11 ms·

Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

207 points by DanielRibeiro 13y ago

dmoy 13y ago
This is going to take a long time to change for the better. My Chinese friends who don't cheat because they actually want to learn stuff definitely complain a lot about the rampant cheating. If you want to get into and finish Uni completely legit, you have to work way, way harder than everyone else :\ And you will end up doing worse than people who cheated and got away with it, just have to suck it up. There's a lot of inertia to solving it, and it's very hard to do across the board. For Uni entrance, there's ~10 million+ people taking the exam every year - that prevents a lot of non-exam based solutions to "who do we let into Uni?" I do not envy the position of the people in charge of all of this :(
- lsc 13y ago
  Wow. You realize that this world where people care enough about school to put in that much effort is /completely foreign/ to me, right? Personally, I think the school system I came from, where nobody cares is in bigger trouble than the system where cheating is endemic.
  - JulianMorrison 13y ago
    They still don't care about school. They care about not being weeded from the pile of resumes because they didn't have "the right grade" - which they got by a pantomime that superficially resembled school. As a system it's highly optimized to select candidates who'll "go along to get along".
    - lsc 13y ago
      >As a system it's highly optimized to select candidates who'll "go along to get along". Yeah, but isn't that a big part of what school teaches, though? It's an important skill, too. If you want to get a good grade on that paper, you've gotta read the professor and figure out what they are expecting, and give it to them. That's an important skill. I mean, what school doesn't teach is that you can also choose who you want to please; different people want different things, so if you want to be one way, well, you just find a boss/partner/whatever that wants you to do the things you want to do. school doesn't cover that.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  I am not coming from a perspective that has inherent insight into this, but this all seems very strange to me. It seems to me that only the top [whatever] percent of a population is going to be able to get into a class of school of their choosing, and only a top [whatever] percent of those admitted to those schools are going to successfully graduate. Now, China's population is unfathomably large, so that means way more people are going to be rejected or fail to graduate. On the other hand, it also means way more people are going to be accepted and graduate. 10x the population should mean 10x the rejected people, but it should also mean 10x the accepted and 10x the graduated, right? I don't really see why a larger population should mean that cheating is incentivized more, unless the real problem is an undersupply (proportionately) of education. Now, if lack of education positions is the real problem, then cheating isn't a solution to that; rampant cheating just changes the equation from "top [whatever] get accepted" to "top [whatever] at cheating get accepted". But do those who don't meet "top [whatever]" in a large population have more incentive to cheat than those who don't meet "top [whatever]" in a small population? I don't see why. The incentives should be the same in either a large or a small population, right?
  - burntsushi 13y ago
    > I don't really see why a larger population should mean that cheating is incentivized more, unless the real problem is an undersupply (proportionately) of education. I interpreted dmoy's comment much differently. I thought the point was that since there are so many people entering Uni, they just don't have the resources to penalize enough people for cheating. The obvious solution is to put people on site and prevent it rather than look for it after-the-fact, but apparently that results in rock throwing protests...
  - dmoy 13y ago
    Sorry, I didn't mean to say that the higher population CAUSES cheating. Just that the insane volume of people applying makes the current system (single exam being 99% of your entrance to Uni) more logistically feasible than a lot of other potential systems. The disadvantage is that you have no other way to prove yourself than a single test score. That's also why you're seeing such outrage, because that single test is going to open (or shut) a lot of doors. (See above comment about O(n), he articulated it way better than me :P)
- Sven7 13y ago
  Cheating is always going to exist in highly competitive environments. Confusing kids in such environments with excessive focus on honesty and integrity can put them at a serious disadvantage. In my experience, irrespective of country or culture, most people (even those that have cheated) inherently want to be fair and that sort of balances the equations out over the long term.
  - miguelrochefort 13y ago
    Sounds exactly like those people who want to make privacy a right.
tzs 13y ago
For those who haven't read the article yet, when they say "fight", they mean actual physical fighting: > By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped as students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, more than 2000 people had gathered, smashing cars and chanting: ''We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.'' Cheating in China goes way beyond cheating to get into school. Two years ago, the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science became the first Chinese journal to use text analysis software to spot plagiarism. They found that 31% of their papers were plagiarized. 40% for computer science and life science papers. [1] [2] [1] http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138937778/plagiarism-plague-hinders-chinas-scientific-ambition http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138937778/plagiarism-plague-hi... [2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7312/full/467153d.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7312/full/467153d...
- leke 13y ago
  Yes, we have this scheme in our Finnish polytechnic. Regardless though, people still do it and try and get away with it. Sometimes they don't even try and make any small changes to the original document. I have no idea why they do it -- perhaps they don't believe the system will catch it?
  - miguelrochefort 13y ago
    People plagiarize because doing the actual work is soul-crushing. How motivating is it to read a bunch of high quality work, put them together and produce a mediocre work? It's not motivating at all, and people simply try to stay sane.
    - javajosh 13y ago
