Chinese Students' Cheating Techniques - Don't Try at Home

corbettw writes "According to a wire report on Yahoo! news, competition for university admissions in China are so intense that people are coming up with new, and sometimes dangerous, ways to cheat. The methods include microscopic earphones and wireless devices. In some cases, students are required surgery to recover from their cheating attempts. If there are that many people that desperate to get into a university, the obvious question would be, why don't they just open more schools?"

another good idea.

" If there are that many people that desperate to get into a university, the obvious question would be, why don't they just open more schools?"

And why dont we just print more money to solve poverty?

Re:another good idea.

With schools you can open as many as you want but without professors it's just going to be babysitting for college students.

Re:another good idea.

Just because you train someone and slap the title professor on them doesn't mean they can teach. I think everyone has had at least one teacher that they could not guess how they managed to keep a job. If they rush the production of teachers just to open schools, the problem becomes worse.

Re:another good idea.

In U.S. universities there is basically zero effort put into preparing people to teach college classes. One day a new grad student shows up to start their graduate school career and a week later they're standing in front of 40 undergrads trying to explain the difference between a joule and a watt. It's about the same with the actual professors; they generally just look at what sorts of research you've done and what school you got your PhD from, and as long as you can speak reasonably fluent english they don't worry about your teaching ability. It's certainly not a perfect system, but it seems to work well enough. There's no obvious reason why China's current universities couldn't produce more than enough professors to double or tipple their number of universities in a few years.

Re:another good idea.

I don't know about the uni you went to but at mine they waved the "reasonably fluent english" requirement.

Re:another good idea.

It's kind of like overexpansion in baseball. There's too many teams right now and there are over a hundred players on major league rosters who would have been only good enough for the minors before.

You could suddenly fund a hundred new schools, but the staff you'd get for them would have to come from a pool that was never good enough to teach at the current schools, lowering the quality of education.

I'm sure that over time, quality professors could be developed, but "build more schools!" won't work as well.

Re:another good idea.

The problem is not that there isn't enough schools, the students don't want to go to ust jANY university. The students want to get into the TOP brand name universities, there-in lies the problem. It's a matter of employment, there are literally millions of unemployed university graduates in china, a university degree is the foot in the door for ANY white collar position.

Having a degree from a brand name university if almost the only ticket to a well paying job for most chinese. I mean you go to any office and the LOWEST most UNDERPAID person, usually the office boy will almost certinaly have a bachelors degree. University graduates are so common in china there is just not enough work for all of them. That's why you have to get into a brand name one.

Re:another good idea.

The problem is not that there isn't enough schools, the students don't want to go to ust jANY university. The students want to get into the TOP brand name universities

Well build more TOP universities, then. Do I have to do all the thinking round here?

Re:another good idea.

I mean you go to any office and the LOWEST most UNDERPAID person, usually the office boy will almost certinaly have a bachelors degree. University graduates are so common in china there is just not enough work for all of them.

What a load of bullshit. Graduates may not get the jobs they'd like, but they are certainly NOT common. See these Unesco figures [usaid.gov] for the number of students enrolled in tertiary education as a proportion of the tertiary school-age population. In 2002, China's ratio was 16%, compared to 83% for the US, 51% for Japan, for example. Whatever offices you're visiting (Fortune 500 branches?) are extremely untypical of China as a whole.

Re:another good idea.

According to the Times Higher Educational Supplement [thes.co.uk] (I think you need a subscription).

Last year, colleges and universities enrolled 5.04 million students, nearly five times as many as in 1998. Yet over the next six months 60 per cent of new graduates will be unable to find work, as the number of graduates jumps 22 per cent from last year to more than 4 million, while the number of available jobs will have dropped to 1.66 million.

So, yep, it looks like you're almost right. It's not too many professors, it's too many graduates.

Re:another good idea.

Right, because when we all have college degrees, the robots will do the manual labor anyway. Plumbing will become self-healing, roofs and roads will be self-repairing, buildings will build and paint themselves! Robot tractors will simply pull containers through the fields while fruit and vegetables just leap into it.

Interestingly, many people take jobs to do these things because they feel obligated to work because they can, not because someone is threatening them with starvation; they feel obligated to not leech off society if they don't have to. Some people actually feel guilty taking money from others because they are not pulling their own weight. They are not doing it to feed someone elses power trip.

