Foreign Students Seen Cheating More Than Domestic Ones | Hacker News Reader

Foreign Students Seen Cheating More Than Domestic Ones

wsj.com

54 pointsjimsojim83 comments

If a native students finds it hard to graduate school she/he might drop out of collage but a foreign student who's struggling can't just drop out. Dropping out often means going back home as a giant failure. It's a much bigger pressure.

I'm not saying it's fine if they cheat. I'm also not ignoring the cultural differences. This is just another way of seeing this phenomenon.

I'm pleasantly surprised to see the audience on HN be aware and considerate of the socio-cultural differences.

To add a few other points to the list -

1. The pressure is also to literally survive, and can sometimes extend to their families. It's not uncommon to find Indian students coming to the US to alleviate their families' financial condition by studying here and consequently getting a job here. A lot of times their families would have mortgaged their apartments/houses to get a loan to fund the education. I was such a student about 3 years ago. If I would have failed, not only would my parents not have an apartment anymore, but it would also be difficult for us to survive as a family (my parents earn very little). I realize this was a calculated risk and no one forced me(us) into it, but it was very pressuring regardless.

2. While cheating is frowned upon at a run-of-the-mill Indian university, it's not dealt with as severely as at American universities. Consequently it can be a little like you were careless enough to be jaywalking in a foreign country you're visiting and finding out they're going to imprison you for it later.

3. The immigration rules here don't help as well. You have a limited amount of time for which you can stay in the US after finishing up studies to find a job. Failing to find a job in that time results into having to go back. Sometimes you have to go back even if you found a job but didn't get through the H1 lottery.

Let me firmly state that having said all of that, I don't condone this behavior, and am unreservedly against it. I'm just glad people here on HN already have additional perspective into why this happens and I'd just like to add to it since I feel I can.

American universities are very upfront about their strict academic honesty policies, so it's not really analogous to jaywalking.

That's what my point is - in your head, you might think you're doing something that's less of an offense. But it's not.

Maybe, maybe not. As with most very diverse things: it depends. Yes, googling for the honesty policies is easy, if you know they are typically referred to as the 'honor code.' I would imagine that a fair percentage of US and foreign students would be confused as to what 'honor' has to do with cheating though ("Like, chivalry is dead, bro"), but that is not an excuse. And to be fair, even though the honor codes are strict, does not mean that the cheating is not rampant. A friend's wife taught a lot of Chinese nationals as a grad student and she said that they cheated a lot. However, that was not due to maliciousness or ignorance. They knew it was 'not kosher' to cheat, but back in China it seems that these kids has the same 'don't cheat' policy but if you believed in that, you were totally screwed and the cheating was seen as a necessary evil by people at all levels of society. You had to hide it, but everyone knew everyone else did it. Now to these 17/18 year old kids newly in the US, they did not expect the system to really be any different (think back to yourself at that age). And typically it is not. You only get punished if you get caught. There really are no downsides for them. Yeah, sure, some scapegoat is made every once in a while, but how is that different than the way China works anyways? The only difference here is that you don't have to bribe as much. I mean, the average grade at Harvard is an A- [0], how could you NOT think that cheating is rampant at the very highest levels? Sure, they call it 'grade inflation', but a rose by any other name smells just as sweet.

[0]https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2015/05/27/harvard-cl...

Students are told about the honor codes. It's not something you have to look up.

Grade inflation has nothing to do with cheating - that's just more FUD. If a class curves to a B, and everyone cheats, the average grade is still a B.

> can't just drop out.

This is terribly discriminatory to thousands of other intl students who wanted to, but never made it to a US university. That's not social sensitivity, it's pandering.

I would imagine it would be similar for a local student (minus visa issues and interest in immigration) in the case where the family is supporting them financially, particularly in countries where university tuition is a significant portion of their income.

> This is just another way of seeing this phenomenon

I think I detected a bit of justification in there. If not what policies or changes would you propose based on those explanations. So maybe some of them will have to leave the country if they are caught cheating. They'll be seen as failures at home. What should US universities do? Let foreign students cheat, be more lenient with them? Ask them about their family poverty level before they engage in disciplinary action?

I'm going to ignore your implicit rhetoric that there's nothing that can be done to help this and offer a potential suggestion - universities here can go an extra mile to put severe emphasis in educating international students about how cheating is dealt with in the US and how severe the consequences were when students were caught in the past doing it. It would also probably help if the students were convinced that there's a high probability of being caught with modern tools.

