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Chinese Thesis Ghostwriting Scandal Reveals Huge Gray Market

138 points by ilamont 8y ago

RileyJames 8y ago
My friend makes a living writing these kinds of papers, primarily for Chinese students in Australian universities. He’s brilliant and can write on any subject (often the students provide notes / data, so it’s more about writing than topic knowledge). What annoys me is that this is rampant, and universities know it (or they’re intentionally being naive). But rather than crack down on those who are paying course fees, plus paying someone else to do their work. It would be nice if they put some effort into finding those who are actually writing all these papers and enabling them. Make them tutors, professors, ‘student assistants’, what ever. Some people will always cheat, who cares. In the end they cheat themselves, and it’s up to companies to screen people to ensure they actually have the capabilities they require. Rather than spend on removing the cheaters, spend on enabling the honest. Or even better, transfer directly from the cheaters to the honest, which is effectively what happens, but in the shadows. But for my friend, who is a perfect match for academia, this is his funding model. I hope one day he can be credited with all the papers he’s actually written.
- beerlord 8y ago
  Studying at University in Australia as an international student is not about the education, its about the immigration pathway it enables. Australia has something like 600,000 international students, second only to the USA, because all international students are immediately given a work visa, and then can permanently migrate to the country fairly easily at the end of the degree. Once you have PR you can access welfare and medicare, and can bring your whole family over eventually.
  - wodenokoto 8y ago
    Is this being downvoted because it is factually inaccurate? I think it's an interesting point.
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    Yep the whole thing is a total scam. My local Coles (Australian supermarket) is 100% staffed by overseas people who did a degree (mostly accounting from my informal questioning) here in Australia and who got PR via this degree.
    - wp381640 8y ago
      It isn't a scam if it is working exactly as intended It's a backdoor way into Australia that not many Australians know about and nobody rocks the boat on because everybody knows the country needs the migrants and investment. Ditto with the investment visas. Pretty crazy when at the same time everybody loses their minds over boats with a few hundred people on them
      - danieltillett 8y ago
        Australia does not need more migrants. Our entire economy is a Ponzi scheme based around immigration driving ever higher house prices. The more the major parties ignore this issue the more power it gives to those on the political extremes. The issue with the boats is it would not be a few hundred people for very long as the Europeans have found out over the last few years.
        woah 8y ago
        Maybe you need to build more houses? This kind of denial of reality and xenophobia is rampant in SF as well.
        danieltillett 8y ago
        We re building masses of houses. The problem is not the building of houses, but the not building of all the infrustructure required to support all the new residents - roads, schools, hospitals, public transport, sewerage, electricity, water, etc. It is not xenophobia to want to see responsible development where development only occurs when it is supported by the infrustucture. If we can't afford to build the infrustucture then don't create the housing.
  - sumedh 8y ago
    > and can bring your whole family over eventually. You have to pay 100K AUD for bringing your parents.
- wonthegame 8y ago
  They're not cheating just themselves. The impact of cheating is way more widespread than that. Often if one person cheats off of another student - they both suffer the consequences, if caught. Regardless of the other student(s) being aware someone cheated off of them. If you're doing group work and one person decides to plagiarize the entire group could be in serious trouble with the institution. It goes further too. It undermines the integrity of the school. Lets say that cheater gets by as you've suggested - now they're in the workforce and their boss realizes they're not very good. This doesn't reflect well on where they obtained their credentials. Worst is that they took a spot at a university that could have been given to a student that wanted to learn. You should also evaluate your friendship with this person. You want them to get credit but it annoys you with how rampant it is. I wouldn't associate with someone that was doing this on an ongoing basis. I'll bring up another reason why this is bad - your friend is writing papers while lacking the technical background of that topic. Sure he has notes and can research but this is not enough. There is a reason why reading webMD and self-diagnosing is not a completely creditable route. Sure your friend might be right, but they also could be wrong AND misguiding people that come across his papers.
  - RileyJames 8y ago
    In Australia at least, no spot was “taken”. As most of the cheaters are overseas full paying students, and there are near an unlimited number of those places available. (They cost big $$$, as other comments have stated, it’s a track to residency) But my point is more that, universities could look at the ‘problem’ and contain it internally rather than the current outside model. University students require some income to survive. Some students are not capable of completing the work required (or don’t want to). Some students are MORE than capable of completing their degree, on top of others. So pair them up. One on one tutoring, paring students who can’t with those that can. Then at least the students doing all the work get paid and recognised for their capabilities. Those that want a piece of paper can have it. Without this my friend (and other gifted students) end up working some mindless job for minimal pay to get through university. Who does that serve? If anything it takes an unskilled position away from the unskilled.
