Slashdot Mirror
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.
Just hit my two score birthday, so perhaps its the age talking, but MAN are kids today idiots.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
This is why university degrees from India are about as valuable as a high school diploma in the U.S.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Don't be surprised if students ask for the same thing.
Oh, was this about India? Silly me. I thought the story was about the USA.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
In other news, Indians felt it was their right to steal information obtained from their employer's outsourcing arrangements from US corporations. Also to operate telemarketing scams to the USA using cell phone numbers that were rotated weekly.
So if those with money or political influence can cheat, poorer students ask, why shouldn't they?
Hey, if those with money or political influence can murder someone and get away with it, why shouldn't everyone be able to? It's their democratic right!
Seriously, is this even a QUESTION? The real problem is not that you CAN'T cheat, it's that others CAN.
of what I deal with at work every day.
This is an ex-parrot!
...india is a corrupt shithole that needs serious help.
It is about India, because people in India are at least honest about their graft.
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.
Don't follow bad example. You can see what's happening in the states, and around the world because of that attitude.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Sigh. True that. We cheat about cheating by pretending we don't cheat.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
So if those with money or political influence can cheat, poorer students ask, why shouldn't they?"
Two wrongs don't make a right.
Exams generally try to determine how you have memorized some subject, not how you can adapt what you've learned.
By cheating on exams you're basically fooling yourself.
The point of education is to give you some stepping stone to each subject and something for you to go on when you need to research the subject further yourself.
There are no atheists when recovering from tape backup.
Sadly, most people learn this little gem of wisdom too late in life. Cheating only harms the cheater. It may mildly harm those who employ these people, but it doesn't take long for others to see despite your piece of paper, you're just an idiot who knows nothing, when you cheat.
So I say, if that's what they want to do, let 'em. It'll bite them in the butt soon enough.
this is why university degrees from India are about as valuable as a high school diploma in the U.S.
Are these public universities? Because a private university would have a strong incentive to catch and remove cheaters so that the value of their degrees are not diminished. There are no "rights" when you agree to abide by a student Code of Conduct, there is an agreement with pre-ordained consequences for both parties (at least outside a government apparatus).
The Universities that confer meaningful degrees would obviously place graduates more ably and thus command higher tuition - the incentives seems to be aligned for the university. Individuals would still be incentivized to accept bribes, but the universities should see those administrators as costing them tuition dollars by sullying their reputation.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
My wife ran close to a 4.0 undergraduate and graduate. She was also naive, having done grade school through HS at a small private women's school. In college at a large state school, the prof noticed a group of minority students that actively cheated off my wife, who always sat first row. For the final, the prof shoved my wife into a far back corner, rendering the cheating strategy impossible. The cheaters were given full opportunity to show how little they had learned. They spent the hour glaring at wife who was complying with the prof's request.
The only time I was cheated from was in grade school. The teacher assumed (or rather confused me with) my brother who was not quite so well behaved as I. When the classmate cheated from me, she did a poor job, but she still got a higher grade than I did.
Face it. Life is unfair.
I mean, with that culture, how could your chip design for the military satellite specification end up in the wrong hands?
Oh, sorry. My mistake. That was outsourced to China via three levels of third party vendors.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
They have the "ability" to cheat. Being "able" to do something does not make it a "right".
These kids, and other kids around the world who cheat or otherwise beat the system are only damaging their own careers. University diplomas don't have the face value they used to -- it's what they do to you, how smart, capable and competent they make you that matters. If you're incapable then it doesn't matter if you have a diploma from MIT (or the Indian equivalent) you're not getting hired. Or fired unceremoniously soon after getting hired.
With online courseware growing at the rate it is, some day, exams are likely going to become a form of self-evaluation. You work hard to get the scores that convince you that you know enough, and then you take the plunge into real life and see how convincing you are.
Simply because something is endemic and pervasive in a society, does not make it a right. Cheating is dishonest, pure and simple - there is no good way to rationalize it. Cheating in an exam means that you either did not take the time or care enough to understand the material. If I were an employer, I would be wary of hiring someone so unscrupulous.
Cheating only harms the cheater...
There is one other group harmed, and quite seriously, by widespread cheating: those who have worked hard and honestly for the best diploma they can both achieve and afford, but see it devalued to worthlessness because too many holders of the same diploma are cheaters, and incompetent.
when I was in college it was all the Rich kids. Daddy was an executive so they dont have to work hard nor play by the rules. They also paid people to write their papaers, etc....
