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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.
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?
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.
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
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.