Slashdot Mirror
Chinese Nationals Accused of Taking SATs For Others
Vadim Makarov writes: Fifteen Chinese nationals living in the U.S. have been charged with creating an elaborate scheme to take U.S. college entrance exams on behalf of students. For the past four years, the accused provided counterfeit Chinese passports to impostors, who sneaked into testing centers where they took the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), the Graduate Record Examination (GRE), and others, while claiming to be someone else, according to a federal grand jury indictment. Special Agent in Charge John Kelleghan for Homeland Security Investigations of Philadelphia said: "These students were not only cheating their way into the university, they were also cheating their way through our nation's immigration system."
Just because you suck at every test you take doesn't mean they're worthless. Quite the reverse, actually.....
I find it mildly ironic that China's lengthy history of testing for public servants dating back millennia means they basically invented standardized testing...so they probably also invented cheating on standardized testing.
They already have you put your prints on the LSAT, actually.
The SATs and GREs are not state tests. They are run by private companies.
Disagree.
SAT scores correlate closely with measured IQ, and, when taken together with high school grades, are a decent predictor of success at university. I do think that article discounts the extent to which the SAT can be "gamed", though. Of course, if you get a high score because you spent hours studying the SAT in order to get a high score then that also measures something. Maybe not intelligence, but "ambition" and "self-discipline". Which, of course, also contribute to success at university (and in the job market).
There were decades of twisted testing. Within graduate education world, I have personally met a large number of chinese nationals who barely could speak or write English, yet had perfect scores. Every graduate school knows this phenomena and this is the reason why certain asian related biases were formed. No doubt many of them are very smart people, but some just could not learn the language even in 3 or 4 years.
Many graduate schools no longer pay significant attention to certain test and yes, unofficial quotes have been created to counter numerous candidates with perfect scores.
I am waiting for further developments: perhaps a listing of thousands of people who benefited from imposter exam takers will be announced.
Not to play that card, but I've been hearing how my employer(s) can hire a PhD from China or India at half the price of an America or that we have to allow the, "cream of the crop," to enter the USA. But all I've heard about the education system from these two counties is that it's okay to cheat, in fact, it's expected in an apparent attempt to show you're serious about succeeding. And that's what its really about, succeeding at any cost. Glad to be so close to retirement and then I won't have to deal with this crap.
I don't think the SAT is really that useful of a test. However colleges seem to use them for entrance criteria, as a number is easier to evaluate than judging a person on the whole.
But if they are willing to cheat on the SAT test to get in, I don't think colleges really want people of such questionable moral caliber to enter the school.
My experience with Chinese students, this isn't too surprising, they are far more willing to cheat, than take the consequences of getting a low grade. That is why when they show statistics showing where China is succeeding, I really question it, because their culture seems to want to win, with the actual objectives of the grading as not important. A Sr.Year computer science major the student was the curve breaker on the tests. Went to me asking how in C++ can he use decimal numbers (the answer was using the float data type, which we learned about on day 3 in the freshman class, and had used such a data type all threw the program. Made me realize, this student was either cheating technically (threw nefarious methods), or cheating himself (Only test prep, once the test is done, it brand dumps out of the system). Because in anything practical he was useless.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
SAT and IQ tests certain domains that are predictive of intelligence and achievement but don't gauge the most important intelligence for life: social intelligence
much as you can have as autistic savant/ asperger's individual who can play 12 games of chess in his head but doesn't know the difference between the price of a candy bar and a car, the rest of us also have small mental domains where we are geniuses, but in other domains we are idiots. all of us. for those who attach much value to topological manipulation or word memorization, tested intelligences, real life will come as a shock when someone else who isn't "smart," according to traditional testing methods, achieves highly and surpasses the "smart" individuals, because they are able to perceive, communicate, and manipulate in the social sphere of life at a more advanced level
social intelligence is the real iq, the real true intelligence, and the most crucial and vital mental skill you can have in your life. the rest are pathetic sideshows. there are math professors who can't balance their checkbooks. see the problem?
btw, i scored near perfect on my SAT and very highly on my IQ tests. i attach no self-worth to either. they are cute little games, sandboxed kiddie stuff, not my sense of meaning in life. anyone who attaches meaning to their SAT scores or IQ tests is, in all serious, an idiot
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/S...
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
British Columbia had the problem of Chinese immigrants hiring others to take their driver's license test for them. It took yeas to try and sort out the cheters that had bought their driver's license this way and re-test them.
BUT, don't make the mistake that this sort of abuse is just a Chinese thing. Every race has members that will game the system for their benefit. It's just part of being human.
The SAT/GRE/etc. are terrible ways of selecting students; they can be specifically prepped for, students can cheat, they exclude otherwise-worthy students who don't "test" well, etc. But for better or worse, they are about the best available.
An "ideal" admissions method could somehow magically select the "best" students, but as any person who interviews and hires people can tell you, is rather difficult to do well. And impossible to do well on a mass scale. Employers, who have a huge vested interest in hiring only employees who will "work out" (given the utterly ridiculous costs of bringing somebody up to speed in a new workplace) haven't been able to figure this out yet. Colleges, who have a much smaller cost for admitting mediocre students, certainly aren't going to perfect this skill.
Given the cost/time/scale constraints of a better process, heavily weighting admissions decisions on SAT scores is not the worst compromise that could be made.
