Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

http://www.smh.com.au/world/chinese-students-and-families-fight-for-the-right-to-cheat-their-exams-20130621-2oo6o.html

by DanielRibeiro • 13 years ago

207 122 13 years ago

smh.com.au

dmoy2• 13 years ago

This is going to take a long time to change for the better. My Chinese friends who don't cheat because they actually want to learn stuff definitely complain a lot about the rampant cheating. If you want to get into and finish Uni completely legit, you have to work way, way harder than everyone else :\ And you will end up doing worse than people who cheated and got away with it, just have to suck it up.

There's a lot of inertia to solving it, and it's very hard to do across the board. For Uni entrance, there's ~10 million+ people taking the exam every year - that prevents a lot of non-exam based solutions to "who do we let into Uni?"

I do not envy the position of the people in charge of all of this :(

lsc2• 13 years ago

Wow. You realize that this world where people care enough about school to put in that much effort is /completely foreign/ to me, right?

Personally, I think the school system I came from, where nobody cares is in bigger trouble than the system where cheating is endemic.

JulianMorrison• 13 years ago

They still don't care about school. They care about not being weeded from the pile of resumes because they didn't have "the right grade" - which they got by a pantomime that superficially resembled school.

As a system it's highly optimized to select candidates who'll "go along to get along".

jlgreco• 13 years ago

I am not coming from a perspective that has inherent insight into this, but this all seems very strange to me.

It seems to me that only the top [whatever] percent of a population is going to be able to get into a class of school of their choosing, and only a top [whatever] percent of those admitted to those schools are going to successfully graduate. Now, China's population is unfathomably large, so that means way more people are going to be rejected or fail to graduate. On the other hand, it also means way more people are going to be accepted and graduate. 10x the population should mean 10x the rejected people, but it should also mean 10x the accepted and 10x the graduated, right?

I don't really see why a larger population should mean that cheating is incentivized more, unless the real problem is an undersupply (proportionately) of education.

Now, if lack of education positions is the real problem, then cheating isn't a solution to that; rampant cheating just changes the equation from "top [whatever] get accepted" to "top [whatever] at cheating get accepted". But do those who don't meet "top [whatever]" in a large population have more incentive to cheat than those who don't meet "top [whatever]" in a small population? I don't see why. The incentives should be the same in either a large or a small population, right?

burntsushi• 13 years ago

I don't really see why a larger population should mean that cheating is incentivized more, unless the real problem is an undersupply (proportionately) of education.

I interpreted dmoy's comment much differently. I thought the point was that since there are so many people entering Uni, they just don't have the resources to penalize enough people for cheating. The obvious solution is to put people on site and prevent it rather than look for it after-the-fact, but apparently that results in rock throwing protests...

dmoy2• 13 years ago

Sorry, I didn't mean to say that the higher population CAUSES cheating. Just that the insane volume of people applying makes the current system (single exam being 99% of your entrance to Uni) more logistically feasible than a lot of other potential systems.

The disadvantage is that you have no other way to prove yourself than a single test score. That's also why you're seeing such outrage, because that single test is going to open (or shut) a lot of doors.

(See above comment about O(n), he articulated it way better than me :P)

auctiontheory• 13 years ago

10x the population should mean 10x the rejected people, but it should also mean 10x the accepted and 10x the graduated, right?

I don't know where you got that. The number of seats in "elite" or even "good enough" universities is not a linear function of the national population. In populous but poor countries like China and India and Bangladesh, there is much less educational opportunity than there are smart people.

Sven7• 13 years ago

Cheating is always going to exist in highly competitive environments. Confusing kids in such environments with excessive focus on honesty and integrity can put them at a serious disadvantage.

In my experience, irrespective of country or culture, most people (even those that have cheated) inherently want to be fair and that sort of balances the equations out over the long term.

miguelrochefort4• 13 years ago

Sounds exactly like those people who want to make privacy a right.

tzs• 13 years ago

For those who haven't read the article yet, when they say "fight", they mean actual physical fighting:

By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped as students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, more than 2000 people had gathered, smashing cars and chanting: ''We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.''

