's the teacher's responsibility to make their students interested in the material.

Lastly, I find that it is typically those most expert in a field that either cannot remember what was difficult about learning material for the first time, or are simply so "brilliant" that the way they think about things (paradigms, if you will) is not understable by lesser beings (i.e. undergraduates).

Re:another good idea.

[alienw]

Well, the problem is that there are far more people attending college. This devalues college degrees, for obvious reasons. All this is doing is turning colleges into remedial high schools. The first two years of college in the USA are basically remedial education. In many other countries, this stuff is taught in high school.

The solution is to improve high school education, not to lower standards in college. It's already become bad enough. It's possible to get a Ph.D in computer science and not learn a whole lot. Many people go to degree mills like ITT, Devry, or about 20 others, hoping that with a "college" degree they will finally be able to get a decent job. Obviously, nobody would hire a Devry graduate, so they get screwed. The only people that profit are the ones that pocket all the money that the government hands out. Even the real colleges are horrible. Employers pretty much expect a new graduate to spend a few years on the job before they actually learn everything they supposedly learn in college, and the quality of new hires is steadily diminishing. We have a real crisis, and nobody is paying attention.

Re:another good idea.

[stalebread]

I just finished my PhD and find the whole notion of 'teaching' to be absurd. Before my PhD I thought a great deal of the notion...but after being in the system for awhile I see being a student in a whole new light. Students learn what they want to learn from who they want to learn it. In other words, good students are able to overcome bad teaching any day of the week. Trouble occurs when the teachers either do not know the students or have no contacts for advancing the good students to where they want to go.

As far as Doctoral studies go, I'd agree with you. The professor's reputation and contacts are more important than his teaching ability. The professor is more mentor than teacher. But for undergraduate studies, the professor's teaching ability makes a huge difference. The undergraduate education is classroom based, and with the right professors, going to lectures can be a real pleasure. They can also be a complete waste of time with poor professors. A good student will still do well in poor professor's classes, but that's just because they score higher than the average student in any class (study study study). The whole scale is lower. From the best student to the worst, they'll all learn less with a poor professor. I had a professor who couldn't teach to save his life. When it came time to take exams, the class average was around 25%. If you could achieve 30% correct, you'd get a B. The highest grade in the class was 50%. I managed a B, but I walked away feeling as if I hadn't learned a thing.

Encouragement

[Billosaur]

You hear that America! Now China is about to outdo is in another category: cheating! Are we going to stand for this?!?

Precisely why do we care? Admittedly, if China's colleges and universities get filled with these industrious but otherwise dim individuals, we won't have to worry about China being a technological force to be reckoned with.

Re:I have an easy solution

[CogDissident]

They do try to at least "pretend" to be actually a communist nation, where people are entitled to the same service. Its not true of course, but they at least give a feeble effort to look like they do.

Why not just open more schools?

[Distinguished Hero]

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?"

Maybe because in the real world resources are finite? Yes, in a free market situation, where the price that people were willing to pay would be higher than the marginal cost of production, more would be sold, and high profit margins would encourage even more people to enter the market, satisfying even more demand; however, education is (probably) highly subsidized, and as such, every additional student or school opened costs even more money. There is also the matter of very good or even decent teachers being a finite resources. Add in the matter of prestige (everyone wants to get placed in a top school), and the fact that it doesn't make much sense to graduate a lot more people than the demand for jobs (unless you want to depress wages by increasing unemployment or think that these people will be entrepreneurs who will in the future generate even more jobs), and the fact that graduating more sub-par students in addition to the best of the best is not really necessary or all that beneficial and you will come to realize that the decision is rather rational.

Black Thursday=Exam Day

[Blorgo]

If you are from a poor Chinese family, this is the only chance you will have to get into get into a university, with the govt. paying most or all of the costs. It is a way out of poverty for a whole family; the pressures are enormous, and there are many suicides of students who failed to get high enough scores on the entrance exam (held just once per year, typically on a Thursday). So, anything goes. If you can't afford to pay a tutor, or are not quite smart enough in the first place, and don't have a Party member for a family friend to pull some strings, you are doomed to work in an IPod factory or even a rice paddy for the rest of your life. So, you do whatever it takes.

In the west, we have lots of opportunities and second chances, and China is doing better these days, but has much govt. control still. It's a developing country, with a huge gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots'.

I personally hope the Chinese govt. can keep things from boiling over at some point. People (over 1 Gig of people there) want more than the Govt. can supply, and it's a balancing act. Most of the top govt. officials are engineers, which (if you know engineers) is both good and bad.

