Chinese Thesis Ghostwriting Scandal Reveals Huge Gray Market
caixinglobal.com
caixinglobal.com
What annoys me is that this is rampant, and universities know it (or they’re intentionally being naive). But rather than crack down on those who are paying course fees, plus paying someone else to do their work. It would be nice if they put some effort into finding those who are actually writing all these papers and enabling them.
Make them tutors, professors, ‘student assistants’, what ever. Some people will always cheat, who cares. In the end they cheat themselves, and it’s up to companies to screen people to ensure they actually have the capabilities they require. Rather than spend on removing the cheaters, spend on enabling the honest. Or even better, transfer directly from the cheaters to the honest, which is effectively what happens, but in the shadows.
But for my friend, who is a perfect match for academia, this is his funding model.
I hope one day he can be credited with all the papers he’s actually written.
It's a backdoor way into Australia that not many Australians know about and nobody rocks the boat on because everybody knows the country needs the migrants and investment.
Ditto with the investment visas. Pretty crazy when at the same time everybody loses their minds over boats with a few hundred people on them
The issue with the boats is it would not be a few hundred people for very long as the Europeans have found out over the last few years.
It is not xenophobia to want to see responsible development where development only occurs when it is supported by the infrustucture. If we can't afford to build the infrustucture then don't create the housing.
Immigration is achieving the following:
- Lowers wages by increasing supply of labour, including creating a pool of workers willing to be employed at illegal rates - $10/hour. Many workers are willing to work for these rates, substantially below minimum wages, because it is more than they would earn in their home country, and because of promises from the employer that they will sponsor them for permanent residency. (Typically they will be paid correct minimum wage for 20 hours work, but in reality be staffed to work 30 to 50 hours).
- Increasing demand on public services. More people means a greater need for shared services: health, education, public transport, roads, welfare. Considering that the majority (~80%) of new migrants are going to Melbourne and Sydney, two built-up mature megacities of 5 million people, adding more services to these cities is incredibly expensive (eg. a new rail line means tunnelling, land buy-back, extensive shutdowns of existing road and rail etc).
- Increases consumption. This means increased consumer demand throughout the economy, simply based on the higher number of people. However, it also means consumption in an environmental sense: increased demand for water (which we need to desalinate, on the margins), increased demand for food and land (resulting in land clearance), increased CO2 emissions (Australia is a CO2 intensive country), increased pollution and waste.
- Increased demand for land and housing. Young Australians can no longer buy a house in their own country, and home ownership is at historical lows. Huge amounts of houses are being converted to large apartments.
So, if you're a land-owner and business-owner, happy days. You have greater demand for the things you own, and lower wages to pay out. If you're a tradesperson, you're also benefiting a lot from the intense housing and infrastructure construction activity. If you're an average Australian, you have lower wages, higher congestion on public services, increased taxes to pay for those services to be expanded, and no hope (in many cases) of buying your own house.
There is also the added social friction of these two large groups of migrants moving to the country - Indian and mainland Chinese culture is dissimilar to Australian. Already we are seeing neighbourhoods stratified by ethnicity.
You have to pay 100K AUD for bringing your parents.
It goes further too. It undermines the integrity of the school. Lets say that cheater gets by as you've suggested - now they're in the workforce and their boss realizes they're not very good. This doesn't reflect well on where they obtained their credentials.
Worst is that they took a spot at a university that could have been given to a student that wanted to learn.
You should also evaluate your friendship with this person. You want them to get credit but it annoys you with how rampant it is. I wouldn't associate with someone that was doing this on an ongoing basis.
I'll bring up another reason why this is bad - your friend is writing papers while lacking the technical background of that topic. Sure he has notes and can research but this is not enough. There is a reason why reading webMD and self-diagnosing is not a completely creditable route. Sure your friend might be right, but they also could be wrong AND misguiding people that come across his papers.
But my point is more that, universities could look at the ‘problem’ and contain it internally rather than the current outside model.
University students require some income to survive.
Some students are not capable of completing the work required (or don’t want to).
Some students are MORE than capable of completing their degree, on top of others.
So pair them up. One on one tutoring, paring students who can’t with those that can.
Then at least the students doing all the work get paid and recognised for their capabilities. Those that want a piece of paper can have it.
Without this my friend (and other gifted students) end up working some mindless job for minimal pay to get through university. Who does that serve? If anything it takes an unskilled position away from the unskilled.
Your friend may lack the soft skills for tutoring, and definitely lacks the ethics to earn money honestly.
Gee, I feel like I'm on another planet to people in this thread. Am I super-naïve or something?
What about - worst is, it makes a total farce of the entire university system? Does no-one care about that?? If you can just pay to get someone to write your work, how is that better than a non-existing diploma mill? Isn't the whole idea, to educate people? If they've just paid for a bit of paper, and that's ok, why do we need universities at all?
The hard sciences are pretty immune to it at the undergraduate level (we have exams), but it is totally rampant in the economics/commerce/arts facilities. Where the hard sciences have issues is at the postgraduate level where you are expected to ensure all your overseas students graduate even if they can't write in English and know next to nothing about the topic. After you have been through an incoherent thesis draft for the fourth time you know it is going to be quicker to just write it yourself.
