Four Chinese Nationals Arrested and Charged in Connection with College Admissions Exam Scam

Cadets are not officers.

Also, at the time I believed the problem was with the university, at least primarily. It was the first time I’d seen it so blatant, which is why I left the nationality off.

Like I also mentioned, in engineering at least this doesn’t last long. Nobody else will put up with it.

In a conversation last week a couple of us joked about it being important for our corporate professional standards to be worthy of our personal reputations. We were goofing around but there’s a nugget of truth: If we see something blatantly unprofessional, we’ll call it out. We’re proud of what we do and of the company we keep.
Cheating isn’t.

While the punishment is the same, IMO it’s different to be the actual cheaters vs the more than half of the implicated charged because they were aware of it but didn’t report it. Don’t know the ranks, but it’s unlikely someone is going to report a superior officer.

This differs from what I observed.

Regardless, I don’t think one culture has the market cornered on cheating. I do think it’s a predictable byproduct of the infatuation with prestige.

Agree that the infatuation with prestige feeds some of the massive cheating insome cultures. But as others have said, the cheating culture may not be limited to college admissions.

“As an aside, I suspect the problem does not arise with the likes of MIT, but more to do with those institutions who actively trawl the globe, particularly China, looking for tuition dollars.”

@ elguapo1
Agreed. In which case – since tuition dollars is the main goal, not academic integrity – I don’t perceive it as a major problem. Even the Ivies have admitted idiots because they were attached to major tuition dollars :slight_smile:

Wouldn’t the reliability of TOEFL scores be called into question when these accepted Asian students get to class and can’t speak functional English?

Yes, I thinks that’s the attraction of the Duolingo test that so schools are starting to ask for. While it’s an easier test than TOEFL, the student is visible by webcam while taking the test.

@katliamom “since tuition dollars is the main goal, not academic integrity – I dont perceive it as a major problem.” Did you really mean to say that because it’s a doozy. These are universities, academic integrity is a core mission. With your statement why even bother with the charade of going to class; deposit the tuition check then rip a diploma off the roll on your way out!

It clearly is a problem as it is the whole reason for the thread. If academic integrity is to be maintained then universities need cease with their current wilfull blindness.

MODERATOR’S NOTE: For the 1,000th time, this is not a debate site. If another poster annoys you, put him or her on ignore instead of responding back and forth and back and forth. I deleted quite a few posts.

“Did you really mean to say that because it’s a doozy.”

@elguapo1 I did mean it. There was a reason why JFK was admitted into Harvard, GWB into Yale and JFK Jr into Brown. And that reason had nothing to do with academic integrity. If the Ivies do this, why shouldn’t podunk U’s strapped for tuition money?

@prof2dad This leaves a bad taste in my mouth about Northeastern. My teenagers would call this 'sus."

@JenJenJenJen Every time I brought my daughter to New England Conservatory for her private lesson and walked around the nearby NU campus and neighborhood, I always thought that I were in a Chinese university.

According to this: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/11/16/number-foreign-students-boston-surges/0rrwqyAoHbSjn6f7chxxMI/story.html, NU has about 10,000 international students. The entire NU has about 20,000 students, I believe.

I think it is a great university for learning Mandarin Chinese. :slight_smile:

"Administrators at Northeastern and BU said they have intentionally increased the number of foreign students as part of a strategy to prepare students to work in an increasingly global society. "

“She attributes the increased diversity to a large admissions staff — nine people — who this fall visited 400 high schools in 82 cities in 50 countries, in addition to recruiting students in the United States.”

It seems these schools are really dedicated to help US students!

NEU also doesn’t include the test scores of internationals in what they report to USNews, I believe I read somewhere.

@katliamom: “There was a reason why JFK was admitted into Harvard, GWB into Yale and JFK Jr into Brown. And that reason had nothing to do with academic integrity.”

They weren’t admitted because of their tuition dollars, though. The Ivies/equivalents could fill their entire class with (less famous/connected) full-payers, but they do not.

Now a school like NEU admitting to get tuition dollars? I can see that.

@katliamom Because 2 wrongs dont make a right. If the likes of Harvard and Brown whore themselves around for celebrity/donor/developmental admits, it doesn’t mean ‘PodunkU’ should do likewise for foreign $$$$ at the expense of US students.

Once you undermine academic standards and compromise integrity by chasing $$$, you cheapen and de-value the hardwork and achievements of all the previous alumni through that institution.

@Tanbiko If NEU and BU are strip mining the globe for tuition $$$ in the name of diversity claiming it is an effort to prepare US kids for a global economy, it is so bogus a middle schooler could see through it.

The really sad part about all this is, it is such an easy problem to fix, and yet US schools in their avarice choose not to.

BU is also actively recruiting international students, but there is a BIG gap between BU and NEU.

The % of international students at BU is about 25% (8,000/32,000), and this percentage is slightly above 50% at NEU (10,000/20,000).

Just to be clear, at NEU, only 20% to 21% of the undergraduates are international. BU actually has slightly more (in number and %) of international undergraduates.

https://provost.northeastern.edu/uds/cds/2016-2017/

Interesting side note, about 15% of NEU’s undergrads are “first-time freshmen” (this is the cohort used to calculate US News stats like graduation rates, etc.), you would expect it to be around 20 to 22%+. However, those freshman who are not on campus in the Fall (such as those spending the first semester abroad) don’t count in the stats. Same as those undergraduate students in the USPP that spend their freshman year in China and then enroll at NEU (or any other school).

“Further, some schools, including Northeastern, do not require students from international high schools to submit SAT scores with their applications, and therefore those students do not factor into the schools’ college rankings reports.”

"“I have no idea what the caliber of international students is,” Bob Lowndes, who recently retired as vice provost for global relations at Northeastern, said last year. “It’s a revenue generator. We don’t have to give financial aid. They’re paying full freight, so some of that revenue can be used to help domestic students.”

http://www.newsweek.com/us-colleges-expelled-many-8000-chinese-students-3-years-337445

I think it would be hard to find any vice provost, a major 'academic" administrator, at any major university who does not know the caliber of their international students.

@Gator88NE I do not know how to reconcile with the numbers from the link you provided because it is hard to understand how NEU reports its numbers. This is another source based on actual F1 visa issued:

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/04/the-most-chinese-schools-in-america-rankings-data-education-china-u/

NEU ranks 2nd on the ratio of F1 Chinese visas to the total enrollment in the US. BU is like #17. Also note that this ranking likely combines both undergraduate and graduate students. It is known that those universities with more emphasis on graduate programs would have higher such a ratio, but NEU is largely an undergraduate school and has about 2/3 of its students at the undergraduate level (Student Population: 19,798; Undergraduate Population: 13,510).