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.

[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.

[t3ch lawy3r]

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.

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.

[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.

[mrchaotica]

The problem is that if you continue, you'll just end up with 100% of the population being professors and the economy will collapse because nothing gets done. In other words, I'm guessimg that China is intentionally limiting the number of students in University, probably for some economic purpose. I'm not saying that China is right or wrong about it, but there is some optimum percentage of the population that ought to be college-educated, and the rest (who would be doing vocational-type tasks) shouldn't be (according to the whole "command economy" philosophy they've got over there).

Re:another good idea.

[posdnous]

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.

Re:another good idea.

[jeremymiles]

According to the Times Higher Educational Supplement (I think you need a subscription).

Last year, colleges and universities enrolled 5.04 million students, nearly five times as many as in 1998. Yet over the next six months 60 per cent of new graduates will be unable to find work, as the number of graduates jumps 22 per cent from last year to more than 4 million, while the number of available jobs will have dropped to 1.66 million.

So, yep, it looks like you're almost right. It's not too many professors, it's too many graduates.

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.

[el cisne]

This is my experience as well, not personally, but from my wife and friends who grew up in mainland China. If you scored well on the test in high school, you could go to university, if not, you could go to some 'lesser' school, or go right to work. Often you could take over your parent's job wherever they worked, or you could get set up to work someplace else, espcecially if you know someone that knows someone, etc.

But basically if you don't score well enough on the exam, you don't go.

Getting into a university there is not as easy as it is in US, although US doesn't exactly take 'walk ins', either.

If you can get in to a decent-to-good university, get a degree, you have a chance at getting into a graduate program in another country, (US, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Australia, etc), maybe even with a sufficient scholarship, and later land a job with a company in that country and eventually get naturalized. It is 'apparently' deuced difficult for a non-university grad to get a student visa to an undergrad program in the US. You might get admitted, but that in no way means the US consulate will grant you a visa. If you get into some grad program where they are going to fund you, it is easier to get a visa from the US consulate.

Re:another good idea.

[Ubergrendle]

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."

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.

[Bastard of Subhumani]

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

Well build more TOP universities, then. Do I have to do all the thinking round here?

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.

[mrchaotica]

It's not that some people have to face poverty and starvation, it's that -- pretty much by definition -- not everyone can be a leader (and I mean that in the sense of lead engineers, cutting-edge research scientists etc., not just politicians or managers). For the concept of "leadership" to mean anything at all, there have to be followers. So then you might say, "well, just do away with 'leadership' by making everyone a leader," which would be reasonable except that some people will always be more capable than others.

In other words, there will always be the "haves" and "have nots;" it's just that what those terms mean depends on the prosperity of the civilization. For example, here in the US we've progressed to the point where being a "have not" means only owning a regular TV instead of an HDTV and working in the service industry (e.g. fast food) instead of being a "professional." It's still a far cry from being an impoverished subsistence farmer or something, though!

Re:another good idea.

[1u3hr]

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.

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.

Re:another good idea.

[posdnous]

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.

Re:another good idea.

[Opie812]

I think everyone has had at least one teacher that they could not guess how they managed to keep a job

Ironically enough, in my case its been Chinese profs that fit that profile.

Re:another good idea.

[drmancini]

As someone who was born in the former Soviet block I must let you in on a secret. Not everything in communist countries must submit to the laws of economy, logic or physics for that matter. A loose translation of one of communist soviet mottos goes like this: We shall rule the winds and rain! Don't try to argue that this causes that and that has to be because so ... Almost everything under communist rule is centrally planned. A very good 20 year-old example from my home country is that someone in the central planning committe has created a plan of banana imports. That amount of bananas was purchased one week before Chritmas and noone cared that people were qeueing up for hours to buy bananas. Bananas were therefore available only that one week before Christmas and usually in short supply. Demand doesn't drive the supply! In communist regimes the regime fucks you!!! You'd have to see it to believe it.

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.

[nasor]

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..

Re:another good idea.

[RipTides9x]

I actually have a friend that digs ditches for a living. Funny thing is, out of all the people I know, he makes the most money. He's not the sharpest crayon in the box by any means, but he is a Good ol' Boy and has connections with almost every contracter that works in our local metro area. He started in his late teens with a rented ditch witch and a beater pickup truck and now in his 30's he owns enough equipment to keep 5 crews going constantly, has paid off his home completely, and just built a workshop and started a small local dirt-track race team. This is compared to other friends of mine who have college degrees, 2nd mortgages on their homes to pay off school loans, and live month to month trying to keep up with the joneses.

