Chinese Students' Cheating Techniques - Don't Try at Home 555
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?"
I have an easy solution (Score:0, Interesting)
Perhaps an easier way would be to go overseas... (Score:3, Interesting)
Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
Wikipedia offers a much longer explanation [wikipedia.org] including the criteria by which you were eligible for aid:
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
More schools (Score:5, Interesting)
(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.
The big problem with competition. (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum (Score:1, Interesting)
Your standard American "laborer" makes $2,000-$3,000 a month. Tuition rates at high-end universities here are $20,000-$40,000. Assuming that cost of living scales, seems like we're a lot worse off in terms of tuition costs. Yet it seems that cheating in the US is a lot lower. I don't know about China, but in Russia (which is similar to it in a lot of respects) cheating is an integral part of the culture: if you don't let your friend copy off your exam/homework/whatever, you're a bad friend. So I don't think poverty is a good explanation for cheating.
sign of progress (Score:2, Interesting)
Now they have to be ingenous and imaginative to be able to cheat and not get caught.
World beware, the new China is coming.
I don't see much difference with France... (Score:2, Interesting)
The bachelors exam is the final high school exam.
For the french speaking among us
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baccalaur%C3%A9at_(F
Other countrys have such obligations too.
In my time I had to pass a qualification test, before being able to get to technical college.
Cheating? Yes this is a common among students. Nothing new.
Using new technology? In my time they where using a TI 59 programmable calculator to cheat.
The only difference: The article make it looks like those Chinese are more desperate.
Or is it the aim of the article to sell some sensation? Like some tabloïds?
If you got only one chance, you do what you can (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Chinese Education Reforms & Conundrum (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Experience with cheating in China (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Pivotal exams is norm across Asia. (Score:3, Interesting)
But look in Japan, Taiwan, Singaport, Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia...
There is intense competition in all these places in order to enter a
decent college. Consequently, the students go to cram schools and
devote most of their high school years in preparing for the exams.
This gives a good grounding in the basics and select people who tests well.
It doe NOT mean that they can be good researchers, enterpreneurs,
corporate workers or teachers. The US system probalby is better preparation
in those areas. OTOH, I don't think the US schools' low expectation in sciense,
history/cultural studies, and math is very smart either.
It's the system, man (Score:3, Interesting)
However, I also understand why so many people cheat on their exams. It's all about the money, and not necessarily just scholarships. The tuition structure for Chinese universities is exactly opposite that in the United States.
This is how Chinese high school seniors and their parents have explained it to me:
In the USA, we consider our private schools, our Yales and our Harvards, to be the "best." They're priced accordingly. State schools are considerably cheaper and, agree or disagree, considered by most to be "worse" than private institutions.
The Chinese think this is bizarre. The "best" two schools in China, Beijing University for Liberal Arts and Qinghua University for Science and Engineering, are both operated by the government. Tuition at these schools is mind-bendingly low. A couple thousand US dollars per year. Practically free, by Western standards, and literally free if you qualify for aid.
There are also 2nd and 3rd tier government schools, and as the school is ranked progressively worse, the tuition rises progressively higher. At the bottom of the barrel are private schools, which charge tuition equal to or higher than (in US dollars, they tell me!) Harvard or Yale.
Weird, right? The reason, however, is both simple and time-tested: corruption. Everybody wants a college degree, because that's how you find a good job. At the highest quality universities, there's no wiggle room: you either performed well on your college entrance exam, or you didn't. As you move down through the levels, though, the opportunities for "using the back door," or buying your way in, become greater and greater. Thus, private schools exist for the sole purpose of letting rich parents buy their idiot kid a degree certificate.
So. If a kid isn't bright, and his parents aren't loaded, he'll do whatever he has to on the one test that will define the rest of his life. I don't know how many of you know Chinese people, or how they interact with their families. Let me just tell you: if a Chinese kid blows it on the big day, his mother will never, ever, ever shut up about it. Until the very day she dies.
Re:another good idea. (Score:2, Interesting)
The problem is that if you continue, you'll just end up with 100% of the population being professors and the economy will collapse because nothing gets done. In other words, I'm guessimg that China is intentionally limiting the number of students in University, probably for some economic purpose. I'm not saying that China is right or wrong about it, but there is some optimum percentage of the population that ought to be college-educated, and the rest (who would be doing vocational-type tasks) shouldn't be (according to the whole "command economy" philosophy they've got over there).
Re:A more in-depth story on entrance exams ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:another good idea. (Score:1, Interesting)
The reason is that that solution would be only half of the solution.
Printing more money where the number of consumer products is fixed only makes people compete more for the same number of items.
If you want to solve poverty, first you must agree on what constitutes poverty, and no you can't draw the line on the number on dollars. For the same amount of dollars a month by which you would be poor in New York, you would be insanely rich in Quito (the capital of Equador).