I know I'll get some flak for the last sentence there, but how many people in the world you really think are law-fearing as opposed to law-abiding?

I don't see this as their obligation or responsibility, but if looking for helpful measures that can be taken, I see this as one.

> I'm going to ignore your implicit rhetoric that there's nothing that can be done to help this and offer a potential suggestion

There is no implicit rhetoric. It was quite explicit. I saw a list of possible explanations of why foreign students cheat more. I pointed out those seems like leaning toward a justification, and invited a list of policy proposals based on those explanations.

So far we have "do more during orientation". Trust me, as an exchange student, albeit at just one university. This was made very clear during orientation. There were no maybes, or ambiguity there. But you are right there, it was something that should be done, but it is already done. Maybe force all to sign a paper saying "I will not cheat". Will that help solidify the idea? Perhaps...

> how many people in the world you really think are law-fearing as opposed to law-abiding?

I honestly don't know. I lived in 2 countries so far for long periods of time and people have very different attitudes towards law and authority in both. I wouldn't be surprised if the same people are law fearing for some law (getting caught speeding) and then also law-abiding (they wouldn't steal even if they know they'd never get caught) for others.

> So far we have "do more during orientation".

Another solution would be come up with a secure US-administered standardized test. Students cheat on the SAT [1] (3 min video)

You could (1) pressure the SAT / ACT to become more secure, or (2) create an alternative.

With a secure test, test-prep centers would not find success from cheating. This would pressure schools/businesses in foreign countries to provide better education.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/college-s...

You're implying this isn't done already at universities. In literally every single class in university, the professor would spend lecture time talking about cheating, and it was always spelled out in the syllabus.

This article spends way too much time on badly substantiated differences in cultural norms, and not nearly enough on the differences in incentives and skills between international and domestic students.

English skill is an obvious one the article talks about, but along with that comes an understanding of what is likely to get caught by a professor. In other words, domestic students don't cheat as much not because they believe in norms against cheating but rather because they understand better that they will probably get caught, or they understand better how not to get caught (so they don't get caught).

The article discusses incentives as well — the risk of getting sent back to China and never coming back — but fails to consider that that risk is precisely what might make getting good grades more important for foreign students than domestic ones.

What I'm describing could be seen as a difference in cultural norms too, but there's a huge gap between not believing that you're cheating and not knowing how cheaters in America get caught.

On a similar note, I can't find the study now but I've seen the pretty much all social stratas and races commit crimes at the same rate. It's just that 'we' care about policing and charging 'others' more than ourselves.

As an example, heading East out of London the motorway is often heavy with speed cameras and often police cars (poorer end of London) . Heading West into the Cotswolds (the rich area) , there are few cameras and a high level of very fast speeding. But if you looked at a study it would appear that those from the 'poorer' areas committed more 'speed crime' as those are the only areas we are effectively policing.

I wonder if those looking for cheating also start from the position that foreign pupils are more likely to cheat and therefore spend more time looking for cheating?

This makes no sense. At a given university, foreign and domestic students go to the same university and take the same classes. At best, you might argue bias with foreign-sounding names, but that would be an extraordinary claim to make and would require extraordinary evidence to explain away a 5x difference in cheating.

Extraordinary?

http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/02/16/study-finds-invest...

http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/oct/18/racism-discrimi...

And again that is 5x more discovered cheating, what number of cheating occurred undiscovered for all groups? I'm not saying people don't cheat, because they do, I'm saying look at the environment to understand what other impacts on the number might occur.

One will note that you didn't respond to my first point, which is that your actual argument (about unequal resources devoted to policing cheating) is wrong.

So if you are going to argue the point that there is bias against foreign-sounding names, enough bias to explain a 5x gap, you'll need more than roundabout inference and implication. Extraordinary evidence means direct evidence, not links to employment-related articles.

Or it's ease of detection. Viz repetition between students in written assignments of characteristic ESL mistakes that are glaring to native speakers.

Where I went to school, for each CS course (eg algos 201, 301, etc) all programming homework was submitted with a department run submission utility. After submission, all programs for all time were compared for cheating. My guess is they did some basic comparisons of the AST.

