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Hundreds Expelled, Many Arrested, For Cheating In India's School Exams
Etherwalk writes Sources conflict, but it looks like as many as 300 people have been arrested for cheating in the Indian state of Bihar after the Hindustan Times published images of dozens of men climbing the walls of a test center to pass answers inside. 500-700+ students were expelled and police had been bribed to look the other way. Xinhau's version of the story omits any reference to police bribery, while The ABC's omits the fact that police fired guns into the air.
No, CHEATING is a cultural thing there. Many feel they have the RIGHT to cheat.
Cheating on university exams produces inferior quality graduates, that only make the system cumbersome and unpleasant.
However, there are whole industries that capitalize on this phenomenon. H1B visa mills are just one such industry.
Crackdowns on Indian cheating will directly affect their financial bottom lines. Expect hard pushback.
Have you seen those pictures? So... this apparently isn't some sneaky "we couldn't tell they were cheating" issue. This was the examiners apparently not caring at all about blatant cheating going on right in front of them. I mean, you really can't miss this, right? That being the case, why wouldn't the students just hide the crib sheets on them somehow, or cheat in a way that's not quite as likely to involve a family member falling to death from outside the building's third and fourth story windows?
Can anyone give a plausible explanation? I'm genuinely curious.
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I know I'm not. My Indian students would always be shocked during their first test that they were caught cheating. Some were honestly surprised that I wouldn't allow it.
Remember incidents like this when you see lists of countries supposedly being ahead of other countries in terms of test score results...
China is number one on most tests, and they openly and systematically cheat by excluding the bottom 80% from even taking the exam. Chinese people are assigned to a hereditary social class at birth, under the Hukou System. About 20%, mostly richer people, are privileged "urban" class, which entitles them free education, healthcare, subsidized housing, etc. The bottom 80% are assigned to the "rural" class (even if they live in a city), and aren't even entitled to food during times of shortage (99% of the 30 million deaths by starvation during the Great Leap Forward were people with a rural hukou). Since Chinese students only take the PISA exam in urban areas, where it is illegal for the poor kids to attend public schools, the results are meaningless. It would be like America only testing students from households with incomes in the top quintile. This is all well known, and there has been a lot of complaints about the way China cheats on these tests.
The houkou system is a profound injustice, requiring the poor to pay taxes to support a system that only benefits the rich. Most Americans know nothing about it, because Chinese immigrants to America come almost exclusively from the privileged class, and have no interest in criticizing a system that benefits their families.
You can cheat on the Olympiads. North Korea was caught cheating on the International Mathematical Olympiad twice.
Remember incidents like this ... test score results... are usually pretty worthless predictors of real-world results.
What fraction of American parents would be willing to climb up the side of a building to get their kid a better test score?
Most American parents don't care about academics. Sure you could probably find a few communities where as many as 10% would make the climb but in many other communities it would be less than even a single percent.
It's not necessarily a bad thing that Americans can devote their lives to watching professional sports and pop stars and still live reasonably comfortable lives. But bear in mind that there are levels of poverty and human suffering in India that are incomprehensible to most Americans - which can be a very powerful motivator for those who can avoid succumbing to despair.
Cheating has been a serious problem among asian students at every grade level in Southern California, for at least two decades. Not only cheating but a variety of other ploys, such as harassing teachers into giving out extra credit assignments to those who pester them, which can be used to artificially increase their grades. (Extra credit improves grades more than poor test scores bring them down.)
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Having worked with a number of H1Bs from India, I'd say their level of technical competency was pretty comparable to what you'd expect from Americans. Some were horrible, a few were outstanding, most were OK.
There were two big differences. The first was the large number of masters degrees. This is obviously helpful in the visa process, but I don't think a CS or IT master's degree obtained right after college without any intervening work experience means much in practical terms. This is the kernel of truth in the "dodgy diploma" complaint, except there's nothing wrong with the diploma. It's often from a perfectly good program at a US university, it's just gilding the inexperienced lily.
The second big difference is culture. I don't think either culture has an overall advantage, but Indian engineers tend to be can-do and highly conscientious but are often conflict-averse and reluctant to convey bad news. Americans tend to be more assertive in the face of authority and somewhat less likely to tell the boss what they think he wants to hear rather than what he needs to hear. But it's important to realize that engineers are individuals, not cultural automatons. Some Americans are door mats and some Indian engineers are firebrands. And overall engineers from either country are more like each other than they are like ordinary people.
While I think the economic arguments for H1B are bogus, I am grateful to the program for having introduced me to so many interesting people.
