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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?"
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
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.
Because some cultures beleive, that you should only go to higher school if you can perform there.
:)
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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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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