Hacker News Reader

Comment by whooshee | Hacker News Reader

People are not afraid to calling out cheating. Yes, there are Chinese students do that. People are just not that into overgeneralize a giant group of people.

View on HN

Is it over-generalizing when there is a cultural predisposition around it? Making generalizations about a culture when an element of that culture is the target of the generalization seems fairly reasonable. As always, “it isn’t everyone,” but the exceptions prove the rule.

Well, part of the problem is that humans are pretty bad at accurately assessing frequency within groups. You seem pretty certain that there is a ‘cultural predisposition’ to cheating, but I have only heard anecdotal evidence.

>A Wall Street Journal analysis of data from more than a dozen large U.S. public universities found that in the 2014-15 school year, the schools recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students. They recorded one such report per 100 domestic students.

>Students from China were singled out by many faculty members interviewed. “Cheating among Chinese students, especially those with poor language skills, is a huge problem,” said Beth Mitchneck, a University of Arizona professor of geography and development.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-...

that doesn't mean there's no bias in reporting cheating.

and the second quote is anecdotal. it might be easier to spot the cheater who doesn't write english well if their papers are obviously better written than the student speaks.

it would simply be more difficult to catch cheaters who speak and write english fluently.

it's possible that chinese students cheat more in school, even a significant amount more, even their style of cheating may be drastically different, but I still find it somewhat strange that that gets so much focus in a system that is like what cycling used to be:

https://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2017/02/cheating_i...

We're just going off of random internet strangers ideas about Chinese culture here. Personally, I would need much more information before I decided this was "the rule."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com