SATs Cancelled in China

I feel like if the students can memorize ~150 scantron answers on short notice, they deserve the 2400. That would be really difficult!

(just kidding)

Interesting… For the May 2016 test date, no test centers in China are listed on the CB’s website.

https://sat.collegeboard.org/register/test-center-code-search

Has the May test been cancelled in China in addition to the January one? Other countries in Asia are showing May test venues.

Not sure about this May but I know that not all SAT dates are offered in China normally.

I know that not all SAT dates are offered internationally. But just not China?

Not sure, but there could be a difference due to the fact that College Board has no testing centers in China outside international high schools, who decide if/when to offer SAT test dates. My daughter took her SATs at a school in China and they only offered a couple of dates in the year.

How is that different than the CB not having testing centers in other countries outside the US? If I look at other int’l venues, they tend to be at international schools.

My son goes to a British school here and they give the SAT test at his school.

Finally. I believe China is known for institutionalizing cheating. No student from China should be accepted to a US school unless the college can verify that the transcript isn’t made up and that the letters were not purchased and that the test scores were not faked. Right now that does not seem to be possible. That appears to be why so many Chinese students in US schools seem to lack command of college level English. Many probably cheated to get in and greedy colleges, even state colleges or maybe especially state colleges, know this to be the case but want the tuition dollars. Sad!

There should be a moratorium on accepting students from China until there us a way to ensure that cheaters are excluded.

obviously that would cause outrage, so a better way to stop cheating would be for college board to actually stop administering previous SATs to international students.

@lostaccount

There are third party services that colleges can engage to vet students.

Here’s an example:
http://www.vericant.com/

That’s just too sad. my one week e-study buddies were Chinese and they really worked hard and helped me :frowning:
I think another exam this January that hasn’t been previously administered should be given to them! How can they even keep knowing where the tests come out from? ETS shouldn’t be predictable

I always have been aware of high score frenzy in Asia-me being Asian-but China is just…wow.

@GMTplus7 while what you say about the students choosing to apply to US colleges is an entirely valid point that I had overlooked, I also think that the prevalence of cheating is, first and foremost, a failure on the part of the college board. That is why I feel that they have to do something, even if that is not travel cost reimbursement. After all, such events hurt every single test taker in the world.
As a side note, I have always wondered about why there are so few anti-cheating measures in place. The least they can do is use several different test books that are randomly assigned to people, which is what they do in my country. Is there any particular reason for their aversion to having several test booklets?

My nephew took SAT in Hong Kong last Saturday, is it also cancelled?

@intparent @glasshours I was not allowed to speak during break during my 3 SATs.

And FWIW: There are many international students from Asia that lack basic command of the English language. I am not making any insinuations about them, but I truly wonder how one could write an elite college worthy SAT essay and common app essay with such struggles.

Granted acceptance and a degree may look nice from a certain tier school, it hurts class discussions when there are several students in a discussion section that cannot contribute to conversations because they simply struggle to speak the language or even understand the texts.

Not a big surprise, there have been cheating scandals like this in the US, there were well off school districts who apparently got a hold of the SAT for that year, and there have been claims that some of the test prep firms got the test as well. It doesn’t surprise me that this would happen in China, for the same reason it happens here, there is a lot of pressure to get high SAT stats to get into elite schools, in China going to an elite school means a lot more than it does in the US, if you want to get a job in the Chinese government (where a lot of the money is), or other lucrative jobs, you pretty much have to go to a top school. One of the problems with this mania for standardized testing that I object to across the board is it is a system that can be gamed and will be if at all possible.

The other factor I suspect is that you have a lot of the little emperors/empresses of well off parents, who have the means to insure their kids get ‘ahead’. Part of it is they can pay for intensive tutoring programs, either for the national exams, or for things like the SAT and Ap’s (which is true of the well off here, too), plus institutionally there also is a lot of tempation on the part of teachers to accept bribes to pad kids grades, teachers in places like Korea and China don’t make a lot, and culturally it almost was accepted that teachers would get extra money from parents in return for favors (being in the music world, music teachers at places like Juilliard and other high level music schools have stories about well off parents and kids from Korea and China attempting to bribe them, either for admission (which isn’t really possible, a teacher generally doesn’t have that much power), or in currying them for favors, like recommendations to summer music programs and such).

The real reason? The incredible pressure on the kids, whether it is the standardized exams, or getting into the “IT” school. When cheating has happened here, it is among the same group of students, pushed by parents and expectations to get into (HYP, etc, etc). When you have that kind of pressure, and also ancient cultures where bribery is often a large part of how things get done (put it this way, when the Chinese developed their famous civil service exams, that included things like caligraphy, poem writing and such, it was done to try and stop the practices of pay to play and so forth, and those date back thousands of years). It is sad that the kids who are honest and did it the right way are being punished, but what is even more sad is there is so much pressure that cheating becomes something that becomes in their mind life and death. Similar thing with music school admissions, music schools used to allow students to submit DVD recordings for their auditions, since they were in Asia and it would be very expensive to come to the US or Europe…the schools ended up doing regional auditions in Asia, sending people over there, because they found a lot of the DVD’s were fraudulent, either someone else was playing, or they edited together tracks to get a ‘perfect’ audition.

As they say, when there is a strong enough reason, cheating will happen, these days I suspect a lot of guys working for the NYC building department, with all the mega building going on, are building some nice “retirement” accounts.

I dated a girl from Shenzhen while at Penn. She was in a PhD student in the Linguistics program.She had some really nice handbags shoes a great one bedroom apartment and no roommates. I thought she came from a wealthy family. I was a Poor Med student I found out She made nearly 100K a year taking TOEFL exams for students in China. She would fly back 1-2 times a month all expenses paid. I ended that pretty quick…

Based on a large number of posts I see on CC, there are many college-bound American students born and educated in America, that lack basic command of the English language…

^^^I am tutoring a native speaker for ACT who got 12 in her 1st ACT.

Can you believe it? TWELVE OUT OF THIRTY SIX. This almost gave me a heart attack