You got modded down, but

[nathan s]

I respect your point here. The summary seems a bit flippant and this is not really funny at all.

Re:More schools

[Fex303]

With a meritocratically oriented civil service that runs all the way to the top, the leaders of Chinese government tend to be engineers and scientists, whereas we in the democratic USA are stuck with lawyers.

And in China, do they have all the lawyers design bridges and research physics?

Lawyers making laws are not the problem with the US (or other democracies). Idiots pandering to the lowest common denominator and big business seems to be. Not that China's exactly a model of enlightened government...

why don't they just open more schools?

[dindi]

Because some cultures beleive, that you should only go to higher school if you can perform there.
Your society needs farmes, car repairmen, plumbers and people who clean the streets

HNow in other societies, you can "buy" into college, college that most people can actually finish, then you end up with a bunch of kids with a degree, who are othervise barely suitable for a simple administration job at the local fastfood restaurant, or price/wal/whatever-mart.

I personally grew up at a place, where even getting into highschool (4 yrs after 8yrs primary) was just impossible for some, because they weren't able to perform well enough to get admission..... university exams were kind of a bloodsport back then :)

Is that right? If you allow specialization, and have a good selection of importance choices between subjects: yes ...
In my time, my college points included literature and history, even though I was about to go to an IT school.....
Also in college we wasted a lot of time learning useless stuff because of the lack of specialization, and while I somewhat agree that a universal knowledge should be taught in schools (high, and some uni/college besides the obvious primary), in many times that amount of universal trash should be better considered.

Re:More schools?

[jonin]

"What's the point of opening more schools if people have to cheat to get accepted? That's the wrong answer; the reason there's a test isn't to find the best people, it's to find the qualified people. Some people just don't deserve better schooling."

Because if there are so few schools that the only way to get accepted is to have a passing score of 95% or better, it is no longer about qualified or not.

Although I don't agree with their cheating to get accepted, I do think opening more schools would decrease the problem and maybe even make a little money in the process.

It is not like other countries (especially the U.S.) where if you have a pulse you can get accepted because there are so many schools.

Re:More schools

[prefect42]

Having just been to Beijing and Moscow, I'd say it certainly feels like China has deregulated a lot more than Russia. Talking to a Chinese friend from home I learnt that economic reform has been going on for a lot longer in China than Russia, despite Russia 'turning away' from Communism. But in the same breath I note that a local commented that in China it's a communist country for the ruling elite, but not the general population. But that's the joy of implementation vs specification.

This might be a somewhat cynical view but

[milamber3]

I think that the government would be against opening more schools. It seems that the more educated a society as a whole becomes, the more political opposition to oppression there would be. I met quite a few graduate students from China when I was in school and I will always remember something this one TA told my EE2 lab. He said that almost no one in the higher education system supported communism. They all had to take classes and tests on the subject and that was the only area where everyone was completelty disinterested and large scale cheating was completely overlooked. I'm not saying that everyone who goes on to university will automatically fight the government but I think there is a history of more education leading to that sort of thing.

Re:More schools

[plutonium83]

Seriously, how can you get away with saying something like this. Try talking to a 17 year old American applying to college, now make it so they can only take their SAT's ONCE, then lower the available colleges and acceptance rates, you'd see the same thing in America. "Oh, but it must be because they are Chinese!" I'm surpised someone can get a +4 by making broad generalizations like this. If parent was talking about Linux, the post would be a troll!

Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

[Red Flayer]

"In a perfect Communist society, I was born to do something and as long as I work hard and do it, I get the exact same education you get.

You've got it wrong there. If what you were born to do doesn't require higher education, then you should waste state resources by getting higher education. Education is not a reward, it's a means to an end -- in the true Communist state, a way of creating workers to satisfy needs of the people that can only be done by those with higher education.

So how does one identify who should be assigned these higher-education-requiring jobs? That's what the testing is all about. The idea is that the tests are fair as can be, since everyone is on equal footing when faced with a written examination.

There isn't supposed to be competition dividing people into two classes (one worthy of secondary education, one not)

In this case, you're a person who exemplifies why the system doesn't work -- you ascribe different values to the roles that workers take based upon their education. The janitor should be as highly esteemed as the doctor, provided they both do their jobs to the best of their abilities.

I think you're missing the biggest issue here -- China is no longer a Communist state, if it ever was one. Capitalism is taking over, with the State bing the largest source of capital. This makes it more of a fascist system (though the word has become 'dirty' from its association with certain European governments of the 20th century).