The CS department produced well over 10x the cases of academic fraud as the rest of the college. We got lectured each and every semester about it. There were even locked disposal boxes in the CS labs to dispose of printouts; I got busted for cheating one semester because someone had stolen a printout I'd used to figure out bugs in an algorithm and copied the code! Fortunately, the other student had been caught cheating repeatedly and his programs regularly failed to work while I'd never come close and my program worked. The professor gave me the benefit of the doubt.

However, do I really believe CS produced 10x the cheaters? Of course not. They were just easier to detect.

That said, I was stunned at the amount of cheating in graduate courses. One professor teaching math stats was in the habit of posting distributions for each question on the tests. For a particular question, the distribution was bimodal -- I was one of two people in the middle, and the rest of the ~30 students got nearly 0 points or full credit. The question rested on a really neat integral trick, but if you didn't see it (on a timed test), or used the obvious substitution, it was about two pages of work. If you saw the trick, the problem fell apart.

I had been helping one of the students who got full credit for that question with her homework and her calculus was not her strong point. There were ex-physics students in the class who had won integration contests and I kind of expected them to get a trick like this, but not her. So I privately asked her how the hell she got that question. It turned out she had already seen the test -- the 15-ish Chinese kids in my class passed tests down between years, and the professor just twiddled numbers in them instead of rewriting tests. My solution, since I was graded on a curve with them, was to make sure I got to see the tests too. I'm not really sure if I'm proud of that, but you can't be graded on a curve when half the class sees the tests ahead of time.

> all social stratas and races commit crimes at the same rate

Some communities have bars on their windows and others leave their doors unlocked.

You can't find the study because it doesn't exist. In the United States and in the UK there is a huge disparity in violent crimes committed by race.

Did I say violent crime? I said crime.

http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/8078586.html - 1) If a black person and a white person each commit a crime, the black person is more likely to be arrested. This is due in part to the fact that black people are more heavily policed.

http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/factcheck-black-american...

This does not prove that true crime rates are equal. That is an extremely strong claim to make. I agree the point about being more likely to be arrested, but that hardly leads us to believe therefore that the true rates are equal.

>On a similar note, I can't find the study now but I've seen the pretty much all social stratas and races commit crimes at the same rate.

That sounds completely implausible. For instance:

For example:

https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...

Again, as the comment above, I said crime, the example I gave was speeding.

Speeding isn't usually considered a crime. It won't usually show up on background checks. Usually you can't go to jail for it. It's usually just a fine. When it isn't, you're talking about moving from simple speeding to reckless endangerment and the like.

Speeding (a) isn't a crime, and (b) is committed by just about everybody, making it a pretty bad example.

> domestic students don't cheat as much not because they believe in norms against cheating but rather because they understand better that they will probably get caught, or they understand better how not to get caught (so they don't get caught).

Are you really making a case that the reason students don't cheat is fear of getting caught? Is there no room for students who don't cheat because:

1. they actually want to learn the material

2. don't need to cheat because they learned the material

3. have personal honor and integrity - would rather flunk out than be a cheat

4. want to earn the degree with pride

You can achieve #1 and #2 (pretty much the same thing) and still want to cheat to minimize bad luck, especially if others are cheating, with the curves and all.

#3 and #4 are also pretty much the same thing. Yes some people have academic integrity, others make up for it with integrity in other parts of life (so they still get good feelies about themselves), some people only value winning, some people are lazy, some people just can't cut it and the costs are too high to fail with integrity. All to say it exists, but I don't think this would be a big group if cheating were allowed, even if grades weren't on a curve and other complications were ironed out.

Honor is what separates people from animals.

Anecdotally as a TA this absolutely matches what I've seen. I think it is cultural combined with courses being much more difficult if you don't speak English well.

Not to mention there is much more pressure on foreign students to perform well academically, both due to their culture and due to the fact that their families often sacrifice a lot in order to provide them with the opportunity in the US.

Back when I was a masters foreign student, I had ousted another foreign student who stole my assignment and submitted it as their own. But later I learned how their family had been in poverty and that his parents had done everything possible to get their son out to higher studies in the US and I felt really bad. Life's just more difficult for the average foreign student overall from the small sample space I experienced. That doesn't make it right but the values of right and wrong are somewhat skewed when it comes to survival.

This would be relevant if foreign students were more likely to be poor than domestic students. But that's not the case. If anything, they are more likely to be better-off (the poor students, unless on a scholarship - which US public universities seldom give to international students, will study locally).