    - 8y ago
- danieltillett 8y ago
  As a former academic yes the universities know this is happening and apply great internal pressure to ensure it continues so the gravy train keeps going. It is a very bad idea for your career to try to do something about this by identifying the cheats. The hard sciences are pretty immune to it at the undergraduate level (we have exams), but it is totally rampant in the economics/commerce/arts facilities. Where the hard sciences have issues is at the postgraduate level where you are expected to ensure all your overseas students graduate even if they can't write in English and know next to nothing about the topic. After you have been through an incoherent thesis draft for the fourth time you know it is going to be quicker to just write it yourself.
  - bradleyjg 8y ago
    All models are broken. But if you model most organizations with perpetual boards, as universities do, as partnerships run for the benefit of senior administrators and in the case of universities a handful of powerful faculty you’ll find it’s a pretty good fit.
  - choonway 8y ago
    How did they get in the first place? You mean they managed to cheat their GRE as well?
    - danieltillett 8y ago
      Do you mean the postgraduate science students? That is a good question, but I can say of science Ph.D students if you come with a scholarship from your home country and can fog a mirror then the Australian universities will accept you. I should add that some of the best Ph.D students I have worked with were overseas students. It is not that all overseas students are bad, just that the bottom 25% are not capable of doing a Ph.D and yet we still give them a degree.
    - csa 8y ago
      Yes. There is a very healthy market for every major standardized test (GRE, GMAT, etc.) as well as most (all?) of the major English proficiency tests. Every security measure I have heard of for western testing within the PRC can be bribed around, and it’s so commonplace that it barely warrants discussion (“of course it happens [eyeroll]”. I have heard of a few US schools doing on-campus retests for English proficiency, but mismatches are simply met with required ESL courses (paid non-credit, of course). I have not heard of other on-campus testing, and I’m not sure anyone wants it since these students usually pay full tuition.
- yesenadam 8y ago
  So you don't think this is bad in any way? That your friend is behaving very unethically? That cheating is fine: Some people will always cheat, who cares. I'd rather the next doctor/surgeon I need didn't get someone else to write their uni work, thanks very much. Apart from that I don't want anything to do with anyone that unethical. It's sociopathic. In the end they cheat themselves You're most concerned about how their cheating affects the cheater?! my friend, who is a perfect match for academia I can't tell if you loathe both academia and your friend's ethics, or neither. Neither, it seems to me. Amazing. Did you cheat too? If not, why not? Or..It's OK because a lot of people do it?
- somebadguy 8y ago
  Your friend is a cunt and so are you. Pitiful loser thinking he’s edgy
- GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y ago
  It is very much the universities job to screen these people. They put out a credential that says a person learned such and such. If they do not learn anything, then that credential becomes worthless and the universities role is finished.
downrightmike 8y ago
This is sketchy and unfair to students that actually do the work. But apparently it is a cultural accepted thing to cheat blatantly in china. And Universities are more than likely going to do nothing to stop it because the tuition rate for international students has a much better profit margin than in-state students. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10132391/Riot-after-Chinese-teachers-try-to-stop-pupils-cheating.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/101323...
- bordercases 8y ago
  You would think that all of this non-learning going on would reflect in the reputation of Chinese labor in some HR network or another, along with other parts of the too-good-to-be-true Chinese economy. But maybe education is just overrated relative to OJT? Or maybe the cheapness of such labor flooding the market outweighs the demand for quality? Or nepotism? Or there's a cost to making such blanket statements publically even if they're "sound" in the "this is a good heuristic" sense?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- volgo 8y ago
  It's interesting blatant stereotypes about Asian and Asian Americans are thrown around like it's acceptable. Would you ever make statements like "it's cultural acceptable for black community to condone thefts and petty crimes, and politicians won't do anythign because it's inconvenient?" Just because statistics reveal a uptick for one group, does not make it acceptable for you to generalize. It's a racist remark, just so you understand the unconscious bias
  - ndnxhs 8y ago
    Its not just statistics. Its painfully obvious to anyone currently in uni. Every single person I have seen cheating has been Asian. And the teachers do nothing. Had one guy in my class get caught cheating for the 3rd time and still nothing has happened.
ggm 8y ago
My partner proofreads theses at an hourly rate well below market (students are broke. Predating on them at the closure of their study feels bad) and still can earn more than these quoted costs, fixing English language mistakes. Which makes me wonder how good the originals are, since it takes literally hours to correct semantic and syntactic confusions even by experienced domain-specific-language aware authors. (And yes, she has been asked to write from scratch for some clients and yes, she always declines) TL;DR USD1,000 seems too low for writing a doctoral thesis. You can barely proofread one adequately for this, sometimes.
- jpatokal 8y ago
  I presume the writers are not in the US. $1000 goes a long way in India or the Philippines.
  - ggm 8y ago