I should add that some of the best Ph.D students I have worked with were overseas students. It is not that all overseas students are bad, just that the bottom 25% are not capable of doing a Ph.D and yet we still give them a degree.
Every security measure I have heard of for western testing within the PRC can be bribed around, and it’s so commonplace that it barely warrants discussion (“of course it happens [eyeroll]”.
I have heard of a few US schools doing on-campus retests for English proficiency, but mismatches are simply met with required ESL courses (paid non-credit, of course). I have not heard of other on-campus testing, and I’m not sure anyone wants it since these students usually pay full tuition.
Some people will always cheat, who cares.
I'd rather the next doctor/surgeon I need didn't get someone else to write their uni work, thanks very much. Apart from that I don't want anything to do with anyone that unethical. It's sociopathic.
In the end they cheat themselves
You're most concerned about how their cheating affects the cheater?!
my friend, who is a perfect match for academia
I can't tell if you loathe both academia and your friend's ethics, or neither. Neither, it seems to me. Amazing. Did you cheat too? If not, why not?
Or..It's OK because a lot of people do it?
There is another group of people that will take the phone interview and the remote online coding test for you until you get an onsite interview, since not all phone interview has video chat. That too helped quite some to get accepted into good companies eventually.
That seems a bit much, you're liable to scare away good talent that way.
"Sorry about this but we've had some candidates passing others code as their own. So we've been asked to take all candidates through some code line by line. Such a pain but we have to do it unfortunately. Ill try and get through quickly. You dont mind do you?"
What would be disrespectful was if we ignored all your hard work and hired someone not half as good as you because they had more glowing reviews or more stars on their repos."
Obviously I'm no hiring manager, but often a bit of honesty goes a long way.
And it can lead to very interesting discussions, you learn a lot about a candidate that way.
People, in general, like to talk about themselves, and engineers like to talk about their own code. "See this if statement, well there's a funny story behind that...".
A few years ago I interviewed a candidate who mentioned Github on her CV but no actual URL. What's your username on there, I asked, let's look at some of your code. She refused and said she didn't want me to look at it. Then why did you mention it on your CV I asked? Because she was told she had to, she said. All in all a weird experience, probably for both of us.
Of course I've never coded in a professional capacity, so don't mind me if I said something stupid.
https://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/plagiarism-and-xi-jinp...
But yeah, that is symbolic of the cohort that Bo and Xi led.
Jiang and Hu era was a period of a relative meritocracy, with such shit not being tolerated, or at least not highest levels. But yeah, being anticommunist while being a communist party general secretary wasn't likely to be a working arrangement.
What an irony.
My mom once had fun listening to shitty talks from parents of other students along the lines "hey, can you tell your boy to quiet down a bit, he raises the plank to high for the rest of the class"
You can understand weak students' reasons: they simply can't do it otherwise. But why do strong ones cheat? That what dazzled me about Russians, and Russia in general. What that was is the gigantic, monstrous, totally pathological fear of failure that permeates country's "socially endowed classes."
And secondary to that is the element of social pact: when pupils with excellent marks begin cheating and copying from one another, they begin to embrace the "omerta" created by this, sealing their social contract with their peers.
Most rich, powerful people in Russia teach their children very intentionally to behave along the lines - get close and sycophantic with others privileged people. And you know, to infirm young minds, the reasoning that any privilege one gets in life is through joining some "exclusive social clubs" of other privileged people, is hard to challenge, especially when this comes from their parents.
And after some time, their children become completely accustomed to not to taking upon any challenge straight, because they genuinely believe that even simplest things in life are not doable without tricks, cheats, and favours from other power powerful people. This is the culture in which social elites in Russia grow up.
After being around mainlanders for 11 years while working in electronics, I feel it is very much the same for them. For both of above reasons, people from both nations are extremely afraid of challenge, and more so when you deal with people higher up on the social ladder.
The amount of genuine self-made men who got to any level of prominence in society is so small, they never influenced the societal dynamics in any perceivable way.
Such are still being looked at as if they are some kind of space aliens by regular people.
In the Soviet days, I guess not seeking connection meant a less interesting social position. In the post-Soviet days, if I hear my friends from the former USSR, it could mean getting close to startvation.
Ones who got to that point probably were commies themselves, or were the type of people "sitting around and waiting money to suddenly fall upon then from nowhere just for that, and a nice diploma they had" as they did back in "good ol soviet times"...
Good for them.
> Ones who got to that point probably were commies themselves, or were the type of people "sitting around and waiting money to suddenly fall upon then from nowhere just for that, and a nice diploma they had" as they did back in "good ol soviet times"... That sounds like a generalisation with very little empathy.
The people I have in mind are not ethnic Russians. They didn't live in Russia. One of them had their parents deported to Siberia by the Soviets. Neither of them were in the Komsomol. One of their children was born in 1990. The only serious employer in their city stopped paying wages for months on end. If/when paid, they received 120€/month (early 1997) - for skilled masters degree work. They simply didn't have any buffer to escape the mess. They were definitely not the only ones...