As to tuition:

The most important change is the one from 1999 where tuition fees were introduced. It is my understanding (though I could be wrong) that money is often tight and your standard laborer in China makes roughly $50-$100 USD per month. Can you expect them to afford tuition rates of £200-400? Not really.

First off, you're using two different currencies there. Second, compare that to US tuition. Say, for China:' $75 US per month = $900/yr. Even converting GBP to USD, tuition of $680/yr. So you've a ratio of 1.32 median income to tuition in China, using your figures (source?).

In the US, the median income is just under 44,400 for a family of four, while the same year, the average total cost of college was 11,354. So the ratio is 3.91. However, consider that the median US family has 2 kids -- and your ratio is now 1.96. Now, also consider the fact that US citizens pay for a lot of services that Chinese citizens do not (either because the services are not available, or because the Chinese government pays). Finally, consider the fact that a college education in China (due to the selectivity) is the equivalent of a top-notch education in the US, where you can expect the costs of a year of top-notch college to be in excess of $30,000. In this light, the US ratio would be 1.48, which is remarkable close to the Chinese ratio.

The difference-make here might be scholarships and grants, and I don't know if the equivalent exists in China. But the culture of sacrifice for one's child means that most parents whose child is accepted to university in China can, and do, afford to send the child -- whereas in the US, kids go to state schools even when they qualify for better education, simply because it is more easily afforded by the parents.

Re:More schools

[MightyYar]

An elected representative doesn't need to be a lawyer to write good laws - he or she just needs to hire a lawyer. One problem with this is that the "farm system" for national politicians in the US is local politicians, and they are necessarily lawyers because they don't get much in the way of funding for staff.

My feeling is that there is nothing wrong with lawyers being politicians per se, but they shouldn't make up almost the entire legislature! If the entire legislature were made up of engineers or doctors, I'd say the same thing... it's just that variety is good, and there is no variety in US politics.

Because everybody wants to go to "Harvard"

[idangazit]

The "meritocracy" post above rings true, as a (very crass) generalization I have found chinese academics to be very numbers oriented; when competing with 2 billion or so peers you must really stand out in order to, erm, stand out.

Case in point: check out CNN's interesting article about student riots when a smaller college affiliated with a prestigious university announced that it would no longer be providing diplomas from the presigious uni:

With so much on the line, wouldn't YOU do anything to get ahead? If the alternative was returning to the farmlands and no future? The system rewards smart people who know their stuff or smart hackers who can cheat well enough to escape detection, both of which are different flavors of intelligence.

Re:More schools

[MightyYar]

I don't think that there's anything wrong with making some broad cultural observations in the context of a discussion like this. Of course you can't say, "He's Chinese, therefore he needs to know his rank." But you can say, "In general, Chinese people rely heavily on ranking systems." This is no worse than saying "Most Americans seem to not favor the war in Iraq." It's true and he did not approach it in an offensive way.

As someone who works in Asia regularly, I'd say it's also largely accurate. Things like job title are far more important than they are here. You can't just ask a peer to do something, you need to channel the request through their superior... There's nothing wrong with this - it's just different than in the West, and it can be frustrating until you figure out what is going on. Some Westerners cannot ever wrap their brains around it, and so call the Chinese stupid or incompitent - when usually it is just a cultural difference that they don't understand.

The sub-culture that you point out in the US - that is, the small percentage of kids that enter Ivy League schools - behave in the same way. Many of these kids get frustrated when they enter the American workforce and find that hierarchal, rank-based culture missing. We get a lot of Ivy League educated engineers at work, and while most are excellent engineers, some have actually done things like cry when a (lower-ranked!) technician was assigned to train them. It is not uncommon to hear words like "pion" come from their mouths. They would probably do well in Southeast Asia :) My wife is Ivy League, so don't think I'm saying I don't like them!

Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

[dfenstrate]

If you don't actually believe communism is viable, then nevermind what follows....

This isn't how a Communist country is supposed to be run. There isn't supposed to be any "tuition fees" for education. There isn't supposed to be competition dividing people into two classes (one worthy of secondary education, one not). In a perfect Communist society, I was born to do something and as long as I work hard and do it, I get the exact same education you get. I haven't seen one good thing coming from China's "Communist" party. It seems the only parts of Communism that China kept are the parts that favor the government!

You seem to be speaking as if such as a 'perfect communist society' or anything close to it is possible.

