Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Students' Cheating Techniques - Don't Try at Home
corbettw writes "According to a wire report on Yahoo! news, competition for university admissions in China are so intense that people are coming up with new, and sometimes dangerous, ways to cheat. The methods include microscopic earphones and wireless devices. In some cases, students are required surgery to recover from their cheating attempts. If there are that many people that desperate to get into a university, the obvious question would be, why don't they just open more schools?"
" 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?
You have 5 Moderator Points!
Which Helpless Linux zealot/MS basher do you want to mod down today?
We get hundreds of Chinese international students a year here in Australia... we would welcome many more! Its gotta be easier than surgery!
If it's law enforcement or electrical engineering, they're not off to a good start.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
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:
Wikipedia offers a much longer explanation including the criteria by which you were eligible for aid:
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
My work here is dung.
This LA Times article from the weekend has a more in-depth look at the grueling process of Chinese university entrance exams, and shows a bit more of the motivation to go to such lengths to cheat.
For example:
hinese college admissions officers don't look at your high school grades, personal interviews, recommendations or essays in making their decisions. They don't make allowances if you don't test well. They won't even cut you slack if your mother died the day before. Everything, countless years of sacrifice and hard work, boils down to this one test. Those who perform miserably have to wait another year to take the exam.
Not a great system from any point of view. Encourages cheating. Discourages creativity, not particularly fair to the students .... -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
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.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
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.
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.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
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.
Trust me.. there is nothing socialistic about the current chinese society, least of all their health care.
First, education in a top school is VERY different from education in a recently opened school with no reputation. I know because I teach in a public university. Our classes are dumbed down because the students won't get it otherwise. Most of the classes that I took in junior and senior level in my undergrad can never be taught here.
Second, education is only a small part of the value of university. Creating life-long contacts with people who will be in your field and those who are already successful in your field is almost as (if not a bigger) part.
Third, Ph.D. is awarded for discovering something new in a field. Try discovering something new in Math... And without a Ph.D., you can't teach in a university. This limits the number of university teachers in technical disciplines.
And lastly, since I am compareing China to my American experience, they can't "just" open a university. It takes more than a guy with money willing to build a building. A university degree there is an official governtment document. So all programs must come with official government approval and certification.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
The 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)
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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
That's funny (not ha ha funny), because in the UK, the government has raised tuition fees in order to increase the number of students going to University.
The "Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy" explanation of the logic follows something like this:
Universities are strapped for cash and can't accept any more students. So to increase the number of students, Universities require more funding. As the tax-payer is reluctant to subsidise rich kids getting Media Studies degress, the burden for paying for all these extra students must be carried by the students themselves. Hence, Universities may charge huge fees. Ah, but you say, "What about all the poor people who want to go to University to get degrees so that they can become teachers?". Well, the solution there is to provide cost effective loans, which only need to be paid back, if the student starts employement with a job which pays more £15000 p.a. Ah, but you say, "But teachers earn more than £15000 p.a.!" Good point. We'll drop teachers' pay to less than £15000 so that they don't have to pay thier loans back! It's a Win-win situation.
Student numbers have gone up a little, and then down a little. Oh, well.
Stangely, the National debt continues to go up. After-all what's a £4000 credit-card bill next to a £20000 student loan? Peanuts!
I'm just glad I did my studies when there weren't any fees (or rather they were paid for me).
P.S. Please exscuse my Grammar. I did a Chemistry degree rather than media studies.
return 0; }
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.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
A few days ago I remember reading an article from a magazine (Helsingin Sanomat, if I remember corretly), where an expert on China, said that about 1/3 of graduating students wont find jobs, and academic unemployment is a growing issue. Also in the same article he said that many universities make up or fix their graduate employment statistics to lure better students. So fixing the problem of students cheating by opening up more schools, isn't the answer.
Survey research tool for commercial and scientific use
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.
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.
Interested in a Flash-based MAME front end? Visit mame.danzbb.com
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.