Cheating in China goes way beyond cheating to get into school. Two years ago, the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science became the first Chinese journal to use text analysis software to spot plagiarism.

They found that 31% of their papers were plagiarized. 40% for computer science and life science papers. [1] [2]

[1] http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138937778/plagiarism-plague-hi...

[2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7312/full/467153d...

leke3• 13 years ago

Yes, we have this scheme in our Finnish polytechnic. Regardless though, people still do it and try and get away with it. Sometimes they don't even try and make any small changes to the original document. I have no idea why they do it -- perhaps they don't believe the system will catch it?

miguelrochefort4• 13 years ago

People plagiarize because doing the actual work is soul-crushing. How motivating is it to read a bunch of high quality work, put them together and produce a mediocre work? It's not motivating at all, and people simply try to stay sane.

beedogs2• 13 years ago

This isn't just a problem with Chinese students in China. A large for-pay cheating operation which catered exclusively to Chinese students was just uncovered in New Zealand, too.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/8662224/Chinese-ch...

Volpe9• 13 years ago

These are completely different issues (which you are simply conflating by race).

The exam mentioned in the article is THE exam. If you fail, that's it for you. You can't re-sit and you can't attend a reputable university. Your choices are the equivalent of technical colleges (few which have any reputation), working in low skill jobs, or (if you have A LOT of money) studying abroad.

Given the circumstances, I think cheating is the sensible thing to do, given their are cheaters, by not cheating yourself you put yourself at a disadvantage.

beedogs2• 13 years ago

The term "Chinese" doesn't describe a race; it is descriptive of a nationality. And I don't see how the two issues aren't related at least at some basic level. Cheating at this scale seems to be a cultural phenomenon moreso than a racial one.

fspeech2• 13 years ago

You can retake exams in China, but they are offered only once a year.

evoloution• 13 years ago

Selecting to enforce more strictly the law in a particular area is unfair and not the way to go when you have such high cheating levels reported in the whole country. To walk the path of the "Rule of Law" they have to make the rules stricter for all.

chris_wot2• 13 years ago

This is going to effect innovation and education in China very badly. If there elite University students are getting there by cheating, then it means there elites aren't really elite: just better at being dishonest.

vehementi• 13 years ago

Devil's advocate: grades are a stupid thing; if someone sits in class and learns and for the exam needs to cheat in order to keep up with cheat-driven-grades-inflation, we have not made a comment about that student's ability or anything. The elites may yet be elite.

chris_wot2• 13 years ago

All that proves is that exams aren't the best way of assessing someone's ability. However, cheating doesn't show ability in anything, other than deviousness.

haarg• 13 years ago

As opposed to the elite in the USA...

pjscott2• 13 years ago

I went to school in the US. Anecdotally, the top students genuinely cared about learning. Most of the cheaters just barely got by, if that.

pchander• 13 years ago

This reads like an article from the onion. I had to double check just to make sure it wasn't.

schuke• 13 years ago

Welcome to the People's Republic of China.

xarien• 13 years ago

If this was jeopardy, the question would be: "What is the combination of a child-centric culture and a one child policy."

spikels• 13 years ago

Cargo Cult Education - Schools are built, students attend, teachers lecture, assignments turned in, tests taken and degrees granted. Everyone gets what they want: politicians, students, staff and parents. Yet nothing needs to be taught and nothing needs to be learned.

Doesn't this go on a lot more often then we want to admit?

damian2000• 13 years ago

Everyone gets what they want except the chinese companies who employ them in their first job.

awakeasleep3• 13 years ago

It's ok, they only have to implement plans stolen from other companies.

istorical2• 13 years ago

I'm a spring 2013 undergraduate in CS, and this goes on in America just as it does in China. (the entire process is a charade.) I will admit it without hesitation.

It's incredibly interesting that not a single party in the process sees actual knowledge as the value gained. Everyone sees the piece of paper as the value: the box that's checked. How long can such an illusion continue? Your guess is as good as mine. At the end of the day though, you either learn what you need to learn or you don't. Industry isn't too terrible at calling out those who can't produce value, but can only cross their t's and dot their i's.