My take on the issue of cheating in India is that the stakes are so much higher for some Indians it'd be surprising not to have scandals like this. We Americans see being middle class as a birthright. There isn't a bottomless bit of poverty waiting to swallow us up if we're a few points short of par on our SATs, the way there is for many Indians trying to climb onto the lower rungs of the middle class ladder. But even so *we* cheat plenty. Remember the Air Force officers who shared answers for tests that were supposed to measure their ongoing competency to handle nuclear weapons? That was sheer laziness.
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Ten years before, it is true. But now hukou is mostly outdated and not used, and where it used it is to keep cities not too population. Without it cities would be too crowded and more pollution, crime, and problems. But westerners keep to spread the lies to damage china reputation and image.
I was born here and I also live in "free" country (USA), and there is no big difference except both use the propaganda to attack the other. Foreign don't understand the chinese culture, jist as some chinese don't understand the western culture. And most chinese don't want the western culture that the west try to force on us.
Please try to have open mind when thinking different cultures.
I live in China. Have lived here for 11 years as of this April.
Your claim that hukou isn't used any more is a bald-faced lie.
Furthermore, why would you claim it isn't used in one breath but in the next you claim that it's used to control population?
"But China has too many people"- the standard excuse used by any fenqing when trying to justify a shitty government policy.
Ten years before, it is true. But now hukou is mostly outdated and not used
This is a flat out lie. I have nieces and nephews that live in Shanghai, and have to attend private school because their hukou makes it illegal for them to attend the public school in their neighborhood. My father-in-law had to travel over 1000km back to Sichuan for surgery, because he is ineligible to use the hospitals in Shanghai.
I did my MS in a top-30 US program. It was a state school and roughly half of the students were from India. This also made roughly half the TAs Indian. Although I come from a country where cheating is common (and professors know it so are out to prevent it), I had never seen such mass-scale cheating and collusion before. You see, the Professors did not expect any academic dishonesty - especially large-scale one and trusted their TAs as colleagues. :) I opened her java file and what do I see: no db stuff at all! No connection to the db, no queries, nothing. Hard-coded in java were the test cases...
Example: in a database class as homework for one week we were to implement a flight booking system that given departure/arrival airports used sql queries to find the appropriate flights with up to one interim destination. You were given the database contents and the test cases you were to perform to confirm your project works properly. I left it for the last minute (naturally) so in my hurry the java UI had a minor bug. I don't remember exactly, but it was not something of consequence, the point of the exercise was the sql. I got 95% and I thought it was a bit strict, but anyway. A few days later while I was browsing my home direct on the student server, I noticed that many students still had world readable home directories. You were expected to manage it yourself, so if you wanted to put stuff there you were supposed to secure it. One of the accessible ones was of the TA that had given me 95% and I checked it out. Sure enough, he was putting stuff there without bothering to change the permissions , and one of the "stuff" was an excel sheet with the results of the exercise. I opened it and found out that every Indian had 98-100%. You might say the were the great students and it was not that hard of an exercise, but I knew at least some of those 100%s as weak students. So I went back to the home directory list and found one of the 100% people that did not look 100% material with an accessible directory and their homework right there
By the time I finished the program I knew very well that Indians considered cheating and plagiarism as the norm, as was helping out each-other with that stuff. Also bullshitting came naturally. For example I was representing an office at the job fair and was accepting CVs from graduate students for a position. I was supposed to give my boss the best candidates for an interview. I was surprised to find out that most of the Indian resumes were almost identical. They had all finished an IIT with a great grade (meanwhile back in my home country the top undergrads could perhaps hope for close to 8.5/10 final grade), had all been placed first in a Mathematical Olympiad of some unknown place (town? village? cricket club? who knows?), had some great professional background in an Indian company, some of them who were in my class had developed a "robust airline reservation system" that was presented as being in line to replace the software at Delta... I could not tell them apart. At all. I mean, I knew we had some Indians who were amazing students. I mean, half of the students were Indian, so about half of the top students were also Indian. But their resumes looked the same, based on them I would either send all of them or none for an interview. In the end, I sent the ones that from our brief interaction seemed to have the best communication/interaction skills, but in any case it is indicative.
A year after I finished, an Indian was caught cheating on a test for the second time by a Professor. He told the student he was getting an F. His reply was "why give me an F when all the class submitted the same course project?". The Professor asked the TA for the submitted projects and found out that almost all Indian students in the class (the number was about 20 IIRC) had submitted a copy of the same project, and the TA had dutifully marked all with an "A". There was talk about expelling all of those involved, but in the end they allowed them to continue with an F in that course. Perhaps after that they started checking up on them...
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