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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
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.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
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...
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...
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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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.
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.
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.
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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