Over 100 million people dead in the last century due to communist governments, and the fact that only misery can be found where communism is even close to properly implemented, tells us all quote well that COMMUNISM IS A FAILED IDEOLOGY.

Just to be clear, history has show us quite well that IT CANNOT WORK.

I don't even know why communism is even seriously debated as a possible form of government. History has shown us otherwise quite clearly.

Btw, China is communist in name only nowadays.

Communes can function perfectly fine, as small, relatively isolated self-selected and enforced societies. Anything tried on a nationwide scale- we've seen the results of that time and time again, and it's not good.

Expected response from communists:

The right people haven't been in charge yet!

Yeah, sure, keep thinking that's the only problem.

BTW, i am perfectly aware of the flaws of capitilism, but that's not really the subject of debate right now.

Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

[Kadin2048]

This isn't how a Communist country is supposed to be run.

Well, that's kinda the problem with Communist countries. That is how they are run. Since the system doesn't really work, instead you just keep your society working as best you can using whatever alternative means you can throw together. In China, they seem to be using a combination of oppression and massive exploitation of their natural resources, in an effort to keep things together long enough to transition to a sustainable economy and government.

You can't have a chicken in every pot when there aren't enough chickens to go around. History has taught us that an elite group of individuals is no better in the long run at distributing resources across a society than everyone just trying to grab whatever they can for themselves based on their ability to do so is, and usually they can be a lot worse.

More Colleges = Fewer Laborers

[bloobamator]

China's economy is propped up by their infinite supply of brutally cheap labor. If they were to open more colleges and allow more people to earn college degrees, then their cheap labor supply would become finite. A certain while after the labor pool becomes finite, its cheapness starts to evaporate. Eventually they would be forced to compete economically on a level playing field with the rest of the world, and they know they cannot do that. At least not yet.

Long term, China knows it must catch up with the west technologically, and soon, before the west's technological lead becomes insurmountable. In order to catch up, China is going to need a lot more science and engineering universities, with a lot of money pouring into them. It will be very interesting to watch how China addresses this dilemma.

I'd imagine the real reason is along the lines of

[xenocide2]

There's probably something to di with the Chinese administration's longstanding conflict with acadameia. The Tiananmen Square incident, as much as they've done to conceal it, still echoes in the minds of those old enough to have the skills and knowledge nessecary to become a professor. An old neighbor of mine was a professor from China (Mathematics, I think); he came over about five years after Tiananmen, which is probably close to how long it takes to officially immigrate to the States once the paperwork has been started.

Re:A more in-depth story on entrance exams ...

[qwix]

You are oversimplifying complex things. In Romania, they used to have this exact system (admission exams). They now switched to a HS grade system for admission, and most universities do not have an exam any more. They also normalized the grading system in High Schools. The result is a far worse system in which good High Schools do not give lower grades any more in order to not lower their students' chances of getting into college, and consequently the students are more superficial, because they can easily get a high grade. In an exam-based system you do have problematic elements, the outliers, but overall the system tends to work fairly well. The new system suffers from systemic problems that will only be visible after a few generations, when it's too late to change things. In short it builds generations of superficial students for which "legal cheating" is a ongoing life exercise. Take a look at education in the US for a good example.

Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

[Tezkah]

So a terrible president got elected, does it therefore follow that democracy is a failure? how many people have died at the hands of "democratic governments" over the thousands of years since democracy became a popular choice? Is that really a fault of the ideal of "democracy"?

Or consider the Holocaust, wasn't Hitler both democratically elected to office (before using those powers to make himself a dictator), and a diligent anti-communist? How could one with such a good foundation end up with genocide?

Or the 21st Century Iraq War, I mean your country was founded on the CONSTITUTION, how many lives is that founding document considered responsible for now?

A lot of Americans are taught in school that Communism is somehow inherently evil (Reagan and his "evil empire", etc. It is happening with "terrorism" today, to keep the people in line, fighting shadows instead of holding their government accountable).

However, like everything, politics is not a black and white, left to right, ridged continuum. One can choose one direction for social issues and another for economic, and change based on the situation. Corruption and greed in government (or among the powerful in the market, if you are considering a purely capitalist system) - rather than lofty ideals, such as equality for mankind - cause hardship and suffering among the people under this system. Because Chinese government says they are communist means as much as the US President providing lip-service to the constitution. The NSA spying on you isn't the fault of the founding fathers, just like Stalin murdering his enemies isn't due to Communism.