      "Students plagiarize because the source material will always be of higher quality than their paper" is a very novel argument! And yet, it doesn't hold water. For one thing, teaching kids how to synthesize information, explain how a process works, is quite valuable and not at all soul-crushing. "To learn is to teach," they say, and writing papers about what you've learned is, essentially, teaching about what you've learned. It's a good thing. And of course if you generalize the argument, then students could be excused from learning entirely. How "soul-crushing" is it for a piano student to try to play Étude in C major, when there are countless recordings of it being played perfectly, and with great genius? Following in the steps of great thinkers and doers is not soul-crushing, because you're walking in the footsteps of greatness. Those notes are the right notes. You play it badly, but you're playing it. It is humbling, though. The difference between soul crushing and humility is that for the latter, there's every reason to believe that one day you too could be great. The other good thing about writing papers is that, no matter how expository it may be, there is always opportunity for viewpoint. Even if the viewpoint expressed has to do with how best to organize the material, every paper is a chance for self-expression. The reason students don't like writing papers is that it's really hard. It's hard to consume the information, and it's hard to organize it, especially if you're not used to organizing information. But you have to make mistakes, write papers that are all jumbled and confused, before you can get better. Those jumbled, bad papers are clearly worse than the source material, and the teacher is there with her red pen marking the next step toward greatness.
beedogs 13y ago
This isn't just a problem with Chinese students in China. A large for-pay cheating operation which catered exclusively to Chinese students was just uncovered in New Zealand, too. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/8662224/Chinese-cheats-rort-NZ-universities-with-fakes http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/8662224/Chinese-ch...
- Volpe 13y ago
  These are completely different issues (which you are simply conflating by race). The exam mentioned in the article is THE exam. If you fail, that's it for you. You can't re-sit and you can't attend a reputable university. Your choices are the equivalent of technical colleges (few which have any reputation), working in low skill jobs, or (if you have A LOT of money) studying abroad. Given the circumstances, I think cheating is the sensible thing to do, given their are cheaters, by not cheating yourself you put yourself at a disadvantage.
  - beedogs 13y ago
    The term "Chinese" doesn't describe a race; it is descriptive of a nationality. And I don't see how the two issues aren't related at least at some basic level. Cheating at this scale seems to be a cultural phenomenon moreso than a racial one.
    - Volpe 13y ago
      Well sure, technically, blacks aren't a race either, nor are whites or indians... technically we are All "human" but these semantics don't progress the discussion. I agree that right now, given China's recent history and current state of affairs their is widespread corruption and exploitation. If that qualifies as "cultural phenomenon" then I agree, but I don't agree it was always there, and think it is more to do with the mao/deng transition and the massive injection of wealth into china since.
  - fspeech 13y ago
    You can retake exams in China, but they are offered only once a year.
evoloution 13y ago
Selecting to enforce more strictly the law in a particular area is unfair and not the way to go when you have such high cheating levels reported in the whole country. To walk the path of the "Rule of Law" they have to make the rules stricter for all.
chris_wot 13y ago
This is going to effect innovation and education in China very badly. If there elite University students are getting there by cheating, then it means there elites aren't really elite: just better at being dishonest.
- vehementi 13y ago
  Devil's advocate: grades are a stupid thing; if someone sits in class and learns and for the exam needs to cheat in order to keep up with cheat-driven-grades-inflation, we have not made a comment about that student's ability or anything. The elites may yet be elite.
  - chris_wot 13y ago
    All that proves is that exams aren't the best way of assessing someone's ability. However, cheating doesn't show ability in anything, other than deviousness.
- haarg 13y ago
  As opposed to the elite in the USA...
  - pjscott 13y ago
    I went to school in the US. Anecdotally, the top students genuinely cared about learning. Most of the cheaters just barely got by, if that.
    - Volpe 13y ago
      Anecdotal data point: My brother taught pure math in both Australia, and the U.S (in ivy league institutions). His view is that the quality of students in Australia (largely classless given the govt subsidies education so much) is leagues above the undergrads at top ivy leagues (who are there because of $$$).
      - 13y ago
pchander 13y ago
This reads like an article from the onion. I had to double check just to make sure it wasn't.
- schuke 13y ago
  Welcome to the People's Republic of China.
xarien 13y ago
If this was jeopardy, the question would be: "What is the combination of a child-centric culture and a one child policy."
spikels 13y ago
Cargo Cult Education - Schools are built, students attend, teachers lecture, assignments turned in, tests taken and degrees granted. Everyone gets what they want: politicians, students, staff and parents. Yet nothing needs to be taught and nothing needs to be learned. Doesn't this go on a lot more often then we want to admit?
- damian2000 13y ago
  Everyone gets what they want except the chinese companies who employ them in their first job.
  - awakeasleep 13y ago
    It's ok, they only have to implement plans stolen from other companies.
    - ig1 13y ago
      Flagged. Lets keep xenophobic comments off HN. [Edit: s/racist/xenophobic as per conversation below]
      - monkeypizza 13y ago
        It's interesting you assume he was being racist, rather than culturalist. I think it's equally valid to assume he was talking about mainland Chinese business culture. Is it controversial to say that mainland Chinese companies (as we're talking about here) commonly steal or clone business plans?
        ig1 13y ago
        That's equally unacceptable, saying "mexicans are lazy" is as bad as saying "hispanics are lazy". It's just xenophobia. The OP wasn't starting a conversation about business practices, they were attempting to make a witty one-liner by denigrating a group of people and reinforcing a negative stereotype. They were implying that Chinese people don't need to be educated because they do unimportant work. Imagine if someone had said that it didn't matter if women or blacks cheated in exams because all they did was housework and unskilled labour ? - that's exactly the same as what the OP is doing here.
jmduke 13y ago