Frankly, I'm wishing I never listened to my mom's advice when she would ask me "Do you want to grow up to be a ditch digger?". These days ditch digging seems to be paying off a lot better than my engineering degree.

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.

[Photar]

I don't know about the uni you went to but at mine they waved the "reasonably fluent english" requirement.

Re:another good idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

We had a quantum physics lecturer who didn't seem to be able to annunciate m and n clearly. He also scrawled in some kind of barstardised cursive, so you couldn't really tell the difference there either. Kinda makes life hard when the whole course uses tensor arithmatic with i,j,m,n as the indicies!

We complained. He got upset and scrawled a hugh n next to a huge m on the blackboard "See emma and enna!". Thing is, they were a foot and half high, but you still couldn't tell them apart.

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.

[iminplaya]

You seem to believe that full mechanization is impossible. And it will remain that way as long as that attitude prevails. It's just more of that "man will never fly" routine. The things you mention already exist on a small scale. With the exception of the leaping fruits(but you never know what will happan with genetically modified foods). Your robot tractors would still have to pick them. When nano-tech and robo-tech are ready for prime time, you just might see "self-healing" roofs, pipes, roads, planes, trains, and automobiles. There such is a lot of talk about self-healing computers right now. If nature can do it, there's no reason to believe that we can't. The only thing holding us back is good old fashion politics, greed, lust for power, etc. We spend almost all of our energies keeping people down. This whole "you can't live here because you're not from here" thing must go. National borders are the last legal line of defense for economic stratification. All other methods, like race, sex, religion, etc. have been dutifully outlawed in the more progressive countries. It's time to tear down that last barrier.

Nobody should be obligated to work. Everybody should work based only on their desire. Those are the kind of people that produce the best results. And in a mechanized society there will never be a reason to obligate anybody. Let the machines pull the weight. That's why we invent them.

Now what I'm really wondering is that should we actually restrict education so that only the select few can get a degree. The information is there for all to see, but we spend an enormous amount of energy to restrict access. What in the world could possibly be wrong with allowing everybody to get a college degree?? What do people other than the powerful few have to gain by this? Is there some irrational fear of a well educated public? I can think of only one reason to do this. And that is to maintain a certain level of poverty. And the worse part is that so many people think that this is a good thing. That without poverty society would collapse. The only thing that will collapse is the current slave-master relationships we have maintained since the beginning. Well, I'm the freak that wants a P2P society. That was the idea(on paper anyway) behind the great American fairy tale. That all people were created equal. That our government, our juries were made up of our peers. I was never saying that there aren't people who like to work. But let's let them do it because they like it. Not because Mr. Rockefeller needs a maid. But if somebody actually wants to spend time cleaing his house, then more power to them. I would be the last one to stop them.

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.

[FurryFeet]

Well, yeah, but back then they didn't leverage their capacities into proactive strategies to focus on the customer and become world-class organizations. So, even though they were "very large companies", they never maximized their potential to achieve unparalleled success.

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.

[Kismet]

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.

And I would say that philosophy produces the best thinkers. ;) Scientists tend to be dogmatic and closed minded, only experimenting with things easily observed in the known objective realms. Mathematics - that abstract reasoning which provides the basis for concrete science - can be used to experiment in many areas not yet directly open to empirical observation.

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.

I think work towards that goal was in motion long before the Great Depression, probably since post-civil-war economists determined that if capital couldn't be spent on slave labor, it could at least buy wages. Rich men have always been afraid of what might happen if they couldn't fit everyone into a bell-curve and thus predict revenues for the indefinite future. Americans were once a people with independent livelihoods who lived in local economies and enjoyed free, unrestricted (well, not artificially restricted) enterprise between themselves. Hired labor was culled largely from among the youth (apprenticeships) until they could establish themselves in their own local economy. In those days we had literate people who didn't feel that candle making was beneath them (e.g. Ben Franklin's dad). Education didn't necessarily translate into occupation. People educated themselves because it was the mark of liberty to expand the mind and soul - for the sake of knowledge alone. In the 21st century, it's inconceivable that any highly educated individual would fill an occupation "beneath" his education. We have learned that work and school are one and the same.

