6 ms·

The problem is that if you have 1.4 million people to compete against in your state and you know the authorities don't really care if you cheat, then you absolu

by eitally 12y ago

The problem is that if you have 1.4 million people to compete against in your state and you know the authorities don't really care if you cheat, then you absolutely have an incentive to cheat. This is a political & cultural problem, but is absolutely solvable. In my graduate program (~60 people) at a top tier US engineering school, about 10% were Chinese, 80% Indian, and 10% American. The Indians did all their work as a big team, and it didn't matter whether it was homework, quizzes, projects, tests, or even their theses. They didn't consider it cheating at all, even though it absolutely was (except the homework, where partnership was usually encouraged). Everyone else knew they were cheating, but in the absence of professors willing to confront the problem, what is an honest student to do? Do you maintain your integrity at the risk of lower grades, or do you cheat, too, and ensure a high GPA?

hahla 12y ago
I too noticed this in my graduate program. However the majority 70% were Chinese, and they did the same exact thing you say. They would come into the lecture hall early and plan out their seating arrangements for each and every exam. It was clearly noticeable they were cheating. I cant speak to Indian students as there was only one in the entire graduate program.
JustSomeNobody 12y ago
I'm not clear on how what the Indians are doing affects the GPA of the Chinese or Americans in your example. Do they blow the curve, maybe? Also, Americans tend to put individual before group. I wonder if your example isn't so much cheating as a difference in culture.
- rayiner 12y ago
  It undermines the moral fabric of the society. It's not a coincidence that in India (or Bangladesh, where My family is from), you have to bribe someone to get your phone hooked up.
  - JustSomeNobody 12y ago
    Ok, but I still am not clear about how this would affect the GPA of students who don't cheat.
    - rhino369 12y ago
      Either because it is graded on a curve or because graduates are judged based on GPA. If you earned a fair and square 3.5 and a bunch of people cheated their way to a 3.7 you have a devalued 3.5.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  It is cheating. The rules are quite clear, and these groups break those rules in a way that gives them an immediate and direct advantage over students who don't break the rules. The rules themselves may be subject to debate, but that these people engage in cheating really isn't. They don't blow any curves necessarily but they do appear to be smarter or more able, and that impacts everything from teaching assignments to thesis committee solicitation.
- qzcx 12y ago
  Yeah, they would blow the curve. Most university require professors to have a certain average GPA for a given class. If all of the cheaters pass with flying colors due to cheating, then the people who would have looked good otherwise, now seem average and get a C instead of the A they deserve. Cheaters, whether American or Indian or Chinese, ruin the educational experience of college. Universities really should take it much more serious than they currently do.
- ern 12y ago
  In the case of Microsoft Exams (at least when I took them a few years ago), I had the sense that there was an "arms race". Questions were made more difficult and obscure than they needed to be, in order to drive pass rates down...when the real issue was braindumps and more blatant forms of cheating in some parts of the world. Which creates more demand for braindumps. I wouldn't be surprised if college instructors start doing this as well-make exams tougher to compensate for cheating, rather than dealing with cheating head-on.
rayiner 12y ago
Cheating in U.S. higher education is really a moral crisis, and the amount of accomodation for cheaters is shocking to me. I was bored one day and decided to read through the opinions of my school's honor board proceedings. You wouldn't believe the shit people got away with. One student plagerized most of his final paper from one of the professor's books. He said in his country that was a sign of respect! And he got away with that excuse!
- kamaal 12y ago
  This can happen. In India, you have this tradition of 'notes sharing'. Basically the course instructor circulates around lecture notes(Which is basically a highly trimmed version of the text book), all students do is mug up the whole thing and write it down in exams. The person who gets it 100% right generally scores the highest. If you are some who does it a little differently by thinking and working your way through the course, you can be silently penalized for trying to be smarter than everyone else.
buyx 12y ago
In South Africa some universities have introduced cameras into exam halls, but cheating is probably rampant at those that haven't. I've been in an exam where people in the next row (teachers no less, doing what seemed like an easy exam) were blatantly cheating. First world notions of "honour" and "integrity" don't gel well with third world aspirations. Oh and South African Indian students (in the country for generations, and affluent relative to the rest of the population) are amongst the biggest cheats. A BCom (commerce) degree held by an Indian graduate from the the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) is something to be viewed with great suspicion.
Anonymous9723 12y ago
I decided to post this anonymously. I am a professor at a major CS program in the united states. And we have a very serious cheating problem with indian students. It's clearly cultural. We also see cheating at a fairly high rate among the chinese and students from a handful of middle eastern countries, but the indian students are way out in front: it drives our indian faculty nuts. It seems that indian students have instilled in them a drive to help pull one another out of the abyss. This is probably a noble, and perhaps critical, characteristic for survival in a third world country. But for exams and particularly projects in US institutions, it translates directly into a high degree of unethical plagiarism and cheating. It damages the reputation of the department and the diplomas of our non-cheating students. We do not know what to do about it. I used to hold up the American students as the example to follow, since for decades they have had instilled in them basic notions about the ethics of cheating. But that's changing too: the millennials cheat at a much, much higher rate than Americans did before. Helicopter parenting? Changes in school culture? I don't know, but we have a big, big problem there as well. * Edit. Just to make it clear for those who would like to say "well, the Americans do it too now". While it's true the millennials cheat a lot more than Americans did in the past, it's still a very small fraction of the rate we're seeing in the indian students.
- keerthiko 12y ago
  I was a (top 1%) student all the way through high school in the Indian education system, and our oppressive educational environment makes it far too stressful to perform within our parents' expectations. Even the top students collaborated with each other and "cheated" to ease the stress on ourselves. We also felt bad for weaker students who were struggling with material and being left further and further behind, without being given any time to actually understand the material, having to spend all the time memorizing stuff they didn't get so they could spew it out on exams, and would help them out too. Tired of that system, I went on to attend Olin College of Engineering [0] in the US, the complete opposite end of the spectrum. I wrote a grand total of 1 time-constrained, closed-text written final exam in my 4 years there. Not a student, myself included, ever "cheated" at Olin, even though I had developed a habit of taking whatever means necessary to score higher on exams. I realized that the reason why cheating didn't make sense at Olin was because everything I could have wanted to do to score higher was already allowed. I think the real solution is to build team-oriented finals and exams, with peer evaluation taking a sizeable chunk of the grade distribution, such that there is no longer an action that can be considered "cheating". In the real world, whether it's academia or industry or research, you are allowed to do anything that doesn't harm someone else to reach the answer you seek. I don't see why collaboration between students should be discouraged. Plagiarism is a different issue, and that can be addressed differently. [0] http://www.olin.edu http://www.olin.edu
koyote 12y ago
I always found cheating to be much easier at US universities than back in the UK. Although maybe this was only my personal experience. In the US you could often sit anywhere you liked in exams and have anything on you (cheat sheets were allowed for many exams, which I thought was an interesting concept to say the least). In the UK, at least at my university, you had to leave all of your belongings by the side of the room and were only allowed a pen (and whatever else you needed for writing). Even your pockets had to be empty. It was also in a massive room with empty desks around you and a massive amount of space between every student as well as a handful of supervisors walking around making sure nothing fishy is going on. It definitely felt like a much more serious event than any exam I ever took in the US.
Naagii 12y ago
Well, in my case I never considered cheating as an excuse to anything. May be, I was lucky to born in a small country with 3 million people. I left my grades are to be an indication of how and where I spent studying. My grades are lower than the most other guys who explicitly cared about their grades. Even so, no one hasn't given me a shit about my low grades within 3 years of my career. May be because of in the end all what matters is that you do what you suppose to do good enough.