The fuckers that had these people take their exams? Should there not be some type of penalty for them as well?
I mean imagine if you'd do this and that person went on to become a CEO? Wait nevermind, I see where I went wrong, this is completely acceptable behavior for CEO's or politicians.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
In other words, perfect preparation for your working life.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Don't be too impressed about "social intelligence". Sure, a minimum of it is necessary - those chess-playing autists gets nowhere.
Intelligence though, can gets you jobs in engineering or academia that simply isn't available to others - no matter how much social intelligence they have. Social intelligence can make you a leader, but won't help you make the right decisions. Hence, stupid presidents do stupid things. Hitler had social intelligence enough to gain a lot of power - then he fought a war with too many enemies and lost.
The more successful leader types know their own limitations and use expert advisors - and listens to them. Experts that are overriden on a whim are not useful, and neither is the leader employing them.
Uh, you are "some millennial with a [communications] degree".
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Authoritarianism. Following orders. Lack of creativity. Willing to accept the system even when it's wrong.
The skill: "willingness to accept the system, even when it's wrong, and game it for your benefit" is central to engineering, accounting, law, and finance. Almost all of the goof jobs outside of medicine.
Children expect life to be fair. Adults accept that the world is imperfect, and work for success within it (not to say it's not also worth trying to change the bad parts, but in the mean time do something useful with your life).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Now we have Chinese grade farmers.
When someone says, "Any fool can see
the SAT has a large essay portion that does gauge how well students are able to communicate their knowledge
Many colleges ignore the essay portion of the SAT, because it has not been shown to indicate much of anything. Scores on the multiple choice portion of the test, on the other hand, are more highly correlated with academic success in college, and financial success after college, than any other measurement. So, of course, they are the biggest factor in the admissions process at most universities.
Measured IQ is bullshit. Asimov wrote a great 30 page essay on the topic.
Asimov has a measured IQ of about 160. Do you think you would recommend an essay written by someone with a measured IQ of, say, 80?
social intelligence is the real iq, the real true intelligence, and the most crucial and vital mental skill you can have in your life. the rest are pathetic sideshows. there are math professors who can't balance their checkbooks. see the problem?
First of all, balancing a check book is not social intelligence. Secondly a "math professor" is exactly the sort of person it would take to automate the balancing of checkbooks for society as a whole, removing one more tedious and ultimately unnecessary task from our responsibility.
No the SAT is not a good measure of intelligence, but it is not because it fails to capture social intelligence.
Einstein was bad at arithmetic. Most people misunderstand this to mean that he was bad at math. Nothing could be further from the truth. Math is for creative people, arithmetic is (now) for machines (thanks to those creative people).
Yes social intelligence is important to personal success like a working liver is important to personal success. Since it is exceedingly common, it is rightly ignored as a necessary component to success (like the near infinite number of other potential deficits).
Other forms of intelligence that are far less common in humans, are more widely recognized due to their rarity. It's supply and demand.
Why do we value genius in mathematics and physics, etc higher than social intelligence?
Why is the price of gold higher than price water per weight/volume/particle, even though water is essential to life and gold isn't? Why do gold panners keep the useless gold and throw away all the life sustaining water?
It's the same reason.
If half the people on the planet were math geniuses, then we wouldn't even need to teach it in school. Kids who flunked out of college would get dead end mathematician jobs for minimum wage.
But that's not how it is. Kids who flunk out of college still have enough social intelligence to deal with customers and take directions from a boss, and sense when other people are pissed. This skill is valued (i.e. they find jobs that actually pay money), it's just not highly valued.
Although it's true that many colleges ignore the SAT essay, but multiple choice portion of the test is *not* highly correlated with academic success. The highest correlation is (sadly) family income, followed by weighted/normalized high-school grades (e.g., not GPA, but a weighted GPA), and only then standardized tests. Also above a certain high score (~1400/1600 on the SAT), there is nearly no correlation at all with higher scores and educational and post-educational outcomes (and yes I used to work with admission committees for a university that cooperated with other highly-selective university to compile statistics on this subject over many years back in the '80s).
The idea that the SAT matters is a myth propagated by the Educational Testing Service (ETS) corporation. In fact the creation of the competing ACT test was prompted by the fact that the SAT origins were an *aptitude* test (that can draw it's lineage from the US army IQ testing recruits in WWI) , not an *achievement* test (testing things that you should learn in school).
Colleges wanted an achievement test, but were dismissed by the ETS, however because of the use of the SAT in ivy league schools, the University of California signed on in 1960 and made the ETS/SAT into a juggernaut. Now because of discontent by UC and other schools on its predictive value, the ETS has changes the SAT twice in 10 years, which in its latest form, now looks more like an *achievement* test (like the ACT was).
Of course there is open debate in higher education on even requiring tests like the SAT or ACT. For example this study tracking 123,000 students over 33 universities found only minimal correlation of academic success with even submitting SAT scores to the school to evaluate (let alone what the score actually was).
that may be the status quo, but the status quo is a failed concept
http://www.businessinsider.com...
this is about GPA, not SAT, but they take home is that scores on academic tests are shit, because the "academic environment is an artificial environment". it focuses on skills that don't really help in the job. colleges need to change what they value, because what they value does not adequately prepare people for life
also:
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it