America had the lowest unemployment rate when there were fewest jobs. The man-made problem is the idea of a "job." In order to have plenty of jobs, Leviathan must consolidate and legislate, and all must be willingly subjected to the King's order. Businesses don't really mind this non-free enterpirse (Capitalism it's called now) because it provides such wonderful predictability.

We had a clear glimpse into this in 1934 when William Wirt testified to Congress that he had been party to a plan authored by some in the Roosevelt administration to prolong - on purpose - the Great Depression. Why? So that government control over banking and lending could be permanently secured. Did the administration admit to this? Yes! But it was just a joke, they told us, and Wirt was laughed out of town by the media (who, he had testified earlier, were at the beck and call of the Roosevelt propaganda machine). That's the shape of the memory hole in America.

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.

Perhaps an easier way would be to go overseas...

[Silas Palmer-Cannon]

We get hundreds of Chinese international students a year here in Australia... we would welcome many more! Its gotta be easier than surgery!

But what do they want to major in?

[Dekortage]

If it's law enforcement or electrical engineering, they're not off to a good start.

Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

[eldavojohn]

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?

I certainly hope you are joking about that last statement.

I should start by saying I am an American and therefore have probably been exposed to much propaganda against the Chinese government. Despite this, I have tried to educate myself on the current state of China & would like to point out an RSC article that talks about the history of higher education in China. Here's an excerpt from it:

A brief history of higher education reform in China

1949

China's education system was based on the Russian model. Universities and colleges were divided to form specialist institutes and many universities were moved into rural areas to even out provision. These institutes were controlled by central government which also controlled the distribution of graduate students.

1966-1976

All formal education in China was stopped during the Cultural Revolution. During the later years, people entered university as students only by a process of recommendation. Many subjects were discontinued.

1977

The education system was restructured to give the system that operates today. The national university entrance exam was reintroduced and a comprehensive range of subjects became available with unified curricula for university degree courses.

1986

The government introduced the structural reform of higher education. Many institutes merged to form more comprehensive units. Mergers of centrally controlled institutions led to 72 'national' higher education institutes (HEIs). Mergers of locally controlled institutions led to 257 new HEIs.

1999

Tuition fees introduced for all university students. Fees are in the range Yuan 3000-6000 (£200-400), depending on the subject studied.

2001

Following China's entry into the World Trade Organization, new types of higher education establishments were introduced. These included independently funded universities and colleges, independent university-affiliated colleges for specialist subjects; and cooperation colleges that use foreign investment or foreign universities to set up an affiliated college or international university.

Wikipedia offers a much longer explanation including the criteria by which you were eligible for aid:

• * top students encouraged to attain all-around excellence;
• * students specializing in education, agriculture, forestry, sports, and marine navigation; and
• * students willing to work in poor, remote, and border regions or under harsh conditions, such as in mining and engineering.

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.

I guess it would require a miraculous grant to get a higher education in China and I'm certain that those are a limited number that is quite small compared to a population of one billion. Even then, the best place to find secondary education is abroad as most of the world's leading universities are in the United States.

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 ha

Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

[arivanov]

Welcome to the real world. Congratulations.

The truth about ex-soc countries education is that it has been always a subject to vicious selection for any of the places that were moderately worth it. Ratios of 500:1 at Moscow state were quite common for some science majors and thousands to 1 were normal for humanities because these offered a route into the state administration. And you do not want to even have an idea about the selection ratio at whatever the name of the institute was that specialised in economics.

Other ex-soc countries were not far behind. My wife's class in biotech at Sofia State had a selection ratio in the 250:1+ and my own chemistry class at Sofia state had a selection ration of 35:1. That is once again with a limit of 2 maximum applications within a year. That is after graduating from high schools which themselves had a selection ratio of 30:1 in her case and 200:1 in my case. Once again with similar application limits and specialisation at that time. By the way this was the norm, not a deviation across the ex-soviet block.

In addition to that the exams were per-university (not countrywide like in the west) with a limit on how many universities you can apply to (used to be 2 in most countries). So this ratio of 500:1 or higher was after the voluntary selection performed by people estimating their chances and sending applications only to 2 universities. So the overall selection ratio was actually much much higher.

I know that I am going to evoke some morbid egalitarian screams from the Slashdot community, but I do not see anything wrong in this. Good education implies selection.

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: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.

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

Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

[BalkanBoy]

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.

