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Comment by choonway | Hacker News Reader

It's built into their culture. There was one time when the lecturer left the classroom during a break in the lecture, the china exchange students swarmed over his laptop, which he did not lock down, inserted USB drives, copied files had lookouts posted at the door etc. It was so shockingly spontaneous. They did not know I was not a student but another lecturer auditing his class.

Later I told him that his laptop was raided and left it up to him to decide whether to pursue it. He just said they have an integrity problem. Later I heard they made it non-examinable for them so they did not feel a need to cheat.

I think it's just built into PRC Chinese culture. Maybe for them repercussions aren't that bad. But Singaporean Chinese stick to the rules pretty much (google no U-turn syndrome)

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Is it really limited to chinese culture? US had Echelon to spy on other countries' communications, Israel had destroyed Iranian program to have atomic energy. Europeans have stolen the secret of manufacturing a porcelain. West and Russia have stolen German secrets of making rockets after the war. Nobody wants to play fair.

And if you look at mobile game market, there everyone is stealing ideas from each other.

Is cheating/stealing something you want to perpetuate (cuz revenge or something), or something you want to call out?

I just wanted to note that it is not limited to Chinese culture as the comment above states. And I have remembered another example: Apple has copied Xerox's Alto GUI for its own computer. Here is a quote from Jobs from the article [1]:

> I was so blinded by the first thing they showed me, which was the graphical user interface. I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life.

So Jobs just copied the idea of GUI just because he "liked" it instead of developing his own computer-human interface. Is not it similar to what Huawei does: taking the ideas they "like" and innovating on top of that.

[1] https://www.mac-history.net/computer-history/2012-03-22/appl...

hate to be so nitpicking, but the whole idea of GUI had been around before Xerox and articulated by folks like Jef Raskin who later started the Mac project at Apple[1]:

> "My thesis in Computer Science, published in 1967, argued that computers should be all-graphic, that we should eliminate character generators and create characters graphically and in various fonts, that what you see on the screen should be what you get, and that the human interface was more important than mere considerations of algorithmic efficiency and compactness. This was heretical in 1967, half a decade before PARC started. Many of the basic principles of the Mac were firmly entrenched in my psyche. By the way, the name of my thesis was the "Quick-Draw Graphics System", which became the name of (and part of the inspiration for) Atkinson's graphics package for the Mac."

so yeah, Jobs might have seen the demonstration of it for the first time in his 1979 visit to PARC, but the creator of the Mac Raskin who was already working on Macintosh had already published such "heretic" idea as early as 1967. So no, it's not similar to what Huawei does.

[1] https://apple-history.com/gui_raskin1

Shocking this kind of stereotyping is not only allowed but upvoted to first place on HN.

Are they doing the stereotyping, or are they identifying instances of it? That is, people not avoiding the stereotype. I doubt it's a mystery, I know the stereotypes of white people and white men, and I strive to counteract them. As far as I know it's the only way to fight stereotypes.

Here's Bunnie Huang's explanation of cavalier disregard for copyright/trademark and IP law:

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284

I'm sure he's biased, right?

Not sure how I should understand your comment, but the link you posted is great. It clearly shows what a great place Shenzen is. If Silicon Valley is be the place for software startups, Shenzen is its equivalent in hardware. So much ingenuity combined with an extremely short manufacturing pipeline as described in the article. And as long as we are not talking about actual counterfeit products, I can't blame them for being inspired by known brands products. But unless we are talking acutally patented or copyrighted things, the concept of "IP" isn't as clear-cut as some company lawyers like to make it.

I used to be angry at these posts, but now I'm just sad. Despite the GP then saying it's 'PRC Chinese' vs 'Singaporean Chinese,' it's still unclear if this is a broad swipe at an ethnic group, a nation's people, or their culture at large. It's just easy to vent unsubstantiated anger when it's the popular thing to do.

It's so rife in the academic world that it goes beyond stereotype.

It's a spillover from the right wing reddits. Always starts with "it's in their culture" never mind that almost all of the Chinese expats are just hard working normal humans. Their government might be effed up but it's a bit of a long jump to blame their culture

I don’t know, man. What i am about to say is anecdotal, but as someone who went through educational system (up until beginning of high school) in Russia, it was the same there. As soon as teacher left for a bathroom break in the middle of the class, there would always be a few students who spring up to the desk and search real quick for answer sheets for the upcoming exam or something like that. No one would call them out, because the students who try to find the materials were considered the righteous heroes risking being caught for the common good.

After talking to my dad (who still lives there) recently, I only reinforced my opinion that it is definitely a cultural issue in Russia. I cannot speak for China specifically, but I don’t see why it cannot be the case there as well.

P.S. It sucks I even feel the need to mention this, but I have zero affiliation or interest in anything even remotely right-wing.

I also don't know, man, but that sounds so un-Russian to me, I, as a Russian myself, am having trouble believing it. It wasn't like that 25-30 years ago. Nobody would call people out in general, because in Russian culture being a snitch is one of the worst thing you can be, but nobody would go as far as to rummage through teacher's papers. Cheating was pretty rampant in other ways: people would bring cheatsheets to exams (there's no such thing as "cheatsheets allowed" exams there, and exams are often stupid hard because people keep "passing" them somehow), rip off essays, etc, but teacher's stuff was out of reach at least.

from a lecturer's perspective - It's not a problem if students pass - it's a problem if everybody gets an 'A' and there was no way to differentiate the cohort.

