Mark McDonald writes in the NYT:
In many cases, according to anecdotal evidence and hard-data surveys, the successful Chinese applicants will have cheated their way into college.
There are now 57,000 Chinese undergraduates at American universities, as my colleague Tamar Lewin reports. Five years ago, there were just 10,000. And top private universities in the United States now have freshman classes with 15 percent foreign students or more.
... Many Chinese families hire agents to help them navigate the applications process, and an agent’s fee can range up to $10,000, plus an equally large bonus if the student gets into a school highly ranked by U.S. News & World Report, the QS rankings and the so-called Shanghai List.
Zinch China, a consulting company that advises American colleges and universities about China, published a report last year that found cheating on college applications to be “pervasive in China, driven by hyper-competitive parents and aggressive agents.’’
From the survey’s introduction: “Our research indicates that 90 percent of recommendation letters are fake, 70 percent of essays are not written by the applicant, and 50 percent of high school transcripts are falsified.’’
I wonder what these rates are in America? I'm not convinced Americans are that ethical about college applications anymore either.
... There might well be a cultural disconnect here. Fudging a transcript, plagiarizing a previously “successful” essay or embroidering your credentials is often seen as common practice in China — a low means to a higher end.
But not always.
Jiang Xueqin is the deputy principal of Peking University High School, one of China’s s top schools, and also directs its international division. In a commentary for The Chronicle, he said:
“To be fair, American college recruiters in China feel overwhelmed by the proliferation of cheating, lying, and fraud: Study abroad is big business in China, and young Ivy League graduates write essays for Chinese applicants while many a Chinese public school fakes transcripts and recommendation letters.’’
Americans should demand better ethics from the Chinese. Criticism makes people better. The world will be a better place in the future if the Chinese are now shamed into having more of a culture of shame, like the Japanese have.
Singapore is an example of where the government has reduced the level of corruption among the Chinese over the last 50 years.
Singapore is an example of where the government has reduced the level of corruption among the Chinese over the last 50 years.
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97 comments:
I am Lugash.
Would that be self-criticism?
I am Lugash.
"Americans should demand better ethics from the Chinese. Criticism makes people better. The world will be a better place in the future if the Chinese are now shamed into having more of a culture of shame, like the Japanese have. "
Thank you, Lugash. My sentiments exactly. This last line sounds rather childish. As if Sailer were to say: " So, we have evidence the Chinese are a monolithic group of cheaters. Yet Asians are superior and the Chinese will prevail in the right way as soon as the perfect Japanese show them the way."
I am not Lugash.
The Chinese will react with indignation, accusing the Americans of wanting them to fail. For the Chinese, everything is a zero-sum game.
The best scam I ever saw was the lying about age. I attended classes with Chinese students who already had degrees in China but were retaking all of their classes in the U.S. to get a second bachelor's degree with a higher GPA and better graduate school prospects.
What those universities admitting "high achieving" Chinese students is that the cheating is not going to stop once admitted.
like Eric Cartman would say: "the white mens way".
but seriously, Mao pretty much destroyed chinese culture, communism pretty much transformed the chinese in uneducated, uncultured, shameless people who only think on money and prestige.
Universities are probably well aware of the problem because of the all the grad stufents with near perfect TOEFL scores who don't speak English.
There was a thread on this at Marginal Revolution recently. I gleaned from the comments that these students are becoming a big source of revenue for the schools, and the school administrators aren't too particular about whether this group meets their admissions criteria. The cheating may not even be necessary.
guest007 - it's a wonder more American students don't try this (well I guess is a lot harder for an American to get away with it). My guess is a person with strong aptitude but kind of a slacker academically at 18 may be able to into a top-tier (career track) school at 24 and possible rank quite highly.
Maybe the Chinese are afraid of being perceived as incompetent for not cheating.
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Of course they cheat. All of that English "fair play" stuff is just that: English. We live in a multicultural nation and should accept that different communities behave (and believe) differently.
Fifty-seven thousand Chinese students, huh? I guess the universities aren't suffering. Now that american families are tapped out with debt they can dump us, go Global, go Diverse, and still make out like a bandit.
Eating your young can't last forever, though. When American kids and young adults finally understand that adults are selling them down the river for greed packaged as "green" or "anti-racism", or "affirmative action", or "the Global Economy" I expect they will react badly.
Sooner or later they aren't going to nod sadly and turn away when they hear this:
"I'm sorry kids. There's no more money for scholarships at State U. We topped up on Chinese last month. They pay full tuition and they are much smarter than you."
"Sadly there are no jobs available, either. The ones we didn't send to China for slave labor are being done here by Mexicans. They work cheaper and harder than you."
"Maybe you could join the Army. I hear they need more ground-pounders to keep Israel safe from the Muslim Hordes. That will be especially important once we bomb Iran and all hell breaks loose."