Riggghhht - like communal marriage between two people in the United States where we have 4 million divorces each year (overall rate of > 50% of marriages break up in less than 7 years). Communism sure does work in small(er) settings :).

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.

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.

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

[macklin01]

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

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

[Alicat1194]

don't look at your high school grades, personal interviews, recommendations or essays in making their decisions.

We have that in Western Australia, and it works fine. Basically, you do a set of exams, the scores from which are used to calculate your 'tertiary entrance score' (TES). The students with the highest scores get accepted to Uni, those with lower scores either try again, or go on to do something else. (There are alternative methods of entry (mature age tests, grants, etc), but they're only used by a relatively small percentage of students)

It helps to get rid of a lot of bias in who gets in and who doesn't (even if it does make for a few months of exam-study hell).

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

[lumierang]

As a Chinese who have gone through the Chinese university entrance exams, I have to say while it is certainly not a great system(And quite painful to undertake for even once),it may be the only feisible system for now from a Chinese point of view.Given the number of students waiting to enter college each year ( 8 million in 2006), guarantee the fairness of grading the exam alone is a enormous task, the American system of reviewing simply cannot not work. While it may encourage cheating and discourage creativity , it may be more fair to the students than what will be if Chinese universities copy the American system, since the Chinese educational system is now among the less corrupted systems in China .What is most unfair is not the exam but the disctrict discrimination between major cities (Beijing,Shanghai) and else of China.Since the major universities are concentrated in Beijing ond Shanghai,students in these cities have a much greater chance of entering universities than a student from other district which have far more population than Beijing but only about the same or less number of enrollment .

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.

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.

More schools

[JimBobJoe]

why don't they just open more schools?

(Stereotype alert)

It's my understanding that Asians are very meritocratically oriented, and one of the results is that they must know how people rank. Even if there were more schools to accept all the potential students, people would still be racking their brains because exams would be designed to order 9 million people from the top person to Mr. 9 million.

Their fascination with meritocracy is not necessarily a bad thing. Thomas Friedman mentioned in The world is flat that the Chinese insist on promoting people who know what they're talking about in government. 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.

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...

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.

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: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.

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:More schools

[posdnous]

Chinese Universities ARE MOST definitely not a meritocracy.

In fact it is probably the most unfair admissions process out of all the countries I have ever seen.

The system is heavily slanted towards major cities such as beijing and shanghai. Each university has a quota system for students from each of the countries provinces. So in US terms, it would be like Harvard having a quota for high school students from each state, so if Harvard takes in 1000 students each year, it would allocate 10 students to texas, 10 students to rhode island, 20 students to california, etc....

Now the problem is that the Major cities in China like beijing and shanghai hold most of the universities, and most of the Top universities in China, such as Peking university, Tsinghua University, FuDan university, etc... And each of those universities allocate a HUGE number of positions to students from it's local municipality.

What this means in reality is that Beijing with a population of 18 million people will end up with like 100,000 university spots per year, and a poor, rural province like AnHui with 50 million people will end up with 5,000 university spots. This is reflected in the entrance marks too.

A university in china does not just have ONE entrance mark, it has multiple entrance marks, one for each province which it accepts students from. This means that it will have a low entrance mark for places like beijing which it allocates the most quota to, and an extremely high entrance mark for places which it has a low quota for, like the previously mentioned anhui province.

In education terms this means that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, not a MERITOCRACY at all.

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: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.

Re:I have an easy solution

[phillips321]

Then students who are financially held back will be prevented from studying. Exams are the best form of entry into any university. This allows you to know which candidates are trying their hardest/most intelligent.

If your going to say something stupid atleast try to make it moderately funny.........

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:Socialism

[The_DOD_player]

Trust me.. there is nothing socialistic about the current chinese society, least of all their health care.

a few answers to these questions

[superwiz]

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.

Re:Preferable method?

[tomhudson]

The methods include microscopic earphones and wireless device

The article makes this sound like something new ... but people were doing this more than 30 years ago in high school ... we had one guy who took the finals with a walkie-talky stripped out of its case, battery pack taped to one leg, transceiver to the other, switch in one shirt cuff, earpiece in the other, and wires connecting it all ... so he could get the answers from another student.

Of course, anyone desperate enough to do that is also dumb enough to believe you when you transmit the wrong answers ;-) (in other words, I was tired of him sitting behind or beside me, always trying to copy my answers, and then ME being accused of copying HIS answers)

The big problem with competition.

