[quote]
“Test-taking services. Paper-writing. Take Online Courses for you,” says the social-messaging profile of one Chinese coaching outfit used by Iowa students, UI International Student Services. A pitch emailed by another business ended with this reassuring claim: “Your friends are all using us.”
Today, the University of Iowa, one of the largest state universities in the American Midwest, says it is investigating at least 30 students suspected of cheating. Three sources familiar with the inquiry say the number under investigation may be two or three times higher.[/quote}
What got my attention the most in this article is the story of Xuan “Claren” Rong, and how UC Davis handled (or how they initially didn’t) it.
That part should be labeled with a trigger warning on it for @CaliDad2020 :-t
Notice that must of the cheating is being down via the on-line courses, and that colleges can take steps to catch it (which in turns incents students, of all types, to not cheat).
Take a look at “SUNY Cars” . Boasting great cars! But…
SUNY schools seem to prefer to get slightly more in tuition (despite the fact that each International student costs NY tax payers but the local schools much get to keep more money on their campus for each one they nab) then to ensure that they are excluding cheaters. The number of SUNY students incapable of writing a solid paragraph in English would astound you. They should also institute a rule prohibiting double standards in terms of grading whereby US residents are not held to a higher standard. That should be true for submitting standardized tests too. The TOEFL is not the same as the SAT or ACT. It is a test of English and native speakers would get the top scores on the TOEF even if they can’t get over a 400 on the SATs. Yet, NY residents are rejected from SUNY on the basis of scores from tests that are not even required of International students. It is outrageous and it is straight forward discrimination against US residents, precisely those that spend their life earnings supporting the SUNY system.
NY state has too many corrupt officials and administrators! Greed rules!
That estimate of 8,000 could be very low, since it’s provided by a U.S. company that caters to Chinese students, and is based on a survey of only 1,657 students.
Purely anecdotal: I believe in electric vehicles, and one of my kids attends Rutgers, so I displayed my Tesla and answered questions at Rutgers Day (loosely associated with Earth Day). Two students came by and asked detailed questions. They were initially respectful, but increasingly were presumptuous and treated my car as theirs, to the point where I was minutes from telling them to go away. They were considering buying one, and the six digit price tag didn’t seem to slow them down. One of them had sufficient English to get by in a STEM major, but he had to translate for the other, who could not make his questions understandable to me (btw, as a non-native English speaker myself, I am usually good at deciphering broken English).
One could have gotten a reasonable TOEFL score, the other one absolutely not.
That is a small consolation to Illinois residents who were denied slots at UIUC in favor of non-resident aliens and had to attend a more expensive OOS school instead.
@Zinhead, I believe that international/OOS numbers at UIUC COE have increased dramatically, but IL numbers have not been cut. Granted, that leads to overcrowding, but students flunking/switching out would ease the overcrowding.
@PurpleTitan - It depends on the major. The following is from the ASEE and tracks the student body at engineering schools. Note that the ASEE does not report if resident students are in-state or OOS. They report race, gender and if the student is a non-resident alien.
Based on the ASEE site and using 2007 as a benchmark, the total number of students in the engineering school increased from 1,254 to 1,604, an increase of 350 students. Of that increase, 207 were non-resident aliens while 143 were US residents.
However, if we look at computer science and engineering exclusively, we find that the total number of CS majors increased from 270 to 304. However, the number of non-resident alien CS majors increased from 23 to 85, while the number of resident CS majors decreased from 247 to 219. Given that CS is the most desirable program at UIUC and one of the best in the country, it is a shame seeing UIUC selling slots to non-resident aliens at the expense of qualified in-state kids.
You missed a long conversation regarding this issue earlier. The UIUC discussion start on page 5.
@Gator88NE - My point exactly. They cheat, they get admitted, they are unprepared or underprepared for classes here and flunk out, or they try to get through the system here by cheating, get caught, and get thrown out.
I teach ESL in a university-based English for Academic Purposes program, and we see the results around us every day. Professors complain to us all the time about the students who were admitted based on TOEFL scores, rather than after graduating from our program where they have had to demonstrate speaking, listening, reading, and writing skills at a level that will make it likely that they can succeed in their studies. That is just the language component. I’m not in the business of assessing their command of subject area content or specific skills related to content area. I’m sure many of our graduates struggle once they move on to academic classes.
What is saddening is that so many public universities are grossly undersupported by their state legislatures. That is a factor that drives international student recruitment. Almost all of those students are full pay.
This isn’t solely an issue with international students. This is also an endemic issue among native-born American students not only in public university systems, but even among some native-born American students at the respectable/elite colleges. Including those who were boarding school graduates.
In the intermediate/upper division colloquium/seminar classes at Oberlin I was astounded to find a few older native-born American students with such issues while workshopping our essays*.
This was furthered when on a visit to a friend’s department at Columbia U, an irate native-born "real murikan"undergrad with prep school wear apparently mistook me for a TA from an American History survey class. Had an opportunity to read a few pages of the C graded paper he was irate about as he rudely thrust it right in front of my face. Considering the quality of the writing was littered with grammatical and even spelling errors which would have prompted an F and a mandatory “do-over” from my 9th grade public magnet HS teachers, I had no hesitation in telling this entitled undergrad off in a manner no TA I knew of would have dared. IMO…his TA was overly generous with that C.
There was also several conversations I’ve had with writing-center staffers at Columbia and Harvard, including some international grad students* who were astounded at how many native-born American students with such issues were matriculating at both institutions.
Including some Chinese grad students whose command of written English was such they were assigned to staff the writing center which provides writing support/assistance to undergrad and grad students at Columbia and Harvard.
@happymomof1 It sounds like from reading the article that some of these students continue to use these services post-matriculation to cheat on papers and tests. Depending on the schools procedures, they aren’t all getting caught and kicked out.