    Yes.. the paywalled article is from China. Thing is.. Chinese PhD and masters students are cashed up. The good ones studying overseas are my partners main clients, seeking help with english as a second language. These bad actors are paying for a Chinese thesis written inside China. Maybe competition keeps prices down.
- thrower123 8y ago
  Even at Ivy League universities, many native English speakers can't reliably write coherent paragraphs. Yes, it is mind-boggling, but this is my experience even in junior and senior level history seminars - and history majors have to read and write considerably more than many other majors, so presumably ought to be relatively practiced at writing by that point.
  - whitepoplar 8y ago
    I think part of the problem is that students feel pressured to write Academic English as opposed to regular English and they contort their thoughts in the process of doing so. It happened to me while I was in university and didn't know better.
scoom 8y ago
By and large if a paper is published from a Chinese University, you ignore it. Sounds like we should do that with the students as well.
- ggm 8y ago
  This would be illegal in many economies,is grossly unfair and probably racist. Plus, the rate of Chinese IPR and future knowledge is huge. Do you e.g. want to miss out on Chinese PV and wind and emerging battery know-how? Use the interview to weed out fakes. Don't make sweeping assumptions which risk self harm.
  - zeroname 8y ago
    > This would be illegal in many economies,is grossly unfair and probably racist. It's actually not illegal to not accept somebody based on them having a degree from a university of poor renown. It's called "qualification" and you can discriminate upon it all you want. It's also not unfair. Unfair would be accepting degrees from any place that hands out degrees like candy. It's also not racist, a lot of Chinese parents send their children to study abroad because they know Chinese universities suck. Those foreign degrees open up a lot of doors, both abroad and domestic. > Plus, the rate of Chinese IPR and future knowledge is huge. Do you e.g. want to miss out on Chinese PV and wind and emerging battery know-how? What's your point? Hire Chinese with junk degrees now so that you magically get to profit from future Chinese innovations?
    - gaius 8y ago
      a lot of Chinese parents send their children to study abroad because they know Chinese universities suck I'm told the value of a British degree, once highly prestigious, is rapidly declining in China due to the number of degree mills (ex-polys) we have here churning out degree certificates as fast as they can cash the tuition fee cheques.
  - scoom 8y ago
    > Use the interview to weed out fakes. My time is actually more valuable than this. There are signals available to them to show they take original work seriously and are bucking their cultural trends of cheating academia to get worthless degrees.
moltar 8y ago
News flash. This happens not only in China. It’s rampant in North America too. Source: I know someone who does this for loving. Plus there are a ton of services online advertising these services. Universities know this. They don’t care. They are just squeezing out the last juices from the dying industry.
- christophilus 8y ago
  Does this for loving? Prostitution is illegal in most of the US, at least.
- sago 8y ago
  > Universities ... are just squeezing out the last juices from the dying industry. I agreed up to this point. Can you say more what you mean? University education is a dying industry? What about the massive and growing legislative requirements for degrees in all kinds of occupations?
  - turtlecloud 8y ago
    I would say the advent of the internet has really changed how information is valued in society. Prior to this universities were places where critical thought and an discussion of new ideas could be formed. The current situation is that it is more like institutions whoring out their brand names instead of fostering minds (Harvard lol) In the past, the universities did well by mere fact of self selection since most people didn’t need college degrees to do well. Only the intellectually curious ventured in. What I imagine happening later is that things will turn more into a guild model. Where you must have a certain level of competence / reputation to join.
  - manfredo 8y ago
    This comment was probably specifically referring to universities specifically in the US.This is probably more specific to the US, where university was historically a means of socializing and networking for the sociopolitical elite and has since turned into an indicator of class or status. A lot of people are going into university because that's just what middle and upper class people do - a lack of a university education imparts a big cut in terms of status. Legislative requirements for degrees means that someone needs to study for 4 years (most of which will be on topics unrelated their job) otherwise they're locked out of employment options. People are forking over tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars mostly because society expects them to. I think more and more people are realizing that the benefit of a university education isn't very good for the cost. Don't get me wrong, it is a positive return on investment, but it could probably be better structured as a vocational school for most people. If my parents didn't pay for my education, I probably would have tried doing a coding school and going directly into the workforce. I learned a lot of cool stuff in university, and attending a prestigious school opened up many opportunities. But most of the former was irrelevant to my job, and the latter is basically just an elaborate means of signalling status (which, while it definitely helped me I fundamentally don't think it'd be fair to hire a university grad simply for being a university grad if a non-grad as the same or better skills).
ausjke 8y ago
Not just that, github is abused in china now, you pay and they will set up a repo for you, star it for you, so you can show your potential employer "your" github repo, it's a business operation now. There is another group of people that will take the phone interview and the remote online coding test for you until you get an onsite interview, since not all phone interview has video chat. That too helped quite some to get accepted into good companies eventually.