Re:another good idea.

Printing money (what you really mean is inventing monetary value, since physically printing money doesn't do anything to the economy) requires that you devalue the monetary value you currently have, since the money supply represents a "set amount" of value, and forcing it around to more people cuts into the value of what each unit holds. The same is not true of univeristies. That is, we're very far from the situation where opening another univeristy will so crowd the market for higher education that the value of an education will decline due to the presence of more of them. Therefore, your analogy is false, because it's based on a bad assumption about marginal value. They should consider opening more schools so more of their people can get a higher education without resorting to cheating.

Virg

Re:another good idea.

Actually, there are diminishing marginal returns on the value of college degrees in China since there is a high-end job shortage. It is already the case that many students can't garner jobs comensurate with their degrees. Adding more students with degrees will only lower their expected value. Given that in the short-run, the demand for high-end labor is essentially fixed, there is a fixed amount of "value" so to speak for college degrees. Adding degrees, like printing more paper money, only lowers the expected value of a degree. China's problem is not a lack of higher education, it's a lack of high-end industry demand for advanced degrees. Hence the printing money analogy is pretty good.

Re:another good idea.

You have it completely wrong. People say that we will always need ditch diggers and toilet cleaners. With technology we've invented backhoes and ditch witches, toilet cleaning additives and tank drop-ins that keep toilets clean much longer.

The economic issue in play is the Chinese Government that is rationing education for their own benefit. Privatizing and deregulating the educational process will introduce economic competition that will spur growth in the education industry and increase the supply.

A private system would be detrimental to the totalitarian state that is the Peoples Republic of China. Keeping people dumb keeps them under your thumb. America's elementary and secondary educational system is run in much the same way. Privatization of education is the only real solution.

Re:another good idea.

Keeping people dumb keeps them under your thumb. America's elementary and secondary educational system is run in much the same way. Privatization of education is the only real solution.

Yeah, private education will really help the oppressed in America to be able to climb out of their poverty and despair, with only a minimal expense of paying out several times their annual salary in tuition each year.

Re:another good idea.

There is DEFINITELY such a thing as academic credential inflation. There was no such thing as an MBA fifty years ago, yet people managed to run very large companies.

Re:another good idea.

Well, yeah, but back then they didn't leverage their capacities into proactive strategies to focus on the customer and become world-class organizations. So, even though they were "very large companies", they never maximized their potential to achieve unparalleled success.

I'd imagine the real reason is along the lines of

There's probably something to di with the Chinese administration's longstanding conflict with acadameia. The Tiananmen Square incident, as much as they've done to conceal it, still echoes in the minds of those old enough to have the skills and knowledge nessecary to become a professor. An old neighbor of mine was a professor from China (Mathematics, I think); he came over about five years after Tiananmen, which is probably close to how long it takes to officially immigrate to the States once the paperwork has been started.

Re:another good idea.

All of your points are totally correct. However, none of it means anything when trying to get a job where they care about a degree. What a college diploma seems to mean these days is "I was able to keep my life from falling apart for 4 years, I'm a stable person!" Of course, 7 year graduation rates for college freshmen are around the 50% mark at most schools, so that may be more of an achievement than it sounds.

And we need the American university system, if only for the reason that our public school system doesn't teach people enough. I had never had a history class that said anything bad about America (they were taught from the textbooks purchased by the state government, what do you expect?) I never had a chemistry or physics class that taught more than the most elementary calculations.

Our public school systems are not producing adults who can compete in a global work force, so we need the exact kind of university system we have: a couple really prestigious places, and a whole lot of "teaching colleges." Last I heard, only about 25% of Americans had a 4-year college degree, so it's not quite so ubiquitous to be meaningless. If anything, we need MORE universities that cater to the lowest common denominator: not everyone can go to Yale, but everyone should be able to get an education, even if it is from community college.

Only in some imaginary world

was there ever some "guarantee" that people in schools in the USSR were bright. Take off those rose colored glasses (once you do, you can see the 50 million people "Uncle Joe" killed) and you'll realize that children of high government officials, party members, and celebrities were regularly given spots a top-notch Soviet schools. Money might not have played as big a role as it does in the US, but a parent's political connection is no better arbiter of scholastic success than their financial success.