Betting it's still the same way. The rich kids that daddy is paying their way are still the cheating scum.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Keep this article mind when hiring your next H-1Bs over your American counterparts which undergoes extensive liberal arts and ethics education.
New Economic Perspectives
For years I’ve been hearing how India is posed to take off economically. No one talked about China being a powerhouse 30 years ago, then 20 years ago the litany became India was next and posed to pass China, you know, because of freedom and stuff. I still kept hearing this, but it just never seems to happen. Meanwhile lots of doom and gloom predictions about China that never seem to materialize.
Both are countries are corrupt, but in very different ways. China’s leaders are pushing their populous into the modern age to benefit both their people and themselves. The richer the people are the more they can skim off the top.
India seems to want to let half of its population wallow in ignorance, superstition, and class based prejudice, all the while setting the tone for corruption at all levels that keeps anything from getting done.
Religious fanaticism is unpleasant, but if we could conquer corruption there would be very little left to fix in the world.
BTW, if I were a poor student in India, I would cheat too, then work hard in the real world to make it not just a selfish waste.
Letter To Iran
I just went to GoogleNews and searched "school cheating"... Atlanta school officials speaking how there are all different levels of cheating, NY students paying up to $3,200 to a guy to take their tests, a girl suing over an F she was given after crib notes were found... So, certainly not just Indian students...
These Indian students should come to America. Over here we call it "freedom of speech" to cheat on things. Elections, mostly.
Because "But he did..." is not a valid justification for any kind of behavior.
Of course, the real issue here is that students who cheat care more about grades than they do about learning, but that doesn't make nearly as attractive a headline.
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.
Exactly. There's a lot that people have the ability to do every day though they refrain from doing so. You could walk down the street and just decide to punch everyone in the nose. That's within your ability, but most people don't do this. (Mainly because they would get in trouble for doing so and/or would encounter someone who would punch back.) You also have the ability to walk down the street handing $1 bills to everyone you meet. Again, most people don't do this (as you might quickly run out of money to give out). Sadly, too many people confuse "can do X" with "it is my right to do X."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
That's an urban legend.
because you'll leave university completely unequipped for life?
that's if you are lucky enough to survive the compounding problem of cheating to get from lower to higher level classes. eventually you reach a point where you are so lost in the subject matter you can't even fake it.
Hard work is for proles.
at least you were well off enough to go to a university along side rich cheating scum. consider yourself fortunate.
What's the point of going to college if you are just going to cheat on exams? Your degree is worthless at that point.
Even if you do use that degree to get a job, you'll probably be fired not too long after, because you can't* cheat at work.
*I'm sure you can in India.
Easy morals to have if you're not the one on the bottom. Your assumption is that if someone cheats at all to offset an unfair advantage then they will be incapable of doing anything afterward.
By my way of think the unprivledged that stay in the system my offset the priviledged that will never be expected to perform because all they needed was a peice of paper to cover the corruption that got them to where they are. The unpriviledged will actually have to produce when they get where they are going whether in India or America. Granted there will be a lot of chaff, but there will also be some wheat.
Letter To Iran
I get my medical care from the VA and am very happy with it. My current Primary Caregiver got his medical education at a university in Egypt, and I'm perfectly satisfied with his abilities. Among other things, I like the fact that when he didn't like the way my Type II diabetes was reacting to my current medications, he referred me to Endocrinology because he knew his limits and didn't find anything wrong with asking for help when he needed it. I'd much rather put my health in his hands than in somebody who went to a more "western" medical school who wasn't willing to admit that he didn't know everything.
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The difference perhaps is that in America we are not proud of being cheaters, or at least not yet. If we had student rallies in front of the US capital building demanding the right to cheat they'd be laughed at from both high and low society. Yet this actually happened in India and the government backed down.
I'm a computer programmer, and encounter plenty of people with "various credentials" from "various nations".
It may be frustrating and annoying, but thats life.
However, I'm also a Private Pilot, and what truly terrified me in flight school was the foreign students who came to the USA to start on their Professional Pilot training, and cheated their way through the tests. They cheated through the written tests simply because they were goofing off and not paying attention in class.
The tests were entirely fair and passable if you paid attention in class and did the homework. But they chose not to, cheated through the tests (were occasionally angry when they were caught.... they were *paying* a lot for this education! Didn't you know... they *deserved* to pass for how much they were paying!)
It wasn't only the pilots. Several studying to be aircraft mechanics (in another class) were also caught cheating.
I know a student from a Air Traffic Control program who had several Chinese nationals in her class, and they were cheating their way through.
