7 ms·

Foreign Students Seen Cheating More Than Domestic Ones

54 points by jimsojim 10y ago

x5n1 10y ago
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- smt88 10y ago
  Original parent comment which has now been removed: > In software and programming it matters little if you cheat. It works or it's shit. It's easy to tell the difference. And it's pretty easy to fire interns or juniors, etc. Not only that but you don't really learn how to do jobs anyhow. Every single sentence in your comment is ludicrously false. > In software and programming it matters little if you cheat. What if you steal software from your old employer? What if you hack a competitor? What if you base your entire project on something that you can't legally use, and then you're sued? Outside the corporate/legal world, there are still areas where cheating is very harmful. Violating open-source licenses, pretending someone else's work is your own, etc. The open-source world works (when it does work) because of transparency and something like the honor system. Cheating matters a lot in software. > It works or it's shit. That is just complete, utter nonsense. There is a huge spectrum from "good" to "shit", and "working" begins near the "shit" end. > It's easy to tell the difference. If it were easy to tell the difference, you could just throw a junior developer into a management role. Lots of juniors have the people skills and organization skills to manage a small project, but they don't have the experience to know which practices are OK in the long-run and which practices aren't. Object-oriented programming is a great example. Many programmers in the FP camp think all OO programs are shit. Many of them took years to come to that conclusion. If it's so easy and clear-cut, why is there little agreement on what makes good software and what doesn't? > And it's pretty easy to fire interns or juniors, etc. Not in the US and most other developed countries. Firing people is risky and expensive. I worked for a company that was sued by an ex employee for a completely bullshit reason, and the company lost $400k in legal fees that they could never recover because the employee didn't have that kind of cash. > Not only that but you don't really learn how to do jobs anyhow. You don't learn how to write code for a living, but you do learn time management and people skills, which are much more important anyway. Most coding work at most companies only requires an average worker. Would it be better to have people with amazing skills doing 100% of the work? Yes, but there aren't enough of them. What differentiates all those average people is whether they work well on a team, how well they manage their time, and how well they learn. All those things are learned in college, and all of them are undermined by cheating.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
brianmcconnell 10y ago
Cue Donald Trump In 3...2...1
takshak 10y ago
Title should be "Foreign Student Seen 'Innovating' More Than Domestic Ones".
sul4bh 10y ago
Homework/project outsourcing is also rampant.
gleb 10y ago
The idea of academic cheating being bad is not a universal value. In Soviet K-12 it was more like in NASCAR - cool in moderation so long you don't get caught. Don't know about college. In fact there is no word for [academic] "cheating" in Russian. Wonder how it is in other cultures.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Anecdotal from my experience with international students: In my college most of them went back to their countries to work in their parents' or relatives' companies (sometimes). It seemed like getting a US degree was the important part, not learning the material. With a US degree, they got a ton of interviews and jobs where they learned on the job. I know for a fact my US degree would put me at a super high advantage back in my home country, even if I knew less than people there.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    > It seemed like getting a US degree was the important part, not learning the material I think this describes very many students of many backgrounds.
- return0 10y ago
  It doesn't need to be universal. It just had to match the expectations of people from university X. It would be better if every student cheated a little, rather than just some bad actors.
- zekevermillion 10y ago
  That is interesting. Maybe something to do with the relationship between people and "authority"? Certainly if you are not able to collude vs. the state in an authoritarian regime, you're not going to get very far.
- calibraxis 10y ago
  Good point. It should also tell us about the US's own highly bureaucratic, test driven educational culture. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/03/anti-intellectualism-terrorism-and-elections-in-contemporary-education-a-discussion-with-noam-chomsky/ http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/03/anti-intellectualism-... Dan Falcone: Yeah, I’ve seen this type of thinking before. The school that I’m in now is changing the department. It’s including more advanced placement test-driven subjects whereas it used to be a place where you could go to – Noam Chomsky: – Think about things. So we have people out to grab a business certificate from a big bureaucracy. (If that's what an "education" means now for many, because their job/compensation prospects are such a headache, I couldn't care less about most forms of cheating. It's not the problem to solve. Even people I know with fancy degrees have to put up with shitty workplaces.)
selectron 10y ago