Here's a fun aspect:

At most schools, if you know of cheating and don't report it, it's a violation of their honor code which will get you punished.

Whether it was "justified" cheating or not, it is cheating. Even if you don't want them to get in trouble, don't let yourself get screwed in the process.

I've never heard about that, and I graduated from a top college fairly recently, which leads me to believe this is not true of most schools.

As well, it seems to be non-domestic students who are from countries with low English language penetration, possibly because they tend to have peer groups almost exclusively of their native language.

Again, this is anecdotal.

The idea of academic cheating being bad is not a universal value.

In Soviet K-12 it was more like in NASCAR - cool in moderation so long you don't get caught. Don't know about college.

In fact there is no word for [academic] "cheating" in Russian.

Wonder how it is in other cultures.

Anecdotal from my experience with international students:

In my college most of them went back to their countries to work in their parents' or relatives' companies (sometimes). It seemed like getting a US degree was the important part, not learning the material. With a US degree, they got a ton of interviews and jobs where they learned on the job. I know for a fact my US degree would put me at a super high advantage back in my home country, even if I knew less than people there.

> It seemed like getting a US degree was the important part, not learning the material

I think this describes very many students of many backgrounds.

It doesn't need to be universal. It just had to match the expectations of people from university X. It would be better if every student cheated a little, rather than just some bad actors.

That is interesting. Maybe something to do with the relationship between people and "authority"? Certainly if you are not able to collude vs. the state in an authoritarian regime, you're not going to get very far.

Good point. It should also tell us about the US's own highly bureaucratic, test driven educational culture. http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/06/03/anti-intellectualism-...

Dan Falcone: Yeah, I’ve seen this type of thinking before. The school that I’m in now is changing the department. It’s including more advanced placement test-driven subjects whereas it used to be a place where you could go to –

Noam Chomsky: – Think about things.

So we have people out to grab a business certificate from a big bureaucracy. (If that's what an "education" means now for many, because their job/compensation prospects are such a headache, I couldn't care less about most forms of cheating. It's not the problem to solve. Even people I know with fancy degrees have to put up with shitty workplaces.)

even within a single culture, you have generational differences. I remember some classes I performed pretty badly. Didn't show up, etc. and end up with a "B." Professor was from a different time.

I think it's very important to note that foreign students are not representative of immigrants as a whole.

At many schools in the US, foreign students are not eligible for financial aid. The students who are able to attend school are often wealthy (sometimes extremely wealthy), and they're in the US to check a box. They come for the diploma and then return home to do... something. They care a lot less about actually learning anything than a student who actually needs the degree to get by in post-college life.

One of the reasons why cheating is rampant in India is because the examination system in most colleges is mind-numbing and uncreative. The intelligent students don't find an incentive in working hard for an examination based on a rote pattern, and the "smart" ones follow suit leading to a culture where honesty in examinations isn't important. I have seen a few of my Indian peers be able to appreciate the difference in the testing methods and change their attitude accordingly. But the "acting smart" mindset is set in far too deep in most of the students who just care about getting good grades. Having said that, I think improving the vetting procedure for the entry of international students is necessary; and sadly that does not seem to be in focus due to the revenue that students from foreign countries bring in.

> I think improving the vetting procedure for the entry of international students is necessary; and sadly that does not seem to be in focus due to the revenue that students from foreign countries bring in.

Agreed. I think there's an opportunity for someone to come in and one-up the SAT or ACT with a better vetting procedure for international students.

In Russia 9 out of 10 students are cheating on exams, The vast majority of young people especially in smaller cities don't care about actual learning of a subject, most of them do it only for a degree. No wonder they continue doing the same when they came to USA

the russian kids are probably not that much different from the american kids.

Five times more likely to cheat or five times more likely to get caught? I think this says more about a growing culture of people who take short-cuts than it does about people.

As a former foreign student in the US, I take some offense at the generalization of all foreign students as cheating.

Now I couldn't read more than the initial lines of the article since I didn't have an account, but judging from the comments here there was no distinction between the type of foreign students.

In the name of political correctness I think one is generalizing across all foreign students, when there are wide varieties between the subgroups. I was a foreign student from Norway e.g. who studied with a lot of Indians. We have very little in common culturally and certainly with respects to the view on cheating. My impression was that cheating was endemic in India and while the Indians I knew were very nice people, they cheated an awfully lot. I simply don't think they viewed that as that bad of a thing to do. More than half I could actually see cheating through the exam. Others paid for homework.