Put your little red book down and come back to reality.

Re:another good idea.

" If there are that many people that desperate to get into a university, the obvious question would be, why don't they just open more schools?"

Because you need someone to dig the ditches.

Re:another good idea.

If you print more dollars, all dollars become worthless. Education increases in value as more people have it. There may be a threshold where building another school would only appeal to those whose commitments to education are so low that they wouldn't receive any benefit, but clearly that's not the case in China if people are hurting themselves just to get admission.

Some may just be cheating for a free ride, but I clearly remember the SATs here. The ones I remember trying to come up with the most exotic cheating methods were the ones religiously doing the "1600 SAT questions" guides and were the people that would already have scored better than 90% of their peers. The difference between a 1600 and a 1500, in their minds, was going to mean the difference between MIT and a serving fries at Micky D's.

But what do they want to major in?

If it's law enforcement or electrical engineering, they're not off to a good start.

Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

If there are that many people that desperate to get into a university, the obvious question would be, why don't they just open more schools?

I certainly hope you are joking about that last statement.

I should start by saying I am an American and therefore have probably been exposed to much propaganda against the Chinese government. Despite this, I have tried to educate myself on the current state of China & would like to point out an RSC article [rsc.org] that talks about the history of higher education in China. Here's an excerpt from it:

A brief history of higher education reform in China

1949

China's education system was based on the Russian model. Universities and colleges were divided to form specialist institutes and many universities were moved into rural areas to even out provision. These institutes were controlled by central government which also controlled the distribution of graduate students.

1966-1976

All formal education in China was stopped during the Cultural Revolution. During the later years, people entered university as students only by a process of recommendation. Many subjects were discontinued.

1977

The education system was restructured to give the system that operates today. The national university entrance exam was reintroduced and a comprehensive range of subjects became available with unified curricula for university degree courses.

1986

The government introduced the structural reform of higher education. Many institutes merged to form more comprehensive units. Mergers of centrally controlled institutions led to 72 'national' higher education institutes (HEIs). Mergers of locally controlled institutions led to 257 new HEIs.

1999

Tuition fees introduced for all university students. Fees are in the range Yuan 3000-6000 (£200-400), depending on the subject studied.

2001

Following China's entry into the World Trade Organization, new types of higher education establishments were introduced. These included independently funded universities and colleges, independent university-affiliated colleges for specialist subjects; and cooperation colleges that use foreign investment or foreign universities to set up an affiliated college or international university.

Wikipedia offers a much longer explanation [wikipedia.org] including the criteria by which you were eligible for aid:

• * top students encouraged to attain all-around excellence;
• * students specializing in education, agriculture, forestry, sports, and marine navigation; and
• * students willing to work in poor, remote, and border regions or under harsh conditions, such as in mining and engineering.

The most important change is the one from 1999 where tuition fees were introduced. It is my understanding (though I could be wrong) that money is often tight and your standard laborer in China makes roughly $50-$100 USD per month. Can you expect them to afford tuition rates of £200-400? Not really.

I guess it would require a miraculous grant to get a higher education in China and I'm certain that those are a limited number that is quite small compared to a population of one billion. Even then, the best place to find secondary education is abroad as most of the world's leading universities are in the United States.

This isn't how a Communist country is supposed to be run. There isn't supposed to be any "tuition fees" for education. There isn't supposed to be competition dividing people into two classes (one worthy of secondary education, one not). In a perfect Communist society, I was born to do something and as long as I work hard and do it, I get the exact same education you get. I ha

Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

Welcome to the real world. Congratulations.

The truth about ex-soc countries education is that it has been always a subject to vicious selection for any of the places that were moderately worth it. Ratios of 500:1 at Moscow state were quite common for some science majors and thousands to 1 were normal for humanities because these offered a route into the state administration. And you do not want to even have an idea about the selection ratio at whatever the name of the institute was that specialised in economics.

Other ex-soc countries were not far behind. My wife's class in biotech at Sofia State had a selection ratio in the 250:1+ and my own chemistry class at Sofia state had a selection ration of 35:1. That is once again with a limit of 2 maximum applications within a year. That is after graduating from high schools which themselves had a selection ratio of 30:1 in her case and 200:1 in my case. Once again with similar application limits and specialisation at that time. By the way this was the norm, not a deviation across the ex-soviet block.