Entrance exams treat undergraduate admissions as an O(n) problem. As anyone who has worked in undergraduate admissions will tell you, it is far more complex than that. But when n grows prohibitively large, you have to go with solutions that are less than ideal. My alma mater, thirty years ago, eschewed the traditional college application in favor of a more homebrew approach: since it was a small liberal arts college, it felt that the best way to see if a student was a fit for the college was to place him there for a span of a week or so: meeting with professors, faculty, taking a tour of the place, making sure things 'clicked'. He or she took an exam at the end of it, focused less on trying to define the student intellectually and more whether or not they were engaged with the college: there were quizzes on campus trivia (we're the second oldest college in the nation, and talk about our history incessantly), open-ended questions about what they liked, et cetera -- all designed to see if the student was really meant to be a part of the college. This worked twofold: it let the admissions faculty see whether or not the student was really taking the experience seriously, and it let the student see whether or not they wanted to take it seriously. (Why no math tests? When a professor spends a few hours with a prospective student, they can generally deduce whether or not they're smart enough to handle the rigor.) Today, such a practice is impossible: the number of applicants has increased by at least 20x. There literally are not enough days in the calendar.
- awakeasleep 13y ago
  Williams and Mary Represent
- anon-cheater 13y ago
  That is a great system, but unsustainable for the volume, you are right. As a non-cheater who has been blessed with a lot of academic success, this article upsets me so much. my academic success has been dearly earned and I feel like cheaters completely undermine my efforts. True, cheaters don't have the knowledge and maybe I am a step ahead of them, because I actually put in the effort. But still, it feels like someone stole a taxi medallion and I bought one.
  - ishansharma 13y ago
mynameishere 13y ago
If everyone cheats and they construct a pilot enforcement program that focuses on .1 percent of the population, of course it's unfair. The real solution is to drop the cheatable system altogether. You aren't going to fix universal corruption with baby steps.
- lignuist 13y ago
  This could mean a few years without graduates...
- wtrk 13y ago
  Cheating is not endemic within the gaokao system because, as a testing regime, it's excessively vulnerable to cheating. It's not any more cheatable than the SAT, GREs, or other standardized entrance or aptitude exams. Mainland Chinese society at all levels is thoroughly corrupt and its pretty much impossible to achieve what a reasonable observer would recognize as a materially successful life within the PRC without being actively involved in corruption. Even simply to muddle along and live hand-to-mouth, content to have most of the doors to success either closed to them from the get-go or slammed in their face, a regular Mainland person has to turn a blind eye to a steady stream of illegal, unethical, and downright harmful behavior on the part of their peers. That's a part of why (along with many other factors) many Mainland citizens are eager to emigrate to pretty much anywhere that's not the PRC.
  - Volpe 13y ago
    This feels like a massive over generalisation (given the size of china)... Any kind of evidence of this?
    - wtrk 13y ago
      Can I provide evidence to prove to you that my generalization is accurate? Can you prove to me that Antarctica exists? That there were ever dinosaurs? If I'm intent on not being convinced? Come to China for an extended visit. Reside in one region for a while, then move to another for a bit. Repeat that process a few times until you're satisfied. Being able to read and write Chinese (simplified characters) and speak Putonghua (or, if you stay in one place long enough, the local dialect) would probably speed things up for you. Even then, you could (if you were determined enough) maintain a conviction that you had just had a run of bad luck in terms of the places you'd chosen to live and the people with whom you'd happened to interact. I don't know how much time you'd have to spend here to be satisfied.
awakeasleep 13y ago
> Transmitter disguised as a pencil eraser Let's not forget, resourcefulness is a greater predictor of success than raw intellectual ability.
- pjscott 13y ago
  If all your friends are using pencil eraser radios, then how resourceful do you really have to be to use one too?
redbit 13y ago
"We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat." I can't imagine how people can say it out their mouth. Just like when someone kill, due to fairness you kill too. I am a Chinese, and I feel shame on this kind of Chinese logic. They use wording like fairness, human right not seek for proper, but their benefit, I have see too much ridiculous in my homeland.
- icebraining 13y ago
  Well, I'm not Chinese, but I think they're right. Fairness requires impartiality, and they're being discriminated against. The solution should be to implement the anti-cheating measures everywhere, not just in a few schools.
  - leke 13y ago
    I think it's wrong for people to jump on the band wagon. It just adds to the problem instead of making it a minority thing which can be easier to deal with.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      But is it a minority thing? That doesn't seem to be the case.
  - redbit 13y ago
    They want the schools allow them to cheat instead of fight for anti cheating system that's the most ridiculous point
  - gwern 13y ago
    > Fairness requires impartiality, and they're being discriminated against. > The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China's tough ''gaokao'' exams, winning a disproportionate number of places at the country's elite universities. Last year, the city was cautioned by the province's education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject.
- 13y ago
redbit 13y ago
"We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat." I can't imagine how people can say it out their mouth. Just like when someone kill, due to fairness you kill too. I am a Chinese, and I feel shame on this kind of Chinese logic. They use wording like fairness, human right not seek for proper, but their benefit, I have see too much ridiculous in my homeland.
redbit 13y ago
"We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat." I can't imagine how people can say it out their mouth. Just like when someone kill, due to fairness you kill too. I am a Chinese, and I feel shame on this kind of Chinese logic. They use wording like fairness, human right not seek for proper, but their benefit, I have see too much ridiculous in my homeland.
rorrr2 13y ago
Surprisingly, not The Onion.
kenster07 13y ago
1) Stephen Covey often talked about the "personality ethic" over the "character ethic." The set of ethics a society chooses will determine its future in the long-term. Charades cannot last forever. 2) The article didn't hesitate to conflate the events at this one school with the character of the entire country, which, given the disparate scale of the two, seems to be poor journalism. But then again, such articles have come to be expected nowadays.
maximem 13y ago
At this level, some might say "Cheating is an art", the more crafty and resourceful you get the more you'll go farther!
sly010 13y ago