Of course we also had different incentives in that my life did not depend that much on my American exams. For many Indians it could make the difference between poverty or wealth.

If you Google 'Foreign Students Seen Cheating More Than Domestic Ones' and click on the wsj link that appears on the results, you'll be able to see the entire article.

As a former foreign student in a CS / CE degree in US, I don't take offense at all.

A large proportion of students are from China. The article does focus more on those students. I think if you add India in the mix, that would overwhelm statistically all the other countries (South America, Africa, Europe etc).

> I take some offense at the generalization of all foreign students as cheating.

Where did you read that? Can you show the quote where it says "all foreign students are cheating". I couldn't find it directly, or implied.

> when there are wide varieties between the subgroups.

They are wide variaties. But surely you don't believe their is a proportional representation from all the countries (if there are 100 students, they'll be 10 from Norway, 10 from India, 10 from Bolivia 10, etc). You are from Norway, I was from Europe as well. On average most students would probably be from China and India though.

I believe you miss the point. Stating that foreign students cheap more, implies that simply being foreign is what increases your chance of cheating. When in fact it would have been more accurate to say 3rd world students cheat more. Of course that wouldn't have been politically correct so it gets watered down.

The reason this matters is that e.g. in Japan, foreigners are described as the source of all sorts of problems, because yes statistically speaking if you throw everybody who is a foreigner into one group and run statistics on them they are significantly overrepresented on a number of bad things.

That means you would struggle with getting things like an apartment because simply being foreign labels you.

I guess in a screwed up way some people might thing this is a more democratic form of racism.

But I don't think it is a step forward when we "democratize" prejudices by creating artificial groups of people and discriminating based on that.

Would it somehow be more fear if we in Europe regarded the US as dangerous as Mexico because we artificially picked the whole of north America including Mexico to make generalizations about everybody living there?

It is a correlation based heuristic. Quantifying and splitting countries into 1st, 2nd, 3rd world would be a bit too much. Where to make the cut-offs? As a cohort, and looking simply at correlation being a foreign student in US seems to be correlated with cheating. And I speak this as a former foreign student as well.

> Stating that foreign students cheap more, implies that simply being foreign is what increases your chance of cheating.

Not quite. The article does go into more details showing that a large number of foreign students are Chinese. So it is not as simple as being from another country. Being a foreign student in US doesn't imply being a random sample from all of the world's countries. India and China account for the majority of students and the article does focus on China quite a bit.

> When in fact it would have been more accurate to say 3rd world students cheat more

Ok thinking about it some more. Isn't that more problematic. Is China a 3rd world country? What does 3rd world even mean anymore? Wouldn't that be deeply insulting to them?

> That means you would struggle with getting things like an apartment because simply being foreign labels you.

I would struggle, agreed. But that is their country and if a simple heuristic works for them, well it works for them. Perhaps expanding energy and inquiring what country tenants are coming from or white/blacklisting nationalities, religions, countries and managing rules based on that is just too troublesome so they look at a general correlation.

> I guess in a screwed up way some people might thing this is a more democratic form of racism

It is not quite the same. Unless it is really about another persons' skin color. But it is not, it is about cheating, crime, and so on. It so happens that is also correlated with certain nationalities, cultures or skin colors. Haven't been to Japan. Maybe they are really that racist, but I wouldn't be surprised if landlords just don't want to get ripped off, and managing profits and risk is what they worry about.

> Would it somehow be more fear if we in Europe regarded the US as dangerous as Mexico because we artificially picked the whole of north America including Mexico to make generalizations about everybody living there?

Fair to who? Maybe it would be fair to you if say you were flooded by lots of people from North America who committed crimes, picked pockets, stole, started fights in the street, threw trash all over. It might not be fair some people from US who don't behave that way typically, but the world doesn't operate on fairness.

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They are speaking mainly about cheating by Chinese students (and also Indian ones) in the article. No data about the other foreign students?

[edit] Is it because Chinese and Indian students represent the bulk of foreign students in the US?

> No data about the other foreign students?

Because after those 2 major groups are accounted for, others are an insignificant proportion. Those minorities could be more honest than the domestic students, statistically it wouldn't matter much.

