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Comment by graupel | Hacker News Reader

This is fascinating, aside from one huge, glaring bit of stupidness on the authors part - highlighted here:

"One interesting observation: Almost all cheating happened within ethnic lines. Koreans copy from Koreans. Indians from Indians. Greeks from Greeks. Jews from Jews. Chinese from Chinese."

Korea=country India=country Greece=country China=country Jewish=religion

This would appear to show some form of bias, or at least a lack of cultural understanding by Panos Ipeirotis, who I'm assuming is of Greek origin based on his name.

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All of those are ethnic origins.

Compared to the others listed, it's out of place - all Greeks originate from Greece - where do all Jewish people originate from? (and as much as that sounds like the start of a joke, it's not)

As someone working on converting to Judaism, I can tell you that the situation is complicated, with ethnicity and religion strongly interrelated. Anyone that claims Jewishness solely involves religion is just as wrong as anyone that claims Jewishness solely involves ethnicity. You cannot think about Judaism the same way you'd think about, say, Christianity.

With that disclaimer in mind, the vast majority of Jews - due to traditional prohibitions against intermarriage and low numbers of converts - originate from the general area where the State of Israel is today. Here, both the founding myths in the Torah and modern genetic testing are in agreement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jews

You are correct. I did not want to sound racist. Perhaps "cultural ties" would be a better term. Btw, most of this happens because students with common cultural ties tend to socialize together in student clubs, etc.

Thanks for the reply, glad to see you here & participating.

I noticed the same thing. I'd like to know what criteria he used for placing students in the "Jew" category. Perhaps he watched too many "films" by Goebbels.

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