Anecdotally as a TA this absolutely matches what I've seen. I think it is cultural combined with courses being much more difficult if you don't speak English well.
- enraged_camel 10y ago
  Not to mention there is much more pressure on foreign students to perform well academically, both due to their culture and due to the fact that their families often sacrifice a lot in order to provide them with the opportunity in the US.
- astav123 10y ago
  Back when I was a masters foreign student, I had ousted another foreign student who stole my assignment and submitted it as their own. But later I learned how their family had been in poverty and that his parents had done everything possible to get their son out to higher studies in the US and I felt really bad. Life's just more difficult for the average foreign student overall from the small sample space I experienced. That doesn't make it right but the values of right and wrong are somewhat skewed when it comes to survival.
  - argonaut 10y ago
    This would be relevant if foreign students were more likely to be poor than domestic students. But that's not the case. If anything, they are more likely to be better-off (the poor students, unless on a scholarship - which US public universities seldom give to international students, will study locally).
  - caseysoftware 10y ago
    Here's a fun aspect: At most schools, if you know of cheating and don't report it, it's a violation of their honor code which will get you punished. Whether it was "justified" cheating or not, it is cheating. Even if you don't want them to get in trouble, don't let yourself get screwed in the process.
    - 10y ago
bArray 10y ago
Five times more likely to cheat or five times more likely to get caught? I think this says more about a growing culture of people who take short-cuts than it does about people.
partycoder 10y ago
Or more likely to be inspected.
dcre 10y ago
This article spends way too much time on badly substantiated differences in cultural norms, and not nearly enough on the differences in incentives and skills between international and domestic students. English skill is an obvious one the article talks about, but along with that comes an understanding of what is likely to get caught by a professor. In other words, domestic students don't cheat as much not because they believe in norms against cheating but rather because they understand better that they will probably get caught, or they understand better how not to get caught (so they don't get caught). The article discusses incentives as well — the risk of getting sent back to China and never coming back — but fails to consider that that risk is precisely what might make getting good grades more important for foreign students than domestic ones. What I'm describing could be seen as a difference in cultural norms too, but there's a huge gap between not believing that you're cheating and not knowing how cheaters in America get caught.
- ljf 10y ago
  On a similar note, I can't find the study now but I've seen the pretty much all social stratas and races commit crimes at the same rate. It's just that 'we' care about policing and charging 'others' more than ourselves. As an example, heading East out of London the motorway is often heavy with speed cameras and often police cars (poorer end of London) . Heading West into the Cotswolds (the rich area) , there are few cameras and a high level of very fast speeding. But if you looked at a study it would appear that those from the 'poorer' areas committed more 'speed crime' as those are the only areas we are effectively policing. I wonder if those looking for cheating also start from the position that foreign pupils are more likely to cheat and therefore spend more time looking for cheating?
  - argonaut 10y ago
    This makes no sense. At a given university, foreign and domestic students go to the same university and take the same classes. At best, you might argue bias with foreign-sounding names, but that would be an extraordinary claim to make and would require extraordinary evidence to explain away a 5x difference in cheating.
usaphp 10y ago
In Russia 9 out of 10 students are cheating on exams, The vast majority of young people especially in smaller cities don't care about actual learning of a subject, most of them do it only for a degree. No wonder they continue doing the same when they came to USA
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- xo5050 10y ago
  the russian kids are probably not that much different from the american kids.
smt88 10y ago
I think it's very important to note that foreign students are not representative of immigrants as a whole. At many schools in the US, foreign students are not eligible for financial aid. The students who are able to attend school are often wealthy (sometimes extremely wealthy), and they're in the US to check a box. They come for the diploma and then return home to do... something. They care a lot less about actually learning anything than a student who actually needs the degree to get by in post-college life.
msoad 10y ago
If a native students finds it hard to graduate school she/he might drop out of collage but a foreign student who's struggling can't just drop out. Dropping out often means going back home as a giant failure. It's a much bigger pressure. I'm not saying it's fine if they cheat. I'm also not ignoring the cultural differences. This is just another way of seeing this phenomenon.
- impish19 10y ago