School teachers call it "cheating".

Management calls it "cooperation".

Our school system preps kids in a way that is different than how we work. Or at least the best way to work.

They have cooperation in schools too.

Yes, and any progress they make at it is instantly destroyed by the notion of competition. There might be a lesson where students work together, but then they all take tests individually.

Schools don't even know what they are doing. This should't be a surprise. It is a system. A system cannot understand itself.

personal story 1: Back then at college I was once a grader for a computer science course. I reported two students' projects that matched all too perfectly and turned out one student tricked another into giving the project as a "reference" and ended up copying the whole thing. My college has zero-tolerance policy towards any kind of cheating, therefore the cheating student was booted out. These two seemed to be close friends and it was probably devastating to their mutual trust and friendship, not to mention one's academic path was basically over due to the cheating incident.

personal story 2: I took a CS course with a Matlab project as the final project. When it was close to the deadline many of my classmates including me got an email from our TA, at least the sender's name is our TA's name, saying that we needed to submit the project through email by midnight. Some of us grew suspicious that the sender's email address was a gmail account and did not end with ".edu", and the deadline never changed on the official course calendar. It turned out it was indeed someone that faked TA's identity and sent out those emails, since anyone who enrolled in the class can see their classmates' email addresses if shared. There were still some students who finished the project early and ended up emailing their project to that fake TA account. The perpetrator was never caught. (If you are from my university and majored in CS, you probably heard of this incident. It caused quite a bit of stir)

As a former grader to many college courses, cheating involves a mix of both international and domestic students. If one's educational background does not stress the consequence of cheating, he/she is likely to cheat. In this case, some cultures do not really punish students for cheating aside from scolding.

Also, giving some 5.1/100 or 1/100 ratio is pointless. Wait until you get your PhD and you will know academic dishonesty happens all the time regardless of where you are from. It's just some cheating is more clever than the other.

> averages don't represent correlation

what does this even mean?

> and massive aggregate numbers tell us nothing about any member of the population

sounds like someone cheated their way through statistics class.

Please don't respond to a comment you think is wrong by getting personally nasty. That's worse than being wrong, and takes things further in an unwanted direction.

Edit: Your comments have been breaking the HN guidelines egregiously and often. We ban accounts that do this, so please read the rules and follow them when commenting here. That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844948 and marked it off-topic.

Regardless of the prominence of the source, this is xenophobic stereotyping. They are painting every person in a large, incredibly diverse group (at every school in the United States, and including every foreign student from every country in the world, Canada to Angola to China to Andorra!) with one broad brush. The headline itself is absurd, inflammatory sensationalism.

They have little basis: The statistics are almost meaningless; averages don't represent correlation and massive aggregate numbers tell us nothing about any member of the population. For example, the average wealth of 999 bankrupt people and Bill Gates is $75 million, a number which tells us nothing about anyone in that group.

I never thought I'd see something like this from the WSJ, or say that one of their stories should be removed from HN, but I flagged this one.

(Admittedly there's a chance of something more substantive beyond the headline and pre-paywall paragraph I can read, but I still can't imagine anything can justify that headline or the inept use of statistics to justify it.)

EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions on the web search (which I should have thought of). It turns up this headline too, in the Daily Caller; great job on spreading this story with your excellent journalism, WSJ:

Foreign Students Five Times As Likely To Cheat In College

Click on the "web" link to get past the paywall.

Thanks for the suggestion, but for some reason it didn't work.

Not to be overly critical, but there's an irony in you criticising the thoroughness of the methodology considering you only read a paragraph of the article.

That said, this is probably a problem with paywalled articles on HN in general.

I agree with everything you say, but I'm a commenter on Hacker News, not a journalist for one of the world's most influential publications. The standards are a little different.

Not so different as to justify angrily denouncing an article you didn't read. Though at least you were honest about that.

I can't read it (the web workaround didn't work). I can read the headline, which cannot be justified, so I disagree.

EDIT: I'm surprised to see you taking sides in a discussion. I don't think I violated any norms of HN.

I'm not taking a side on college cheating, just advocating for quality in HN discussion. Angry denunciations degrade that quality, and so does reacting primarily to titles. The combination of the two is particularly bad, hence my comment.

Sorry you feel that way, and I fully support your efforts to improve the quality of discussion here - in fact, I'd say be even more active!