- xkcd-sucks 8y ago
  Yeah so do all these fucking bootcamp graduates who copypaste their classmates' code into new repos and star each other. Always ask the candidate to walk you through the repo line by line!
  - aldoushuxley001 8y ago
    > Always ask the candidate to walk you through the repo line by line! That seems a bit much, you're liable to scare away good talent that way.
    - Gustomaximus 8y ago
      Coudnt that be easily managed by saying: "Sorry about this but we've had some candidates passing others code as their own. So we've been asked to take all candidates through some code line by line. Such a pain but we have to do it unfortunately. Ill try and get through quickly. You dont mind do you?"
      - reitanqild 8y ago
        And if there is a need for follow up, some variation of "we quite clearly are interested in you and value your time since we spend actual engineer hours walking through your code. What would be disrespectful was if we ignored all your hard work and hired someone not half as good as you because they had more glowing reviews or more stars on their repos." Obviously I'm no hiring manager, but often a bit of honesty goes a long way.
07d046 8y ago
This is a problem from the top down. Even Xi Jinping's doctoral thesis contains plagiarism, and it's possible that the whole document was written by someone else. https://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/plagiarism-and-xi-jinping/ https://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/plagiarism-and-xi-jinp...
- baybal2 8y ago
  I'm amazed that somebody outside China picked that up! But yeah, that is symbolic of the cohort that Bo and Xi led. Jiang and Hu era was a period of a relative meritocracy, with such shit not being tolerated, or at least not highest levels. But yeah, being anticommunist while being a communist party general secretary wasn't likely to be a working arrangement. What an irony.
zeroname 8y ago
Mainland China has education all backwards, children get tons of pressure during primary and secondary education, to the point of them commiting suicide. Then, when it's about university education, it's all business. Parents pay good money for their children's "education", so they expect good grades. Universities compete for students, not the other way around. It's a racket.
baybal2 8y ago
My stance on that: ex-bloc countries have that¸ I tell you as one who did part of my high school in Russia. Weak students cheat, strong students cheat, and only few cranky principled oddballs reject the system and shout "Hey you, ex university prof, throw whatever you want at me, I'll solve it and shred it to pieces" - those being universally hated for "making life harder for everybody" My mom once had fun listening to shitty talks from parents of other students along the lines "hey, can you tell your boy to quiet down a bit, he raises the plank to high for the rest of the class" You can understand weak students' reasons: they simply can't do it otherwise. But why do strong ones cheat? That what dazzled me about Russians, and Russia in general. What that was is the gigantic, monstrous, totally pathological fear of failure that permeates country's "socially endowed classes." And secondary to that is the element of social pact: when pupils with excellent marks begin cheating and copying from one another, they begin to embrace the "omerta" created by this, sealing their social contract with their peers. Most rich, powerful people in Russia teach their children very intentionally to behave along the lines - get close and sycophantic with others privileged people. And you know, to infirm young minds, the reasoning that any privilege one gets in life is through joining some "exclusive social clubs" of other privileged people, is hard to challenge, especially when this comes from their parents. And after some time, their children become completely accustomed to not to taking upon any challenge straight, because they genuinely believe that even simplest things in life are not doable without tricks, cheats, and favours from other power powerful people. This is the culture in which social elites in Russia grow up. After being around mainlanders for 11 years while working in electronics, I feel it is very much the same for them. For both of above reasons, people from both nations are extremely afraid of challenge, and more so when you deal with people higher up on the social ladder.
- markvdb 8y ago
  Thank you for this comment. Useful analysis, even if a bit overly broad. One can only speculate how much for the former USSR this has to do with the trauma of the crazy nineties.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    Nineties has nothing to do with it, that's more of Brezhnev's doing, and some extend Stalin's. Whenever there is a talk of socially endowed classes, that pretty much means ex-communists, and officials' families. The amount of genuine self-made men who got to any level of prominence in society is so small, they never influenced the societal dynamics in any perceivable way. Such are still being looked at as if they are some kind of space aliens by regular people.
anonymous5133 8y ago
Like everything. These methods will work for a while until they won't. Employers aren't stupid. They will eventually catch on once enough people are doing it and then they will just be more aggressive in their the application process. Probably more on-site interviews. More computer based exams and so on that you can't cheat through.
bitxbit 8y ago
I don't really condone this but the world simply doesn't reward original work. This is particularly true in corporate world. The whole concept of Modern China is built on technology transfer so I don't know why we are so surprised to find that plagiarism is commonplace there. That said, it is not easy to come up with original thoughts and ideas especially in a world where it's become increasingly difficult to "think" in isolation.
nikkiofearth 8y ago
paywalled