(not just a few questions or a few percentage points... but wholly cheating on entire exams).
Much of Asia likely has incompetent pilots flying improperly maintained aircraft, and directed by incompetent Air Traffic Controllers. I will never fly over there after what I saw.
There is no shortage of examples in business or politics of people making short-term expedient decisions even knowing the long-term costs.
...as long as it's the institution's right to unceremoniously expel them for academic dishonesty.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
That's funny, bringing a knife; to a gun fight.
I had a tutoring student with a teacher who gave zero credit on three correctly-answered test problems, because the student did not show her work. The problem? "Give the point slope form of the linear equation shown in the following graph." I told the girl's mom there was nothing I could do. The math wasn't the problem, the teacher was.
Ok. Let's think for a moment. What can a piece of paper with 2(i) in Physics do, on its own? Nothing, that's what.
What can a student capable of getting a 2(i) in Physics on their own merit do? Probably quite a bit.
What can a student capable of only getting a 3 in Physics on their own merit do? Probably less.
Exams are meant to test what a student has learned. If someone can't add up or multiply, having a first class maths degree to their name doesn't change that.
Judging people by qualifications is a shortcut to assessing their actual ability. But if qualifications are unreliable, and cheating makes them unreliable, then we have to revert to actually assessing what people can do, and ultimately by methods that are not written exams: rather the throw-em-in-the-deep-end sink-or-swim type tests. This takes more effort and resources, for no material gain. Hence everybody loses.
But cheating and corruption are the natural destination for a system which prizes exam results and pins career prospects on the back of them, rather than on genuine ability.
John_Chalisque
Being an engineering college we see many Indian and Chinese grad students. In both cases we numerous students who have real difficulty with any kind of synthesis and application of knowledge. They want to memorize a bunch of facts and formulas and crunch numbers to get the result. Solving real problems is something they have a lot of difficulty with. In particular there's not a good concept of problem solving. If they don't know the answer to something they believe the solution is to seek the person that does, not apply problem skills.
It, unsurprisingly, comes from the elementary and undergraduate education they received. That is what learning is to them. It is a real issue since of course in real engineering, you don't get to work from a textbook.
WTF? Isn't it rather the other way around? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
-er is a common suffix in English to denote "one who does X." You would rather introduce nonstandard nounifications of verbs? Or do you have any examples of other words that follow your convention?
Taking German, we learned the "standard" conjugation scheme of verbs, but the list of nonstandard ones was literally as long as the standards. I know *I* don't want that.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
People keep talking about slashdot going downhill but either they are new here or they've got selective memory. There are websites out there that have been around more than a decade that have discussion board rules that say "we are not slashdot". About the only thing that's ever been worse than slashdot is 4chan.
So, remind me, why are we hiring from this particular labor pool? I mean there's demonstrably many who know their stuff, but also demonstrably many who are faking it. Why take the chance?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
The right to cheat becomes the right to that degree which opens the doors to the right to an H1-B visa and a right to that better life in the great US of A.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
When I think back to my University years, I think about the long tradition of cheating that has always existed.
I bet there is hardly a single professor, principal, or dean out there that has not cheated during their schooling. Consider plagiarism, the easiest form of cheating that can be detected; If you were take all the essay's and documents produced by any given educator, politician, or other professional, and had it analyzed, I would bet my last dollar you would find some evidence of plagiarism.
Can anyone in Slashdot claim they have never cheated during their education? Are you not relieved that your materials were not analyzed by cheat detection algorithms? I know I am. I was only interested in mathematics and computers and didn't care about all the mandatory classes I had to take. I admit I took a few shortcuts with those mandatory courses, and I mean a few, but I didn't totally abuse the system either.
I don't agree with cheating advocates who claim they have a right to cheat, but I accept that it happens and that all such people can go on to have productive careers. What I'm against is the hypocrites that cast the first stone and condemn cheating, when they successfully got away with it themselves when there was less oversight.
Not just an urban legend, it's fucking stupid. Teachers wouldn't know who was connected? Please.
They try to fix their low grades by cheating. What they should try instead is to fix the high grades others get by bribery. Making the part of the graduates that have undeserved grades much higher will do only one thing: De-valuate the grade.