  I'm pleasantly surprised to see the audience on HN be aware and considerate of the socio-cultural differences. To add a few other points to the list - 1. The pressure is also to literally survive, and can sometimes extend to their families. It's not uncommon to find Indian students coming to the US to alleviate their families' financial condition by studying here and consequently getting a job here. A lot of times their families would have mortgaged their apartments/houses to get a loan to fund the education. I was such a student about 3 years ago. If I would have failed, not only would my parents not have an apartment anymore, but it would also be difficult for us to survive as a family (my parents earn very little). I realize this was a calculated risk and no one forced me(us) into it, but it was very pressuring regardless. 2. While cheating is frowned upon at a run-of-the-mill Indian university, it's not dealt with as severely as at American universities. Consequently it can be a little like you were careless enough to be jaywalking in a foreign country you're visiting and finding out they're going to imprison you for it later. 3. The immigration rules here don't help as well. You have a limited amount of time for which you can stay in the US after finishing up studies to find a job. Failing to find a job in that time results into having to go back. Sometimes you have to go back even if you found a job but didn't get through the H1 lottery. Let me firmly state that having said all of that, I don't condone this behavior, and am unreservedly against it. I'm just glad people here on HN already have additional perspective into why this happens and I'd just like to add to it since I feel I can.
  - freshyill 10y ago
    American universities are very upfront about their strict academic honesty policies, so it's not really analogous to jaywalking.
hackuser 10y ago
Regardless of the prominence of the source, this is xenophobic stereotyping. They are painting every person in a large, incredibly diverse group (at every school in the United States, and including every foreign student from every country in the world, Canada to Angola to China to Andorra!) with one broad brush. The headline itself is absurd, inflammatory sensationalism. They have little basis: The statistics are almost meaningless; averages don't represent correlation and massive aggregate numbers tell us nothing about any member of the population. For example, the average wealth of 999 bankrupt people and Bill Gates is $75 million, a number which tells us nothing about anyone in that group. I never thought I'd see something like this from the WSJ, or say that one of their stories should be removed from HN, but I flagged this one. (Admittedly there's a chance of something more substantive beyond the headline and pre-paywall paragraph I can read, but I still can't imagine anything can justify that headline or the inept use of statistics to justify it.) EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions on the web search (which I should have thought of). It turns up this headline too, in the Daily Caller; great job on spreading this story with your excellent journalism, WSJ: Foreign Students Five Times As Likely To Cheat In College
- pcr0 10y ago
  Click on the "web" link to get past the paywall.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    Thanks for the suggestion, but for some reason it didn't work.
- cshenton 10y ago
  Not to be overly critical, but there's an irony in you criticising the thoroughness of the methodology considering you only read a paragraph of the article. That said, this is probably a problem with paywalled articles on HN in general.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    I agree with everything you say, but I'm a commenter on Hacker News, not a journalist for one of the world's most influential publications. The standards are a little different.
toehead2000 10y ago
> averages don't represent correlation what does this even mean? > and massive aggregate numbers tell us nothing about any member of the population sounds like someone cheated their way through statistics class.
- dang 10y ago
  Please don't respond to a comment you think is wrong by getting personally nasty. That's worse than being wrong, and takes things further in an unwanted direction. Edit: Your comments have been breaking the HN guidelines egregiously and often. We ban accounts that do this, so please read the rules and follow them when commenting here. That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844948 and marked it off-topic.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
stuffedBelly 10y ago
personal story 1: Back then at college I was once a grader for a computer science course. I reported two students' projects that matched all too perfectly and turned out one student tricked another into giving the project as a "reference" and ended up copying the whole thing. My college has zero-tolerance policy towards any kind of cheating, therefore the cheating student was booted out. These two seemed to be close friends and it was probably devastating to their mutual trust and friendship, not to mention one's academic path was basically over due to the cheating incident. personal story 2: I took a CS course with a Matlab project as the final project. When it was close to the deadline many of my classmates including me got an email from our TA, at least the sender's name is our TA's name, saying that we needed to submit the project through email by midnight. Some of us grew suspicious that the sender's email address was a gmail account and did not end with ".edu", and the deadline never changed on the official course calendar. It turned out it was indeed someone that faked TA's identity and sent out those emails, since anyone who enrolled