138 points by ilamont 8y ago

My friend makes a living writing these kinds of papers, primarily for Chinese students in Australian universities. He’s brilliant and can write on any subject (often the students provide notes / data, so it’s more about writing than topic knowledge). What annoys me is that this is rampant, and universities know it (or they’re intentionally being naive). But rather than crack down on those who are paying course fees, plus paying someone else to do their work. It would be nice if they put some effort into finding those who are actually writing all these papers and enabling them. Make them tutors, professors, ‘student assistants’, what ever. Some people will always cheat, who cares. In the end they cheat themselves, and it’s up to companies to screen people to ensure they actually have the capabilities they require. Rather than spend on removing the cheaters, spend on enabling the honest. Or even better, transfer directly from the cheaters to the honest, which is effectively what happens, but in the shadows. But for my friend, who is a perfect match for academia, this is his funding model. I hope one day he can be credited with all the papers he’s actually written.

beerlord 8y ago
Studying at University in Australia as an international student is not about the education, its about the immigration pathway it enables. Australia has something like 600,000 international students, second only to the USA, because all international students are immediately given a work visa, and then can permanently migrate to the country fairly easily at the end of the degree. Once you have PR you can access welfare and medicare, and can bring your whole family over eventually.
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  Is this being downvoted because it is factually inaccurate? I think it's an interesting point.
- danieltillett 8y ago
  Yep the whole thing is a total scam. My local Coles (Australian supermarket) is 100% staffed by overseas people who did a degree (mostly accounting from my informal questioning) here in Australia and who got PR via this degree.
  - wp381640 8y ago
    It isn't a scam if it is working exactly as intended It's a backdoor way into Australia that not many Australians know about and nobody rocks the boat on because everybody knows the country needs the migrants and investment. Ditto with the investment visas. Pretty crazy when at the same time everybody loses their minds over boats with a few hundred people on them
    - danieltillett 8y ago
      Australia does not need more migrants. Our entire economy is a Ponzi scheme based around immigration driving ever higher house prices. The more the major parties ignore this issue the more power it gives to those on the political extremes. The issue with the boats is it would not be a few hundred people for very long as the Europeans have found out over the last few years.
      - woah 8y ago
        Maybe you need to build more houses? This kind of denial of reality and xenophobia is rampant in SF as well.
        danieltillett 8y ago
        We re building masses of houses. The problem is not the building of houses, but the not building of all the infrustructure required to support all the new residents - roads, schools, hospitals, public transport, sewerage, electricity, water, etc. It is not xenophobia to want to see responsible development where development only occurs when it is supported by the infrustucture. If we can't afford to build the infrustucture then don't create the housing.
- sumedh 8y ago
  > and can bring your whole family over eventually. You have to pay 100K AUD for bringing your parents.
wonthegame 8y ago
They're not cheating just themselves. The impact of cheating is way more widespread than that. Often if one person cheats off of another student - they both suffer the consequences, if caught. Regardless of the other student(s) being aware someone cheated off of them. If you're doing group work and one person decides to plagiarize the entire group could be in serious trouble with the institution. It goes further too. It undermines the integrity of the school. Lets say that cheater gets by as you've suggested - now they're in the workforce and their boss realizes they're not very good. This doesn't reflect well on where they obtained their credentials. Worst is that they took a spot at a university that could have been given to a student that wanted to learn. You should also evaluate your friendship with this person. You want them to get credit but it annoys you with how rampant it is. I wouldn't associate with someone that was doing this on an ongoing basis. I'll bring up another reason why this is bad - your friend is writing papers while lacking the technical background of that topic. Sure he has notes and can research but this is not enough. There is a reason why reading webMD and self-diagnosing is not a completely creditable route. Sure your friend might be right, but they also could be wrong AND misguiding people that come across his papers.
- RileyJames 8y ago
  In Australia at least, no spot was “taken”. As most of the cheaters are overseas full paying students, and there are near an unlimited number of those places available. (They cost big $$$, as other comments have stated, it’s a track to residency) But my point is more that, universities could look at the ‘problem’ and contain it internally rather than the current outside model. University students require some income to survive. Some students are not capable of completing the work required (or don’t want to). Some students are MORE than capable of completing their degree, on top of others. So pair them up. One on one tutoring, paring students who can’t with those that can. Then at least the students doing all the work get paid and recognised for their capabilities. Those that want a piece of paper can have it. Without this my friend (and other gifted students) end up working some mindless job for minimal pay to get through university. Who does that serve? If anything it takes an unskilled position away from the unskilled.
  - 8y ago
danieltillett 8y ago
As a former academic yes the universities know this is happening and apply great internal pressure to ensure it continues so the gravy train keeps going. It is a very bad idea for your career to try to do something about this by identifying the cheats. The hard sciences are pretty immune to it at the undergraduate level (we have exams), but it is totally rampant in the economics/commerce/arts facilities. Where the hard sciences have issues is at the postgraduate level where you are expected to ensure all your overseas students graduate even if they can't write in English and know next to nothing about the topic. After you have been through an incoherent thesis draft for the fourth time you know it is going to be quicker to just write it yourself.
- bradleyjg 8y ago
  All models are broken. But if you model most organizations with perpetual boards, as universities do, as partnerships run for the benefit of senior administrators and in the case of universities a handful of powerful faculty you’ll find it’s a pretty good fit.
- choonway 8y ago
  How did they get in the first place? You mean they managed to cheat their GRE as well?
  - danieltillett 8y ago
    Do you mean the postgraduate science students? That is a good question, but I can say of science Ph.D students if you come with a scholarship from your home country and can fog a mirror then the Australian universities will accept you. I should add that some of the best Ph.D students I have worked with were overseas students. It is not that all overseas students are bad, just that the bottom 25% are not capable of doing a Ph.D and yet we still give them a degree.
  - csa 8y ago
    Yes. There is a very healthy market for every major standardized test (GRE, GMAT, etc.) as well as most (all?) of the major English proficiency tests. Every security measure I have heard of for western testing within the PRC can be bribed around, and it’s so commonplace that it barely warrants discussion (“of course it happens [eyeroll]”. I have heard of a few US schools doing on-campus retests for English proficiency, but mismatches are simply met with required ESL courses (paid non-credit, of course). I have not heard of other on-campus testing, and I’m not sure anyone wants it since these students usually pay full tuition.
yesenadam 8y ago
So you don't think this is bad in any way? That your friend is behaving very unethically? That cheating is fine: Some people will always cheat, who cares. I'd rather the next doctor/surgeon I need didn't get someone else to write their uni work, thanks very much. Apart from that I don't want anything to do with anyone that unethical. It's sociopathic. In the end they cheat themselves You're most concerned about how their cheating affects the cheater?! my friend, who is a perfect match for academia I can't tell if you loathe both academia and your friend's ethics, or neither. Neither, it seems to me. Amazing. Did you cheat too? If not, why not? Or..It's OK because a lot of people do it?
somebadguy 8y ago
Your friend is a cunt and so are you. Pitiful loser thinking he’s edgy
GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y ago
It is very much the universities job to screen these people. They put out a credential that says a person learned such and such. If they do not learn anything, then that credential becomes worthless and the universities role is finished.

