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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.
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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?
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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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.
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...
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.
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.
Only those funny foreigners cheat. Never happens here in the US...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...
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.
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.
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 .
If by including the line "#include <stdio.ht>" before each and every call to a stdio function leading to hundreds of compile errors "interferes" with the job of a programmer, then yes. He was the single most incompetent fraud I've ever encountered in my life.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
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.
And, that means what? You've already lost your job, the H1B is filling your position, and even IF he is fired, he'll still be here in the US, applying for jobs where HR files YOUR application in the circular file. Because he was a successful cheater, he got to America, and you lost your job. You're going to feel better somehow, because he got fired from your job? You ain't getting it back!
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Sounds like a perfect match with employers who post literally impossible qualifications (5 years experience in a 3 year old technology for example) and then when they don't find a local qualified applicant, miraculously find the literally impossible H1-B candidate.
Actually, his language skill is in line with USA's average language skill..
The education system has also failed them. In some cases the teachers were ineffective and didn't know the material they were supposed to be teaching.
If the education system gave them access to textbooks and other course materials, the teacher is irrelevant. The education system did not fail them, they failed themselves.
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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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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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.