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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.
Remember incidents like this when you see lists of countries supposedly being ahead of other countries in terms of test score results... without knowing how much cheating is going on, such lists are usually pretty worthless predictors of real-world results.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
How can they crank out "qualified applicants" at bargain basement prices, if they cant get ahold of disreputable young people with dodgy diplomas for bargain basement prices?
I hate to sound ignorant but from everything I've heard a lot of pressure is put onto school kids to get a good education and get married (particularly males)
I doubt it's something they can really change with a law or some arrests, it's seems like a deeply rooted cultural thing.
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
This link to the fucking article:
http://www.hindustantimes.com/...
Has a fucking hilarious picture that you fucking have to see. Made my fucking day.
Of course many feels that they have the right to cheat ...
We only have to look at what happened in Wallstreet to remind us that cheating is MASSIVELY PROFITABLE and if they can cheat, why can't we?
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.
Maybe we do have something in common with India, after all!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Predictable response when it comes to India and China. Check out the following article.. Hint: cheating, or at least the temptation, is something universal in human nature.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-...
On an unrelated note, Chinese students dominate the prestigious International Science Olympiad competitions. You can't cheat in those.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Lol...wut?!
The tests are the problem. When police are involved, your education has ceased to become about knowledge transfer. It is about control.
Tests aren't needed. They are a lazy, inaccurate way of assessing learning. Socrates needed no tests. Buddha never taught with a closed fist holding some knowledge back. Censorship promotes an effete monoculture, not innovation.
Remember, the best cheaters will be arriving on our shores (United States) within a few short years, thanks to the H1B programs!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Sadly, it's a cultural thing. The first Indian I met was caught with a forged degree from a University he never went to. Over the years as I've gotten to work and know more Indians, I found an endemic culture of cheating on taxes, cheating on business deals, ripping off customers, degrees bought from diploma mills, and most recently, refusing to honour their own restaurant's gift certificates when you tried to cash them in.
Worse, every single one of these individuals bragged about how they "beat the system."
They don't worry that cheating is wrong, just about getting caught. :(
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
You can cheat on the Olympiads. North Korea was caught cheating on the International Mathematical Olympiad twice.
cheating, or at least the temptation, is something universal in human nature.
My experience is that most people will cheat if the following list of criteria are satisfied:
1. They think they will get away with it.
You can cheat on the Olympiads. North Korea was caught cheating on the International Mathematical Olympiad twice.
My kids compete in the Math Olympiad, and I helped proctor the test for their school. There was about 60 students, and only one other parent present. Cheating would have been trivial. I could have easily slipped the answers to my kid, or to several kids. I didn't because I didn't know that America's honor was being threatened by NK. I wasn't even aware that NK participated. I will be ready next year.
Let everyone get away with it. Try to transmit information. Information does not follow conservation laws: yoy can learn something as you teach it. You gain, the students gain. Use tests as voluntary exercises, where students are free to help each other, and can do the test ad many times ad they want without penalty.
I hate to sound ignorant but from everything I've heard a lot of pressure is put onto school kids to get a good education and get married (particularly males)
I doubt it's something they can really change with a law or some arrests, it's seems like a deeply rooted cultural thing.
Perhaps this has not occurred to you...
But if you have to cheat in order to get a good score you don't have a good education.
So they have failed in their task, and no amount of cheating will make them any less of an abject failure.
s/yoy/you
s/ad/as
Only those funny foreigners cheat. Never happens here in the US...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...
It would explain some of the "experts" hired on H-1B visas recently.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Give up testing altogether. Help everyone get to an A+ level.
No amount of education is going to cram an understanding of calculus into the head of someone who is incapable of learning calculus.
How do you propose we get those people "to an A+ level" in calculus? This is not something you can "give" someone, so it's not like we are "selfishly withholding" an understanding of calculus from them. They are just incapable of learning calculus.
So your suggestion is rather naive at best, and lacking in critical thinking skills at worst. It's like asking society to help someone with no arms and no legs "get to an A+ level" in juggling. It's just not going to happen, ever.
If you had critical thinking skills, you'd recognize that equality of opportunity does not guarantee equality of outcome, no matter how much time, effort, and money you pour into trying to make it untrue.
Better idea - use sophisticated computer programmed learning + continuous testing. Since students are learning and continually being retested on the material, and the questions are rarely the same for two different students (or even the same student 10 minutes later), nearly all cheating other than just standing there and answering for the student becomes impossible or at least impractical - IOW actually continuously monitor the students progress and help them actually _learn_ instead of faking it.
Of course, the education establishment really doesn't want to know a student's real capability, as this would elicit questions of actual performance, and ability - completely politically incorrect.
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How else will you determine whether someone is worthy of entry to the next level of education or a job? Aren't job interviews tests? Do you just ship software to customers without doing any testing?