downrightmike 8y ago

This is sketchy and unfair to students that actually do the work. But apparently it is a cultural accepted thing to cheat blatantly in china. And Universities are more than likely going to do nothing to stop it because the tuition rate for international students has a much better profit margin than in-state students. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/10132391/Riot-after-Chinese-teachers-try-to-stop-pupils-cheating.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/101323...

bordercases 8y ago
You would think that all of this non-learning going on would reflect in the reputation of Chinese labor in some HR network or another, along with other parts of the too-good-to-be-true Chinese economy. But maybe education is just overrated relative to OJT? Or maybe the cheapness of such labor flooding the market outweighs the demand for quality? Or nepotism? Or there's a cost to making such blanket statements publically even if they're "sound" in the "this is a good heuristic" sense?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
volgo 8y ago
It's interesting blatant stereotypes about Asian and Asian Americans are thrown around like it's acceptable. Would you ever make statements like "it's cultural acceptable for black community to condone thefts and petty crimes, and politicians won't do anythign because it's inconvenient?" Just because statistics reveal a uptick for one group, does not make it acceptable for you to generalize. It's a racist remark, just so you understand the unconscious bias
- ndnxhs 8y ago
  Its not just statistics. Its painfully obvious to anyone currently in uni. Every single person I have seen cheating has been Asian. And the teachers do nothing. Had one guy in my class get caught cheating for the 3rd time and still nothing has happened.

ggm 8y ago

My partner proofreads theses at an hourly rate well below market (students are broke. Predating on them at the closure of their study feels bad) and still can earn more than these quoted costs, fixing English language mistakes. Which makes me wonder how good the originals are, since it takes literally hours to correct semantic and syntactic confusions even by experienced domain-specific-language aware authors. (And yes, she has been asked to write from scratch for some clients and yes, she always declines) TL;DR USD1,000 seems too low for writing a doctoral thesis. You can barely proofread one adequately for this, sometimes.

