<p>Let’s not generalize this too quickly. Do you have proof of this? If Asia is what you have in mind, then I’d say cheating on college entrance exam in Asia is dealt with more severity than in the US. In most of Asia, college entrance exam is the sole determinator of college admissions. Cheaters are often banned from going to college for at least a year or longer in addition fines and jail time.</p>
<p>Given the opportunities and the means, people will cheat regardless of national boundaries. Just look at CC forums for either eye witness accounts or personal confessions. When I was a senior in high school, my math department head altered the answers on the MAA test (equivlant of today’s AMC 12) for the top three students . It was most disturbing to hear him say how this other school must be cheating because they still beat us.</p>
<p>Um…ok. So let me get this straight. These kids, after having the exam three hours before actually taking it, only scored 2250 and 2210? Are they idiots? Check that; they felt that they needed to cheat on the freaking SAT. If you need to cheat on the SAT to do well, I’m pretty sure you are destined to be a failure in college/life.</p>
<p>They might not have memorized it very well. The SAT test is really long and it’s quite possible that they still got something wrong; the human memory is one of the most imperfect things there is.</p>
<p>Well I know memory isn’t perfect but it just goes to show cheating doesn’t pay. Although if someone got a 2390 then I guess the cheating did help them. Hopefully the colleges they got accepted to/went to kick them out.</p>
<p>Generalization? Proof? Are we talking about Asia? </p>
<p>We are indeed talking about Asia and about the lack of ethics displayed by Asians when it comes to admissions in a FOREIGN country. The fact that the severity of the punishment of being caught in the home country is totally irrelevant in this issue. When it comes to the United States and admissions in US colleges, it seems that no amount of manipulation, fabrication, cheating, is off-limits, and this does not even account for parenting that comes very to outright child abuse. Only the result matter as the resulting social mobility dwarfs everything else. </p>
<p>I wrote that the overwelming majority of accounts of students being caught cheating on ETS standardized tests are in Asia. Do you have any information that would make my statement untrue. This pretty much mimics the geographical areas of our world where the “trade” in older tests and at times unreleased tests flourishes. For instance, which are the two countries that would send the most replies to an internet offer to sell pirated copies or cheap copies of the GRE Big Book or SAT tests? It sure ain’t Finland and Canada! </p>
<p>Spend enough time of board and communities dedicated to prepare for the SAT or ACT, and it won’t take much to form an opinion about who is honest and who is looking for shortcuts, be it legitimate or … not so legitimate. And, fwiw, it is not that different from the “ethnic” distribution of people who always seem to have pipelines to old tests and papers … in college!</p>
<p>As far as the College Board catching people, you can put your money on someone spilling the beans, or someone deciding to check why extremely high scores in reading and writing do not seem to correspond to essays that exhibit poor spelling and grammar. Large increases in score should be a dead giveaway, but that would not work when people cheat on the first tests.</p>
<p>If we agree there is no visible difference in ethics when it comes to taking the college entrance exams in one’s own country, then I find it difficult to believe the ethics would go straight down hill when it comes to taking another country’s college entrance exam. I’m not saying its not possible and you may be right, but since you made the assertion, I was hoping you have some reference points.</p>
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<p>Again, you made the claim and I’d like to see references if available. </p>
<p>The word “majority” may be misleading. If for argument’s sake, 75% of the oversea test takers are Asian, then all else being equal, most of the cheaters will be Asian, but this by itself does not lend any support to the statement that implies Asians test takers are more unethical than other foreigner test takers. Otoh, your claim would be true if Asian cheats more than their share as reflected by their proportion of overall test takers.</p>
<p>I’m with you there. Cheating in this case has the same pitfalls as honest studying; you can read an American history textbook but that doesn’t mean you’ll remember every single detail and be able to regurgiate all of it perfectly on a test. Cheating makes it easier since you won’t be looking at information that won’t be on the test but still, apart from being dishonest and corrupt, it’s not an infallible system unless you actually bring the answers in.</p>
<p>Cheats compete for top China jobs
BBC News, Shanghai </p>
<p>In China about 1,000 entrants taking civil service entrance exams have been caught cheating, some of them using technology used by spies. </p>
<p>Spy-tech </p>
<p>More than 300 applicants were caught cheating while completing their papers. </p>
<p>Officials said some had planted tiny electronic receivers in their ears to pick up broadcasts from accomplices. </p>
<p>Others were thought to have used standard answers they had bought before the test. </p>
<p>Another 700 of those who had sat the exams were deemed to have cheated because their answers were too similar. </p>
<p>Those who were caught cheating were not just disqualified from the application process.