EDIT: I should definitely draw a distinction between the magnitude of cheating/carelessness described in the article and what I encountered at an American university. The article describes a situation that is much worse.

munin• 13 years ago

I can promise you that there are schools in America where students and faculty see the knowledge gained as the value, it sucks that you're not at one though.

gems• 13 years ago

"I'm a spring 2013 undergraduate in CS, and this goes on in America just as it does in China. (the entire process is a charade.) I will admit it without hesitation."

www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/my-articles/engeduc/ARUSSIAN.PDF

The article is about a Russian mathematician who starts teaching in American universities. The same thing already happens in America with these 'business calculus' courses.

glesica3• 13 years ago

This has most to do with the student. If the student wishes to acquire knowledge, most American universities can provide the student with a great deal of knowledge. If you are not at such a university (unlikely, though some schools are significantly weaker in some disciplines than other schools, so YMMV), then such a university is generally just a transfer application away (protip: admissions standards are different for transfer applicants, it is generally, though not universally, easier to get into a more prestigious school as a transfer, having already shown an aptitude for college work).

No student at an American university can honestly claim not to have learned anything and yet be blameless for not having learned anything.

I will admit that many students are not ready to attend college at the age of 18. I think we should do more to allow students the freedom to take some time to explore their options and possibly even take a year or two off of school before deciding whether or not to attend college, where to attend college, and what to study once there.

eigenvector• 13 years ago

At the engineering school I graduated from in Canada, which is ranked in the top 20 worldwide, cheating was prolific with nearly all unsupervised work being gratuitously plagiarized.

Although supervised examinations accounted for at least 50% of each grade, any student who didn't cheat and wasn't also very, very bright probably lost at least half a letter grade on their CGPA as a result.

It was common for me to do well above average on examinations and well below average on assignments, since I was not plagiarizing them.

danpalmer2• 13 years ago

Maybe it's different here in the UK, or maybe I'm naïve.

With my A-Levels (end of high-school exams) I felt like I was learning material that I would need to know for my university course, and my university entrance was conditional on the grades I achieved.

Having been at uni for 3 years now, it has confirmed this for me. I had friends in high-school who didn't study maths, and they wouldn't have managed the CS course at my university. I wouldn't have managed it without the A-Level grades I got (or slightly below them).

I also think that my degree matters quite a lot. To me it's a piece of paper that says I have a reasonable competency in computer science, and anyone who has a brief look at the syllabus should see that I will be of a certain level of ability.

It is possible to self-teach yourself much of computer science, but when I talk to other people of a similar age to me who have self-taught and not gone to university, I don't want to come across as cocky, but the gap in knowledge appears very significant to me. After 5 years working I'm sure my degree won't matter much, but I think it will give me a big head start on knowledge and understanding.

salmonellaeater• 13 years ago

This ignores the fact that a huge part of a degree's value is as proof you've passed a lot of difficult filters. One of those filters is ability to do an institution's bidding for many years. For many companies, this is much more important than any particular academic knowledge. For jobs that really require deep knowledge, there are fairly easy ways to test for it that the employer can do themselves (i.e. by interviewing).

jmduke• 13 years ago

Entrance exams treat undergraduate admissions as an O(n) problem.

As anyone who has worked in undergraduate admissions will tell you, it is far more complex than that. But when n grows prohibitively large, you have to go with solutions that are less than ideal.

My alma mater, thirty years ago, eschewed the traditional college application in favor of a more homebrew approach: since it was a small liberal arts college, it felt that the best way to see if a student was a fit for the college was to place him there for a span of a week or so: meeting with professors, faculty, taking a tour of the place, making sure things 'clicked'. He or she took an exam at the end of it, focused less on trying to define the student intellectually and more whether or not they were engaged with the college: there were quizzes on campus trivia (we're the second oldest college in the nation, and talk about our history incessantly), open-ended questions about what they liked, et cetera -- all designed to see if the student was really meant to be a part of the college.