in the class can see their classmates' email addresses if shared. There were still some students who finished the project early and ended up emailing their project to that fake TA account. The perpetrator was never caught. (If you are from my university and majored in CS, you probably heard of this incident. It caused quite a bit of stir) As a former grader to many college courses, cheating involves a mix of both international and domestic students. If one's educational background does not stress the consequence of cheating, he/she is likely to cheat. In this case, some cultures do not really punish students for cheating aside from scolding. Also, giving some 5.1/100 or 1/100 ratio is pointless. Wait until you get your PhD and you will know academic dishonesty happens all the time regardless of where you are from. It's just some cheating is more clever than the other.
jernfrost 10y ago
As a former foreign student in the US, I take some offense at the generalization of all foreign students as cheating. Now I couldn't read more than the initial lines of the article since I didn't have an account, but judging from the comments here there was no distinction between the type of foreign students. In the name of political correctness I think one is generalizing across all foreign students, when there are wide varieties between the subgroups. I was a foreign student from Norway e.g. who studied with a lot of Indians. We have very little in common culturally and certainly with respects to the view on cheating. My impression was that cheating was endemic in India and while the Indians I knew were very nice people, they cheated an awfully lot. I simply don't think they viewed that as that bad of a thing to do. More than half I could actually see cheating through the exam. Others paid for homework. Of course we also had different incentives in that my life did not depend that much on my American exams. For many Indians it could make the difference between poverty or wealth.
- impish19 10y ago
  If you Google 'Foreign Students Seen Cheating More Than Domestic Ones' and click on the wsj link that appears on the results, you'll be able to see the entire article.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  As a former foreign student in a CS / CE degree in US, I don't take offense at all. A large proportion of students are from China. The article does focus more on those students. I think if you add India in the mix, that would overwhelm statistically all the other countries (South America, Africa, Europe etc). > I take some offense at the generalization of all foreign students as cheating. Where did you read that? Can you show the quote where it says "all foreign students are cheating". I couldn't find it directly, or implied. > when there are wide varieties between the subgroups. They are wide variaties. But surely you don't believe their is a proportional representation from all the countries (if there are 100 students, they'll be 10 from Norway, 10 from India, 10 from Bolivia 10, etc). You are from Norway, I was from Europe as well. On average most students would probably be from China and India though.
  - 10y ago
feigenbalue 10y ago
One of the reasons why cheating is rampant in India is because the examination system in most colleges is mind-numbing and uncreative. The intelligent students don't find an incentive in working hard for an examination based on a rote pattern, and the "smart" ones follow suit leading to a culture where honesty in examinations isn't important. I have seen a few of my Indian peers be able to appreciate the difference in the testing methods and change their attitude accordingly. But the "acting smart" mindset is set in far too deep in most of the students who just care about getting good grades. Having said that, I think improving the vetting procedure for the entry of international students is necessary; and sadly that does not seem to be in focus due to the revenue that students from foreign countries bring in.
- studentrob 10y ago
  > I think improving the vetting procedure for the entry of international students is necessary; and sadly that does not seem to be in focus due to the revenue that students from foreign countries bring in. Agreed. I think there's an opportunity for someone to come in and one-up the SAT or ACT with a better vetting procedure for international students.
programLyrique 10y ago
They are speaking mainly about cheating by Chinese students (and also Indian ones) in the article. No data about the other foreign students? [edit] Is it because Chinese and Indian students represent the bulk of foreign students in the US?
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > No data about the other foreign students? Because after those 2 major groups are accounted for, others are an insignificant proportion. Those minorities could be more honest than the domestic students, statistically it wouldn't matter much.
anotherhacker 10y ago
School teachers call it "cheating". Management calls it "cooperation". Our school system preps kids in a way that is different than how we work. Or at least the best way to work.
- freshyill 10y ago
  They have cooperation in schools too.
  - anotherhacker 10y ago
    Yes, and any progress they make at it is instantly destroyed by the notion of competition. There might be a lesson where students work together, but then they all take tests individually. Schools don't even know what they are doing. This should't be a surprise. It is a system. A system cannot understand itself.
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54 points by jimsojim 10y ago