by eitally 12y ago

hahla 12y ago

I too noticed this in my graduate program. However the majority 70% were Chinese, and they did the same exact thing you say. They would come into the lecture hall early and plan out their seating arrangements for each and every exam. It was clearly noticeable they were cheating. I cant speak to Indian students as there was only one in the entire graduate program.

JustSomeNobody 12y ago

I'm not clear on how what the Indians are doing affects the GPA of the Chinese or Americans in your example. Do they blow the curve, maybe? Also, Americans tend to put individual before group. I wonder if your example isn't so much cheating as a difference in culture.

rayiner 12y ago
It undermines the moral fabric of the society. It's not a coincidence that in India (or Bangladesh, where My family is from), you have to bribe someone to get your phone hooked up.
- JustSomeNobody 12y ago
  Ok, but I still am not clear about how this would affect the GPA of students who don't cheat.
  - rhino369 12y ago
    Either because it is graded on a curve or because graduates are judged based on GPA. If you earned a fair and square 3.5 and a bunch of people cheated their way to a 3.7 you have a devalued 3.5.
Iftheshoefits 12y ago
It is cheating. The rules are quite clear, and these groups break those rules in a way that gives them an immediate and direct advantage over students who don't break the rules. The rules themselves may be subject to debate, but that these people engage in cheating really isn't. They don't blow any curves necessarily but they do appear to be smarter or more able, and that impacts everything from teaching assignments to thesis committee solicitation.
qzcx 12y ago
Yeah, they would blow the curve. Most university require professors to have a certain average GPA for a given class. If all of the cheaters pass with flying colors due to cheating, then the people who would have looked good otherwise, now seem average and get a C instead of the A they deserve. Cheaters, whether American or Indian or Chinese, ruin the educational experience of college. Universities really should take it much more serious than they currently do.
ern 12y ago
In the case of Microsoft Exams (at least when I took them a few years ago), I had the sense that there was an "arms race". Questions were made more difficult and obscure than they needed to be, in order to drive pass rates down...when the real issue was braindumps and more blatant forms of cheating in some parts of the world. Which creates more demand for braindumps. I wouldn't be surprised if college instructors start doing this as well-make exams tougher to compensate for cheating, rather than dealing with cheating head-on.