So you need to produce those items and then distribute them among the population. Well it turns out that all people would have to work or people would have to work longer hours. In Socialist countries behind the Berlin wall (also known as ex-comunist countries)people worked up to 30 hours a week, not more. Why? Because everyone had to work, and having a surplus of items is useless (except the needed stock), so people had to go home at 2 pm every single day. No people living in the streets.
There you go, you have a solution. Now the problem is that there is no incentive on producing more, on buying better machines, and the economy erodes, until it is too late to recover. Too late to recover, you think? Sure, everyone has a job, remember? There is no one willing to change jobs to produce the new machines. Also remember that there is only one employer, the government, so if your invention screws it up, no promotion, and worse yet, no job. There is no need to write a resume, there is no one to hire you. Starvation because of failure, not a pretty picture, huh?
Capitalism is the only way to go, the only problem is that new machines and new techniques mean that companies that have the new technology grab more market share at lower prices, leaving other less sofisticated companies bankrrupt, those companies fire their employees or they succumb like Enron. Unemployment is a direct consequence of capitalism, and a necessary one, because when you want to start a new business you need people looking for a job, willing to learn, etc.
So capitalist countries (mainly us, canada, australia and europe) invented something called "social security", in which all workers are required to pay a considerable part of their income, and unemployed people recieve the same amount.
What's the benefit? 4% to 10% of unemployment is considered normal, which means 100 workers pay for 4 to 10 unemployed. The government uses the extra money to build bridges and roads. Everyone is happy. Well, in practice people who pay social security are not so happy, but then it means that the demand for food and housing is steady, which means lower prices, also people in developed countries are not used to work for pennies like in undeveloped countries, simply because they can stay at home and make more. So companies in developed countries prefer to hire people from undeveloped countries who are willing to work for pennies.
It works like a charm. The demand is not going down, but the costs are certainly going down. In the end people in developed countries will have to raise the Social Security, so that only people from undeveloped countries work and pay Social Security and people stay home making more.
Look at Abu Dabi, where natives do not work, only aliens do the work. I think the future looks like that. That's exactly what happened in Ancient Rome, where Romans did not work, but only slaves. The problem was eventually that slaves rebelled and burned Rome, they ware called the Goths, who were Germanic tribes, the VisiGoths in Spain and the OstroGoths in Italy. And now the US, in which English is the first language, and English is a Germanic language, is going in the same avenue as the old masters.
It all began trying to go the other way (everybody free) and so far it has worked. The Roman Model is mindlessly coming again as a natural reaction to the action of freedom. Paradoxically, isn't it? It can happen in the follwing 100 yea
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:More schools (Score:5, Interesting)
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:another good idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
But basically if you don't score well enough on the exam, you don't go.
Getting into a university there is not as easy as it is in US, although US doesn't exactly take 'walk ins', either.
If you can get in to a decent-to-good university, get a degree, you have a chance at getting into a graduate program in another country, (US, Canada, Great Britain, Germany, Australia, etc), maybe even with a sufficient scholarship, and later land a job with a company in that country and eventually get naturalized. It is 'apparently' deuced difficult for a non-university grad to get a student visa to an undergrad program in the US. You might get admitted, but that in no way means the US consulate will grant you a visa. If you get into some grad program where they are going to fund you, it is easier to get a visa from the US consulate.
Downside of free higher education (Score:4, Interesting)
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:Experience with cheating in China (Score:3, Interesting)
I also suggested software that locks down the computer and just gives you a very stripped down browser (SecureExam, Lock Down Browser, etc, etc) and this was always dismissed as "too expensive."
I got out of there. Dealing with China and all of their problems and issues became a huge headache when you have to make 2 different cultures happy, the American employer and the demanding, and largely incompetent and non-caring, Chinese client.
Short term issue... (Score:3, Interesting)
As a result, we have a GLUT of PhDs in a similar age range that are hanging around until retirement. In addition, that same generation didn't produce a larger follow-on generation, so we have a decrease in NEED for educators (there also isn't a draft that requires people to hide in the Academy, which lowers demand further).
But that same Glut of Professors have protected themselves from the market with tenure and other policies. When the boomers retire en masse, we are going to have massive ripple effects... The Boomer generation climbed the ladder, pulled it up behind them, and are looking at the smaller generation after them wondering why they won't take care of them the way they took care of their parents...
Re:another good idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
It's not that some people have to face poverty and starvation, it's that -- pretty much by definition -- not everyone can be a leader (and I mean that in the sense of lead engineers, cutting-edge research scientists etc., not just politicians or managers). For the concept of "leadership" to mean anything at all, there have to be followers. So then you might say, "well, just do away with 'leadership' by making everyone a leader," which would be reasonable except that some people will always be more capable than others.