x5n1 10y ago

smt88 10y ago
Original parent comment which has now been removed: > In software and programming it matters little if you cheat. It works or it's shit. It's easy to tell the difference. And it's pretty easy to fire interns or juniors, etc. Not only that but you don't really learn how to do jobs anyhow. Every single sentence in your comment is ludicrously false. > In software and programming it matters little if you cheat. What if you steal software from your old employer? What if you hack a competitor? What if you base your entire project on something that you can't legally use, and then you're sued? Outside the corporate/legal world, there are still areas where cheating is very harmful. Violating open-source licenses, pretending someone else's work is your own, etc. The open-source world works (when it does work) because of transparency and something like the honor system. Cheating matters a lot in software. > It works or it's shit. That is just complete, utter nonsense. There is a huge spectrum from "good" to "shit", and "working" begins near the "shit" end. > It's easy to tell the difference. If it were easy to tell the difference, you could just throw a junior developer into a management role. Lots of juniors have the people skills and organization skills to manage a small project, but they don't have the experience to know which practices are OK in the long-run and which practices aren't. Object-oriented programming is a great example. Many programmers in the FP camp think all OO programs are shit. Many of them took years to come to that conclusion. If it's so easy and clear-cut, why is there little agreement on what makes good software and what doesn't? > And it's pretty easy to fire interns or juniors, etc. Not in the US and most other developed countries. Firing people is risky and expensive. I worked for a company that was sued by an ex employee for a completely bullshit reason, and the company lost $400k in legal fees that they could never recover because the employee didn't have that kind of cash. > Not only that but you don't really learn how to do jobs anyhow. You don't learn how to write code for a living, but you do learn time management and people skills, which are much more important anyway. Most coding work at most companies only requires an average worker. Would it be better to have people with amazing skills doing 100% of the work? Yes, but there aren't enough of them. What differentiates all those average people is whether they work well on a team, how well they manage their time, and how well they learn. All those things are learned in college, and all of them are undermined by cheating.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

brianmcconnell 10y ago

Cue Donald Trump In 3...2...1

takshak 10y ago

Title should be "Foreign Student Seen 'Innovating' More Than Domestic Ones".

sul4bh 10y ago

Homework/project outsourcing is also rampant.

gleb 10y ago

The idea of academic cheating being bad is not a universal value. In Soviet K-12 it was more like in NASCAR - cool in moderation so long you don't get caught. Don't know about college. In fact there is no word for [academic] "cheating" in Russian. Wonder how it is in other cultures.

sotojuan 10y ago
Anecdotal from my experience with international students: In my college most of them went back to their countries to work in their parents' or relatives' companies (sometimes). It seemed like getting a US degree was the important part, not learning the material. With a US degree, they got a ton of interviews and jobs where they learned on the job. I know for a fact my US degree would put me at a super high advantage back in my home country, even if I knew less than people there.
- hackuser 10y ago
  > It seemed like getting a US degree was the important part, not learning the material I think this describes very many students of many backgrounds.
return0 10y ago
It doesn't need to be universal. It just had to match the expectations of people from university X. It would be better if every student cheated a little, rather than just some bad actors.
zekevermillion 10y ago
That is interesting. Maybe something to do with the relationship between people and "authority"? Certainly if you are not able to collude vs. the state in an authoritarian regime, you're not going to get very far.
calibraxis 10y ago
Good point. It should also tell us about the US's own highly bureaucratic, test driven educational culture. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/03/anti-intellectualism-terrorism-and-elections-in-contemporary-education-a-discussion-with-noam-chomsky/ http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/03/anti-intellectualism-... Dan Falcone: Yeah, I’ve seen this type of thinking before. The school that I’m in now is changing the department. It’s including more advanced placement test-driven subjects whereas it used to be a place where you could go to – Noam Chomsky: – Think about things. So we have people out to grab a business certificate from a big bureaucracy. (If that's what an "education" means now for many, because their job/compensation prospects are such a headache, I couldn't care less about most forms of cheating. It's not the problem to solve. Even people I know with fancy degrees have to put up with shitty workplaces.)