In addition to that the exams were per-university (not countrywide like in the west) with a limit on how many universities you can apply to (used to be 2 in most countries). So this ratio of 500:1 or higher was after the voluntary selection performed by people estimating their chances and sending applications only to 2 universities. So the overall selection ratio was actually much much higher.

I know that I am going to evoke some morbid egalitarian screams from the Slashdot community, but I do not see anything wrong in this. Good education implies selection.

Well I guess the question I'd ask

Is if this ultra-hard nosed approach found in some of teh eastren bloc countries is the right way to do it, why are there so many great minds produced in Western European and American universities? Why do so many of the best and brightest from other countries come to study there?

The answer is that this idea that being super elitest, super competitive and making test scores reign supreme does not foster free thinking and that's really the thing of value that can come out of a higher education. Memorizing tons of facts and formulas really isn't that useful. My computer can do that, and far better than you can. What's useful is the ability to take knowledge like that and apply it to the real world in new and novel ways, to develop new tools to attack problems, and so on.

Perhaps American universities are too lax on admissions, but over all it seems to work pretty well. We seem to be able to produce lots of bright people and have no lack of applicants from other countries that want to come study here.

Something I do notice is that many people who come from these ultra-competitive environments to do grad work cannot think indedpendantly to nearly any degree. If you ask them a question in terms of formulas you they know, they'll solve it in a flash. If you ask them the very same question in terms of real world interactions, they stare blankly. They've basically been trained to be little hard working computers. They study like mad and such, but all their knowledge is fragile, as it exists only in theories, not in applications.

Richard Feynman talks about this phenomena at some length in his biography and it's a worthwhile read.

Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum

"In a perfect Communist society, I was born to do something and as long as I work hard and do it, I get the exact same education you get.

You've got it wrong there. If what you were born to do doesn't require higher education, then you should waste state resources by getting higher education. Education is not a reward, it's a means to an end -- in the true Communist state, a way of creating workers to satisfy needs of the people that can only be done by those with higher education.

So how does one identify who should be assigned these higher-education-requiring jobs? That's what the testing is all about. The idea is that the tests are fair as can be, since everyone is on equal footing when faced with a written examination.

There isn't supposed to be competition dividing people into two classes (one worthy of secondary education, one not)

In this case, you're a person who exemplifies why the system doesn't work -- you ascribe different values to the roles that workers take based upon their education. The janitor should be as highly esteemed as the doctor, provided they both do their jobs to the best of their abilities.

I think you're missing the biggest issue here -- China is no longer a Communist state, if it ever was one. Capitalism is taking over, with the State bing the largest source of capital. This makes it more of a fascist system (though the word has become 'dirty' from its association with certain European governments of the 20th century).

As to tuition:

The most important change is the one from 1999 where tuition fees were introduced. It is my understanding (though I could be wrong) that money is often tight and your standard laborer in China makes roughly $50-$100 USD per month. Can you expect them to afford tuition rates of £200-400? Not really.

First off, you're using two different currencies there. Second, compare that to US tuition. Say, for China:' $75 US per month = $900/yr. Even converting GBP to USD, tuition of $680/yr. So you've a ratio of 1.32 median income to tuition in China, using your figures (source?).

In the US, the median income is just under 44,400 [whitehouse.gov] for a family of four, while the same year, the average total cost of college was 11,354 [cnn.com]. So the ratio is 3.91. However, consider that the median US family has 2 kids -- and your ratio is now 1.96. Now, also consider the fact that US citizens pay for a lot of services that Chinese citizens do not (either because the services are not available, or because the Chinese government pays). Finally, consider the fact that a college education in China (due to the selectivity) is the equivalent of a top-notch education in the US, where you can expect the costs of a year of top-notch college to be in excess of $30,000. In this light, the US ratio would be 1.48, which is remarkable close to the Chinese ratio.

The difference-make here might be scholarships and grants, and I don't know if the equivalent exists in China. But the culture of sacrifice for one's child means that most parents whose child is accepted to university in China can, and do, afford to send the child -- whereas in the US, kids go to state schools even when they qualify for better education, simply because it is more easily afforded by the parents.

