Who lost the most marks when cheating was stopped?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
So... was the aim to reduce cheating, or was it just to disadvantage the richer kids?
Because if the aim was really to reduce cheating, then I can't see how any of the consequences were precisely the reverse of the aims.
It's poorly worded but they seem to hypothesise that poorer students were sort of piggy backing off of those who paid for the cheats. So they were cheating too.
More interestingly, the teachers (which were the invigilators) rationalized this as "everybody is cheating, if you don't than the stupid kids from the country side would have bigger grades than you, so you should cheat too" (I was in an elite school).
The bribe was not huge (around $50 total sum per class per exam), so I don't think it wasn't the primary motivator for the teachers. Way more money was made by private untaxed tutoring.
So I wonder a bit at what makes education ineffective. I coached at risk latino high school students briefly while attending college and for them it was pretty clear that they needed to work to help support the family so they had fewer hours to devote to study. I suggested to the program that paying these kids minimum wage to spend time with a tutor would pay for itself in reduced social services costs and police costs down the road but they were not interested in hearing about that.
*edit: and yeah, when it comes to the exam, you're no longer educating. literally the only important thing for both student and teacher at this point is the score
They aimed to help poor and disenfranchised groups get into their specialized public schools, by forcing a meritocracy, as disproportionately wealthy and white families were accepted because admittance was previously too discretionary and lots of excuses were made about why (hm sounds familiar).
After the meritocracy was established it became disproportionately asian by a huuuuuge margin (stuyvesant high school being ~75% asian with the city having a ~10% asian population) while poor and disenfranchised groups are still poor and disenfranchised. Just even more apparently now.
This is no comment about meritocracies, it is about illuminating how far off base a governing body will be at promoting a particular outcome.
There is a lot of literature behind what those exact quirks in New York City, if you'd like to read about it.
Why would I think exam cheating would influence structural problems, advantages and disadvantages, associated with SES levels? Getting rid of cheating doesn't get rid of private tutors, better equipped schools, less distracting home environments, etc.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to imagine what such an expectation might betray.
What it would betray is the reality that not all wealth is earned equally. Yes, there are plenty of people that earn through effort and merit. But to look at one's environment (wether in a first, second, or third world country) and not see how much wealth is created through cheating is ludicrous. When someone walks into a bank with a gun and empties the registers, it's easy for us to see how that's criminal. But someone who empties a bank via Wall Street, etc. is just doing their job I suppose.
Poorer students are more likely to be lazy and not want to study, due to their upbringing and because their parents are also less educated and have more distrust in the skills that are taught in schools. Richer students' parents are more likely to be well-educated and thus to impose on their children that they need to study harder and take education more seriously.
This is not news or any revelation. Of course, some of the richest kids may also be lazier, but the big difference would be between the poor and the middle-class kids.
The poor can't afford such measures and lack the social connections, so they have no choice to play outside the confines of the system and expect results; they have to obtain the relevant differentiator -- in this case, grades -- leaving some desperate subset among them to resort to the most overt, blatant types of cheating to get ahead.
In fact I was explicitly told by my parents to study rather than work. Their reasoning was that the whole point of them grinding their butts off working was so I could have the best education money could buy (they grew up poor in post WW2 Japan and were dirt poor immigrants in grad school in the 70's).
Worked out for me, but there's no denying that I had an enormous edge over the vast majority of my peers.
It seems to me that the basis of the author's misunderstanding that leads to their surprise is the narrative of wealthy people being more likely to be corrupt on a per capita basis, which clearly runs counter to the statistics which demonstrate those of less economic means committing more crimes per capita.
It also runs counter to the fact that those of greater means have greater scores due to greater means, and thus less likely to need to cheat to have good scores.
The most likely culprit, it emerged, was that the "collective" and "petty" forms of corruption, as witnessed by Dr Borcan herself, had a curious effect: they might be paid for chiefly by well-off students bribing invigilators, but everyone benefited. It gave the poorer students "a free ride" to higher marks.
It also meant that when cheating was removed, the academic advantages of wealthier students became even more apparent. Cheating it seemed had provided a kind of levelling effect.
I'm not sure from where you're deriving these narratives and counter narratives from.
The point is rather that such a result only comes as a surprise if one has a strong a priori expectation that rich people cheat more than poor people. Otherwise one would predict exactly this effect.
I know people which were a constant 5 at math through high school but which got 9.85 in the exam (1-10 grades at the time).
Teachers preferred corruption to happen in the exam room, since it was the students cheating, than in the grading stage where they were liable.
This isn't to say that social status/family has to determine someone's future - I'm a firm believer that hard work and choices can turn that around. Although on a purely statistical basis, it seems that this is rarely the case.
Unless, of course, intelligence is "bad" for the wealthy and "good" for the poor, but I doubt that's the case...
But intelligence without wealth can easily be beaten by average intelligence plus wealth and status. E.g. Trump
'Inheritance' doesn't have to mean just what was passed down at death - it must also include all the additional resources available during development to have any meaning.
But if you are saying that education makes little difference to lifetime earnings, you're going to have to back that up with a reference because it's an extraordinary claim.
You seem to be suggesting some sort of natural selection process, whereas it's also legitimate to posit that status contributes to higher IQ (or g, if you prefer) in the form of:
- fewer chemical contaminants in utero and in early life (i.e. living in a less chemically polluted environment)
- access to better nutrition
- access to better medical care
- less stress in utero and in early life
- less exposure to disease
- less exposure to psycho-physiological toxicity (e.g.: poor sleep quality due to a noisy environment)
The list goes on.
tl;dr: you're assuming causation from correlation.
Worth thinking about what a level playing field really looks like.
The problem is systemic - in European post-socialist countries, education is based mostly on rote learning which becomes more and more pointless in a modern world. Example on the bottom.
Students cope with that by cheating, which allows them to concentrate their time on actually useful aspects. Most teachers, except the dullest ones, tolerate that. In other words, the whole system sort-of works only because of cheating! As it's so accepted rote learning is irritating, but mostly harmless.
There's a fine boundary where cheating stops being beneficial - crib notes are great, making someone else solve problems for you, or having pre-made answers is not. That actually should be punished.
Punishing all forms of cheating is going to be incredibly damaging, because it means the best scoring students are going to be those best at memorization.
Wouldn't it be better to remove rote learning instead? Obviously, but I'm afraid that's not realistic. Harshly punishing cheating now is going to achieve the opposite: today's top rote learners become tomorrow's professors and teachers. Not only did they get great scores, but they presumably feel good in a rote-learning system.
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What do I mean by rote learning? Memorize these numbers [0] to the third decimal place. Not a joke - it's a real example, albeit exceptional in its absurdity.