rayiner 12y ago

Cheating in U.S. higher education is really a moral crisis, and the amount of accomodation for cheaters is shocking to me. I was bored one day and decided to read through the opinions of my school's honor board proceedings. You wouldn't believe the shit people got away with. One student plagerized most of his final paper from one of the professor's books. He said in his country that was a sign of respect! And he got away with that excuse!

kamaal 12y ago
This can happen. In India, you have this tradition of 'notes sharing'. Basically the course instructor circulates around lecture notes(Which is basically a highly trimmed version of the text book), all students do is mug up the whole thing and write it down in exams. The person who gets it 100% right generally scores the highest. If you are some who does it a little differently by thinking and working your way through the course, you can be silently penalized for trying to be smarter than everyone else.

buyx 12y ago

In South Africa some universities have introduced cameras into exam halls, but cheating is probably rampant at those that haven't. I've been in an exam where people in the next row (teachers no less, doing what seemed like an easy exam) were blatantly cheating. First world notions of "honour" and "integrity" don't gel well with third world aspirations. Oh and South African Indian students (in the country for generations, and affluent relative to the rest of the population) are amongst the biggest cheats. A BCom (commerce) degree held by an Indian graduate from the the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN) is something to be viewed with great suspicion.

Anonymous9723 12y ago

I decided to post this anonymously. I am a professor at a major CS program in the united states. And we have a very serious cheating problem with indian students. It's clearly cultural. We also see cheating at a fairly high rate among the chinese and students from a handful of middle eastern countries, but the indian students are way out in front: it drives our indian faculty nuts. It seems that indian students have instilled in them a drive to help pull one another out of the abyss. This is probably a noble, and perhaps critical, characteristic for survival in a third world country. But for exams and particularly projects in US institutions, it translates directly into a high degree of unethical plagiarism and cheating. It damages the reputation of the department and the diplomas of our non-cheating students. We do not know what to do about it. I used to hold up the American students as the example to follow, since for decades they have had instilled in them basic notions about the ethics of cheating. But that's changing too: the millennials cheat at a much, much higher rate than Americans did before. Helicopter parenting? Changes in school culture? I don't know, but we have a big, big problem there as well. * Edit. Just to make it clear for those who would like to say "well, the Americans do it too now". While it's true the millennials cheat a lot more than Americans did in the past, it's still a very small fraction of the rate we're seeing in the indian students.

keerthiko 12y ago
I was a (top 1%) student all the way through high school in the Indian education system, and our oppressive educational environment makes it far too stressful to perform within our parents' expectations. Even the top students collaborated with each other and "cheated" to ease the stress on ourselves. We also felt bad for weaker students who were struggling with material and being left further and further behind, without being given any time to actually understand the material, having to spend all the time memorizing stuff they didn't get so they could spew it out on exams, and would help them out too. Tired of that system, I went on to attend Olin College of Engineering [0] in the US, the complete opposite end of the spectrum. I wrote a grand total of 1 time-constrained, closed-text written final exam in my 4 years there. Not a student, myself included, ever "cheated" at Olin, even though I had developed a habit of taking whatever means necessary to score higher on exams. I realized that the reason why cheating didn't make sense at Olin was because everything I could have wanted to do to score higher was already allowed. I think the real solution is to build team-oriented finals and exams, with peer evaluation taking a sizeable chunk of the grade distribution, such that there is no longer an action that can be considered "cheating". In the real world, whether it's academia or industry or research, you are allowed to do anything that doesn't harm someone else to reach the answer you seek. I don't see why collaboration between students should be discouraged. Plagiarism is a different issue, and that can be addressed differently. [0] http://www.olin.edu http://www.olin.edu

koyote 12y ago

I always found cheating to be much easier at US universities than back in the UK. Although maybe this was only my personal experience. In the US you could often sit anywhere you liked in exams and have anything on you (cheat sheets were allowed for many exams, which I thought was an interesting concept to say the least). In the UK, at least at my university, you had to leave all of your belongings by the side of the room and were only allowed a pen (and whatever else you needed for writing). Even your pockets had to be empty. It was also in a massive room with empty desks around you and a massive amount of space between every student as well as a handful of supervisors walking around making sure nothing fishy is going on. It definitely felt like a much more serious event than any exam I ever took in the US.

Naagii 12y ago

Well, in my case I never considered cheating as an excuse to anything. May be, I was lucky to born in a small country with 3 million people. I left my grades are to be an indication of how and where I spent studying. My grades are lower than the most other guys who explicitly cared about their grades. Even so, no one hasn't given me a shit about my low grades within 3 years of my career. May be because of in the end all what matters is that you do what you suppose to do good enough.