selectron 10y ago

Anecdotally as a TA this absolutely matches what I've seen. I think it is cultural combined with courses being much more difficult if you don't speak English well.

enraged_camel 10y ago
Not to mention there is much more pressure on foreign students to perform well academically, both due to their culture and due to the fact that their families often sacrifice a lot in order to provide them with the opportunity in the US.
astav123 10y ago
Back when I was a masters foreign student, I had ousted another foreign student who stole my assignment and submitted it as their own. But later I learned how their family had been in poverty and that his parents had done everything possible to get their son out to higher studies in the US and I felt really bad. Life's just more difficult for the average foreign student overall from the small sample space I experienced. That doesn't make it right but the values of right and wrong are somewhat skewed when it comes to survival.
- argonaut 10y ago
  This would be relevant if foreign students were more likely to be poor than domestic students. But that's not the case. If anything, they are more likely to be better-off (the poor students, unless on a scholarship - which US public universities seldom give to international students, will study locally).
- caseysoftware 10y ago
  Here's a fun aspect: At most schools, if you know of cheating and don't report it, it's a violation of their honor code which will get you punished. Whether it was "justified" cheating or not, it is cheating. Even if you don't want them to get in trouble, don't let yourself get screwed in the process.
  - 10y ago

bArray 10y ago

Five times more likely to cheat or five times more likely to get caught? I think this says more about a growing culture of people who take short-cuts than it does about people.

partycoder 10y ago

Or more likely to be inspected.

dcre 10y ago

This article spends way too much time on badly substantiated differences in cultural norms, and not nearly enough on the differences in incentives and skills between international and domestic students. English skill is an obvious one the article talks about, but along with that comes an understanding of what is likely to get caught by a professor. In other words, domestic students don't cheat as much not because they believe in norms against cheating but rather because they understand better that they will probably get caught, or they understand better how not to get caught (so they don't get caught). The article discusses incentives as well — the risk of getting sent back to China and never coming back — but fails to consider that that risk is precisely what might make getting good grades more important for foreign students than domestic ones. What I'm describing could be seen as a difference in cultural norms too, but there's a huge gap between not believing that you're cheating and not knowing how cheaters in America get caught.

ljf 10y ago
On a similar note, I can't find the study now but I've seen the pretty much all social stratas and races commit crimes at the same rate. It's just that 'we' care about policing and charging 'others' more than ourselves. As an example, heading East out of London the motorway is often heavy with speed cameras and often police cars (poorer end of London) . Heading West into the Cotswolds (the rich area) , there are few cameras and a high level of very fast speeding. But if you looked at a study it would appear that those from the 'poorer' areas committed more 'speed crime' as those are the only areas we are effectively policing. I wonder if those looking for cheating also start from the position that foreign pupils are more likely to cheat and therefore spend more time looking for cheating?
- argonaut 10y ago
  This makes no sense. At a given university, foreign and domestic students go to the same university and take the same classes. At best, you might argue bias with foreign-sounding names, but that would be an extraordinary claim to make and would require extraordinary evidence to explain away a 5x difference in cheating.

usaphp 10y ago

In Russia 9 out of 10 students are cheating on exams, The vast majority of young people especially in smaller cities don't care about actual learning of a subject, most of them do it only for a degree. No wonder they continue doing the same when they came to USA

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
xo5050 10y ago
the russian kids are probably not that much different from the american kids.

smt88 10y ago

I think it's very important to note that foreign students are not representative of immigrants as a whole. At many schools in the US, foreign students are not eligible for financial aid. The students who are able to attend school are often wealthy (sometimes extremely wealthy), and they're in the US to check a box. They come for the diploma and then return home to do... something. They care a lot less about actually learning anything than a student who actually needs the degree to get by in post-college life.

msoad 10y ago

If a native students finds it hard to graduate school she/he might drop out of collage but a foreign student who's struggling can't just drop out. Dropping out often means going back home as a giant failure. It's a much bigger pressure. I'm not saying it's fine if they cheat. I'm also not ignoring the cultural differences. This is just another way of seeing this phenomenon.