[damburger]

For years its been quite stylish to voice an ideology of bringing competition into all aspects of life. This situation demonstrates the horrible flaw in the idea.

The question you've got to ask yourself is what about a person is actually being measured by the competative system? In educational systems like this one, what is being measured is the ability to pass a test. Cheaters score very highly on this scale, so you end up distilling the most ruthless cheaters from society.

Don't get too comfortable mocking China for this though - most western countries include extensive testing in their high school education systems, in the pursuit of the almight 'competativeness', and this leads to the same kind of thing.

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.

sign of progress

[Nowhere.Men]

Before they were stupidly studying very hard to be able recite their lesson at the exams.

Now they have to be ingenous and imaginative to be able to cheat and not get caught.

World beware, the new China is coming.

I don't see much difference with France...

[gedeco]

In France you have to pass a bachelors exam before you might go to university.
The bachelors exam is the final high school exam.

For the french speaking among us
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baccalaur%C3%A9at_(Fr ance)

Other countrys have such obligations too.
In my time I had to pass a qualification test, before being able to get to technical college.

Cheating? Yes this is a common among students. Nothing new.
Using new technology? In my time they where using a TI 59 programmable calculator to cheat.

The only difference: The article make it looks like those Chinese are more desperate.
Or is it the aim of the article to sell some sensation? Like some tabloïds?

If you got only one chance, you do what you can

[Opportunist]

You only have one shot. How far would you go?

Imagine this: Studying is your ONLY chance to get a well paying job. There is no such thing as having THE killer idea, gathering some venture vultures and getting rich that way, you study, or you're assembling Furbys for the rest of your life.

And you only have ONE shot. ONE try. ONE single chance to prove that you're "worth" it. It's not like "write to a billion colleges and even if MIT rejects you, the university of Wallawalla will accept you". Studying abroad is also not necessarily an option.

You have to succeed. If it costs your life.

How far would you go? Personally, I'd sacrifice a virgin should I find one, just for the odd chance that this might appease some kind of deity I don't believe in.

Re:If you got only one chance, you do what you can

[clambake]

Personally, I'd sacrifice a virgin should I find one

That was ironic... becuase if you are female in china, you have TWO shots... the entrance exams... OR sacrificing your virginity to somone else who passes (i.e. get yourself and M.R.S. degree).

Re:If you got only one chance, you do what you can

[Opportunist]

Note to self: When inventing some place to refer to as bad, make sure it doesn't really exist.

A culture of cheating?

[ThePyro]

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.

Re:A culture of cheating?

[AK Marc]

It's just a given that many of them will cheat.

I'm in a two part class in China. The first half was in May, and I'll be back in October. We had tests throughout the class, and all the Chinese students cheated. All of them. We were split up in tables of 6 students each (about one American per table) and the Americans are the only ones that didn't cheat. Of course, out of politeness, I did keep my answer sheet open in a manner that they could easily look on it to see what I got and I waited until at least one of them coppied my answers before I turned in my test, but I didn't use theirs for my benefit. It was expected that we cheat, and some of the Americans were explicitly invited to cheat by the classmates when it was noticed that we weren't cheating. I pre-empted that by telling my table that I did not wish to cheat. They weren't offended and did honor my request by not pressing the issue. These were all professionals in a masters level class.

Re:A culture of cheating?

[dinsdale3]

Unfortunately, there does appear to be a cultural acceptance of cheating amongst the Chinese (at least by students). I ran into this during graduate school in the US. A large percentage of the students in my year were Chinese. For one class, we were given an individual, take-home, closed-book exam and a lot of us were working on it in the departmental library. A couple of the American students, myself included, observed two tables of Chinese students who were clearly discussing answers and referencing text books.

One other American student and myself went to complain to the department and were basically told: China has different views on cheating than we do, we are aware of the problem, and we grade on two separate curves based on this.

This seriously pissed me off and struck me as unfair not only to myself, but to any Chinese student who was honest enough to not cheat.

Re:A culture of cheating?

[Dread_ed]

I think I witnessed an importation of this cultural idea when I was in highschool.

