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The Students Who Feel They Have the Right To Cheat
ub3r n3u7r4l1st writes with this story of endemic cheating in Indian Universities and the students who see it as a right. "Students are often keen to exercise their rights but recently there has been an interesting twist - some in India are talking about their right to cheat in university exams. 'It is our democratic right!' a thin, addled-looking man named Pratap Singh once said to me as he stood, chai in hand, outside his university in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. 'Cheating is our birthright.' Corruption in the university exam system is common in this part of India. The rich can bribe their way to examination success. There's even a whole subset of the youth population who are brokers between desperate students and avaricious administrators. Then there's another class of student altogether, who are so well known locally - so renowned for their political links - invigilators dare not touch them. I've heard that these local thugs sometimes leave daggers on their desk in the exam hall. It's a sign to invigilators: 'Leave me alone... or else.' So if those with money or political influence can cheat, poorer students ask, why shouldn't they?"
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
I always thought it was bizarrely tautological. If you wish something to be different and you personally can make a choice for it under your control to be different, then you make the correct choice. For example, I don't throw a soda can out the window of my car while complaining about pollution on the highway. Other people obviously don't care but I control the drop in the bucket I'm responsible for and I make the ethical choice.
... I get a similar feeling about this article. I understand it is sometimes harder to play by ethical rules than legal rules when everyone around you is benefiting from misconduct but ... it seems this is yet another example of the caste system thriving in India. It's simply stupefying on the "My dad is Li Gang" level.
But as I got older, I actually found and still find people that think they should be forced to do it the right way even while complaining about the abuse. Case in point, a friend in the medical profession was actually complaining about tax dodges while setting up his own backdoor Roth IRA. When I asked him about abusing the very rules he was decrying, he simply shrugged and said he doesn't make the rules he just follows them. He acknowledged it's shady as hell but pretty much felt like his hands were tied.
It was deeply troubling
My work here is dung.
Where less than 20% of the MBAs are employable. They'll do anything to get that skin, and then do nothing with it but weedle. I had to interview over 5k of them just to come up with 150 that were anywhere near hiring, and 10% of those didn't make the first six months. That figure fell to 50% after two years, as they were constantly looking for lateral moves inside the country. The country? China.
There's a name for the effect, which I can't recall, but we tend to project our current self into our past self's shoes. When someone in their 40s thinks about when they were a teenager, they remember it as if they had the experience and wisdom that they have in their 40s, not as they actually were in their teens. This is one of the main reasons older generations talk about how kids these days are dumber, etc... because they don't accurately remember how kids were in their day, just how they would have been if they had decades more life experience.
TL;DR: You were just as dumb as a kid as the "kids these day" are that you're complaining about... you're just too dumb to account for the decades in between.
Depends... I'm about the same age as the parent poster, and I know I've done some dumb things, although nothing that would constitute as autodarwination. No grunge tattoos, no Prince Alberts, no Skid Row-esque ear to nose piercings.
I don't really see the college student age range as dumber. Hell, they have far more info at their fingertips than when I was in college (I had to either use the man command, or actually go to the 1300 page binder that had all the stuff printed out near the room of VT-100 terminals.) The difference is income. Camaros, Buick Regals, and Mustangs got replaced by Civics... and now because of declining incomes, at best, people have low-end Mazda 3s, VW Jettas, Kias, or Hyndais -- cars that people would have sneered at five years ago.
Less income available, coupled with inflation makes people have to improvise. With the Trans-Pacific Partnership allowing for China to have even more control of the US, living standards only will get worse unless one owns a business or is lucky enough to have enough investments to not have to actively seek out work.
The high schoolers I encounter are not dumb either. Stuff that was done way back when (racing, donuts in the parking lot, moving a teacher's car to the football field) would cause a teen to wind up in jail with felony-hard charges, and where I live, there is no definite release date for juvis... they have to "earn" their release in the private prison system... or stay in until age 21. Just telling a teacher off, something that might get an afternoon of detention or maybe a day of ISS... will earn jail time, maybe even a felony. So, high school kids are pretty limited in their "rebellion" to what type of breed of cat pictures they can stick on their backpack in class. Music sucks, as pirates have caused record labels to collapse, and only corporate-made bands are promoed. Yes, one has more bands to find, but the days of having a radio station as something in common with others is long gone.
The kids have not gotten dumber... they just have a pretty crappy hand dealt to them. The wealth in the US has fled offshore, so have the meaningful jobs. Their kids will be the ones walking to school barefoot, in the snow, uphill both ways.
It's a big country, and I'm sure there has to be some variance between values among people when you have a billion to choose from.
But...
Color me racist. No, please do. I really, really am.
India is a country where unwanted children are dumped like trash into the streets, corruption is considered normal and the atmosphere of hyper-competitiveness seems to push everybody's brain into a crazed kind of fight or flight mode which hampers every other human circuit. I can't be around Indian culture without wanting to hide under furniture to escape the crazy.
Wait. Hold on. This just in: Not racist, per se. Because, interestingly, people who are only one generation removed from that seething land mass are entirely capable of developing into excellent, entirely likable people who aren't completely batshit insane. So it's not genetic vile stupidity. It's cultural vile stupidity. Probably a lot like the heavy crime areas in the U.S. -Pull babies out of those places and raise them in bullet-free zones where people treat each other with dignity and love, and I'm sure you'll get fine, undamaged people that way also.
So, really, I don't care what genetic material you start with, if you force people to endure pressure-cooker lives of massive over-population limited resources and shitty infrastructure, combined with the momentum of hundreds of sustained years of dog-eat-dog corruption, you're going to end up with nothing but vast yields of psychologically damaged people.
India is a problem I don't know how to solve without basically wiping it clean of humans and starting again.
Maybe just the cities.
Folks in the rural areas sound less insane from the traveler's reports I've heard.
That's why in pretty much all of my classes the I replace the final exam with a few class sessions at the end where each student has to give a short lecture on a topic that we have not covered in class. If you have learned what you are supposed to learn about the basics of the subject, then you can research and present advanced topics to your peers. If you haven't, then you will have a lot of trouble. And there is no way to cheat.