Source: I know someone who does this for loving. Plus there are a ton of services online advertising these services.
Universities know this. They don’t care. They are just squeezing out the last juices from the dying industry.
I agreed up to this point. Can you say more what you mean? University education is a dying industry? What about the massive and growing legislative requirements for degrees in all kinds of occupations?
The current situation is that it is more like institutions whoring out their brand names instead of fostering minds (Harvard lol)
In the past, the universities did well by mere fact of self selection since most people didn’t need college degrees to do well. Only the intellectually curious ventured in.
What I imagine happening later is that things will turn more into a guild model. Where you must have a certain level of competence / reputation to join.
I think more and more people are realizing that the benefit of a university education isn't very good for the cost. Don't get me wrong, it is a positive return on investment, but it could probably be better structured as a vocational school for most people. If my parents didn't pay for my education, I probably would have tried doing a coding school and going directly into the workforce. I learned a lot of cool stuff in university, and attending a prestigious school opened up many opportunities. But most of the former was irrelevant to my job, and the latter is basically just an elaborate means of signalling status (which, while it definitely helped me I fundamentally don't think it'd be fair to hire a university grad simply for being a university grad if a non-grad as the same or better skills).
What if the customer is unattractive or otherwise not their type? Or the wrong gender?
Master degrees make a lot of money for the universities. On paper there are strict antiplagiarism rules but in practice many get away with it.
Then, when it's about university education, it's all business. Parents pay good money for their children's "education", so they expect good grades. Universities compete for students, not the other way around. It's a racket.
Just because statistics reveal a uptick for one group, does not make it acceptable for you to generalize. It's a racist remark, just so you understand the unconscious bias
Imagine if someone said something like "Apparently it is culturally accepted thing for cops to shoot black people"
I mean, you can find a ton of examples of this happening, and plenty of examples of nobody doing anything about it. Does that mean it is culturally accepted here?
Maybe it is culturally accepted in China to cheat? Do you know? Is a statement racist if it is true?
It is culturist (to make up a word). There's a huge difference between this and racism in that culture, unlike race, creates clear statistical differences in behavior.
There are good arguments that discriminating based on culture would have many negative effects, not unlike racism. That as a result of the negative effects we shouldn't treat people differently as a result of the culture they are coming from. Moreover there are already laws in many places attempting to enforce that.
Burying your head in the sand and denying that there are culture differences however is insane. It's entirely obvious statistically, and anecdotally that they exist. Burying your head in the sand is exactly what you (or rather volgo) are suggesting when you are saying that people shouldn't be making statements about the differences between cultures.
I can't say if cheating is more of less acceptable in India than elsewhere, and for sure very many students in India are honest and genuinely interested in learning, but people treating knowledge and teachers as divine is far from reality.
Do you make a comment about that? No, because you have no context and you'll likely be shunned in polite society. You have a James Damore syndrome and probably will not help you in your career
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The best classes that I've taken have been "Feel free to collaborate, but turn in your own work." It allows people to work together on hard problems, but the slackers still fail.
I speak Mandarin and have lived in China, my partner is Chinese. I was shocked during her undergraduate and masters to see just how often cheating took place. Of her close ~8-10 friends, every single one paid for their work to be completed on multiple occasions. It was cheap and quick, and justified with things like “I have to go see a friend for a week, but I need to have the paper written by Thursday”. Costs for most pieces was in the region of $70-120.
The cultural attitude is that cheating is only bad unless you’re caught. Otherwise you’re cunning and able to succeed using any method; everyone does it so there’s nothing wrong.
As absurd as this sounds, my sense is that there's a similar impulse behind more banal grade inflation at elite American Universities.
Sounds like we should do that with the students as well.
Plus, the rate of Chinese IPR and future knowledge is huge. Do you e.g. want to miss out on Chinese PV and wind and emerging battery know-how?
Use the interview to weed out fakes. Don't make sweeping assumptions which risk self harm.
It's actually not illegal to not accept somebody based on them having a degree from a university of poor renown. It's called "qualification" and you can discriminate upon it all you want. It's also not unfair. Unfair would be accepting degrees from any place that hands out degrees like candy. It's also not racist, a lot of Chinese parents send their children to study abroad because they know Chinese universities suck. Those foreign degrees open up a lot of doors, both abroad and domestic.
> Plus, the rate of Chinese IPR and future knowledge is huge. Do you e.g. want to miss out on Chinese PV and wind and emerging battery know-how?
What's your point? Hire Chinese with junk degrees now so that you magically get to profit from future Chinese innovations?
I'm told the value of a British degree, once highly prestigious, is rapidly declining in China due to the number of degree mills (ex-polys) we have here churning out degree certificates as fast as they can cash the tuition fee cheques.
My time is actually more valuable than this. There are signals available to them to show they take original work seriously and are bucking their cultural trends of cheating academia to get worthless degrees.
TL;DR USD1,000 seems too low for writing a doctoral thesis. You can barely proofread one adequately for this, sometimes.
These bad actors are paying for a Chinese thesis written inside China. Maybe competition keeps prices down.