This worked twofold: it let the admissions faculty see whether or not the student was really taking the experience seriously, and it let the student see whether or not they wanted to take it seriously.

(Why no math tests? When a professor spends a few hours with a prospective student, they can generally deduce whether or not they're smart enough to handle the rigor.)

Today, such a practice is impossible: the number of applicants has increased by at least 20x. There literally are not enough days in the calendar.

awakeasleep3• 13 years ago

Williams and Mary Represent

anon-cheater• 13 years ago

That is a great system, but unsustainable for the volume, you are right. As a non-cheater who has been blessed with a lot of academic success, this article upsets me so much. my academic success has been dearly earned and I feel like cheaters completely undermine my efforts. True, cheaters don't have the knowledge and maybe I am a step ahead of them, because I actually put in the effort. But still, it feels like someone stole a taxi medallion and I bought one.

ishansharma• 13 years ago

Same here! It feels bad when people think that cheating is a RIGHT!

I'm from India and 70% of people in my class think that cheating is fine. They'll copy assignments, cheat in tests and even exams. Though situation is not so bad here that people DEMAND for cheating but everything else is same.

I guess this is because of society and pressure. I don't know about China but in India, professions are like fashion. When doctors seem to be making money, there is a large portion of students wanting to be doctors and there is pressure from parents and society as a whole. Academic qualification is treated as the ONLY thing that one will be judged on and this also leads to parents stopping kids form going into sports, music and arts.

And poor kids who can't cope up with all this have to cheat.

calibraxis2• 13 years ago

I get the impression that these people are fighting for the right to have more decent lives and better schools. If so, organized cheating is a cost of the unequal system they live under.

Reminds me of Basho's chief architect (the Riak company), who advised at Ricon's closing keynote that you should lie and misrepresent yourself to anyplace doing interesting things, as he did at Apple (where he got to write a distributed filesystem), Akamai, etc.

Once in "the real world", we discover that corporations and governments routinely lie, cheat and steal. Because it's effective. Does anyone honestly think Steve Jobs was averse to sociopathic behavior, or went unrewarded for it? We live in institutions which reward such sheer winning over obeying rules. (Regardless whether those rules are important or terrible.) The people who make the rules themselves are subject to such pressures. The mass of cheaters here on HN simply are too wise to speak up and admit it.

I say that as someone who never cheated on a school test or homework. I don't begrudge those who did, because the mainstream educational systems are disgusting. I have no fear that a cheater will make my worklife hard, because that's what interviews are for. I'm more concerned about play-by-the-rules people who've stuck to conventional wisdom all their lives, and defer to bosses.

moonese• 13 years ago

Entrance exam is a big thing in China, it will determine one's future, and we all take it quite seriously. Cheating is reported every year, but not in large cities, and this is the first time that someone will 'fight' as their children will not being able to cheat. Comparing to the total number of students who take the exam, 9,120,000 this year, cheating is really really quite small, from my experience, I never heard of cheating around me for entrance exam; and we also feel very ridiculous for such thing could happen here in China.

fspeech2• 13 years ago

The dilemma here is that admission quota is by province, so there is incentive for municipalities to go easy so that local students gain more seats at the prestigious schools. In other words the local education bureaus administering the tests are not disinterested parties.

mynameishere• 13 years ago

If everyone cheats and they construct a pilot enforcement program that focuses on .1 percent of the population, of course it's unfair. The real solution is to drop the cheatable system altogether. You aren't going to fix universal corruption with baby steps.

lignuist• 13 years ago

This could mean a few years without graduates...

wtrk3• 13 years ago

Cheating is not endemic within the gaokao system because, as a testing regime, it's excessively vulnerable to cheating. It's not any more cheatable than the SAT, GREs, or other standardized entrance or aptitude exams.

Mainland Chinese society at all levels is thoroughly corrupt and its pretty much impossible to achieve what a reasonable observer would recognize as a materially successful life within the PRC without being actively involved in corruption.