These people loved knowledge and were probably already well off. To other people, education is a means to getting a job and therefore, survival.
What you describe is how Khan Academy works.
Olympiads test the top five or six students of a population. It should be obvious to anyone with even a tenuous grasp of mathematics that countries with a large population to draw from will be favored. That does not provide any useful information on the overall level of education in the country, except that it is sufficient enough for preternaturally skilled students to be identified and coached.
China does well in the Olympics for the same reason, but that doesn't mean that Chinese people are overall more athletic.
before any of you start saying India this and India that, ban H1B, nuke em all etc. Just remember this is one image and India is 1.3 million Sq mile in area with 29 states, 7 Union Territories, 122 major languages and 1599 other languages, 3 sign languages, 6 major religions, oral literature dating back to 1500 BCE, some of the richest and the poorest people, at least 14 different ethnic groups, 6 national level political parties, 1800 total political parties... etc. India is not " is" India "are". So please take a nuanced approach to everything. Read, learn, present arguments with humility that you know only a small fraction of what needs to be known to even take a position on this country.
It's trivial to cheat on those, there was a case back 15-20 years ago here in Canada were participants were caught cheating in it. The same happened in the pascal math tests. I'm sure that in cases in the last 5 years people have been caught cheating in those tests as well.
Om, nomnomnom...
The tests are the problem. When police are involved, your education has ceased to become about knowledge transfer. It is about control.
what knowledge? 80% of these people are going to get government jobs in India through political connections bribes or reservation. 10% are going to buy a computer engineering degree and end up in the outsourcing business and help create the stereotype of the shallow Indian techie. 9% are going to be unemployed. 1% will do something worthwile in their life .
I wondered what this "Xinhau" was. An Indian rip off of Xinhua? But, no, it's somebody who can't spell a word correctly when it's sitting in front of them. Reminds me of some of my students, in fact.
And that's a big part of it, because - apparently - until this because a big, embarrassing news story, they likely were getting away with it. Either due to bribes or just a generally broken system. Yes, cheating happens in "western" countries too, but it's certainly not this blatant, and there's an expectation of certain consequences if one is caught.
No amount of education is going to cram an understanding of calculus into the head of someone who is incapable of learning calculus.
Calculus is trivial. Anyone within a standard deviation or two of median intelligence should be able to learn it if they have a teacher who understands it. The widespread lack of understanding is just a reflection of how badly we fail, as a society, to educate.
OK, so the students somehow got the exam answers. The University actually caught it because SOMEBODY WAS DOING THEIR FUCKING JOB, and reporting it. It went up the chain, and the students got dealt with. It's embarrassing, but it doesn't appear that the university condoned the cheating in any way. I'm sure some people do cheat, and manage not to get caught, but at least they system is set up so that they have to be lucky/sneaky to do so.
Now compare to this situation. People are climbing the walls. It's BLATANTLY FUCKING OBVIOUS that it was happening, so why didn't the institution deal with it before it became a viral web sensation?
I'm sorry, but when parents in Harvard, Oxford, or even NoName U are scaling walls and passing notes to the kids in plain view... then you can make a comparison against the host countries. The "well, other people do it too" explanation has got to be one of the worst type of enablers for sort of behavior, and even so there's simply no comparison.
For them to do something about it and save face. Sweet.
It's not only that. When adjusted to population size, India does very poorly, worse than China, Korea & Co. but also much worse that Russia and Romania.
As a former participant (from a small country, so it was easier to get in), I should note that IMO problems are not a good representation of general education in a country. They are very specific, wildly different from both high school and university mathematics. So success on the IMO is much more dependent on the individual's and the country's level of preparation for the specific event. IPhO, for example, is much more similar to the physics we learn at school, except the problems are more difficult.
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It is a bit of a straw man: you only demonstrates that you can get caught cheating.
Don't you know it is now both immoral and criminal to think beyond the next quarterly report?
Actually, his language skill is in line with USA's average language skill..
I remember quite well Slashdot had an article about cheating on India's university exam tests. Some statistician made a graph and proved the huge spike were people who cheated. Which then brings up the question...how many of these "college bound" students and parents were arrested? Because I don't remember ever seeing that being mentioned as a punishment for them.
Care killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
Fraudulent degrees are grounds for immediate deportation, because it means the H-1B petition was perjured.
So we have them beat on square miles, number of states, number of territories, number of sign languages, number of major religions, oral literature, number of ethnic groups, and richest and poorest people!
Obviously we are falling behind on total languages and national level political parties (we could fix that last by getting rid of the electoral college) and total political parties.
Truly, we need to close the "Tower of Babel" gap, the better to not be able to communicate effectively, but you can't always be the best at everything...
They're usually from the very top universities, the kind of which, even if there is talk of reservation for 'minorities', let alone cheating, can lead to people 'self-immolating' [wikipedia.org] in protest.