This may be obvious, yet unmentioned in the article, but if you are a Chinese student, you can take this exam exacly once, and this is the one single number they will judge you on. Understandable if you are upset. Perhaps if no single exam would be so important and you were able to retake them whenever you want, there were less pressure for cheating. Our education and qualification systems are indeed unscalable. Are we in a need for a more granular and more subjective way of "quantifying" peoples achievement?
pron 13y ago
Stories likes this make life worth living! It's got irony, farce, class struggle, crushed dreams - everything human existence is made of. I actually have a lot to say about it, but this great Baffler piece, Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard, says it best: http://thebaffler.com/past/adam_wheeler_went_to_harvard http://thebaffler.com/past/adam_wheeler_went_to_harvard. Then, I would add a snippet from this Thomas Frank article[1] in Harper's: After all, what universities were selling then, and what they are selling today, is an extremely valuable commodity: entry into what sociologists call the professional managerial class. There’s a reason that Lexus LX 570 that almost ran you down in the crosswalk the other day had a harvard sticker neatly centered on its rear window. And it isn’t because the driver believes we would all profit from immersing ourselves in theories of intersectionality, or because of a lifelong attachment to Crimson field hockey. That sticker is there because Harvard is a crucial part of who that SUV driver is. A college degree from a prestigious school is the credential that matters most in American life, and growing college-enrollment figures suggest that an increasing number of Americans have figured this out. [1]: http://harpers.org/archive/2012/06/the-price-of-admission/ http://harpers.org/archive/2012/06/the-price-of-admission/ (subscribers only)
lucb1e 13y ago
Instead of calling it cheating, whynot describe objectively what they are doing and let us judge ourselves whether it's cheating? This article makes it sound obvious that everyone is using cell phones or other devices to communicate with people outside or with each other, but for all we know that was a single occurrence out of thousands of students. Too often articles like these turn out to tell only one side of the story, and I don't like it. It sounds too crazy that all Chinese students think cheating is fair; heck, it wouldn't be called cheating by them if they thought it was!
danpalmer 13y ago
In the usual pre-exam instructions this year at university (in the UK) the invigilators made specific reference to network enabled watches as a prohibited item - I have a Pebble, as do a few of my friends, but not many students do in general. One interesting thing I've noticed is with assignments we have strict anti-plagiarism checks which always seem to be emphasised for foreign students. We have quite a few students from China and India on our courses and it's almost like it's a special mention for them. Several times lecturers have made reference to different cultures having an expectation of plagiarism, and I've spoken to academics who say it is a very common thing from foreign students.
computeruser123 13y ago
Wow, Really Makes You Think As To How The Current Computer's Are Done. Maybe The Us Should Give The Students An Andriod Tablet, So They Can Do It Better.
roy_x 13y ago
I am a native Chinese and I must say this is something considered very abnormal in China. The college entrance examination is one of the most important exam hold in the whole country level. If anything happen in this exam, the governor whom in charge of the area will lose a lot of score in their KPI performance.
- ttflee 13y ago
  Less important in this case, from my perspective, as the students are competing SPORTS and ARTS colleges/majors, which are always seen as categories that requires less solemn test scores on everything(, except for the talent in specific sports/arts, which is hard to test though). My mother always watches Youth Singers Competition year after year on TV, where they draw random questions as 'overall quality' section. And you can tell many of the best youth singers in China are less competitive in literature, history and some common knowledge in science(, and some of them are even less competitive in answering questions in music theory/history). I am not trying to generalize any conclusion about the cheating rate or something. I am just less inclined to believe that the media have already reported all the truth(, nothing but the truth). And it may not necessarily hint that other students who focus other majors like science, technology or business are cheating in the same level.
hucxsz 13y ago
这年头神马JB 鸟都会发文章 ...
e3pi 13y ago
"...Mr Li had confiscated a mobile phone from his son and then refused a bribe to return the handset. Cohen Bros' A Serious Man, deftly sounded this Asian custom as a passing grade bribe into a mixed-metaphor with 'Schrodinger's Cat', all the while quantum engineer uncle Arthur's Mentaculous, returns a fortune.
b0rsuk 13y ago
The article reads as if it was something from The Onion. It's funny, then you realize it's real, and it become scary. I got a very similar vibe from "Journey Beyond Tomorrow" by Robert Sheckley. It's half SF, half satire, and very witty. The book chilled me a few times because I realized things he makes fun are happening around the world, just on a smaller scale (for example, people committing crimes in order to be sent to jail. Free food and shelter). When reading the book, I had to make breaks not because I was tired, but because it was like overdosing laughing gas.
samsolomon 13y ago
This is a perfect example of the problem with test scores. The test becomes a metric to game, and any actual learning is negated in the process.
msie 13y ago
I'm glad to see that there wasn't a comments thread on that story. It would have probably been filled with racist comments.
ttflee 13y ago
Back in the days of the Great Cultural Revolution, students who handed in blank answer sheets were praised as 'white paper heroes'. Now, at least they are trying to write something rather than nothing.
redwood 13y ago
As a though experiment, what do you think Americans would do if the government banned SAT prep courses? I know this isn't exactly a parallel; but consider that in many ways those courses are a leg up for the with it and able families.. just as this racket sounds like it was.
- rdouble 13y ago
  Nothing, because there are about a thousand colleges one can get into with dismal SAT scores.
gbraad 13y ago
This is about the 高考 (gaokao) or the university entrance exam. There are many discussions about this since ages. The parents in other provinces think it is unfair their child needs a higher score than those from Beijing; well, the cheating is one reason, but also the universities are paid by the taxpayers from Beijing. In short: This exam decides a lot about the students future... If they have a bad score, no good uni, no good future. After this, only money can help you get a way to buy you into education or a good future.

