Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

Flagged. Lets keep xenophobic comments off HN.

[Edit: s/racist/xenophobic as per conversation below]

I'm not trying to suggest that there aren't schools where knowledge is the goal, only that such is the case at a minority of schools. My education was definitely better off than most; I attended a good school. If you do believe there are schools where very little or no cheating occurs, I'd love to hear about it though.

There are numerous more subtle forms of corruption in the US system of education

1. Grade inflation.

2. Bell curves so that a certain percentage of students must pass.

3. Student evaluations and students voting by enrolments that discourage tough/realistic marking.

4. Marking of courses is controlled by the teachers of the course. Thus the teachers are in effect assessing themselves.

5. In some countries students who pay full fees are marked easier than those who have government funded places.

Hiring people in IT, I was amazed to find that a high percentage of people who have passed programming courses are totally incapable of writing a working program.

So let us not be too scornful of the Chinese.

I agree, and disagree.

Having recently been a student in an American university, I found that in a number of my classes, having a wish to acquire knowledge puts you at a disadvantage. When the majority of your peers are "working in a group" (read: academically sanctioned cheating) and you are not, your grade is likely to suffer. I was able to grasp and learn the material better in the long run, but at the cost of not having a great GPA.

This situation forces any student interested in maintaining a high GPA to focus more on the grade and not the material. The delicious irony being that students who are most eligible for graduate studies are those least intellectual.

In my engineering school in Poland everyone was given a different assignment, so copying off other students was not possible. Other pathology occured though - since most of the tasks were group assignments (with the usual group being 2-3 people), it was common for a group to just divide the workload among its members across multiple courses, which in practice resulted in a possibility of getting a grade for course x on which one didn't do any work (because he was busy doing group's assignment for course y). The cool unintended consequence of this was that the whole studies were a multiyear training ground in team organisation and negotiations, which is arguably worth more in real life than some of the highly theoretical courses.

"Students plagiarize because the source material will always be of higher quality than their paper" is a very novel argument! And yet, it doesn't hold water. For one thing, teaching kids how to synthesize information, explain how a process works, is quite valuable and not at all soul-crushing. "To learn is to teach," they say, and writing papers about what you've learned is, essentially, teaching about what you've learned. It's a good thing.

And of course if you generalize the argument, then students could be excused from learning entirely. How "soul-crushing" is it for a piano student to try to play Étude in C major, when there are countless recordings of it being played perfectly, and with great genius? Following in the steps of great thinkers and doers is not soul-crushing, because you're walking in the footsteps of greatness. Those notes are the right notes. You play it badly, but you're playing it. It is humbling, though. The difference between soul crushing and humility is that for the latter, there's every reason to believe that one day you too could be great.

The other good thing about writing papers is that, no matter how expository it may be, there is always opportunity for viewpoint. Even if the viewpoint expressed has to do with how best to organize the material, every paper is a chance for self-expression.

The reason students don't like writing papers is that it's really hard. It's hard to consume the information, and it's hard to organize it, especially if you're not used to organizing information. But you have to make mistakes, write papers that are all jumbled and confused, before you can get better. Those jumbled, bad papers are clearly worse than the source material, and the teacher is there with her red pen marking the next step toward greatness.

In case you missed it, that was for a Journal, not for undergraduate academic work.

The people writing journal papers are supposed to be doing high quality, original work, contributing to science, the knowledge of mankind, all that kind of thing.

I like to think different people can express things in different ways. For example, if you can simplify a piece so that it is more understandable to a wider audience, is it still mediocre?

Ironically, in this case, the Chinese students who demanded rights to cheat were about to compete opportunities to enter SPORTS, MUSIC and ARTS colleges.

The way many things work in Chinese societies is deviated far away from common knowledge, moral standard and laws. It is an eternal mystery how and why something is done for anybody outside of certain society. Although schools I attended never encouraged cheating, but the teachers did mention that gaps existed between the social reality and textbooks.

How does it feel like when people think that privacy is a RIGHT?

> Once in "the real world", we discover that corporations and governments routinely lie, cheat and steal.