impish19 10y ago
I'm pleasantly surprised to see the audience on HN be aware and considerate of the socio-cultural differences. To add a few other points to the list - 1. The pressure is also to literally survive, and can sometimes extend to their families. It's not uncommon to find Indian students coming to the US to alleviate their families' financial condition by studying here and consequently getting a job here. A lot of times their families would have mortgaged their apartments/houses to get a loan to fund the education. I was such a student about 3 years ago. If I would have failed, not only would my parents not have an apartment anymore, but it would also be difficult for us to survive as a family (my parents earn very little). I realize this was a calculated risk and no one forced me(us) into it, but it was very pressuring regardless. 2. While cheating is frowned upon at a run-of-the-mill Indian university, it's not dealt with as severely as at American universities. Consequently it can be a little like you were careless enough to be jaywalking in a foreign country you're visiting and finding out they're going to imprison you for it later. 3. The immigration rules here don't help as well. You have a limited amount of time for which you can stay in the US after finishing up studies to find a job. Failing to find a job in that time results into having to go back. Sometimes you have to go back even if you found a job but didn't get through the H1 lottery. Let me firmly state that having said all of that, I don't condone this behavior, and am unreservedly against it. I'm just glad people here on HN already have additional perspective into why this happens and I'd just like to add to it since I feel I can.
- freshyill 10y ago
  American universities are very upfront about their strict academic honesty policies, so it's not really analogous to jaywalking.

hackuser 10y ago

Regardless of the prominence of the source, this is xenophobic stereotyping. They are painting every person in a large, incredibly diverse group (at every school in the United States, and including every foreign student from every country in the world, Canada to Angola to China to Andorra!) with one broad brush. The headline itself is absurd, inflammatory sensationalism. They have little basis: The statistics are almost meaningless; averages don't represent correlation and massive aggregate numbers tell us nothing about any member of the population. For example, the average wealth of 999 bankrupt people and Bill Gates is $75 million, a number which tells us nothing about anyone in that group. I never thought I'd see something like this from the WSJ, or say that one of their stories should be removed from HN, but I flagged this one. (Admittedly there's a chance of something more substantive beyond the headline and pre-paywall paragraph I can read, but I still can't imagine anything can justify that headline or the inept use of statistics to justify it.) EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions on the web search (which I should have thought of). It turns up this headline too, in the Daily Caller; great job on spreading this story with your excellent journalism, WSJ: Foreign Students Five Times As Likely To Cheat In College

pcr0 10y ago
Click on the "web" link to get past the paywall.
- hackuser 10y ago
  Thanks for the suggestion, but for some reason it didn't work.
cshenton 10y ago
Not to be overly critical, but there's an irony in you criticising the thoroughness of the methodology considering you only read a paragraph of the article. That said, this is probably a problem with paywalled articles on HN in general.
- hackuser 10y ago
  I agree with everything you say, but I'm a commenter on Hacker News, not a journalist for one of the world's most influential publications. The standards are a little different.

toehead2000 10y ago

> averages don't represent correlation what does this even mean? > and massive aggregate numbers tell us nothing about any member of the population sounds like someone cheated their way through statistics class.

dang 10y ago
Please don't respond to a comment you think is wrong by getting personally nasty. That's worse than being wrong, and takes things further in an unwanted direction. Edit: Your comments have been breaking the HN guidelines egregiously and often. We ban accounts that do this, so please read the rules and follow them when commenting here. That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844948 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844948 and marked it off-topic.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

stuffedBelly 10y ago

personal story 1: Back then at college I was once a grader for a computer science course. I reported two students' projects that matched all too perfectly and turned out one student tricked another into giving the project as a "reference" and ended up copying the whole thing. My college has zero-tolerance policy towards any kind of cheating, therefore the cheating student was booted out. These two seemed to be close friends and it was probably devastating to their mutual trust and friendship, not to mention one's academic path was basically over due to the cheating incident. personal story 2: I took a CS course with a Matlab project as the final project. When it was close to the deadline many of my classmates including me got an email from our TA, at least the sender's name is our TA's name, saying that we needed to submit the project through email by midnight. Some of us grew suspicious that the sender's email address was a gmail account and did not end with ".edu", and the deadline never changed on the official course calendar. It turned out it was indeed someone that faked TA's identity and sent out those emails, since anyone who enrolled in the class can see their classmates' email addresses if shared. There were still some students who finished the project early and ended up emailing their project to that fake TA account. The perpetrator was never caught. (If you are from my university and majored in CS, you probably heard of this incident. It caused quite a bit of stir) As a former grader to many college courses, cheating involves a mix of both international and domestic students. If one's educational background does not stress the consequence of cheating, he/she is likely to cheat. In this case, some cultures do not really punish students for cheating aside from scolding. Also, giving some 5.1/100 or 1/100 ratio is pointless. Wait until you get your PhD and you will know academic dishonesty happens all the time regardless of where you are from. It's just some cheating is more clever than the other.