jpatokal 8y ago
I presume the writers are not in the US. $1000 goes a long way in India or the Philippines.
- ggm 8y ago
  Yes.. the paywalled article is from China. Thing is.. Chinese PhD and masters students are cashed up. The good ones studying overseas are my partners main clients, seeking help with english as a second language. These bad actors are paying for a Chinese thesis written inside China. Maybe competition keeps prices down.
thrower123 8y ago
Even at Ivy League universities, many native English speakers can't reliably write coherent paragraphs. Yes, it is mind-boggling, but this is my experience even in junior and senior level history seminars - and history majors have to read and write considerably more than many other majors, so presumably ought to be relatively practiced at writing by that point.
- whitepoplar 8y ago
  I think part of the problem is that students feel pressured to write Academic English as opposed to regular English and they contort their thoughts in the process of doing so. It happened to me while I was in university and didn't know better.

scoom 8y ago

By and large if a paper is published from a Chinese University, you ignore it. Sounds like we should do that with the students as well.

ggm 8y ago
This would be illegal in many economies,is grossly unfair and probably racist. Plus, the rate of Chinese IPR and future knowledge is huge. Do you e.g. want to miss out on Chinese PV and wind and emerging battery know-how? Use the interview to weed out fakes. Don't make sweeping assumptions which risk self harm.
- zeroname 8y ago
  > This would be illegal in many economies,is grossly unfair and probably racist. It's actually not illegal to not accept somebody based on them having a degree from a university of poor renown. It's called "qualification" and you can discriminate upon it all you want. It's also not unfair. Unfair would be accepting degrees from any place that hands out degrees like candy. It's also not racist, a lot of Chinese parents send their children to study abroad because they know Chinese universities suck. Those foreign degrees open up a lot of doors, both abroad and domestic. > Plus, the rate of Chinese IPR and future knowledge is huge. Do you e.g. want to miss out on Chinese PV and wind and emerging battery know-how? What's your point? Hire Chinese with junk degrees now so that you magically get to profit from future Chinese innovations?
  - gaius 8y ago
    a lot of Chinese parents send their children to study abroad because they know Chinese universities suck I'm told the value of a British degree, once highly prestigious, is rapidly declining in China due to the number of degree mills (ex-polys) we have here churning out degree certificates as fast as they can cash the tuition fee cheques.
- scoom 8y ago
  > Use the interview to weed out fakes. My time is actually more valuable than this. There are signals available to them to show they take original work seriously and are bucking their cultural trends of cheating academia to get worthless degrees.

moltar 8y ago

News flash. This happens not only in China. It’s rampant in North America too. Source: I know someone who does this for loving. Plus there are a ton of services online advertising these services. Universities know this. They don’t care. They are just squeezing out the last juices from the dying industry.

christophilus 8y ago
Does this for loving? Prostitution is illegal in most of the US, at least.
sago 8y ago
> Universities ... are just squeezing out the last juices from the dying industry. I agreed up to this point. Can you say more what you mean? University education is a dying industry? What about the massive and growing legislative requirements for degrees in all kinds of occupations?
- turtlecloud 8y ago
  I would say the advent of the internet has really changed how information is valued in society. Prior to this universities were places where critical thought and an discussion of new ideas could be formed. The current situation is that it is more like institutions whoring out their brand names instead of fostering minds (Harvard lol) In the past, the universities did well by mere fact of self selection since most people didn’t need college degrees to do well. Only the intellectually curious ventured in. What I imagine happening later is that things will turn more into a guild model. Where you must have a certain level of competence / reputation to join.
- manfredo 8y ago
  This comment was probably specifically referring to universities specifically in the US.This is probably more specific to the US, where university was historically a means of socializing and networking for the sociopolitical elite and has since turned into an indicator of class or status. A lot of people are going into university because that's just what middle and upper class people do - a lack of a university education imparts a big cut in terms of status. Legislative requirements for degrees means that someone needs to study for 4 years (most of which will be on topics unrelated their job) otherwise they're locked out of employment options. People are forking over tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars mostly because society expects them to. I think more and more people are realizing that the benefit of a university education isn't very good for the cost. Don't get me wrong, it is a positive return on investment, but it could probably be better structured as a vocational school for most people. If my parents didn't pay for my education, I probably would have tried doing a coding school and going directly into the workforce. I learned a lot of cool stuff in university, and attending a prestigious school opened up many opportunities. But most of the former was irrelevant to my job, and the latter is basically just an elaborate means of signalling status (which, while it definitely helped me I fundamentally don't think it'd be fair to hire a university grad simply for being a university grad if a non-grad as the same or better skills).

ausjke 8y ago

Not just that, github is abused in china now, you pay and they will set up a repo for you, star it for you, so you can show your potential employer "your" github repo, it's a business operation now. There is another group of people that will take the phone interview and the remote online coding test for you until you get an onsite interview, since not all phone interview has video chat. That too helped quite some to get accepted into good companies eventually.

