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Comment by rawnlq | Hacker News Reader

Another interesting cultural bit from the same author on chinese collaboration:

> You know how overseas Chinese students in America all copy each others work to get answers? This workflow scale. How we work when older too. So if I have a question I open up QQ and have a few hundred friends. We all help each other with whatever. Many are engineers or work in factories here in Shenzhen. Most of the electronics in the world are made here and a lot of them designed and engineered here also. So easy to get very very professional help. This network has been called gongkai. Also why so many hardware startup here.

Found from the author's comment history on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DIY/comments/3c9l2m/my_diy_underlit....

She seems to have a lot of (culturally) interesting opinions in general: https://www.reddit.com/user/SexyCyborg/comments/?sort=top

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She was calling out common traits for people then trying to label them Chinese, and readers, like you, suddenly feel "interesting"...

> how overseas Chinese students in America all copy each others work to get answers?

Student colluding is any special? I was college ta before, I do not think there is ever a class students do not copy each other.

There's a difference between some students going that way for whatever reason -vs- copying work being absolutely normal and generally expecting that this is the way to go. There are many articles talking about it if you google. Some connect it to "you advance to a university or stay rural with your family forever" situation, some with other factors.

No, Chinese stidents, as claimed in another post, were taught to respect hierarchy. Their colluding is the result that it's a working way of game the system.

But is there anything special?

Gaming the system is the human nature.

I speak a bit of Chinese and have Chinese friends who were studying in Germany and one time I got to sit in on their copying session. I was quite surprised when a lot of Chinese showed up whom I'd never seen before.

Turns out some of them were seniors who had brought their homework from previous years. It wasn't like everyone just copied the work either, there was plenty of discussion about the points they had trouble understanding. (But my Chinese wasn't quite good enough to pick up on most of it.)

So if I may generalize from my anecdote, I'd say that Chinese students colluding is special in that they form a tightly knit community abroad, helping each other out.

Again, is that special to the Chinese? Isn't US history filled with examples of foreigners forming tight-knit communities based on nationality or ethnicity?

My only other experience with large groups of foreign students from the same country was when I stayed in China as an exchange student and met a lot of Pakistanis.

They definitely hung out with each other more often, but they didn't seem to actually study much together. I had a few email me with questions on the same exercise, so at least those three hadn't exchanged notes.

Of course there might have been some Pakistani-only homework sessions I was simply never invited to, but I don't think that was the case.

One of the major benefits of being in a fraternity in my university was that the fraternities and sororities all had every homework and test most of the teachers at the school had ever released. I tests on the hardest math teacher in the school going back 36 years. I got asked a question on his final that he asked on his first and didn't ask in-between.

If he had spent more time teaching instead of coming up with insanely hard test questions we wouldn't have had that huge of a back file on him.

We used them for study sessions.

I can only imagine they are all online now.

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