We had a group of about 40 mostly Asian students that we called the "Xerox club." They would all get together in the morning before school in the cafeteria with the other studens. While everyone else was studying, eating, or trying to catch one last wink before school these guys and girls were copying their homework. Usually only 1 or 2 people would do the assignment and then they would pass it around for the others to copy. Once you finished copying you handed it to someone else so that everyone culd finish before the bell. It was pretty stealthy because while some were copying other people were taking and having a good time like normal, but all the students in the higher level classes knew what they were doing. Most of us had participated at one time or another as well. As long as you were cool with them they didn't mind you getting in on the action.

There were 2 funny results. First, every once in awhile people would grab the wrong assignment and turn it in. Sometimes it went unnoticed but other times they had to explain why they had someone elses homeowrk. Easy enough, we were studying together, etc. What was better is that one of my friends showed me that the teacher had graded his calculus homework and not even noticed that it wasn't his. He laughed and said something about "All Asians must look the same" to the teacher.

Second, copying doesn't teach well. Many of those students were in AP classes and after a few weeks of taking the copying shortcut they were behind on the book knowledge. They were pretty desperate come test time and many of them cheated. I saw furtive coded hand signals, almost microscopically written notes in the side of a pencil, ye olde graphing calculator with memory trick (that was new in my day), and even the long-sleeves-in-summer-with-stuff-written-on-your- arm method.

What surprised me the most was that the people who cheated could rely on the students that knew the answers (the ones they ultimately copied off of) to help them cheat on the tests too.

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: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.

Experience with cheating in China

[Therlin]

My previous employer taught American courses in China through Chinese universities. Cheating was a huge problem.

Tests were done online. Students used all sorts of IM software to message each other. They used cell phones to text friends outside of the room with the books. IMs were blocked. Cell phones confiscated on the way into the rooms. They still found ways to cheat.

Some instructors stopped testing online and moved to paper tests. Students would pay the university's copy center to get copies of the exam.

For Internet tests, some instructors now only ask questions that do not require the use of the keyboard. The keyboards are placed on top of the monitors before the tests begin so that students cannot send any messages to anyone.

Plagarism? Standard everyday occurance.

Then students get caught and told that they are going to fail the course. Then they cry and ask for another chance because they don't want to go back home and not have a future. When given that chance, they are often caught again in the future.

Re:Experience with cheating in China

[Srin Tuar]

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.

Re:Experience with cheating in China

[Therlin]

A lot of it was incompetence by the instructors in China. It took us forever to get them to activate the "randomize" option in the tests. Others just didn't want to have to write more questions so that each student would get a test largely different from the people next to him or her.

I also suggested software that locks down the computer and just gives you a very stripped down browser (SecureExam, Lock Down Browser, etc, etc) and this was always dismissed as "too expensive."

I got out of there. Dealing with China and all of their problems and issues became a huge headache when you have to make 2 different cultures happy, the American employer and the demanding, and largely incompetent and non-caring, Chinese client.

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:Marie Antoinette

[Compulsion]

I don't know what they'll be doing IN college. But once they're OUT they will spend all their otherwise-productive hours browsing /.

Pivotal exams is norm across Asia.

[Tungbo]

I don't know about the cheating part.
But look in Japan, Taiwan, Singaport, Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia...

There is intense competition in all these places in order to enter a
decent college. Consequently, the students go to cram schools and
devote most of their high school years in preparing for the exams.

This gives a good grounding in the basics and select people who tests well.
It doe NOT mean that they can be good researchers, enterpreneurs,
corporate workers or teachers. The US system probalby is better preparation
in those areas. OTOH, I don't think the US schools' low expectation in sciense,
history/cultural studies, and math is very smart either.

It's the system, man

[Anonymous Coward]

China doesn't need to open any more schools. There are plenty. I wouldn't be surprised if Beijing alone has more colleges than the entire state of Texas, and I say this as one who lives there. Even the locals aren't sure how many schools there are in Beijing, because there are so many colleges here that it's almost impossible to keep track. I can think of 9 famous ones right off the top of my head, and that's only scratching the surface.

However, I also understand why so many people cheat on their exams. It's all about the money, and not necessarily just scholarships. The tuition structure for Chinese universities is exactly opposite that in the United States.

This is how Chinese high school seniors and their parents have explained it to me:

In the USA, we consider our private schools, our Yales and our Harvards, to be the "best." They're priced accordingly. State schools are considerably cheaper and, agree or disagree, considered by most to be "worse" than private institutions.