207 points by DanielRibeiro 13y ago

dmoy 13y ago

This is going to take a long time to change for the better. My Chinese friends who don't cheat because they actually want to learn stuff definitely complain a lot about the rampant cheating. If you want to get into and finish Uni completely legit, you have to work way, way harder than everyone else :\ And you will end up doing worse than people who cheated and got away with it, just have to suck it up. There's a lot of inertia to solving it, and it's very hard to do across the board. For Uni entrance, there's ~10 million+ people taking the exam every year - that prevents a lot of non-exam based solutions to "who do we let into Uni?" I do not envy the position of the people in charge of all of this :(

lsc 13y ago
Wow. You realize that this world where people care enough about school to put in that much effort is /completely foreign/ to me, right? Personally, I think the school system I came from, where nobody cares is in bigger trouble than the system where cheating is endemic.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  They still don't care about school. They care about not being weeded from the pile of resumes because they didn't have "the right grade" - which they got by a pantomime that superficially resembled school. As a system it's highly optimized to select candidates who'll "go along to get along".
  - lsc 13y ago
    >As a system it's highly optimized to select candidates who'll "go along to get along". Yeah, but isn't that a big part of what school teaches, though? It's an important skill, too. If you want to get a good grade on that paper, you've gotta read the professor and figure out what they are expecting, and give it to them. That's an important skill. I mean, what school doesn't teach is that you can also choose who you want to please; different people want different things, so if you want to be one way, well, you just find a boss/partner/whatever that wants you to do the things you want to do. school doesn't cover that.
jlgreco 13y ago
I am not coming from a perspective that has inherent insight into this, but this all seems very strange to me. It seems to me that only the top [whatever] percent of a population is going to be able to get into a class of school of their choosing, and only a top [whatever] percent of those admitted to those schools are going to successfully graduate. Now, China's population is unfathomably large, so that means way more people are going to be rejected or fail to graduate. On the other hand, it also means way more people are going to be accepted and graduate. 10x the population should mean 10x the rejected people, but it should also mean 10x the accepted and 10x the graduated, right? I don't really see why a larger population should mean that cheating is incentivized more, unless the real problem is an undersupply (proportionately) of education. Now, if lack of education positions is the real problem, then cheating isn't a solution to that; rampant cheating just changes the equation from "top [whatever] get accepted" to "top [whatever] at cheating get accepted". But do those who don't meet "top [whatever]" in a large population have more incentive to cheat than those who don't meet "top [whatever]" in a small population? I don't see why. The incentives should be the same in either a large or a small population, right?
- burntsushi 13y ago
  > I don't really see why a larger population should mean that cheating is incentivized more, unless the real problem is an undersupply (proportionately) of education. I interpreted dmoy's comment much differently. I thought the point was that since there are so many people entering Uni, they just don't have the resources to penalize enough people for cheating. The obvious solution is to put people on site and prevent it rather than look for it after-the-fact, but apparently that results in rock throwing protests...
- dmoy 13y ago
  Sorry, I didn't mean to say that the higher population CAUSES cheating. Just that the insane volume of people applying makes the current system (single exam being 99% of your entrance to Uni) more logistically feasible than a lot of other potential systems. The disadvantage is that you have no other way to prove yourself than a single test score. That's also why you're seeing such outrage, because that single test is going to open (or shut) a lot of doors. (See above comment about O(n), he articulated it way better than me :P)
Sven7 13y ago
Cheating is always going to exist in highly competitive environments. Confusing kids in such environments with excessive focus on honesty and integrity can put them at a serious disadvantage. In my experience, irrespective of country or culture, most people (even those that have cheated) inherently want to be fair and that sort of balances the equations out over the long term.
- miguelrochefort 13y ago
  Sounds exactly like those people who want to make privacy a right.

tzs 13y ago

For those who haven't read the article yet, when they say "fight", they mean actual physical fighting: > By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped as students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, more than 2000 people had gathered, smashing cars and chanting: ''We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.'' Cheating in China goes way beyond cheating to get into school. Two years ago, the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science became the first Chinese journal to use text analysis software to spot plagiarism. They found that 31% of their papers were plagiarized. 40% for computer science and life science papers. [1] [2] [1] http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138937778/plagiarism-plague-hinders-chinas-scientific-ambition http://www.npr.org/2011/08/03/138937778/plagiarism-plague-hi... [2] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7312/full/467153d.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7312/full/467153d...

