The entire article is worth a read.
Here’s a bit more from the article (though not really convinced CB has been anywhere near as vigilant as they could be)
Maybe until they straighten this out no more visas should be issued for undergrad Ed? They would sort it out post haste then!!
Not surprising. Lack of ethics/integrity seems to be a significant problem in Chinese culture, in general.
Another interesting read regarding ethics and Chinese science. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891906/
Dishonesty is jot the way to start a college career. And many flunk out or get kicked out.
Unfortunately, a large part of this is recent(Within the last 15 years) due to increasing wealth available to the newly emerged Mainland upper/upper-middle class and their crass obsession with materialistic/brand name social climbing…especially considering the number of first-year seats vs applicants there means only a tiny minority would get admitted to what are considered “Great/good colleges”(First tier or two) in the PRC.
Ironically, this is in contrast to the generation of international Mainland Chinese college students who attended college back before the early '00s like the Mainland college classmates who tended to be poorer* and from families with some prior backgrounds in academia or otherwise esteemed learning for its own sake. The vast majority of the ones who were undergrad classmates and reportedly of friends at other respectable/elite colleges were genuine high academic achievers and the thought of them cheating would have been considered absurd.
Why would they when back then they were held to higher admission standards than domestic US students AND had to prove they can be full-pay/or had the equivalent in private outside scholarships that their academic caliber meant they would never feel the need to cheat??
- Many of the ones at my college worked in the dining halls serving food to us fellow students and/or washing the dirty dishes/trays left after we finished eating. Especially considering most American work-study eligible students were able to find higher paying and less labor-intensive work-study jobs than dining hall work.
If you’re going to generalize Chinese culture to that extent, I wonder if you’d have an issue with some internationals stereotyping Americans “in general” as fanatical gun nuts, extremely provincial about the world outside the confines of the US, having a very low baseline of academic achievement/intellectualism, and obese due to disproportionate consumption of fast food and meat in our diets?
And if you’re wondering…yes those are all stereotypes of Americans I’ve had said to me/overheard from several international students while I studying abroad. Most of the ones making such stereotypes from that group happened to be Northern and Western Europeans.
Most Americans don’t care what the rest of the world thinks of them. That trait is a blessing.
(I always tell my European friends that if they wanted us to care about their issues, they probably shouldn’t have kicked us out of their countries;). A joke…I don’t need an immigration history lesson!
IN GENERAL?
A country who underwent a drastic social/economic change in such a short period of time (since Mao, etc.) could have its share of the problems in this phase – many other countries had gone through a not very pleasant phase in history. But is there a need for sweeping generalization? (Selling opiums to another country forcefully was not a very ethical thing to do just because a country had been militarized earlier than other countries. You know which country this country is.)
The College Board has long known about issues with the timing of SAT administrations worldwide. Here’s one article that details this loophole fairly comprehensively:
The failsafe preventive measure is to develop different tests for different time zones, but they haven’t done that. Worse, the CB reuses past tests for SAT administrations in China.
Being robbed is never fun. Leave your door wide open, and you can’t be too surprised when it happens.
Stereotypes exist for a reason. Yes, we probably do have more “fanatical gun nuts”, and obese people than many other countries. Technically speaking, we are ranked #1 in the world when it comes to gun ownership per capita, and #18 for percentage of obese people. It’s all relative…
When someone says “Americans are a bunch of fanatical gun nuts”, they are exaggerating for effect. What they are really saying is “There are a lot of fanatical gun nuts in America, relative to other countries”.
Americans have such a low baseline of academic achievement/intellectualism that the Chinese want to take advantage of it and have to cheat to do so.
I noticed the line in the article about keeping the tests locked up, and laughed out loud. Since they re-use tests, and there are idiots who post every question online for discussion as soon as they leave the testing room, that doesn’t cut it.
They weren’t exaggerating for effect. They actually did view Americans as a bunch of fanatical gun nuts and being obese fast food lovers. It’s the mirror effect of how many Americans overgeneralize other races and ethnic groups…including some posters on this very thread.
Nice patronizing attempt at trying to imply you knew what they were saying more than I did even though you weren’t present in that conversation and I was…
One thing often left out of these overgeneralizing discussions is not only is this cheating issue a recent phenomenon from the early '00s onwards, it also fails to acknowledge a great demographic shift in the types of Chinese students going onto college-prep high schools and yes, applying to colleges…especially US colleges.