Nevertheless, make sure you continue to squawk the party line (you are free to choose between these two identical but opposite ideals!), and also buy consumer goods! You guys should really change your national bird from the eagle to the Consumerist Parrot. Seems to sadly be where we are heading.

Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely - Lord Acton

Only in some imaginary world

[blueZ3]

was there ever some "guarantee" that people in schools in the USSR were bright. Take off those rose colored glasses (once you do, you can see the 50 million people "Uncle Joe" killed) and you'll realize that children of high government officials, party members, and celebrities were regularly given spots a top-notch Soviet schools. Money might not have played as big a role as it does in the US, but a parent's political connection is no better arbiter of scholastic success than their financial success.

Put your little red book down and come back to reality.

Bullshit

[Moraelin]

A more appropriate Heinline quote (paraphrased from memory):
"The society that values the artist over the plumber merely because art is more noble, has neither good art nor good plumbing."

Except in this case they merely make sure that someone flashing their college engineering diploma at a job interview, has actually earned that diploma, and not just had someone else write their exams for them. (Even via a micro-radio in the ear.)

And no, it's not elitism against the plumbers or anything else. If a plumber has some professional credentials (certified to work on a certain kind of pipes or whatever), then I hope to God that those aren't just a bogus piece of paper either. If that guy works on a high pressure steam pipe or on a gas pipe, for example, I certainly hope he won't cause some problem waiting to happen.

Ditto for anything else:

- if they're a truck driver, then I certainly hope that they've earned that class of driver's license the old fashioned way, and not with a radio in the ear and someone telling them which boxes to tick. When that big truck comes into an intersection, I _don't_ want to discover that the guy doesn't actually know who has the priority there.

- if they're they're an auto mechanic, I sure hope to heck and back that they learned something about engines, and someone actually tested that knowledge. _Their_ knowledge, not that of whoever is at the other end of the radio-in-the-ear cheat.

- if they're an electrician, I sure hope they've been trained and tested too. For the obvious reasons.

Etc.

So, yes, any job that requires some training and some skills, no matter how lowly, I fail to see a reason to devalue it by selling a diploma to any cheater who wants one. If there's something as lowly as being certified to dig a hole with a shovel, then, yes, whoever has that certification has something to be proud of. It seems to me like starting to just hand that certifficate to anyone who wants one is devaluing and disrespectful to those who actually have the skills and passion for that profession.

And if anything, it's that kind of giving anyone a diploma just because they want one, that's the way to end up with neither good art, nor good plumbing, nor good engineering.

Re:More schools

[Spatula Sam]

So in US terms, it would be like Harvard having a quota for high school students from each state

Or Harvard having a quota for high school students from different races... or a quota for the children of alumni, donors, or well-connected people.

I'm sure glad that Harvard doesn't do that.

Re:A culture of cheating?

[Shajenko42]

For one class, we were given an individual, take-home, closed-book exam

Methinks the professor was a tad... naive.

Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

[dfenstrate]

So a terrible president got elected, does it therefore follow that democracy is a failure? how many people have died at the hands of "democratic governments" over the thousands of years since democracy became a popular choice? Is that really a fault of the ideal of "democracy"?

Don't make an absurd argument and expect me to research your answers for you. There's 100 million people dead at communisms feet since Marx and Engels came to the scene a little over a century ago, and true believers like you can still be found.

The conversation isn't about capitilism, it's about communism. I have no interest in discussing any of the numerous flaws in western societies. You will not put me on the defensive, because my point is that communism leads to misery and murder. You cannot prove otherwise and weakly seek to engage in some sort of relative debate of governments, when I hold the debate is well settled.

Don't give me crap about any party line or the brainwashing of Americans about communism. The mountains of corpses from every attempt at a communist society speaks volumes about communism, more than any jingonistic American textbook from the past 60 years possibly could.

Your precious but unworkable ideals are not worth the lives of even one more person, nor even a papercut on him. The lives of the citizens of any nation are not your playthings for yet another murderous social expirement.

Not any school - top schools...

[SenseOfHumor]

In India and China, the competition is high to get into top schools - not just any school. What the article is missing is that the top performers of these exams go to top schools and hence all these attempts. As the high school kids in the US compete to get into HYPS(Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford), is the solution building more HYPS?

Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

[Chuns]

Communism only fails because human nature is in conflict with it. It is a perfect form of government for perfect people. Too bad there are none around. Capitalism thrives because people are greedy, ambitious, proud, or all of the above.