leke 13y ago
Yes, we have this scheme in our Finnish polytechnic. Regardless though, people still do it and try and get away with it. Sometimes they don't even try and make any small changes to the original document. I have no idea why they do it -- perhaps they don't believe the system will catch it?
- miguelrochefort 13y ago
  People plagiarize because doing the actual work is soul-crushing. How motivating is it to read a bunch of high quality work, put them together and produce a mediocre work? It's not motivating at all, and people simply try to stay sane.
  - javajosh 13y ago
    "Students plagiarize because the source material will always be of higher quality than their paper" is a very novel argument! And yet, it doesn't hold water. For one thing, teaching kids how to synthesize information, explain how a process works, is quite valuable and not at all soul-crushing. "To learn is to teach," they say, and writing papers about what you've learned is, essentially, teaching about what you've learned. It's a good thing. And of course if you generalize the argument, then students could be excused from learning entirely. How "soul-crushing" is it for a piano student to try to play Étude in C major, when there are countless recordings of it being played perfectly, and with great genius? Following in the steps of great thinkers and doers is not soul-crushing, because you're walking in the footsteps of greatness. Those notes are the right notes. You play it badly, but you're playing it. It is humbling, though. The difference between soul crushing and humility is that for the latter, there's every reason to believe that one day you too could be great. The other good thing about writing papers is that, no matter how expository it may be, there is always opportunity for viewpoint. Even if the viewpoint expressed has to do with how best to organize the material, every paper is a chance for self-expression. The reason students don't like writing papers is that it's really hard. It's hard to consume the information, and it's hard to organize it, especially if you're not used to organizing information. But you have to make mistakes, write papers that are all jumbled and confused, before you can get better. Those jumbled, bad papers are clearly worse than the source material, and the teacher is there with her red pen marking the next step toward greatness.

beedogs 13y ago

This isn't just a problem with Chinese students in China. A large for-pay cheating operation which catered exclusively to Chinese students was just uncovered in New Zealand, too. http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/8662224/Chinese-cheats-rort-NZ-universities-with-fakes http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/8662224/Chinese-ch...

Volpe 13y ago
These are completely different issues (which you are simply conflating by race). The exam mentioned in the article is THE exam. If you fail, that's it for you. You can't re-sit and you can't attend a reputable university. Your choices are the equivalent of technical colleges (few which have any reputation), working in low skill jobs, or (if you have A LOT of money) studying abroad. Given the circumstances, I think cheating is the sensible thing to do, given their are cheaters, by not cheating yourself you put yourself at a disadvantage.
- beedogs 13y ago
  The term "Chinese" doesn't describe a race; it is descriptive of a nationality. And I don't see how the two issues aren't related at least at some basic level. Cheating at this scale seems to be a cultural phenomenon moreso than a racial one.
  - Volpe 13y ago
    Well sure, technically, blacks aren't a race either, nor are whites or indians... technically we are All "human" but these semantics don't progress the discussion. I agree that right now, given China's recent history and current state of affairs their is widespread corruption and exploitation. If that qualifies as "cultural phenomenon" then I agree, but I don't agree it was always there, and think it is more to do with the mao/deng transition and the massive injection of wealth into china since.
- fspeech 13y ago
  You can retake exams in China, but they are offered only once a year.

evoloution 13y ago

Selecting to enforce more strictly the law in a particular area is unfair and not the way to go when you have such high cheating levels reported in the whole country. To walk the path of the "Rule of Law" they have to make the rules stricter for all.

chris_wot 13y ago

This is going to effect innovation and education in China very badly. If there elite University students are getting there by cheating, then it means there elites aren't really elite: just better at being dishonest.

vehementi 13y ago
Devil's advocate: grades are a stupid thing; if someone sits in class and learns and for the exam needs to cheat in order to keep up with cheat-driven-grades-inflation, we have not made a comment about that student's ability or anything. The elites may yet be elite.
- chris_wot 13y ago
  All that proves is that exams aren't the best way of assessing someone's ability. However, cheating doesn't show ability in anything, other than deviousness.
haarg 13y ago
As opposed to the elite in the USA...
- pjscott 13y ago
  I went to school in the US. Anecdotally, the top students genuinely cared about learning. Most of the cheaters just barely got by, if that.
  - Volpe 13y ago
    Anecdotal data point: My brother taught pure math in both Australia, and the U.S (in ivy league institutions). His view is that the quality of students in Australia (largely classless given the govt subsidies education so much) is leagues above the undergrads at top ivy leagues (who are there because of $$$).
    - 13y ago

pchander 13y ago

This reads like an article from the onion. I had to double check just to make sure it wasn't.

schuke 13y ago
Welcome to the People's Republic of China.

xarien 13y ago

If this was jeopardy, the question would be: "What is the combination of a child-centric culture and a one child policy."

spikels 13y ago

Cargo Cult Education - Schools are built, students attend, teachers lecture, assignments turned in, tests taken and degrees granted. Everyone gets what they want: politicians, students, staff and parents. Yet nothing needs to be taught and nothing needs to be learned. Doesn't this go on a lot more often then we want to admit?

damian2000 13y ago
Everyone gets what they want except the chinese companies who employ them in their first job.
- awakeasleep 13y ago
  It's ok, they only have to implement plans stolen from other companies.
  - ig1 13y ago
    Flagged. Lets keep xenophobic comments off HN. [Edit: s/racist/xenophobic as per conversation below]
    - monkeypizza 13y ago
      It's interesting you assume he was being racist, rather than culturalist. I think it's equally valid to assume he was talking about mainland Chinese business culture. Is it controversial to say that mainland Chinese companies (as we're talking about here) commonly steal or clone business plans?
      - ig1 13y ago
        That's equally unacceptable, saying "mexicans are lazy" is as bad as saying "hispanics are lazy". It's just xenophobia. The OP wasn't starting a conversation about business practices, they were attempting to make a witty one-liner by denigrating a group of people and reinforcing a negative stereotype. They were implying that Chinese people don't need to be educated because they do unimportant work. Imagine if someone had said that it didn't matter if women or blacks cheated in exams because all they did was housework and unskilled labour ? - that's exactly the same as what the OP is doing here.