The Chinese think this is bizarre. The "best" two schools in China, Beijing University for Liberal Arts and Qinghua University for Science and Engineering, are both operated by the government. Tuition at these schools is mind-bendingly low. A couple thousand US dollars per year. Practically free, by Western standards, and literally free if you qualify for aid.

There are also 2nd and 3rd tier government schools, and as the school is ranked progressively worse, the tuition rises progressively higher. At the bottom of the barrel are private schools, which charge tuition equal to or higher than (in US dollars, they tell me!) Harvard or Yale.

Weird, right? The reason, however, is both simple and time-tested: corruption. Everybody wants a college degree, because that's how you find a good job. At the highest quality universities, there's no wiggle room: you either performed well on your college entrance exam, or you didn't. As you move down through the levels, though, the opportunities for "using the back door," or buying your way in, become greater and greater. Thus, private schools exist for the sole purpose of letting rich parents buy their idiot kid a degree certificate.

So. If a kid isn't bright, and his parents aren't loaded, he'll do whatever he has to on the one test that will define the rest of his life. I don't know how many of you know Chinese people, or how they interact with their families. Let me just tell you: if a Chinese kid blows it on the big day, his mother will never, ever, ever shut up about it. Until the very day she dies.

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:I have an easy solution

[TangoCharlie]

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.

Publicly funded problems

[dada21]

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.

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.

holes in your torso = flunked

[jjustus]

From the article:
"...an electronic device connected to headphones and strapped to a third student's body exploded, leaving a bleeding hole in his abdomen..."
Maybe he was applying to an EE program to become a designer of portable electronics. If that's the case, I think it's good that he failed his entrance examination.

It DOES devalue education

[Moraelin]

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.

SKOOL

[mb12036]

"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?"

Lots of skools in the U.S. Have you seen the quality of the students they're producing these days? Gotta keep giving them passing grades so they keep writing checks for tuition - even if they graduate in worse shape than they were when they started. What's worse than a moron? An moron empowered by a diploma.

It's the Free Market!

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:I have an easy solution

[tehcyder]

I did a Chemistry degree rather than media studies

It's OK, you're among friends here, just let it all out.

Is there even need for more graduates?

[Iloinen Lohikrme]

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.

Downside of free higher education

[AtlanticCarbon]

In my experience, countries with free (or very cheap) higher education impose a lot of barriers on entrance and graduation. They do this because the state can't afford to educate everyone at a higher level. While my preference is a mixed contribution system like US public/state schools, at least in privitized systems you can get an education if you're willing to take the risk (debt).
I wonder what the actual cost per student is in China and what percentage of an average yearly income it represents.

I wish in more countries (including the US) there were cheaper options to pursue education via self-study. I've attended universities with pools, fancy fitness centers and well-known research professors (for whatever they're worth to students) but I've learned most when simply reading books I've chosen on my own. I'd like a more fleshed out CLEP-like system where you study on your own and then pay for a test that will measure your knowledge of the subject. I recognize self-study doesn't work at all levels, but one should be able to learn on one's own by the the time they graduate from high school.

Slightly OT, but...

[Nutria]

the rest of us should get fast-food and unskilled-labor jobs instead of slacking off.

• The graduate with a Science degree asks, "Why does it work?"
  
• The graduate with an Engineering degree asks, "How does it work?"
  
• The graduate with an Accounting degree asks, "How much will it cost?"
  
• The graduate with a Liberal Arts degree asks, "Do you want fries with that?"

Re:Slightly OT, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The CS Grad says "Can I build a web based interface for it?"
The Management Grad says "Can we have a meeting and discuss it?
The Law grad says "My Client already has a patent for it. give me $$$"
The MSCD says "Can I build an Active X Control for it?"
The Certified hacker says "Please do!"

Short term issue...

[alexhmit01]

Unfortunately, America is still suffering a bizarrely warped market by the baby boomers. They were a massive generation, promoting growth, which is a good thing... however when they were coming of age, the US went to war, instituted a draft, and granted exemption for education. As a result, people would hide in universities to avoid service.

As a result, we have a GLUT of PhDs in a similar age range that are hanging around until retirement. In addition, that same generation didn't produce a larger follow-on generation, so we have a decrease in NEED for educators (there also isn't a draft that requires people to hide in the Academy, which lowers demand further).