In other words, there will always be the "haves" and "have nots;" it's just that what those terms mean depends on the prosperity of the civilization. For example, here in the US we've progressed to the point where being a "have not" means only owning a regular TV instead of an HDTV and working in the service industry (e.g. fast food) instead of being a "professional." It's still a far cry from being an impoverished subsistence farmer or something, though!
Except they weren't that many (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:More schools? NOPE! (Score:2, Interesting)
It's their myopic abitiuos government, they don't set a good example for the population. Take for example their leading wireless provider. The chinese stole the technology from American wireless companies, grew to a billion dollars in size, and is now competing directly with them.
In fact, every product that's sold in China from a foreign source need's to go through a rigourous inspection program whereby government sponsored scientists reverse engineer every piece of technology. They even go so far as to request the blue prints and building instructions!
It's a severe problem. China has no intellectual property enforcements nor do they ever innovate; this is why it's so cheap to buy from china, because their products do not bear the incremental cost of technology and IP.
Their government is doing nothing to stop this. And the US government's work along these lines is embarassing at best.
Which is why their students are cheating on their tests. They figure if their future employers are copying off the business plans and product designs of the Americans, then why can't they?
Re:another good idea. (Score:2, Interesting)
Quantity != Quality (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:another good idea. (Score:2, Interesting)
Frankly, I'm wishing I never listened to my mom's advice when she would ask me "Do you want to grow up to be a ditch digger?". These days ditch digging seems to be paying off a lot better than my engineering degree.
Re:another good idea. (Score:2, Interesting)
Nobody should be obligated to work. Everybody should work based only on their desire. Those are the kind of people that produce the best results. And in a mechanized society there will never be a reason to obligate anybody. Let the machines pull the weight. That's why we invent them.
Now what I'm really wondering is that should we actually restrict education so that only the select few can get a degree. The information is there for all to see, but we spend an enormous amount of energy to restrict access. What in the world could possibly be wrong with allowing everybody to get a college degree?? What do people other than the powerful few have to gain by this? Is there some irrational fear of a well educated public? I can think of only one reason to do this. And that is to maintain a certain level of poverty. And the worse part is that so many people think that this is a good thing. That without poverty society would collapse. The only thing that will collapse is the current slave-master relationships we have maintained since the beginning. Well, I'm the freak that wants a P2P society. That was the idea(on paper anyway) behind the great American fairy tale. That all people were created equal. That our government, our juries were made up of our peers. I was never saying that there aren't people who like to work. But let's let them do it because they like it. Not because Mr. Rockefeller needs a maid. But if somebody actually wants to spend time cleaing his house, then more power to them. I would be the last one to stop them.
Re:another good idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
And I would say that philosophy produces the best thinkers.
The American obssession with employment is a result of the Great Depression. It became the goal of the United States to prevent such a man-made catastrophe from ever happening again. It became the national goal to ensure that there would always be jobs for the people, and it shapes the major policies of the U.S. government. It's all about the economy because it's what produces the jobs. Every great empire has a mission, a goal, an ideal. For the United States as a whole it has been getting as close to 0% unemployment as feasible since the 1930s.
I think work towards that goal was in motion long before the Great Depression, probably since post-civil-war economists determined that if capital couldn't be spent on slave labor, it could at least buy wages. Rich men have always been afraid of what might happen if they couldn't fit everyone into a bell-curve and thus predict revenues for the indefinite future. Americans were once a people with independent livelihoods who lived in local economies and enjoyed free, unrestricted (well, not artificially restricted) enterprise between themselves. Hired labor was culled largely from among the youth (apprenticeships) until they could establish themselves in their own local economy. In those days we had literate people who didn't feel that candle making was beneath them (e.g. Ben Franklin's dad). Education didn't necessarily translate into occupation. People educated themselves because it was the mark of liberty to expand the mind and soul - for the sake of knowledge alone. In the 21st century, it's inconceivable that any highly educated individual would fill an occupation "beneath" his education. We have learned that work and school are one and the same.
America had the lowest unemployment rate when there were fewest jobs. The man-made problem is the idea of a "job." In order to have plenty of jobs, Leviathan must consolidate and legislate, and all must be willingly subjected to the King's order. Businesses don't really mind this non-free enterpirse (Capitalism it's called now) because it provides such wonderful predictability.
We had a clear glimpse into this in 1934 when William Wirt testified to Congress that he had been party to a plan authored by some in the Roosevelt administration to prolong - on purpose - the Great Depression. Why? So that government control over banking and lending could be permanently secured. Did the administration admit to this? Yes! But it was just a joke, they told us, and Wirt was laughed out of town by the media (who, he had testified earlier, were at the beck and call of the Roosevelt propaganda machine). That's the shape of the memory hole in America.
Re:Only in some imaginary world (Score:3, Interesting)
What's your point? George W. Bush jumped the queue to get into Yale. A completely private system is no better than a completely socialist system in this respect. The only difference is the currency used as a pay-off. In the USSR it was influence and power. In the USA it's money and power.