I agree the tone is too angry; sorry. In almost all cases I'd agree about such emphasis on a headline - but I think this is an exception. Many people don't read or think past a major publication's very influential headlines (ironic, I know, but certainly many HN and WSJ users read even less than I did).

Foreign Students Seen Cheating More Than Domestic Ones

If they substituted other groups for Foreign, such as certain religions or races, then my response would be broadly supported no matter how the WSJ qualified it in the body. To tar the character of all those students because of their foreign origins is, I still believe, inflammatory, xenophobic, and atrocious.

Anyway, I don't mean to re-litigate the substance of it; I only want to point out that I think this is an exceptional case. Have a great day.

> this is xenophobic stereotyping

No it's not. It's just a statistic, what a pathetic rant. If we sampled 1000 people in your Bill Gates example, we can look deeper into the 1000 that make 75 million on average and find Bill Gates - the anomaly - pretty quickly across the population.

Maybe some particular nationalities are pulling that number up it's worth further investigation. It's also not a huge stretch that the students who flew across the world to study in the US have more at stake, and might be more likely to cheat.

At the moment it's just a number and whatever your emotion to that number is it does tell us something.

> At the moment it's just a number

It's not at all just a number. One of the world's leading publications has printed that headline and story; to the great majority of people, the number will be insignificant next to the headline.

> It's also not a huge stretch that the students who flew across the world to study in the US have more at stake, and might be more likely to cheat.

In fact, it's completely speculative to draw that conclusion, to conclude that they are cheating, and to conclude a causal relationship. I challenge you to show us some factual basis for it.

> In fact, it's completely speculative to draw that conclusion

I didn't conclude, I presented 2 possible explanations for the number. Tbh I think you're the one who has made up his mind already on this matter

> HN, but I flagged this one.

You should at least read the article. If you can't read the article, don't flag as quickly. Just jump to the next news item.

> this is xenophobic stereotyping.

And I am sure many first hand accounts above of seeing the same pattern are just paid shills of Kochs brothers or hidden racist Trump supporters hiding amongst the HN crowd ;-)

> They are painting every person in a large, incredibly diverse group

Yeah the foreign student group, especially in CS/CE area is not really that diverse and doesn't even come close to representing proportionally every country in the world.

Title should be "Foreign Student Seen 'Innovating' More Than Domestic Ones".

Cue Donald Trump In 3...2...1

Original parent comment which has now been removed:

> In software and programming it matters little if you cheat. It works or it's shit. It's easy to tell the difference. And it's pretty easy to fire interns or juniors, etc. Not only that but you don't really learn how to do jobs anyhow.

Every single sentence in your comment is ludicrously false.

> In software and programming it matters little if you cheat.

What if you steal software from your old employer? What if you hack a competitor? What if you base your entire project on something that you can't legally use, and then you're sued?

Outside the corporate/legal world, there are still areas where cheating is very harmful. Violating open-source licenses, pretending someone else's work is your own, etc. The open-source world works (when it does work) because of transparency and something like the honor system.

Cheating matters a lot in software.

> It works or it's shit.

That is just complete, utter nonsense. There is a huge spectrum from "good" to "shit", and "working" begins near the "shit" end.

> It's easy to tell the difference.

If it were easy to tell the difference, you could just throw a junior developer into a management role. Lots of juniors have the people skills and organization skills to manage a small project, but they don't have the experience to know which practices are OK in the long-run and which practices aren't.

Object-oriented programming is a great example. Many programmers in the FP camp think all OO programs are shit. Many of them took years to come to that conclusion.

If it's so easy and clear-cut, why is there little agreement on what makes good software and what doesn't?

> And it's pretty easy to fire interns or juniors, etc.

Not in the US and most other developed countries. Firing people is risky and expensive. I worked for a company that was sued by an ex employee for a completely bullshit reason, and the company lost $400k in legal fees that they could never recover because the employee didn't have that kind of cash.

> Not only that but you don't really learn how to do jobs anyhow.

You don't learn how to write code for a living, but you do learn time management and people skills, which are much more important anyway. Most coding work at most companies only requires an average worker. Would it be better to have people with amazing skills doing 100% of the work? Yes, but there aren't enough of them.

What differentiates all those average people is whether they work well on a team, how well they manage their time, and how well they learn. All those things are learned in college, and all of them are undermined by cheating.

Or more likely to be inspected.

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