Really? I'm not sure I've experience of this. Might be a geographic/cultural thing, I guess, but business and governance in the UK doesn't seem to be particularly corrupt.

> ... routinely lie, cheat and steal. Because it's effective

It's a prisoners dilemma thing. It works while they are suckers to cheat, but the refutation of that entire way of thinking comes when everybody cheats and everyone suffers.

In my personal value system I value the one who is able to beat a system through a clever hack much higher than the one who follows just the instructions to the point how somebody else planned it out.

After all in you world of non-cheating companies you would have to be strictly agains the business practices of companies such as Uber or Airbnb. After all they were certainly breaking the rules when they first started out and are still facing some serious legal battles.

I believe that everyone has the personal responsibility to challenge the rules, to question them, to demand answers why they are there and whom do they benefit. If the answers are unsatisfying it comes down to the personal evaluation: Is it better to follow the rules, challenge the rules, or break them.

This is why we have a crappy world: the tragedy of the commons.

Do you have a link to the keynote where he mentions this perhaps? Would be very interested in it and my google powers didn't find anything.

While I haven't done it, I have recommended it to various people to lie on their resumes if they think it is the resumes preventing them to get a job. I was lucky to enter the work world in a time that they accepted just about everyone, but I see very smart folks nowadays scrapping for a job because they don't 'cheat' the interview process.

Basho's Chief Architect here. I was talking about self-taught programmers and companies irrational bias towards people with CS degrees.

I didn't say "lie and misrepresent", I said "BS and charm". It was a rephrasing of an earlier tweet of mine:

https://twitter.com/argv0/statuses/222618738250350592

My main point was that all this stuff can be learned without a degree, but should always be learned, and that these jobs mainly require skills not taught in school; that charm goes a long way, etc.

Your parsing of what I said is unfortunate and your characterization of what I was espousing ('sociopathic', 'cheaters') is wrong.

EDIT: Try to interpret what I said in a positive way.

I was talking about personal intellectual growth, not obtaining things you don't deserve via lies.

I was talking only about bootstrapping yourself into a career you want - of course you must then master whatever it is you have set out to do or will be found out and fired.

If you want a job and know you can learn it, then obtain that job however you can and prove yourself.

>As a system it's highly optimized to select candidates who'll "go along to get along".

Yeah, but isn't that a big part of what school teaches, though? It's an important skill, too. If you want to get a good grade on that paper, you've gotta read the professor and figure out what they are expecting, and give it to them. That's an important skill.

I mean, what school doesn't teach is that you can also choose who you want to please; different people want different things, so if you want to be one way, well, you just find a boss/partner/whatever that wants you to do the things you want to do. school doesn't cover that.

Well sure, technically, blacks aren't a race either, nor are whites or indians... technically we are All "human" but these semantics don't progress the discussion.

I agree that right now, given China's recent history and current state of affairs their is widespread corruption and exploitation. If that qualifies as "cultural phenomenon" then I agree, but I don't agree it was always there, and think it is more to do with the mao/deng transition and the massive injection of wealth into china since.

I did not know that. So it isn't completely dire, but you'll lose a year.

But is it a minority thing? That doesn't seem to be the case.

Anecdotal data point: My brother taught pure math in both Australia, and the U.S (in ivy league institutions). His view is that the quality of students in Australia (largely classless given the govt subsidies education so much) is leagues above the undergrads at top ivy leagues (who are there because of $$$).

Can I provide evidence to prove to you that my generalization is accurate?

Can you prove to me that Antarctica exists? That there were ever dinosaurs? If I'm intent on not being convinced?

Come to China for an extended visit. Reside in one region for a while, then move to another for a bit. Repeat that process a few times until you're satisfied. Being able to read and write Chinese (simplified characters) and speak Putonghua (or, if you stay in one place long enough, the local dialect) would probably speed things up for you.

Even then, you could (if you were determined enough) maintain a conviction that you had just had a run of bad luck in terms of the places you'd chosen to live and the people with whom you'd happened to interact.

I don't know how much time you'd have to spend here to be satisfied.