5 ms·

If it can subsidize native students, it's not a bad thing, what's needed is an enviroment in which cheating and political manipulation can be freely called out.

• onetimemanytime 7y ago
  They need to start fresh, with no sacred cow when it comes to expenses. Universities have become so bloated is not even funny.
• smt88 7y ago
  I had the same attitude as you, but many of the wealthy, Chinese-raised students at my local (prestigious, private) university can't speak basic English. The school then has to choose to either fail the student or ignore their cheating. With a $250k incentive to choose the former, that's what they choose.
  • 8f2ab37a-ed6c 7y ago
    Has this been documented anywhere, by the way? You'd think that there would be more reporting around this topic.
    • Chris2048 7y ago
      reported by who?
      • HPsquared 7y ago
        Disgruntled parents/children, perhaps?
    • jbarham 7y ago
      https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/degrees-of-deception-promo/6398568 https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/degrees-of-deception-promo/6...
    • smt88 7y ago
      I have read articles about it, but it's very hard to Google for it. It would be hard to research, too, because the schools are complicit. They want these students to get their rubber-stamp diplomas for $250k+ and then leave the US. There would need to be some huge third-party investigation with subpoena powers over the schools to uncover all the fraud. So for now, it's anecdata that seems to ring true for anyone I talk to who gets near universities.
    • pnw_hazor 7y ago
      My brother in law is a CS professor at a US state university. Failing foreign students is highly discouraged even ones caught cheating. He has learned to not do it anymore.
      • ridv 7y ago
        Former TA here. I saw this happen several times with foreign students and domestic students. Maybe I could shed a little light on why this is this the case in most universities (mine was a public one in a large state for what it's worth). Failing someone on the grounds of cheating at the university where I attended was a huge time investment. If the student contested their failing grade, the professor/lecturer who was the accuser had to go with evidence and present it before an internal panel. The student would obviously be allowed to defend themselves. The outcome of the panel would rarely be in the favor of the accuser and against the student. The student would have to have been accused multiple times before the panel would take the complaint seriously. The punishment would end up being something like turning the failing grade into just one grade above failing. When you consider how much a lecture gets paid, and how little importance teaching is given for researchers, you begin to understand why lecturers/professors just hand out Ds and move on with their lives. The amount of times I caught people with MOSS[1] was too damn high. Never had anything come out of it so I stopped going the extra mile past sending the results to the person teaching the course. [1] https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/ https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/
        • pnw_hazor 7y ago
          My daughter has been TAing for undergrad intro-to-programming courses at her university (she is ugrad too). Her heart was broken more than once when she discovered how blatantly people she otherwise liked a lot would cheat. Initially it posed quite a dilemma for her since she had the power to give zeros for cheating, we determined the best course of action is to forward the evidence to the professor and forget about it.
  • beojan 7y ago
    > The school then has to choose to either fail the student or ignore their cheating. With a $250k incentive to choose the former, that's what they choose. Isn't the former exactly what they should be choosing?
    • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Not if they're a University; yes if they're a short-termist capitalist enterprise.
    • legolas2412 7y ago
      I guess they meant "latter"
      • smt88 7y ago
        Yes, thank you for the correction!
    • smt88 7y ago
      I meant that they choose the latter. As for what they "should" be choosing, I think the article hits on it: they should be running leaner operations that can survive without what is essentially a large scale diploma fraud operation, in which both the schools and foreign students are complicit.
  • catalogia 7y ago
    > Chinese-raised students at my local (prestigious, private) university can't speak basic English. The school then has to choose to either fail the student or ignore their cheating. The financial pressure to ignore their cheating makes sense to me, but it's not clear to me how that's related to language skills.
    • smt88 7y ago
      Sorry, there was an implied premise that I probably should have included. These US schools are teaching classes only in English, so the students' inability to speak, write, and (in some cases) read English means that they can't do the work. I've observed them brazenly cheating during tests by looking at other students' papers, but I think it's more common to hire English speakers who know Chinese to do the work for them. They fail some tests, sure, but they end up with C's overall and a diploma to take home. I actually had a classmate in college who ended up founding a successful business that exclusive connects American speakers of Chinese with wealthy students from China to write their essays and do their homework.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    • tristor 7y ago
      Because examinations they're passing and all the classes they're not attending are conducted entirely in English only. What I've observed happening in some places is that some specific schools are predominantly populated by rich international students from China and they pay someone else to attend classes and take their exams, or otherwise behave in cheating behavior to get the grade, but they themselves are not attending class or learning anything useful. It's a scam on both sides and it devalues the degrees.
• curiousgal 7y ago
  > cheating I see this getting discussed a lot but having studied in the US, Africa and Europe, let me tell you that the reason it seems like Chinese students cheat a lot is because Americans don't cheat. Cheating culture in countries like France for example is prevalent compared to to the US. So yeah, it's not really a Chinese thing, it's a non-American thing. Students in foreign countries are usually not representative of the ones back home.
  • throw_m239339 7y ago
    > Cheating culture in countries like France for example is prevalent compared to to the US There is no more a culture of cheating in France than there is in US, that's preposterous. I can't let you say something like that. On the other hand there is a culture of cheating in China, which you can't possibly put on the same level, the amount of cheating you claim there is in France and the fact that Chinese institutions do not care about cheating. If you get caught cheating in France you won't be allowed to pass any official exam, like a diploma, for 5 years. France takes cheating very seriously.
• fiblye 7y ago
  It'd be nice if it seemed like it was subsidizing anything, but university costs continue to balloon out of control.