A more in-depth story on entrance exams ...

This LA Times article [latimes.com] from the weekend has a more in-depth look at the grueling process of Chinese university entrance exams, and shows a bit more of the motivation to go to such lengths to cheat.

For example:

hinese college admissions officers don't look at your high school grades, personal interviews, recommendations or essays in making their decisions. They don't make allowances if you don't test well. They won't even cut you slack if your mother died the day before. Everything, countless years of sacrifice and hard work, boils down to this one test. Those who perform miserably have to wait another year to take the exam.

Not a great system from any point of view. Encourages cheating. Discourages creativity, not particularly fair to the students .... -- Paul

Encouragement

You hear that America! Now China is about to outdo is in another category: cheating! Are we going to stand for this?!?

Precisely why do we care? Admittedly, if China's colleges and universities get filled with these industrious but otherwise dim individuals, we won't have to worry about China being a technological force to be reckoned with.

More schools

why don't they just open more schools?

(Stereotype alert)

It's my understanding that Asians are very meritocratically oriented, and one of the results is that they must know how people rank. Even if there were more schools to accept all the potential students, people would still be racking their brains because exams would be designed to order 9 million people from the top person to Mr. 9 million.

Their fascination with meritocracy is not necessarily a bad thing. Thomas Friedman mentioned in The world is flat that the Chinese insist on promoting people who know what they're talking about in government. With a meritocratically oriented civil service that runs all the way to the top, the leaders of Chinese government tend to be engineers and scientists, whereas we in the democratic USA are stuck with lawyers.

Re:More schools

Chinese Universities ARE MOST definitely not a meritocracy.

In fact it is probably the most unfair admissions process out of all the countries I have ever seen.

The system is heavily slanted towards major cities such as beijing and shanghai. Each university has a quota system for students from each of the countries provinces. So in US terms, it would be like Harvard having a quota for high school students from each state, so if Harvard takes in 1000 students each year, it would allocate 10 students to texas, 10 students to rhode island, 20 students to california, etc....

Now the problem is that the Major cities in China like beijing and shanghai hold most of the universities, and most of the Top universities in China, such as Peking university, Tsinghua University, FuDan university, etc... And each of those universities allocate a HUGE number of positions to students from it's local municipality.

What this means in reality is that Beijing with a population of 18 million people will end up with like 100,000 university spots per year, and a poor, rural province like AnHui with 50 million people will end up with 5,000 university spots. This is reflected in the entrance marks too.

A university in china does not just have ONE entrance mark, it has multiple entrance marks, one for each province which it accepts students from. This means that it will have a low entrance mark for places like beijing which it allocates the most quota to, and an extremely high entrance mark for places which it has a low quota for, like the previously mentioned anhui province.

In education terms this means that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, not a MERITOCRACY at all.

Re:More schools

Having just been to Beijing and Moscow, I'd say it certainly feels like China has deregulated a lot more than Russia. Talking to a Chinese friend from home I learnt that economic reform has been going on for a lot longer in China than Russia, despite Russia 'turning away' from Communism. But in the same breath I note that a local commented that in China it's a communist country for the ruling elite, but not the general population. But that's the joy of implementation vs specification.

Why not just open more schools?

If there are that many people that desperate to get into a university, the obvious question would be, why don't they just open more schools?"

Maybe because in the real world resources are finite? Yes, in a free market situation, where the price that people were willing to pay would be higher than the marginal cost of production, more would be sold, and high profit margins would encourage even more people to enter the market, satisfying even more demand; however, education is (probably) highly subsidized, and as such, every additional student or school opened costs even more money. There is also the matter of very good or even decent teachers being a finite resources. Add in the matter of prestige (everyone wants to get placed in a top school), and the fact that it doesn't make much sense to graduate a lot more people than the demand for jobs (unless you want to depress wages by increasing unemployment or think that these people will be entrepreneurs who will in the future generate even more jobs), and the fact that graduating more sub-par students in addition to the best of the best is not really necessary or all that beneficial and you will come to realize that the decision is rather rational.