Before the early '00s, places for academic track high schools…much less colleges were much more limited so even if the Mainland students coming to the US to do undergrad were those who were at the very bottom of their college prep classes as illustrated by failing to attain admission to the first tier or two of Mainland colleges or worse…failing to gain admission to any, they were still fell well to the right end of the academic bell-curve relative to the overall pool of same-aged compatriots.
Considering the steeper level of competition to get on the academic prep track back then, this is understandable. It’s also a reason why the Mainland students who attended college during my undergrad years in the '90s were able to meet a higher academic admission bar than was required for us domestic US applicants and mostly excel once there. The ones my HS classmates and I observed at our respective colleges also had on average a higher level of work ethic and better mastery of course material which were rightfully reflected in their grades than native-born American students ON AVERAGE.
However, since the rapid rise and expansion of the newly emerged Mainland Chinese upper/upper-middle class with parents whose education is likely to have ended at the end of 8th/9th grade or sometimes even elementary school due to various factors such as the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the US colleges have started receiving Mainland students who fall more within the middle or even the left-side of the academic bell curve due to the expansion of academic-prep high school access* since the early '00s and parents/families now having the financial means and willing to use it in order to get their child access to a college education…even an expensive overseas one in the US.
Just 15+ years ago, the vast majority of such students would not have been able to continue onto the academic prep track high schools…much less even think about applying for/attending college…and their families would not have likely had the financial means to facilitate attending colleges in the US/overseas. Most of them back then would have likely attended a vocationally oriented high school, start apprenticing themselves in a trade/factory, or enter the workforce in some capacity.
- An event which also meant many in that generation ended up having children very late which actually feeds into their obsession with trying to get their child the best educational opportunities possible which they lacked at the same age.
** All academic prep high schools access is by selective exam. Not like here where going to high school with college-prep potential is a given…even if it’s not always the best.
The Cultural Revolution seems to have killed any sense of morality in that country.
Since this all relates to what is happening NOW, it doesn’t matter one lick what happened or why 15 years ago. Finally, FINALLY they might actually be doing something, anything to get this rampant lying and cheating in check. It is long overdue.
Ahh, cheating aside, I don’t believe we ought to generalize a good 1/8th of the Earth because of this.
I don’t think the Chinese or anyone else has a monopoly on amorality.Getting into top schools is a cultural value of theirs, so some Chinese are willing to sacrifice other ideals in order to get into the desirable schools. Freedom to own a gun is a cultural value of ours, so we’re willing to put up with a few thousand dead children in order to retain that right. Not sure we can claim any moral high ground here.
Well, I can’t stand guns or Chinese cheating!
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The morality problems in china go well beyond cheating on tests. The problem is endemic. This is the country where profiteers thought nothing of poisoning babies with melamine in milk powder (to this day, safe imported milk powder is a top coveted product); where gov’t-constucted school buildings with shoddy costruction collapsed and buried school children in an earthquake; where thousands of bloated, diseased pig carcasses floated in the river at Shanghai; where the gov’t tried to bury a derailed hi speed train car before an investigation; where a huge smoldering crator lies in seaport outside of Beijing, where a man-made mountain of illegally dumped construction waste buried a block of residential buildings. So tell me why anyone is surprised there is rampant test cheating in that country?
Even the ethnic-Chinese people of Hong Kong despise the mainlanders.
Yeah, we have scandals in the US, but they’re the exception not the NORM.
In Transparency International’s annual Corruption Index list, China consistently falls near the bottom half of the list. In the last list, it was down there near Indonesia, another corruption cesspool.
I’ve lived in squeaky “clean” countries and in corruption cesspool countries. Living in the corrupt countries I can see how the local people feel the rules don’t apply.
So are you saying all Chinese cheat?
Since you didn’t provide any qualifiers…that could include Chinese like the high achieving and harder working(in the academic and job sense) undergrad classmates my friends and I encountered in the '90s…or possibly even Chinese-Americans.
Can think of many examples of Americans who cheat…such as USAF Missilier officers:
Does that mean one can say all Americans cheat or even all USAF officers or USAF Missileer officers are cheaters? I don’t think so…and I hope not.