jernfrost 10y ago

As a former foreign student in the US, I take some offense at the generalization of all foreign students as cheating. Now I couldn't read more than the initial lines of the article since I didn't have an account, but judging from the comments here there was no distinction between the type of foreign students. In the name of political correctness I think one is generalizing across all foreign students, when there are wide varieties between the subgroups. I was a foreign student from Norway e.g. who studied with a lot of Indians. We have very little in common culturally and certainly with respects to the view on cheating. My impression was that cheating was endemic in India and while the Indians I knew were very nice people, they cheated an awfully lot. I simply don't think they viewed that as that bad of a thing to do. More than half I could actually see cheating through the exam. Others paid for homework. Of course we also had different incentives in that my life did not depend that much on my American exams. For many Indians it could make the difference between poverty or wealth.

impish19 10y ago
If you Google 'Foreign Students Seen Cheating More Than Domestic Ones' and click on the wsj link that appears on the results, you'll be able to see the entire article.
rdtsc 10y ago
As a former foreign student in a CS / CE degree in US, I don't take offense at all. A large proportion of students are from China. The article does focus more on those students. I think if you add India in the mix, that would overwhelm statistically all the other countries (South America, Africa, Europe etc). > I take some offense at the generalization of all foreign students as cheating. Where did you read that? Can you show the quote where it says "all foreign students are cheating". I couldn't find it directly, or implied. > when there are wide varieties between the subgroups. They are wide variaties. But surely you don't believe their is a proportional representation from all the countries (if there are 100 students, they'll be 10 from Norway, 10 from India, 10 from Bolivia 10, etc). You are from Norway, I was from Europe as well. On average most students would probably be from China and India though.
- 10y ago

feigenbalue 10y ago

One of the reasons why cheating is rampant in India is because the examination system in most colleges is mind-numbing and uncreative. The intelligent students don't find an incentive in working hard for an examination based on a rote pattern, and the "smart" ones follow suit leading to a culture where honesty in examinations isn't important. I have seen a few of my Indian peers be able to appreciate the difference in the testing methods and change their attitude accordingly. But the "acting smart" mindset is set in far too deep in most of the students who just care about getting good grades. Having said that, I think improving the vetting procedure for the entry of international students is necessary; and sadly that does not seem to be in focus due to the revenue that students from foreign countries bring in.

studentrob 10y ago
> I think improving the vetting procedure for the entry of international students is necessary; and sadly that does not seem to be in focus due to the revenue that students from foreign countries bring in. Agreed. I think there's an opportunity for someone to come in and one-up the SAT or ACT with a better vetting procedure for international students.

programLyrique 10y ago

They are speaking mainly about cheating by Chinese students (and also Indian ones) in the article. No data about the other foreign students? [edit] Is it because Chinese and Indian students represent the bulk of foreign students in the US?

rdtsc 10y ago
> No data about the other foreign students? Because after those 2 major groups are accounted for, others are an insignificant proportion. Those minorities could be more honest than the domestic students, statistically it wouldn't matter much.

anotherhacker 10y ago

School teachers call it "cheating". Management calls it "cooperation". Our school system preps kids in a way that is different than how we work. Or at least the best way to work.

freshyill 10y ago
They have cooperation in schools too.
- anotherhacker 10y ago
  Yes, and any progress they make at it is instantly destroyed by the notion of competition. There might be a lesson where students work together, but then they all take tests individually. Schools don't even know what they are doing. This should't be a surprise. It is a system. A system cannot understand itself.

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