Black Thursday=Exam Day

If you are from a poor Chinese family, this is the only chance you will have to get into get into a university, with the govt. paying most or all of the costs. It is a way out of poverty for a whole family; the pressures are enormous, and there are many suicides of students who failed to get high enough scores on the entrance exam (held just once per year, typically on a Thursday). So, anything goes. If you can't afford to pay a tutor, or are not quite smart enough in the first place, and don't have a Party member for a family friend to pull some strings, you are doomed to work in an IPod factory or even a rice paddy for the rest of your life. So, you do whatever it takes.

In the west, we have lots of opportunities and second chances, and China is doing better these days, but has much govt. control still. It's a developing country, with a huge gap between the 'haves' and 'have nots'.

I personally hope the Chinese govt. can keep things from boiling over at some point. People (over 1 Gig of people there) want more than the Govt. can supply, and it's a balancing act. Most of the top govt. officials are engineers, which (if you know engineers) is both good and bad.

a few answers to these questions

First, education in a top school is VERY different from education in a recently opened school with no reputation. I know because I teach in a public university. Our classes are dumbed down because the students won't get it otherwise. Most of the classes that I took in junior and senior level in my undergrad can never be taught here.

Second, education is only a small part of the value of university. Creating life-long contacts with people who will be in your field and those who are already successful in your field is almost as (if not a bigger) part.

Third, Ph.D. is awarded for discovering something new in a field. Try discovering something new in Math... And without a Ph.D., you can't teach in a university. This limits the number of university teachers in technical disciplines.

And lastly, since I am compareing China to my American experience, they can't "just" open a university. It takes more than a guy with money willing to build a building. A university degree there is an official governtment document. So all programs must come with official government approval and certification.

The big problem with competition.

For years its been quite stylish to voice an ideology of bringing competition into all aspects of life. This situation demonstrates the horrible flaw in the idea.

The question you've got to ask yourself is what about a person is actually being measured by the competative system? In educational systems like this one, what is being measured is the ability to pass a test. Cheaters score very highly on this scale, so you end up distilling the most ruthless cheaters from society.

Don't get too comfortable mocking China for this though - most western countries include extensive testing in their high school education systems, in the pursuit of the almight 'competativeness', and this leads to the same kind of thing.

why don't they just open more schools?

Because some cultures beleive, that you should only go to higher school if you can perform there.
Your society needs farmes, car repairmen, plumbers and people who clean the streets

HNow in other societies, you can "buy" into college, college that most people can actually finish, then you end up with a bunch of kids with a degree, who are othervise barely suitable for a simple administration job at the local fastfood restaurant, or price/wal/whatever-mart.

I personally grew up at a place, where even getting into highschool (4 yrs after 8yrs primary) was just impossible for some, because they weren't able to perform well enough to get admission..... university exams were kind of a bloodsport back then :)

Is that right? If you allow specialization, and have a good selection of importance choices between subjects: yes ...
In my time, my college points included literature and history, even though I was about to go to an IT school.....
Also in college we wasted a lot of time learning useless stuff because of the lack of specialization, and while I somewhat agree that a universal knowledge should be taught in schools (high, and some uni/college besides the obvious primary), in many times that amount of universal trash should be better considered.

If you got only one chance, you do what you can

You only have one shot. How far would you go?

Imagine this: Studying is your ONLY chance to get a well paying job. There is no such thing as having THE killer idea, gathering some venture vultures and getting rich that way, you study, or you're assembling Furbys for the rest of your life.

And you only have ONE shot. ONE try. ONE single chance to prove that you're "worth" it. It's not like "write to a billion colleges and even if MIT rejects you, the university of Wallawalla will accept you". Studying abroad is also not necessarily an option.

You have to succeed. If it costs your life.

How far would you go? Personally, I'd sacrifice a virgin should I find one, just for the odd chance that this might appease some kind of deity I don't believe in.

Re:If you got only one chance, you do what you can

Personally, I'd sacrifice a virgin should I find one

That was ironic... becuase if you are female in china, you have TWO shots... the entrance exams... OR sacrificing your virginity to somone else who passes (i.e. get yourself and M.R.S. degree).

Re:If you got only one chance, you do what you can

Note to self: When inventing some place to refer to as bad, make sure it doesn't really exist.

A culture of cheating?