But quite a few students are pretty stupid. When I taught a freshman CS year, they had elaborate cheating schemes for the exercises! You needed to get 50% of the points there to be allowed to take the exam, but that was because unless you got these points yourself, you had absolutely no chance of passing the exam. And the exercise score had no impact whatsoever on the grade. The students were told that multiple times and not only by staff but also by higher years. Some 20% still cheated like it would get them anything. The only point were we brought the foot down was when some student stole submitted exercise sheets from the letterbox they had to be put in and then threw them into the trash after copying. (Like that would not get noticed....) At that point we told them that we would bring a criminal complaint against the one doing this and fortunately it stopped. From my observations, the written exam did very well to separate the cheaters from those that worked hard _and_ had some aptitude. That is what it is supposed to do.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Turns out 60% of my class is Indian.
Here's what happened: I'm teaching one of two sections of a CS course. On one of my homework assignments, I borrowed two of the questions from the other instructor. However, I altered them so that the numbers were different. The other section's answer key came out just before mine was due. Nevertheless, about 60% of my class turned in exact copies of the other section's answers, which were not correct for the assignment I gave them.
Call me lazy if you want, but coming up with good questions isn't as easy as you might think, so instructors often reuse their own questions (with some facts altered), and this isn't a whole lot different. This gave me an opportunity to explain to the students the meaning of the term "honeypot."
Anyhow, India isn't unique in developing this sense of entitlement to do what you want and to achieve grades, regardless of what you might actually learn. Some people will spend more time trying to evade learning than actually doing the learning. But some people find the piece of paper to be more important than having job skills.
Why do teachers teach with a closed fist, holding some knowledge back?
The primary goal of an exam is assessment, not teaching although you could say that it teaches you what you actually understand and what you do not. It is possible to write an open book exam but it is not always easy. I've done this once in the past for a grad course but the questions in such an exam are far, far harder and there is a certain amount of luck involved in finding the right parts of a book to read. Hence I no longer do this type of exam because I don't think it gives an accurate assessment of ability and it is really challenging to set questions which are hard enough to test but still possible to complete given student knowledge.
Exams generally try to determine how you have memorized some subject, not how you can adapt what you've learned.
Clearly you have never taken a physics exam. In physics it is really simple to present the students with a problem slightly different to those they have seen and have them figure out how to solve it by applying the principles covered in the course. Easy questions present situations very similar to those they have seen before, difficult ones present situations that are rather different.
In fact when teaching the first year physics for bioscience course I got so many complaints that I asked questions that they have not seen before that I actually now explain to them that they cannot just memorize every question in the book. They have to know how to apply the course principles to new and different situations. So I think it depends strongly on subject.
Sigh. True that. We cheat about cheating by pretending we don't cheat.
No, we're just better at it. Reminds me of a course I had in school where about 80% of the grade was a single Java project where students worked in teams of 3 or 4. This project is always the same from one semester to the next. One of the projects from the previous year was floating around, and everybody had access to it. Out of a class of 50 or so students, I think 2 groups turned in what looked to be 100% original projects. The groups that re-used the old projects did so at varying levels...some of them completely changed the UI layout, some of them only changed the UI colors, and then you had the groups of the Asian students. They turned in the exact project from the previous semester only changing the names on it. There were 4 Asian groups, and they all had the exact same software...it was blatant. They also all received As on the project.
I hoped you failed them and turned them into the disciplinary committee. They should fail the whole homework not just the two questions. People only change due to consequences. Again. People really really ONLY CHANGE DUE TO consequences. Back in my day plagiarism and cheating were grounds for expulsion. At least they should be put on academia probation. You don't do this just to show how dangerous their behavior was, but as a lesson to others that it won't be tolerated at the school. You are not doing anyone any favors by letting it slide. Not the students, not the school, not the honest students, not other teachers and certainly not society.
People with low morals usually assume everyone else is like them too. This has been shown over and over. I never cheated, lots of people never cheated. Also I never stole as a kid either. I hear that alot too. "Oh everyone stole a candy or money as a young kid" Nope. Wrong. Deal with it.
Good. When US industry outsources their IT jobs to these 'software engineers', I hope they get totally screwed up by people who cheated their ways through school. It will serve them right.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/indiahome/indianews/article-2829102/Nearly-HALF-Modi-s-new-cabinet-criminal-cases-against-majority-crorepatis-worth-average-Rs-18-48-crore.html
What's wrong in students following their leaders?
Casteism
If you meet anybody from India ask him "What Is Your Caste?" If he answers it, then you're doomed. Because he has already injected Cancer into your Country. Caste is like Cancer. It cannot be Cured. It has to be Cut-Off.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/05/15/a-fascinating-map-of-the-worlds-most-and-least-racially-tolerant-countries/
Casteism