He was protesting against the Mandal commission reservations in jobs, not universities. We have 50% reservations for low caste people and minorities in every government educational institute. And though many people have complained, most support it.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
You just displayed the level of logic won by cheating all your tests.
10th class exams are the easiest exams ever! Also, they are TOTALLY inconsequential. In fact, they are optional if your school is affiliated to the most popular board (CBSE). So we are talking about a test that is of so less consequence that you can say "fuck it, I don't need this shit" and everybody is fine with that. And even if you decide to take it, it's so easy that most students cram the entire yearly syllabus in about a month and get decent scores, sans cheating. I really cannot understand why such a huge cheating effort seemed appropriate to these people.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
2. They do not have confidence in the testing system (eg, 'I'm studying to be a technical writer, so it isn't fair that I need to dissect archaic character descriptions in Romeo and Juliet to pass this english course.')
3. They believe other people cheat ('It's only fair, I'd be at a disadvantage otherwise.')
4.
Cheaters cheat at every opportunity, they're also the ones who become notorious shysters and con men of every variety, both inside and outside the law. But most people aren't naturally born cheaters. What really brings out the widespread cheating is the perception that the system is rigged. That's why it is so hard to turn a country full of tax fraud, corruption, bribes and so on around, why should I make an honest effort when everybody else isn't?
At least when it comes to certain crimes I think the culture among your friends and family are far more important than what the law says. If your dad is an old Woodstock hippie and your buddies would say "Sure, who hasn't smoked a little pot in college" it's different than if they'd disown you and your bible study group would expel you. Of course they wouldn't support your cheating but if they cheated too and got away with it they won't take the moral high ground, just the practical advice that the first rule of cheating is to not get caught.
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employers who post literally impossible qualifications (5 years experience in a 3 year old technology for example)
Are you sure they aren't trying to poach someone who worked at the company producing the technology during the two years before release?
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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FWIW, I'm a native English speaker, and I still get rules about capitalization mixed up. (I suppose taking German didn't help things, though...)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yes-No. "Will you cheat?" isn't a black and white thing, and expectation of not getting caught isn't the only modifier. Also involved are how important it is, and what the expected consequences of getting caught are.
Would you cheat on a math test to save your life? Your parents life? Your children's lives? If you said "No" to all of those you're lying. But if you would cheat for a penny, then you're totally without morals...unless there are exceptional circumstances that I haven't thought of.
What about if you had to pay a lot for the opportunity to take the test, and if you passed you would have a good career, and if you failed you wouldn't? I'd wager that would strongly increase the amount of cheating. (And unless you answered no to all the above questions, you can't be sure that you wouldn't, because I purposely left a lot of the motivators vague.)
People not only have differing amounts of "honor", they also disagree about what the term means.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Back in early 90's, I went back to school to pick up another BS, but in C.S. Because I had already coded professionally for 10 years, I helped out on the CS 101, and 201 classes. Regularly, you would have 1-2 Americans that were cheating. However, the main group that we caught over and over was the Chinese group (interestingly, only a very little bit in the Indian group ). If we pulled in individuals from these groups, they could not answer the questions or analogs to them.
It was obvious even back then that the amount of cheating that went on was enormous within the chinese group.
Now, what I find interesting, is that I am modded as a troll, even though I had out and out worked with this.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
In general, what you say is dead on.
However, the other issue that will make ppl cheat is if the rewards are high and they have NOTHING to lose.
As I mentioned earlier, I dealt with Chinese students (amongst others) cheating at CSU. It was obvious that by cheating to get to America, they had little to lose and everything to gain.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Buddha never taught with a closed fist holding some knowledge back.
What information do you assert the teachers in this example are holding back?
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Capitalization wasn't the issue though, it was phrases like
where it used it is to keep cities not too population
westerners keep to spread the lies to damage china reputation and image
Foreign don't understand the chinese culture
There are also lots of missing pronouns etc, which is common for Chinese ESL speakers who don't really use English in real life (except to make stupid posts on /.)
Shoplifting;
http://www.rediff.com/business...
Casteism
How else will you determine whether someone is worthy of entry to the next level of education or a job? Aren't job interviews tests? Do you just ship software to customers without doing any testing?
In science, when you want to test something, you make multiple measurements, and you try to disturb the subject of your measurement as little as possible.
With tests like the one mentioned, you have ONE measurement, and the subject is HIGHLY altered from what would be considered normal, since they know that their future is inextricably tied to the result. Even in the US, people get nervous for midterm exams, since they can be a major portion of the class grade.
A test is the simplest way of evaluating someone's understanding, but the current concept/idea of testing as an evaluation of your knowledge is far from scientific.
The above was posted by me; I forgot to log in as usual. My apologies.