xkcd-sucks 8y ago
Yeah so do all these fucking bootcamp graduates who copypaste their classmates' code into new repos and star each other. Always ask the candidate to walk you through the repo line by line!
- aldoushuxley001 8y ago
  > Always ask the candidate to walk you through the repo line by line! That seems a bit much, you're liable to scare away good talent that way.
  - Gustomaximus 8y ago
    Coudnt that be easily managed by saying: "Sorry about this but we've had some candidates passing others code as their own. So we've been asked to take all candidates through some code line by line. Such a pain but we have to do it unfortunately. Ill try and get through quickly. You dont mind do you?"
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      And if there is a need for follow up, some variation of "we quite clearly are interested in you and value your time since we spend actual engineer hours walking through your code. What would be disrespectful was if we ignored all your hard work and hired someone not half as good as you because they had more glowing reviews or more stars on their repos." Obviously I'm no hiring manager, but often a bit of honesty goes a long way.

07d046 8y ago

This is a problem from the top down. Even Xi Jinping's doctoral thesis contains plagiarism, and it's possible that the whole document was written by someone else. https://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/plagiarism-and-xi-jinping/ https://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/plagiarism-and-xi-jinp...

baybal2 8y ago
I'm amazed that somebody outside China picked that up! But yeah, that is symbolic of the cohort that Bo and Xi led. Jiang and Hu era was a period of a relative meritocracy, with such shit not being tolerated, or at least not highest levels. But yeah, being anticommunist while being a communist party general secretary wasn't likely to be a working arrangement. What an irony.

zeroname 8y ago

Mainland China has education all backwards, children get tons of pressure during primary and secondary education, to the point of them commiting suicide. Then, when it's about university education, it's all business. Parents pay good money for their children's "education", so they expect good grades. Universities compete for students, not the other way around. It's a racket.

baybal2 8y ago

My stance on that: ex-bloc countries have that¸ I tell you as one who did part of my high school in Russia. Weak students cheat, strong students cheat, and only few cranky principled oddballs reject the system and shout "Hey you, ex university prof, throw whatever you want at me, I'll solve it and shred it to pieces" - those being universally hated for "making life harder for everybody" My mom once had fun listening to shitty talks from parents of other students along the lines "hey, can you tell your boy to quiet down a bit, he raises the plank to high for the rest of the class" You can understand weak students' reasons: they simply can't do it otherwise. But why do strong ones cheat? That what dazzled me about Russians, and Russia in general. What that was is the gigantic, monstrous, totally pathological fear of failure that permeates country's "socially endowed classes." And secondary to that is the element of social pact: when pupils with excellent marks begin cheating and copying from one another, they begin to embrace the "omerta" created by this, sealing their social contract with their peers. Most rich, powerful people in Russia teach their children very intentionally to behave along the lines - get close and sycophantic with others privileged people. And you know, to infirm young minds, the reasoning that any privilege one gets in life is through joining some "exclusive social clubs" of other privileged people, is hard to challenge, especially when this comes from their parents. And after some time, their children become completely accustomed to not to taking upon any challenge straight, because they genuinely believe that even simplest things in life are not doable without tricks, cheats, and favours from other power powerful people. This is the culture in which social elites in Russia grow up. After being around mainlanders for 11 years while working in electronics, I feel it is very much the same for them. For both of above reasons, people from both nations are extremely afraid of challenge, and more so when you deal with people higher up on the social ladder.

markvdb 8y ago
Thank you for this comment. Useful analysis, even if a bit overly broad. One can only speculate how much for the former USSR this has to do with the trauma of the crazy nineties.
- baybal2 8y ago
  Nineties has nothing to do with it, that's more of Brezhnev's doing, and some extend Stalin's. Whenever there is a talk of socially endowed classes, that pretty much means ex-communists, and officials' families. The amount of genuine self-made men who got to any level of prominence in society is so small, they never influenced the societal dynamics in any perceivable way. Such are still being looked at as if they are some kind of space aliens by regular people.

anonymous5133 8y ago

Like everything. These methods will work for a while until they won't. Employers aren't stupid. They will eventually catch on once enough people are doing it and then they will just be more aggressive in their the application process. Probably more on-site interviews. More computer based exams and so on that you can't cheat through.

bitxbit 8y ago

I don't really condone this but the world simply doesn't reward original work. This is particularly true in corporate world. The whole concept of Modern China is built on technology transfer so I don't know why we are so surprised to find that plagiarism is commonplace there. That said, it is not easy to come up with original thoughts and ideas especially in a world where it's become increasingly difficult to "think" in isolation.

nikkiofearth 8y ago

paywalled