My wife spent two years teaching English in China. The way she described her experiences, it sounded as if cheating were an accepted norm. Some teachers, rather than ask their students to refrain from cheating, instead ask them to not make it so obvious that the teacher loses face. It's just a given that many of them will cheat. And some of my wife's students explained to her that it's quite an insult to refuse another student's request to help him or her cheat; it could ruin an otherwise lengthy friendship.

Granted, though, this was not at a top university. It was a smaller, almost trade-school atmosphere.

Re:A culture of cheating?

It's just a given that many of them will cheat.

I'm in a two part class in China. The first half was in May, and I'll be back in October. We had tests throughout the class, and all the Chinese students cheated. All of them. We were split up in tables of 6 students each (about one American per table) and the Americans are the only ones that didn't cheat. Of course, out of politeness, I did keep my answer sheet open in a manner that they could easily look on it to see what I got and I waited until at least one of them coppied my answers before I turned in my test, but I didn't use theirs for my benefit. It was expected that we cheat, and some of the Americans were explicitly invited to cheat by the classmates when it was noticed that we weren't cheating. I pre-empted that by telling my table that I did not wish to cheat. They weren't offended and did honor my request by not pressing the issue. These were all professionals in a masters level class.

Re:A culture of cheating?

I think I witnessed an importation of this cultural idea when I was in highschool.

We had a group of about 40 mostly Asian students that we called the "Xerox club." They would all get together in the morning before school in the cafeteria with the other studens. While everyone else was studying, eating, or trying to catch one last wink before school these guys and girls were copying their homework. Usually only 1 or 2 people would do the assignment and then they would pass it around for the others to copy. Once you finished copying you handed it to someone else so that everyone culd finish before the bell. It was pretty stealthy because while some were copying other people were taking and having a good time like normal, but all the students in the higher level classes knew what they were doing. Most of us had participated at one time or another as well. As long as you were cool with them they didn't mind you getting in on the action.

There were 2 funny results. First, every once in awhile people would grab the wrong assignment and turn it in. Sometimes it went unnoticed but other times they had to explain why they had someone elses homeowrk. Easy enough, we were studying together, etc. What was better is that one of my friends showed me that the teacher had graded his calculus homework and not even noticed that it wasn't his. He laughed and said something about "All Asians must look the same" to the teacher.

Second, copying doesn't teach well. Many of those students were in AP classes and after a few weeks of taking the copying shortcut they were behind on the book knowledge. They were pretty desperate come test time and many of them cheated. I saw furtive coded hand signals, almost microscopically written notes in the side of a pencil, ye olde graphing calculator with memory trick (that was new in my day), and even the long-sleeves-in-summer-with-stuff-written-on-your- arm method.

What surprised me the most was that the people who cheated could rely on the students that knew the answers (the ones they ultimately copied off of) to help them cheat on the tests too.

Experience with cheating in China

My previous employer taught American courses in China through Chinese universities. Cheating was a huge problem.

Tests were done online. Students used all sorts of IM software to message each other. They used cell phones to text friends outside of the room with the books. IMs were blocked. Cell phones confiscated on the way into the rooms. They still found ways to cheat.

Some instructors stopped testing online and moved to paper tests. Students would pay the university's copy center to get copies of the exam.

For Internet tests, some instructors now only ask questions that do not require the use of the keyboard. The keyboards are placed on top of the monitors before the tests begin so that students cannot send any messages to anyone.

Plagarism? Standard everyday occurance.

Then students get caught and told that they are going to fail the course. Then they cry and ask for another chance because they don't want to go back home and not have a future. When given that chance, they are often caught again in the future.

Re:Experience with cheating in China

Sounds like incompetence.

Its very easy to rig up a computer so that it can only be used for test-taking, and has
no ability to send IM's or otherwise help the test-taker cheat.

If you allow a student access to a general purpose computer with network access of any kind,
then you are basically allowing them full access to all information on the internet. (for many
things, this degrades the test into a test of their search skills)

For some subjects, there is nothing wrong with that type of "cheating": if you can find the answer than you
can do the job. (in the real world you'll have a desktop and google available to you, so have at it)
That does not apply to all subjects however.

Another way to discourage cheating is to have the students compete against one another.
(the downside is that curves punish the brightest and reward mediocrity in many cases)
I wouldnt advise curves, standards should be objective.

