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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

If it was the rich kids who were the cause of corruption, why should the poor kids suffer for that?

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'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.

Yep. I was in such an exam, and there was a voluntary collection of money to bribe the invigilators. I didn't pay in and was looked down because. I didn't cheat, but I could have if I wanted.

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.

Thank you for sharing that. It seems that the 'test score' was more important than actually educating the student. My assumption was that if the education was effective then the student would have no difficultly passing the test.

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.

well, it's not about passing the test. considering these exams are sorting mechanisms, you don't just have to pass; you have to do better than those that are trying to do the same university course you are

*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

It was the really weird part about "AP" classes here in California. They teach you how to score well on the test for subject X but it is unclear that they impart any real understanding of subject X. And if you score well on the test for subject X you can skip taking it in college which sort of closes the loop on you ever learning the topic. Some teachers however take a better approach but certainly they aren't the common case.

The poor kids were clearly cheating, otherwise their pass rate wouldn't have fallen.

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