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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.
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.
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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.
Quick let's hire more of them to replace US workers. I mean, with high ethical standards like they're expressing, what could possibly go wrong?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
Sigh. True that. We cheat about cheating by pretending we don't cheat.
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So if those with money or political influence can cheat, poorer students ask, why shouldn't they?"
Two wrongs don't make a right.
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.
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.
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.
Keep this article mind when hiring your next H-1Bs over your American counterparts which undergoes extensive liberal arts and ethics education.
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These Indian students should come to America. Over here we call it "freedom of speech" to cheat on things. Elections, mostly.
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.
Well, *that* goes a long way towards explaining why someone with an MS in computer science doesn't know who Kernighan and Ritchie are. And why they're working here for $45k.
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.
There are two kinds of accreditation. "Nationally accredited" is the bullshit minimum standard that the diploma mills meet. "Regionally accredited" has stricter requirements and is what good schools meet.
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That's an urban legend.
Exams generally try to determine how you have memorized some subject, not how you can adapt what you've learned.
Really? Let's say that you're taking the final exam for a course in Trig that consists in nothing but solving problems (and showing your work) that aren't in the text book. If all you've done is memorize the material but haven't learned how to use it, how are you going to pass the test?
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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.
WTF? Isn't it rather the other way around? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
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