Yet another way is to make each student take a unique test: Even simple shuffling the order of the
questions around, while making sure that the test-taker cannot view more than one question at a time
and cannot backtrack, effectively squelches many forms of synchronized or low-bandwidth cheating.

More subtle techniques involve giving similar questions that have slight differences, so that cheaters
who assume two questions are the same without looking too closely will be misled to choose the wrong answer.
Another technique is to "camouflage" questions by changing trivial details such as proper nouns/advectives/contants
and other details that do not affect the answer to the question.

In reality, a minimal effort should be able to prevent 99% of cheating attempts, and this should not be a big problem.
Lack of effort on part of the test administrators, or simple lack of confidience are to blame when cheating is high.

In any case, you cannot blame the students: they need to score high compared to their peers, or it will have a negative
impact on their lives. If they don't take advantage of every tool at their disposal, then they will do poorly.

Downside of free higher education

In my experience, countries with free (or very cheap) higher education impose a lot of barriers on entrance and graduation. They do this because the state can't afford to educate everyone at a higher level. While my preference is a mixed contribution system like US public/state schools, at least in privitized systems you can get an education if you're willing to take the risk (debt).
I wonder what the actual cost per student is in China and what percentage of an average yearly income it represents.

I wish in more countries (including the US) there were cheaper options to pursue education via self-study. I've attended universities with pools, fancy fitness centers and well-known research professors (for whatever they're worth to students) but I've learned most when simply reading books I've chosen on my own. I'd like a more fleshed out CLEP-like system where you study on your own and then pay for a test that will measure your knowledge of the subject. I recognize self-study doesn't work at all levels, but one should be able to learn on one's own by the the time they graduate from high school.

Re:Socialism

Trust me.. there is nothing socialistic about the current chinese society, least of all their health care.

Re:Preferable method?

The methods include microscopic earphones and wireless device

The article makes this sound like something new ... but people were doing this more than 30 years ago in high school ... we had one guy who took the finals with a walkie-talky stripped out of its case, battery pack taped to one leg, transceiver to the other, switch in one shirt cuff, earpiece in the other, and wires connecting it all ... so he could get the answers from another student.

Of course, anyone desperate enough to do that is also dumb enough to believe you when you transmit the wrong answers ;-) (in other words, I was tired of him sitting behind or beside me, always trying to copy my answers, and then ME being accused of copying HIS answers)

Re:More schools?

"What's the point of opening more schools if people have to cheat to get accepted? That's the wrong answer; the reason there's a test isn't to find the best people, it's to find the qualified people. Some people just don't deserve better schooling."

Because if there are so few schools that the only way to get accepted is to have a passing score of 95% or better, it is no longer about qualified or not.

Although I don't agree with their cheating to get accepted, I do think opening more schools would decrease the problem and maybe even make a little money in the process.

It is not like other countries (especially the U.S.) where if you have a pulse you can get accepted because there are so many schools.

Re:I have an easy solution

That's funny (not ha ha funny), because in the UK, the government has raised tuition fees in order to increase the number of students going to University.

The "Hitch-Hikers' Guide to the Galaxy" explanation of the logic follows something like this:

Universities are strapped for cash and can't accept any more students. So to increase the number of students, Universities require more funding. As the tax-payer is reluctant to subsidise rich kids getting Media Studies degress, the burden for paying for all these extra students must be carried by the students themselves. Hence, Universities may charge huge fees. Ah, but you say, "What about all the poor people who want to go to University to get degrees so that they can become teachers?". Well, the solution there is to provide cost effective loans, which only need to be paid back, if the student starts employement with a job which pays more £15000 p.a. Ah, but you say, "But teachers earn more than £15000 p.a.!" Good point. We'll drop teachers' pay to less than £15000 so that they don't have to pay thier loans back! It's a Win-win situation.

Student numbers have gone up a little, and then down a little. Oh, well.

Stangely, the National debt continues to go up. After-all what's a £4000 credit-card bill next to a £20000 student loan? Peanuts!

I'm just glad I did my studies when there weren't any fees (or rather they were paid for me).

P.S. Please exscuse my Grammar. I did a Chemistry degree rather than media studies.