jmduke 13y ago

Entrance exams treat undergraduate admissions as an O(n) problem. As anyone who has worked in undergraduate admissions will tell you, it is far more complex than that. But when n grows prohibitively large, you have to go with solutions that are less than ideal. My alma mater, thirty years ago, eschewed the traditional college application in favor of a more homebrew approach: since it was a small liberal arts college, it felt that the best way to see if a student was a fit for the college was to place him there for a span of a week or so: meeting with professors, faculty, taking a tour of the place, making sure things 'clicked'. He or she took an exam at the end of it, focused less on trying to define the student intellectually and more whether or not they were engaged with the college: there were quizzes on campus trivia (we're the second oldest college in the nation, and talk about our history incessantly), open-ended questions about what they liked, et cetera -- all designed to see if the student was really meant to be a part of the college. This worked twofold: it let the admissions faculty see whether or not the student was really taking the experience seriously, and it let the student see whether or not they wanted to take it seriously. (Why no math tests? When a professor spends a few hours with a prospective student, they can generally deduce whether or not they're smart enough to handle the rigor.) Today, such a practice is impossible: the number of applicants has increased by at least 20x. There literally are not enough days in the calendar.

awakeasleep 13y ago
Williams and Mary Represent
anon-cheater 13y ago
That is a great system, but unsustainable for the volume, you are right. As a non-cheater who has been blessed with a lot of academic success, this article upsets me so much. my academic success has been dearly earned and I feel like cheaters completely undermine my efforts. True, cheaters don't have the knowledge and maybe I am a step ahead of them, because I actually put in the effort. But still, it feels like someone stole a taxi medallion and I bought one.
- ishansharma 13y ago

mynameishere 13y ago

If everyone cheats and they construct a pilot enforcement program that focuses on .1 percent of the population, of course it's unfair. The real solution is to drop the cheatable system altogether. You aren't going to fix universal corruption with baby steps.

lignuist 13y ago
This could mean a few years without graduates...
wtrk 13y ago
Cheating is not endemic within the gaokao system because, as a testing regime, it's excessively vulnerable to cheating. It's not any more cheatable than the SAT, GREs, or other standardized entrance or aptitude exams. Mainland Chinese society at all levels is thoroughly corrupt and its pretty much impossible to achieve what a reasonable observer would recognize as a materially successful life within the PRC without being actively involved in corruption. Even simply to muddle along and live hand-to-mouth, content to have most of the doors to success either closed to them from the get-go or slammed in their face, a regular Mainland person has to turn a blind eye to a steady stream of illegal, unethical, and downright harmful behavior on the part of their peers. That's a part of why (along with many other factors) many Mainland citizens are eager to emigrate to pretty much anywhere that's not the PRC.
- Volpe 13y ago
  This feels like a massive over generalisation (given the size of china)... Any kind of evidence of this?
  - wtrk 13y ago
    Can I provide evidence to prove to you that my generalization is accurate? Can you prove to me that Antarctica exists? That there were ever dinosaurs? If I'm intent on not being convinced? Come to China for an extended visit. Reside in one region for a while, then move to another for a bit. Repeat that process a few times until you're satisfied. Being able to read and write Chinese (simplified characters) and speak Putonghua (or, if you stay in one place long enough, the local dialect) would probably speed things up for you. Even then, you could (if you were determined enough) maintain a conviction that you had just had a run of bad luck in terms of the places you'd chosen to live and the people with whom you'd happened to interact. I don't know how much time you'd have to spend here to be satisfied.

awakeasleep 13y ago

> Transmitter disguised as a pencil eraser Let's not forget, resourcefulness is a greater predictor of success than raw intellectual ability.

pjscott 13y ago
If all your friends are using pencil eraser radios, then how resourceful do you really have to be to use one too?

redbit 13y ago

"We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat." I can't imagine how people can say it out their mouth. Just like when someone kill, due to fairness you kill too. I am a Chinese, and I feel shame on this kind of Chinese logic. They use wording like fairness, human right not seek for proper, but their benefit, I have see too much ridiculous in my homeland.

icebraining 13y ago
Well, I'm not Chinese, but I think they're right. Fairness requires impartiality, and they're being discriminated against. The solution should be to implement the anti-cheating measures everywhere, not just in a few schools.
- leke 13y ago
  I think it's wrong for people to jump on the band wagon. It just adds to the problem instead of making it a minority thing which can be easier to deal with.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    But is it a minority thing? That doesn't seem to be the case.
- redbit 13y ago
  They want the schools allow them to cheat instead of fight for anti cheating system that's the most ridiculous point
- gwern 13y ago
  > Fairness requires impartiality, and they're being discriminated against. > The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China's tough ''gaokao'' exams, winning a disproportionate number of places at the country's elite universities. Last year, the city was cautioned by the province's education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject.
13y ago

redbit 13y ago

rorrr2 13y ago

Surprisingly, not The Onion.

kenster07 13y ago

1) Stephen Covey often talked about the "personality ethic" over the "character ethic." The set of ethics a society chooses will determine its future in the long-term. Charades cannot last forever. 2) The article didn't hesitate to conflate the events at this one school with the character of the entire country, which, given the disparate scale of the two, seems to be poor journalism. But then again, such articles have come to be expected nowadays.

maximem 13y ago

At this level, some might say "Cheating is an art", the more crafty and resourceful you get the more you'll go farther!

sly010 13y ago

This may be obvious, yet unmentioned in the article, but if you are a Chinese student, you can take this exam exacly once, and this is the one single number they will judge you on. Understandable if you are upset. Perhaps if no single exam would be so important and you were able to retake them whenever you want, there were less pressure for cheating. Our education and qualification systems are indeed unscalable. Are we in a need for a more granular and more subjective way of "quantifying" peoples achievement?