Even simply to muddle along and live hand-to-mouth, content to have most of the doors to success either closed to them from the get-go or slammed in their face, a regular Mainland person has to turn a blind eye to a steady stream of illegal, unethical, and downright harmful behavior on the part of their peers.

That's a part of why (along with many other factors) many Mainland citizens are eager to emigrate to pretty much anywhere that's not the PRC.

Volpe9• 13 years ago

This feels like a massive over generalisation (given the size of china)... Any kind of evidence of this?

awakeasleep3• 13 years ago

Transmitter disguised as a pencil eraser

Let's not forget, resourcefulness is a greater predictor of success than raw intellectual ability.

pjscott2• 13 years ago

If all your friends are using pencil eraser radios, then how resourceful do you really have to be to use one too?

redbit3• 13 years ago

"We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."

I can't imagine how people can say it out their mouth. Just like when someone kill, due to fairness you kill too.

I am a Chinese, and I feel shame on this kind of Chinese logic. They use wording like fairness, human right not seek for proper, but their benefit, I have see too much ridiculous in my homeland.

icebraining2• 13 years ago

Well, I'm not Chinese, but I think they're right. Fairness requires impartiality, and they're being discriminated against. The solution should be to implement the anti-cheating measures everywhere, not just in a few schools.

leke3• 13 years ago

I think it's wrong for people to jump on the band wagon. It just adds to the problem instead of making it a minority thing which can be easier to deal with.

redbit3• 13 years ago

They want the schools allow them to cheat instead of fight for anti cheating system that's the most ridiculous point

gwern• 13 years ago

Fairness requires impartiality, and they're being discriminated against.
The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China's tough ''gaokao'' exams, winning a disproportionate number of places at the country's elite universities. Last year, the city was cautioned by the province's education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject.

miguelrochefort4• 13 years ago

What do you think of the "right to privacy"? Isn't it as ridiculous as a "right to cheating"? I mean, they're both dishonest ways to reach fairness.

redbit3• 13 years ago

I think they are misusing the word "fairness" fairness can have both size, all doing the same or all not doing it both we just usually prefer the wrong side as we know we are hard to change the mind of others

rorrr2• 13 years ago

Surprisingly, not The Onion.

kenster07• 13 years ago

1) Stephen Covey often talked about the "personality ethic" over the "character ethic." The set of ethics a society chooses will determine its future in the long-term. Charades cannot last forever.

2) The article didn't hesitate to conflate the events at this one school with the character of the entire country, which, given the disparate scale of the two, seems to be poor journalism. But then again, such articles have come to be expected nowadays.

maximem• 13 years ago

At this level, some might say "Cheating is an art", the more crafty and resourceful you get the more you'll go farther!

sly010• 13 years ago

This may be obvious, yet unmentioned in the article, but if you are a Chinese student, you can take this exam exacly once, and this is the one single number they will judge you on. Understandable if you are upset. Perhaps if no single exam would be so important and you were able to retake them whenever you want, there were less pressure for cheating. Our education and qualification systems are indeed unscalable. Are we in a need for a more granular and more subjective way of "quantifying" peoples achievement?

pron• 13 years ago

Stories likes this make life worth living! It's got irony, farce, class struggle, crushed dreams - everything human existence is made of.

I actually have a lot to say about it, but this great Baffler piece, Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard, says it best: http://thebaffler.com/past/adam_wheeler_went_to_harvard.

Then, I would add a snippet from this Thomas Frank article[1] in Harper's:

After all, what universities were selling then, and what they are selling today, is an extremely valuable commodity: entry into what sociologists call the professional managerial class. There’s a reason that Lexus LX 570 that almost ran you down in the crosswalk the other day had a harvard sticker neatly centered on its rear window. And it isn’t because the driver believes we would all profit from immersing ourselves in theories of intersectionality, or because of a lifelong attachment to Crimson field hockey. That sticker is there because Harvard is a crucial part of who that SUV driver is. A college degree from a prestigious school is the credential that matters most in American life, and growing college-enrollment figures suggest that an increasing number of Americans have figured this out.