Their names and identification numbers will now be placed on a database used by recruiters throughout the public sector. An editorial in a state newspaper, the China Daily, suggested they had got off lightly. It reminded its readers in that in imperial times cheats were executed.</p>
<p>[TurkmenPost</a> :: Worldwide, student cheating on the rise](<a href=“Blogsome”>Blogsome)</p>
<p>Nearly all of India’s ultracompetitive entrance exams have been stolen and sold to students at least once during the past five years. In 2004 students paid up to $15,000 apiece for access to answers to India’s Pre-Medical Testand the perpetrators pocketed $1 million. In China, where the number of university students has almost tripled since 1998 to 16 million, police last year cracked one of the biggest qiangshou (hired gun) gangsWeb-based agencies where students can hire expert look-alikes to take any of a host of national exams for them. The gang had already taken in $212,000 from nearly 1,000 students in 19 provinces across the country. Also in 2005, South Korea faced the biggest exam-cheating scandal in its history when officials realized that the previous fall’s national college-entrance exam, the CSAT, had been infiltrated by more than 20 cheating rings across the country; they had text-messaged exam answers to paying students taking the test. “We’ve passed the tipping point, where cheating is so common that it’s an accepted social norm,” says David Callahan, author of “The Cheating Culture.”</p>
<p>Sociologists argue that the upsurge in school dishonesty also reflects attitudes in the culture at large, where cheating has become acceptable and even admired.</p>
<p>Hundreds of Asian universities’ Web-based bulletin boards are dumping grounds for the memorized answers to Test of English as a Foreign Language questionsthe basis of most U.S. colleges’ admittance of foreign students.</p>
<p>Rampant cheating by tech-savvy students in East Asia, including those from Taiwan, has forced the Educational Testing Service (ETS), the US-based testing organization with an annual budget of nearly US$1 billion, to promulgate a new, “cheat-resistant” version of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) worldwide, testing officials said yesterday.</p>
<p>Armed with electronic jamming devices and other high-tech toys, police officers are regular fixtures at testing sites during days when major tests like the GRE are administered to students eager to test into grad schools abroad, he said.</p>
<p>“You’ve got students with ear pieces receiving information transmitted from outside. Cheating on big tests in Taiwan is a more common phenomenon than in the US, and it’s often a sophisticated operation, too,” said the US-educated teacher.</p>
<p>Lin agreed, saying students’ cheating on tests such as the GRE was rampant throughout the Asia-Pacific region.</p>
<p>“We’ve had to deal with a number of cases,” she said, without elaborating.</p>
<p>So rife is cheating that ETS had to nix its online version of the GRE and revert to a paper-based format after Chinese and South Korean hackers broke into ETS’ database and stole and posted the test’s content on multiple Web sites, said Joe Harwood, an English language proficiency test researcher at the Taipei-based National Development Initiatives Institute.</p>
<p>Bangladesh education authorities have printed front page newspaper advertisements urging high school pupils not to cheat. The adverts warn that the government has taken strong measures to stop cheating, and that anyone caught doing it will be severely punished. </p>
<p>The media campaign - both on print and television - says that cheating has to stop for the sake of Bangladesh and that pupils have to be bold in their efforts to bring the practice to an end. </p>
<p>Ingenious methods </p>
<p>Cheating in exams is commonplace in Bangladesh, especially in rural areas. The techniques used by pupils have become ever more ingenious. Traditionally the favourite method of errant pupils is to bring hidden notes into examinations. </p>
<p>But now there are reports of photocopied exam papers being available on the black market. For a price it is possible for pupils to see their questions in advance. </p>
<p>Cheating options: Hidden cheat notes, buying exam papers in advance, teachers offering a helping hand, and student union assistance</p>
<p>Two female high school teachers in northeast’s China Jilin Province have been detained by police for selling cheating devices to students before the country’s annual college entrance exam that was held from June 7 to 9.</p>
<p>Liu Yanhua, from the No. 1 High School of Fuyu County in Songyuan City, was charged with selling 27 units of cheating devices, including receivers, earphones, chargers and batteries, to parents of students before the national test and made a profit of more than 400,000 yuan (58,823.5 U.S. dollars), a spokesman with the Songyuan Public Security Bureau said Wednesday. </p>
<p>Liu confessed that she bought the cheating devices through online shopping in May and she promised to those parents that she would send test answers to the students through the hi-tech devices during the matriculation, the spokesman said. </p>
<p>Acting on a tip-off, local police began investigating the case on June 2. Liu and her colleague He Shujie were detained by police on the night of June 4 when they were testing the cheating devices in an apartment building near the county’s No. 4 High School, an exam venue</p>
<p>Hahaha, I’m not a Lee or Kim, but those two names do make up over 35% of the Korean population.</p>
<p>Also, the article seems to imply that the cheaters were caught when investigators searched the lecturer’s office. So even if there was no tip-off, the guy could just have been under investigation for something else.</p>
I don’t know about you, but I hesitate to make any assumptions beyond the given information. If two Koreans were caught cheating, then two Koreans have cheated; let’s withhold judgment on any larger group for now. Innocent until proven guilty.</p>
<p>I will admit that the competitive environment of admissions, whether it’s college or a job, in China is probably at fault here.</p>
<p>After spending a few minutes on google, I easily found these links to articles of domestic test cheating. When 1/3 to 40% of our students admitted to cheating, what does it mean? Cheating is rampant in many parts of the world, including our country.</p>
<p>Koreans, why are you worrying? Are the colleges you applied to dumb enough to generalize that all Koreans cheat like the CCers on this thread?</p>
<p>As an asian in the states, from my understanding cheating in Asia is much easier to do. My friends and relatives have told me how the Toefl answers were stolen last year in China. Many job positions also aren’t based on pure meritocracy ( resume, past experience, etc. ) Of course it never is even in the US, but in many Asian cultures friendships and familial connections/nepotism prove stronger than what I find in the US. This is firsthand experience of when I was looking for an internship.</p>
<p>You can’t really be sure that they are. Your application might be read by the dumbest, laziest, most obscenely racist intern whose dad got him a job at the local college; he’ll probably get fired in a month but he can really destroy some people’s dreams in the duration. Any person of even below-average intelligence would know that not all Koreans are the same guy but a complete moron wouldn’t be able to do that.</p>