pron 13y ago

Stories likes this make life worth living! It's got irony, farce, class struggle, crushed dreams - everything human existence is made of. I actually have a lot to say about it, but this great Baffler piece, Adam Wheeler Went to Harvard, says it best: http://thebaffler.com/past/adam_wheeler_went_to_harvard http://thebaffler.com/past/adam_wheeler_went_to_harvard. Then, I would add a snippet from this Thomas Frank article[1] in Harper's: After all, what universities were selling then, and what they are selling today, is an extremely valuable commodity: entry into what sociologists call the professional managerial class. There’s a reason that Lexus LX 570 that almost ran you down in the crosswalk the other day had a harvard sticker neatly centered on its rear window. And it isn’t because the driver believes we would all profit from immersing ourselves in theories of intersectionality, or because of a lifelong attachment to Crimson field hockey. That sticker is there because Harvard is a crucial part of who that SUV driver is. A college degree from a prestigious school is the credential that matters most in American life, and growing college-enrollment figures suggest that an increasing number of Americans have figured this out. [1]: http://harpers.org/archive/2012/06/the-price-of-admission/ http://harpers.org/archive/2012/06/the-price-of-admission/ (subscribers only)

lucb1e 13y ago

Instead of calling it cheating, whynot describe objectively what they are doing and let us judge ourselves whether it's cheating? This article makes it sound obvious that everyone is using cell phones or other devices to communicate with people outside or with each other, but for all we know that was a single occurrence out of thousands of students. Too often articles like these turn out to tell only one side of the story, and I don't like it. It sounds too crazy that all Chinese students think cheating is fair; heck, it wouldn't be called cheating by them if they thought it was!

danpalmer 13y ago

In the usual pre-exam instructions this year at university (in the UK) the invigilators made specific reference to network enabled watches as a prohibited item - I have a Pebble, as do a few of my friends, but not many students do in general. One interesting thing I've noticed is with assignments we have strict anti-plagiarism checks which always seem to be emphasised for foreign students. We have quite a few students from China and India on our courses and it's almost like it's a special mention for them. Several times lecturers have made reference to different cultures having an expectation of plagiarism, and I've spoken to academics who say it is a very common thing from foreign students.

computeruser123 13y ago

Wow, Really Makes You Think As To How The Current Computer's Are Done. Maybe The Us Should Give The Students An Andriod Tablet, So They Can Do It Better.

roy_x 13y ago

I am a native Chinese and I must say this is something considered very abnormal in China. The college entrance examination is one of the most important exam hold in the whole country level. If anything happen in this exam, the governor whom in charge of the area will lose a lot of score in their KPI performance.

ttflee 13y ago
Less important in this case, from my perspective, as the students are competing SPORTS and ARTS colleges/majors, which are always seen as categories that requires less solemn test scores on everything(, except for the talent in specific sports/arts, which is hard to test though). My mother always watches Youth Singers Competition year after year on TV, where they draw random questions as 'overall quality' section. And you can tell many of the best youth singers in China are less competitive in literature, history and some common knowledge in science(, and some of them are even less competitive in answering questions in music theory/history). I am not trying to generalize any conclusion about the cheating rate or something. I am just less inclined to believe that the media have already reported all the truth(, nothing but the truth). And it may not necessarily hint that other students who focus other majors like science, technology or business are cheating in the same level.

hucxsz 13y ago

这年头神马JB 鸟都会发文章 ...

e3pi 13y ago

"...Mr Li had confiscated a mobile phone from his son and then refused a bribe to return the handset. Cohen Bros' A Serious Man, deftly sounded this Asian custom as a passing grade bribe into a mixed-metaphor with 'Schrodinger's Cat', all the while quantum engineer uncle Arthur's Mentaculous, returns a fortune.

b0rsuk 13y ago

The article reads as if it was something from The Onion. It's funny, then you realize it's real, and it become scary. I got a very similar vibe from "Journey Beyond Tomorrow" by Robert Sheckley. It's half SF, half satire, and very witty. The book chilled me a few times because I realized things he makes fun are happening around the world, just on a smaller scale (for example, people committing crimes in order to be sent to jail. Free food and shelter). When reading the book, I had to make breaks not because I was tired, but because it was like overdosing laughing gas.

samsolomon 13y ago

This is a perfect example of the problem with test scores. The test becomes a metric to game, and any actual learning is negated in the process.

msie 13y ago

I'm glad to see that there wasn't a comments thread on that story. It would have probably been filled with racist comments.

ttflee 13y ago

Back in the days of the Great Cultural Revolution, students who handed in blank answer sheets were praised as 'white paper heroes'. Now, at least they are trying to write something rather than nothing.

redwood 13y ago

As a though experiment, what do you think Americans would do if the government banned SAT prep courses? I know this isn't exactly a parallel; but consider that in many ways those courses are a leg up for the with it and able families.. just as this racket sounds like it was.

rdouble 13y ago
Nothing, because there are about a thousand colleges one can get into with dismal SAT scores.

gbraad 13y ago

This is about the 高考 (gaokao) or the university entrance exam. There are many discussions about this since ages. The parents in other provinces think it is unfair their child needs a higher score than those from Beijing; well, the cheating is one reason, but also the universities are paid by the taxpayers from Beijing. In short: This exam decides a lot about the students future... If they have a bad score, no good uni, no good future. After this, only money can help you get a way to buy you into education or a good future.