It's a problem if too many fail - you have people retaking subjects and you don't have enough lecturers for additional classes - there are new students coming through the pipeline. Consequently, a minimum pass is usually indicative of the 'end of the road' and go get a job.

Your marks are adjusted to pass. Unless you never attended classes at all or didn't hand up coursework, you are unlikely to fail.

If the exams were crazy hard... that's because it was a wrong solution to the problem.

What I meant to say, there was a bit of an arms race going on, especially in higher education. The professors and teachers knew many (if not all) students were cheating, so they adjusted the difficulty accordingly, so that, as you point out, not everyone gets an A. I don't know if it's still going on.

And I did have a few professors which considered it a problem if more than half of their class passed the first time they took the exam.

Such professors... have another reason for failing half the class...

They have to fail a number of students so that his class size maintains the numbers to avoid unwanted attention from the administration.

If let's say the normal class size was about 20, but you only get about 15 new students each semester, so you fail 5 of them (or more accounting for dropouts) to make up the numbers.

That's not how it worked in Russia at the time (don't know how it is now). You chose the profession to pursue, the curriculum was fixed and tailored to that profession. The side effect of this is class sizes were fixed, since everyone in the cohort studied the same things. In fact for my profession there were several parallel cohorts. We started out with about 100 people in total, and by graduation it was something like 30-35, the rest dropped out because shit's hard.

well, if you’re talking about 30 years ago, it was probably a different world then. It probably was less of a certification than entry into a guaranteed job.

today, the only analog to such a selection criteria in Singapore would be combat pilot selection. Every year probably a few thousand apply, about 200 manage to pass medicals, aptitudes etc, to go basic wings and only about 15-20 make the final cut.

That doesn’t happen in academia today though. A certificate doesn’t guarantee you a job, fewer tenure positions available, school fees rising, less govt support, administration getting more powerful due to corporatization etc. The certificate is seen as default end product, not a trophy for the top performers.

I find the “it’s their culture” thing inappropriate too. (Especially because it seems to be more a deliberate economic/political strategy.) But you’ve mentioned one of my pet peeves so I am going to weigh in. You can’t judge a country by its expats. The expats are, after all, the ones who left (or were driven out). They’re not representative. Really, there is something a little odd with them—what kind of person abandons their country and all their family ties and moves across the world? Typical people don’t do that. My dad is one of those people. He’s a by the book rule follower, and Bangladeshis typically are ... more flexible. It drove him crazy. Then when he got the chance, he packed up his family and pretty much never looked back.

You have issue with a generalist "it's their culture" and in the same breath generalize about ex-pats? Do you perhaps see a problem with that?

HN has gone completely off the rails. See my comment above. It's been like this for more than a year now. This sort of outright racist hate speech is now completely normal on HN and is eagerly embraced.

Some behaviours are normative in some places and not in others, for whatever reasons.

Some are mundane, some we don't notice, some we don't care about, some we misinterpret.

But 'cheating' is a problem in China which I have come to believe is factually true. Have a gander [1]

Also, thousands of Chinese ex-pat students have been expelled from US schools. [2]

[1] https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1974986...

[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/money-wealth/article/1812115...

why I say it is a cultural issue, is because when there are minority PRC origin students in majority Singaporean classes the PRCs tend to adapt and not try funny tricks. They longer they assimilate, the less they try.

For Singaporeans it's an unholy sin to cheat at exams, (you are barred from exams for the semester, all your grades for the entire semester are invalidated, you parents will be ashamed of you, and everyone you know will unfriend you) but copying homework/assignments/plagiarism is still somewhat tolerated before university level.

> Also, thousands of Chinese ex-pat students have been expelled from US schools.

Very hard to draw any conclusions about this...

From the article: "About 8,000 Chinese students were expelled from American schools in the past year... Most were expelled because of a low grade point average (GPA)"

Another source quoting the same research says:

"A 54-page report released this week says that schools in the United States have expelled 1,657 Chinese since the 2012-2013 school year, mainly for “academic dishonesty or low academic performances,” but a company representative now says the number might be as high as 8,000 students. “A lot of students tend to keep silent or go back to their country,” says Andrew Chen, chief development officer at WholeRen." [1] (also, note that your source is wrong, as this is over the 3 year period from 2012 - 2015, not over the year 2015)

So it's 1657 over 3 years, but "might be as high as as high as 8000" according to a company representative? And over half of that was for poor performance, not cheating. So we can say that between 800 and 4000 students were expelled for academic dishonesty over 3 years.

How does that compare to the general population? Not sure, but according to these statistics, over 100,000 students were expelled in 2006 from public schools in the US. [2] They don't break this down by reason, but that's a pretty big number compared to 200 - 1300 in a year for Chinese students, especially considering the US hosts a quarter million Chinese students each year [1].

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/us-colleges-expelled-many-8000-chin...

[2] https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_169.asp

> It’s built into their culture.

Singaporean exceptionalism, arrogance and small state syndrome are similarly “well known” phenomena - can you see how it would be wrong or even harmful of me to perpetuate such stereotypes?

Yes. Along 'chopping' - or reservation of seats using tissue paper, not returning utensils after eating in a hawker center. You die your problem. You suffer I sleep well tonight. Just google ugly Singaporean.

Yes those ugly habits are "in the Singaporean culture". I find it a lost cause to fight against it.

If everybody cheats, do you not cheat? Does that count as "in your culture"? If everybody takes bribes, do you not give them? Is that "in your culture"?

Our government wanted to ban spitting in public places. I still see old folks do it.

You need generational change to change culture. Or some catastrophe.

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