[1] http://harpers.org/archive/2012/06/the-price-of-admission/ (subscribers only)

lucb1e• 13 years ago

Instead of calling it cheating, whynot describe objectively what they are doing and let us judge ourselves whether it's cheating? This article makes it sound obvious that everyone is using cell phones or other devices to communicate with people outside or with each other, but for all we know that was a single occurrence out of thousands of students. Too often articles like these turn out to tell only one side of the story, and I don't like it. It sounds too crazy that all Chinese students think cheating is fair; heck, it wouldn't be called cheating by them if they thought it was!

danpalmer2• 13 years ago

In the usual pre-exam instructions this year at university (in the UK) the invigilators made specific reference to network enabled watches as a prohibited item - I have a Pebble, as do a few of my friends, but not many students do in general.

One interesting thing I've noticed is with assignments we have strict anti-plagiarism checks which always seem to be emphasised for foreign students. We have quite a few students from China and India on our courses and it's almost like it's a special mention for them. Several times lecturers have made reference to different cultures having an expectation of plagiarism, and I've spoken to academics who say it is a very common thing from foreign students.

roy_x• 13 years ago

I am a native Chinese and I must say this is something considered very abnormal in China.

The college entrance examination is one of the most important exam hold in the whole country level. If anything happen in this exam, the governor whom in charge of the area will lose a lot of score in their KPI performance.

ttflee3• 13 years ago

Less important in this case, from my perspective, as the students are competing SPORTS and ARTS colleges/majors, which are always seen as categories that requires less solemn test scores on everything(, except for the talent in specific sports/arts, which is hard to test though).

My mother always watches Youth Singers Competition year after year on TV, where they draw random questions as 'overall quality' section. And you can tell many of the best youth singers in China are less competitive in literature, history and some common knowledge in science(, and some of them are even less competitive in answering questions in music theory/history).

I am not trying to generalize any conclusion about the cheating rate or something. I am just less inclined to believe that the media have already reported all the truth(, nothing but the truth). And it may not necessarily hint that other students who focus other majors like science, technology or business are cheating in the same level.

e3pi• 13 years ago

"...Mr Li had confiscated a mobile phone from his son and then refused a bribe to return the handset.

Cohen Bros' A Serious Man, deftly sounded this Asian custom as a passing grade bribe into a mixed-metaphor with 'Schrodinger's Cat', all the while quantum engineer uncle Arthur's Mentaculous, returns a fortune.

b0rsuk• 13 years ago

The article reads as if it was something from The Onion. It's funny, then you realize it's real, and it become scary.

I got a very similar vibe from "Journey Beyond Tomorrow" by Robert Sheckley. It's half SF, half satire, and very witty. The book chilled me a few times because I realized things he makes fun are happening around the world, just on a smaller scale (for example, people committing crimes in order to be sent to jail. Free food and shelter). When reading the book, I had to make breaks not because I was tired, but because it was like overdosing laughing gas.

samsolomon• 13 years ago

This is a perfect example of the problem with test scores. The test becomes a metric to game, and any actual learning is negated in the process.

msie• 13 years ago

I'm glad to see that there wasn't a comments thread on that story. It would have probably been filled with racist comments.

ttflee3• 13 years ago

Back in the days of the Great Cultural Revolution, students who handed in blank answer sheets were praised as 'white paper heroes'. Now, at least they are trying to write something rather than nothing.

redwood• 13 years ago

As a though experiment, what do you think Americans would do if the government banned SAT prep courses? I know this isn't exactly a parallel; but consider that in many ways those courses are a leg up for the with it and able families.. just as this racket sounds like it was.

rdouble2• 13 years ago

Nothing, because there are about a thousand colleges one can get into with dismal SAT scores.

gbraad• 13 years ago

This is about the 高考 (gaokao) or the university entrance exam. There are many discussions about this since ages. The parents in other provinces think it is unfair their child needs a higher score than those from Beijing; well, the cheating is one reason, but also the universities are paid by the taxpayers from Beijing. In short: This exam decides a lot about the students future... If they have a bad score, no good uni, no good future. After this, only money can help you get a way to buy you into education or a good future.

Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

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