7 ms·

It's a spillover from the right wing reddits. Always starts with "it's in their culture" never mind that almost all of the Chinese expats are just hard working

It's a spillover from the right wing reddits. Always starts with "it's in their culture" never mind that almost all of the Chinese expats are just hard working normal humans. Their government might be effed up but it's a bit of a long jump to blame their culture

filoleg 7y ago
I don’t know, man. What i am about to say is anecdotal, but as someone who went through educational system (up until beginning of high school) in Russia, it was the same there. As soon as teacher left for a bathroom break in the middle of the class, there would always be a few students who spring up to the desk and search real quick for answer sheets for the upcoming exam or something like that. No one would call them out, because the students who try to find the materials were considered the righteous heroes risking being caught for the common good. After talking to my dad (who still lives there) recently, I only reinforced my opinion that it is definitely a cultural issue in Russia. I cannot speak for China specifically, but I don’t see why it cannot be the case there as well. P.S. It sucks I even feel the need to mention this, but I have zero affiliation or interest in anything even remotely right-wing.
- m0zg 7y ago
  I also don't know, man, but that sounds so un-Russian to me, I, as a Russian myself, am having trouble believing it. It wasn't like that 25-30 years ago. Nobody would call people out in general, because in Russian culture being a snitch is one of the worst thing you can be, but nobody would go as far as to rummage through teacher's papers. Cheating was pretty rampant in other ways: people would bring cheatsheets to exams (there's no such thing as "cheatsheets allowed" exams there, and exams are often stupid hard because people keep "passing" them somehow), rip off essays, etc, but teacher's stuff was out of reach at least.
  - choonway 7y ago
    from a lecturer's perspective - It's not a problem if students pass - it's a problem if everybody gets an 'A' and there was no way to differentiate the cohort. It's a problem if too many fail - you have people retaking subjects and you don't have enough lecturers for additional classes - there are new students coming through the pipeline. Consequently, a minimum pass is usually indicative of the 'end of the road' and go get a job. Your marks are adjusted to pass. Unless you never attended classes at all or didn't hand up coursework, you are unlikely to fail. If the exams were crazy hard... that's because it was a wrong solution to the problem.
    - m0zg 7y ago
      What I meant to say, there was a bit of an arms race going on, especially in higher education. The professors and teachers knew many (if not all) students were cheating, so they adjusted the difficulty accordingly, so that, as you point out, not everyone gets an A. I don't know if it's still going on. And I did have a few professors which considered it a problem if more than half of their class passed the first time they took the exam.
      - choonway 7y ago
        Such professors... have another reason for failing half the class... They have to fail a number of students so that his class size maintains the numbers to avoid unwanted attention from the administration. If let's say the normal class size was about 20, but you only get about 15 new students each semester, so you fail 5 of them (or more accounting for dropouts) to make up the numbers.
        m0zg 7y ago
        That's not how it worked in Russia at the time (don't know how it is now). You chose the profession to pursue, the curriculum was fixed and tailored to that profession. The side effect of this is class sizes were fixed, since everyone in the cohort studied the same things. In fact for my profession there were several parallel cohorts. We started out with about 100 people in total, and by graduation it was something like 30-35, the rest dropped out because shit's hard.
rayiner 7y ago
I find the “it’s their culture” thing inappropriate too. (Especially because it seems to be more a deliberate economic/political strategy.) But you’ve mentioned one of my pet peeves so I am going to weigh in. You can’t judge a country by its expats. The expats are, after all, the ones who left (or were driven out). They’re not representative. Really, there is something a little odd with them—what kind of person abandons their country and all their family ties and moves across the world? Typical people don’t do that. My dad is one of those people. He’s a by the book rule follower, and Bangladeshis typically are ... more flexible. It drove him crazy. Then when he got the chance, he packed up his family and pretty much never looked back.
- FullyFunctional 7y ago
  You have issue with a generalist "it's their culture" and in the same breath generalize about ex-pats? Do you perhaps see a problem with that?

filoleg 7y ago

I don’t know, man. What i am about to say is anecdotal, but as someone who went through educational system (up until beginning of high school) in Russia, it was the same there. As soon as teacher left for a bathroom break in the middle of the class, there would always be a few students who spring up to the desk and search real quick for answer sheets for the upcoming exam or something like that. No one would call them out, because the students who try to find the materials were considered the righteous heroes risking being caught for the common good. After talking to my dad (who still lives there) recently, I only reinforced my opinion that it is definitely a cultural issue in Russia. I cannot speak for China specifically, but I don’t see why it cannot be the case there as well. P.S. It sucks I even feel the need to mention this, but I have zero affiliation or interest in anything even remotely right-wing.

m0zg 7y ago
I also don't know, man, but that sounds so un-Russian to me, I, as a Russian myself, am having trouble believing it. It wasn't like that 25-30 years ago. Nobody would call people out in general, because in Russian culture being a snitch is one of the worst thing you can be, but nobody would go as far as to rummage through teacher's papers. Cheating was pretty rampant in other ways: people would bring cheatsheets to exams (there's no such thing as "cheatsheets allowed" exams there, and exams are often stupid hard because people keep "passing" them somehow), rip off essays, etc, but teacher's stuff was out of reach at least.
- choonway 7y ago
  from a lecturer's perspective - It's not a problem if students pass - it's a problem if everybody gets an 'A' and there was no way to differentiate the cohort. It's a problem if too many fail - you have people retaking subjects and you don't have enough lecturers for additional classes - there are new students coming through the pipeline. Consequently, a minimum pass is usually indicative of the 'end of the road' and go get a job. Your marks are adjusted to pass. Unless you never attended classes at all or didn't hand up coursework, you are unlikely to fail. If the exams were crazy hard... that's because it was a wrong solution to the problem.
  - m0zg 7y ago
    What I meant to say, there was a bit of an arms race going on, especially in higher education. The professors and teachers knew many (if not all) students were cheating, so they adjusted the difficulty accordingly, so that, as you point out, not everyone gets an A. I don't know if it's still going on. And I did have a few professors which considered it a problem if more than half of their class passed the first time they took the exam.
    - choonway 7y ago
      Such professors... have another reason for failing half the class... They have to fail a number of students so that his class size maintains the numbers to avoid unwanted attention from the administration. If let's say the normal class size was about 20, but you only get about 15 new students each semester, so you fail 5 of them (or more accounting for dropouts) to make up the numbers.
      - m0zg 7y ago
        That's not how it worked in Russia at the time (don't know how it is now). You chose the profession to pursue, the curriculum was fixed and tailored to that profession. The side effect of this is class sizes were fixed, since everyone in the cohort studied the same things. In fact for my profession there were several parallel cohorts. We started out with about 100 people in total, and by graduation it was something like 30-35, the rest dropped out because shit's hard.

rayiner 7y ago

I find the “it’s their culture” thing inappropriate too. (Especially because it seems to be more a deliberate economic/political strategy.) But you’ve mentioned one of my pet peeves so I am going to weigh in. You can’t judge a country by its expats. The expats are, after all, the ones who left (or were driven out). They’re not representative. Really, there is something a little odd with them—what kind of person abandons their country and all their family ties and moves across the world? Typical people don’t do that. My dad is one of those people. He’s a by the book rule follower, and Bangladeshis typically are ... more flexible. It drove him crazy. Then when he got the chance, he packed up his family and pretty much never looked back.

FullyFunctional 7y ago
You have issue with a generalist "it's their culture" and in the same breath generalize about ex-pats? Do you perhaps see a problem with that?