But that same Glut of Professors have protected themselves from the market with tenure and other policies. When the boomers retire en masse, we are going to have massive ripple effects... The Boomer generation climbed the ladder, pulled it up behind them, and are looking at the smaller generation after them wondering why they won't take care of them the way they took care of their parents...

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.

Re:Only in some imaginary world

[iamnotaclown]

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

What's your point? George W. Bush jumped the queue to get into Yale. A completely private system is no better than a completely socialist system in this respect. The only difference is the currency used as a pay-off. In the USSR it was influence and power. In the USA it's money and power.

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.

Wrong answers

[AviLazar]

So many answers ...

I didn't say give everyone a piece of paper - i contested your argument that some people don't deserve more education.
School resources are completely different from self-learning resources ala library. Formal education is also someone teaching you in a learning environment with other people.
Just because someone has to dig ditches does not mean they have to be dumb. It also does not mean they are not allowed to learn.
Fabricating? Pfft. Increasing the amount of knowledge people have increased the amount of positive input they can put into your society.

Actually, from your statements above you are against education for many people who don't meet your requirements. You are an elitist snob "unfortunately this doesn't quite kick out..."

If you wish to perform manual labor jobs then do so.

Unfortunately for you, your teachers sucked. When I went to my inner city highschool my teachers said that I have many options and I should seek the one that best suits me. They tried guiding me. I, luckily, realized that I would not perform well in a manual labor profession so I went to college.

Physical labor can and has been outsourced and if you don't believe me check the label on your clothes. The physical labor that cannot be outsourced is the ones requiring manufacture here (like construction of roads/buildings).

But I will stand by my argument...everyone - from the garbage man, to the short order cook, to the computer techy, to the worlds leading brain surgeon should ALL have the option of learning more - and to do it for free! Our schools should be free, and impressive. They should be built like forces. Our defense budget should be our school budget. Instead of having crap teachers who are doing this as their "fall-back" jobs, it should be done by teachers who are begging to get in because the work environment is healthy and the pay is in the six figure range.

Re:More schools? NOPE!

[AustinTSmith]

The problem is not schools.

It's their myopic abitiuos government, they don't set a good example for the population. Take for example their leading wireless provider. The chinese stole the technology from American wireless companies, grew to a billion dollars in size, and is now competing directly with them.

In fact, every product that's sold in China from a foreign source need's to go through a rigourous inspection program whereby government sponsored scientists reverse engineer every piece of technology. They even go so far as to request the blue prints and building instructions!

It's a severe problem. China has no intellectual property enforcements nor do they ever innovate; this is why it's so cheap to buy from china, because their products do not bear the incremental cost of technology and IP.

Their government is doing nothing to stop this. And the US government's work along these lines is embarassing at best.

Which is why their students are cheating on their tests. They figure if their future employers are copying off the business plans and product designs of the Americans, then why can't they?

Quantity != Quality

[jackpan]

"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?" Quantity isn't equivalent to Quality.

Well I guess the question I'd ask

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Well I guess the question I'd ask

[arivanov]

why are there so many great minds produced in Western European and American universities

That depends on the scientific discipline. Just ask anyone involved with the theory behind technology about Russians and math. Or Russians and physics for that matter. That was the case least from the time when I was in an University which was pre-1995 and in many areas is still the case now.

As far as test scores reigning supreme with all due respect you are slightly misguided.

I have studied in both an American and an Eastern European University so I can tell you that based on first hand experience.

In an Eastern European University the test scores reign supreme at admission. After that studying in the university itself is relatively mellow and serene. You get two a test session at the end of a semester (for some subjects even at the end of a year) with a whole month for study and review so you can actually assimilate the material before the exam. There are very few ongoing tests and virtually zero graded homework in most courses.

American Universities are completely different to this. The one I was I had to run through a non-stop weekly, bi-weekly, monthly and semestrial test meatgrinder. An average of 4-6 tests per subject per semester. Every single one of them counted towards your grade and there was no way to relax for even a bit and assimilate what you are studying. That was topped by a 7 days exam session with one day of review time. Essentially you were being converted into an curriculum compliant automaton with virtually zero capability to stand back from the problem and say "Stop, WTF am I doing, there got to be a different way to solve this".

So based on first hand experience with both systems, it is America which is obsessed with scores and tests (at least up to BSc level), not Eastern Europe. As far as the results of this I have enough idea of math and physics to beg to differ from your opinion.

They HAVE opened more schools

[MisterE]

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.

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?