8 ms·

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 wit

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.

ljf 10y ago
Extraordinary? http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/02/16/study-finds-investor-bias-against-foreign-sounding-names/ http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/02/16/study-finds-invest... http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/oct/18/racism-discrimination-employment-undercover http://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/oct/18/racism-discrimi... And again that is 5x more discovered cheating, what number of cheating occurred undiscovered for all groups? I'm not saying people don't cheat, because they do, I'm saying look at the environment to understand what other impacts on the number might occur.
- argonaut 10y ago
  One will note that you didn't respond to my first point, which is that your actual argument (about unequal resources devoted to policing cheating) is wrong. So if you are going to argue the point that there is bias against foreign-sounding names, enough bias to explain a 5x gap, you'll need more than roundabout inference and implication. Extraordinary evidence means direct evidence, not links to employment-related articles.
x0x0 10y ago
Or it's ease of detection. Viz repetition between students in written assignments of characteristic ESL mistakes that are glaring to native speakers. Where I went to school, for each CS course (eg algos 201, 301, etc) all programming homework was submitted with a department run submission utility. After submission, all programs for all time were compared for cheating. My guess is they did some basic comparisons of the AST. The CS department produced well over 10x the cases of academic fraud as the rest of the college. We got lectured each and every semester about it. There were even locked disposal boxes in the CS labs to dispose of printouts; I got busted for cheating one semester because someone had stolen a printout I'd used to figure out bugs in an algorithm and copied the code! Fortunately, the other student had been caught cheating repeatedly and his programs regularly failed to work while I'd never come close and my program worked. The professor gave me the benefit of the doubt. However, do I really believe CS produced 10x the cheaters? Of course not. They were just easier to detect. That said, I was stunned at the amount of cheating in graduate courses. One professor teaching math stats was in the habit of posting distributions for each question on the tests. For a particular question, the distribution was bimodal -- I was one of two people in the middle, and the rest of the ~30 students got nearly 0 points or full credit. The question rested on a really neat integral trick, but if you didn't see it (on a timed test), or used the obvious substitution, it was about two pages of work. If you saw the trick, the problem fell apart. I had been helping one of the students who got full credit for that question with her homework and her calculus was not her strong point. There were ex-physics students in the class who had won integration contests and I kind of expected them to get a trick like this, but not her. So I privately asked her how the hell she got that question. It turned out she had already seen the test -- the 15-ish Chinese kids in my class passed tests down between years, and the professor just twiddled numbers in them instead of rewriting tests. My solution, since I was graded on a curve with them, was to make sure I got to see the tests too. I'm not really sure if I'm proud of that, but you can't be graded on a curve when half the class sees the tests ahead of time.

ljf 10y ago

Extraordinary? http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/02/16/study-finds-investor-bias-against-foreign-sounding-names/ http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/02/16/study-finds-invest... http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html http://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/oct/18/racism-discrimination-employment-undercover http://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/oct/18/racism-discrimi... And again that is 5x more discovered cheating, what number of cheating occurred undiscovered for all groups? I'm not saying people don't cheat, because they do, I'm saying look at the environment to understand what other impacts on the number might occur.

argonaut 10y ago
One will note that you didn't respond to my first point, which is that your actual argument (about unequal resources devoted to policing cheating) is wrong. So if you are going to argue the point that there is bias against foreign-sounding names, enough bias to explain a 5x gap, you'll need more than roundabout inference and implication. Extraordinary evidence means direct evidence, not links to employment-related articles.

x0x0 10y ago

Or it's ease of detection. Viz repetition between students in written assignments of characteristic ESL mistakes that are glaring to native speakers. Where I went to school, for each CS course (eg algos 201, 301, etc) all programming homework was submitted with a department run submission utility. After submission, all programs for all time were compared for cheating. My guess is they did some basic comparisons of the AST. The CS department produced well over 10x the cases of academic fraud as the rest of the college. We got lectured each and every semester about it. There were even locked disposal boxes in the CS labs to dispose of printouts; I got busted for cheating one semester because someone had stolen a printout I'd used to figure out bugs in an algorithm and copied the code! Fortunately, the other student had been caught cheating repeatedly and his programs regularly failed to work while I'd never come close and my program worked. The professor gave me the benefit of the doubt. However, do I really believe CS produced 10x the cheaters? Of course not. They were just easier to detect. That said, I was stunned at the amount of cheating in graduate courses. One professor teaching math stats was in the habit of posting distributions for each question on the tests. For a particular question, the distribution was bimodal -- I was one of two people in the middle, and the rest of the ~30 students got nearly 0 points or full credit. The question rested on a really neat integral trick, but if you didn't see it (on a timed test), or used the obvious substitution, it was about two pages of work. If you saw the trick, the problem fell apart. I had been helping one of the students who got full credit for that question with her homework and her calculus was not her strong point. There were ex-physics students in the class who had won integration contests and I kind of expected them to get a trick like this, but not her. So I privately asked her how the hell she got that question. It turned out she had already seen the test -- the 15-ish Chinese kids in my class passed tests down between years, and the professor just twiddled numbers in them instead of rewriting tests. My solution, since I was graded on a curve with them, was to make sure I got to see the tests too. I'm not really sure if I'm proud of that, but you can't be graded on a curve when half the class sees the tests ahead of time.