"... There might well be a cultural disconnect here. "
Yup. Like cl!t-chopping among Somali refugees and Egyptian immigrants, or selling your 12 year-old daughter into marriage to your uncle or nephew.
Big, big "cultural disconnect".
[Interesting way of putting it. It implies we just have to "connect" them, somehow. Surely through higher education, right?]
“If a student isn’t placed, we’ve got screaming, yelling parents in the lobby,” said Kathryn O’Hehir, who works in Aoji’s office in Beijing. “They don’t want their money back. They want their kid in an Ivy League school.”
Why do Chinese care about US status contests? Is there some mother in Hong Kong with "Yale" and "US Rowing" bumper stickers on her Volvo (do people still drive Volvos)? If this is what the Chinese really care about, I don't think we've got much to worry about. They can have all the overpriced US status totems they like. We're selling the natives shiny trinkets for the price of gold. How long before they figure it out?
That would explain what I experienced at a gathering last year of recent and not so recent Harvard alumni in the Bay Area. About half of the attendees were Chinese. They either chatted among themselves in Mandarin or stood around like dummies staring into space. Wow, whatever happened to "You can tell a Harvard grad, you just can't tell him much?" In contrast, the predominantly white, over 50 set were jabbering away at about 300 words per minute.
It could be Chinese are more shameless about cheating across cultures than within their own culture. It's like Jews traditionally were more likely to cheat goyim than one another.
It's like cheating of Third Worlders when it comes to applying for refugee status.
Africans cheat to come here as refugees escaping persecution.
Chinese cheat to come here as college students.
With colleges being strapped for cash, I think they'll take foreign students who will pay full tuition.
We have massive institutionalized cheating called affirmative action.
Steve,
You don't see the point.The agent is paid sh*tloads in fees in order to ensure his client gets in.
That's what the agent does and does well.If that involves trifling little things such as forging character references and essays, so be it.
Liar's poker, game theory and all of that.The upshot is 'winner takes all'.
All told a good agent is, literally, worth his weight in gold.
Maybe Chinese morality cultural than universal. So, Chinese in Chinese culture understand what is 'right' and what is 'wrong'. But Chinese outside Chinese culture not think about morality with foreign devils. With foreign devils, Chinese think 'what I do to get mine?' To Chinese, there no such thing as universal rules. There is only Chinese rules which good and foreign devil rules which no good for nothing but manipulating for oneself interest.
On other hand, Confucius say fish rot from head, and Chinese elite rotten in tings it do, and so rest of China follow. Chinese think 'need be creative' to get ahead.
Cheating, like eating, in China not just wrongdoing but fine art.
Wonder what percentage then decide to stay here and, once approved, start the chain migration process. How many never intended to go back home in the first place?
I run a business writing academic papers for students. Over half my clients are Chinese. For some of them I wrote their initial application, helped choose their major, and wrote every single essay. I even take their online courses. I have taken a few from undergrad all the way to PhD.
I love the Chinese, they paid for my Finca in Spain!
Too Asian?
I wonder how much of China's GDP data is likewise faked?
What a PC nightmare it would be to try and turn these facts into policy at a public institution!
The first big state university to just stop admitting foreign nationals will prosper. But they'll take a LOT of heat.
I don't know how much your blog posts are composed of red meat to get people to bite.
The way the US is set up, elite school attendance is the prime way we set up admission to the upper class.
You could just be born with loads of cold, hard cash but if you don't have that particular fortune (literally) elite school attendance is the next best way.
These schools can have "legacy" admissions. You feel like bitching about that?
Here's the thing: if you get into one of these schools, odds are you are set for life.
Opportunities will be offered to you that just aren't extended if you don't get the right pedigree.
As a rule, the more money you make, the less you actually do at your job.
Get into one of these schools, you'll have the cash to eat free range, vegan, whatever the rest of your life.
You can actually have an interesting job, one where you can go talk with your boss and negotiate a 3 month absence while you attempt to climb Mount Everest.
Here is an example:
"The industry is connection-based," says Gail Gilmore, a councilor at Harvard's Office of Career Services. "I encourage students to use the connections." Harvard writers tend to work on shows with a number of fellow alums--"The Simpsons" employed 10 Lampoon writers out of its total of 12 at one point."
http://www.jerriblank.com/odonnell.html
I'm not going to write here about wall street investment firms, or elite law firms that just won't hire or even interview you unless you went
This isn't a fair system. It's not what you know, it's who you blow.
I'm kind of in awe about how things can break for you if you move in the right circles.
Facebook is the stupidest shit I've ever heard of in my life. And people gobble it up.
The damn thing was a no-brainer, and could well have been a stolen idea. I bet there were a thousand conversations in bars in the couple years before Facebook was founded about very similar ideas.
Yet not one of those people ever got the funding to set one up.
Usually at this point in a post on this blog, (or any other honestly) some idiot who doesn't know where the bread is buttered will start blathering about entrepreneurship or something similar.
Well and good, and it occasionally happens. But as a rule it doesn't. At least not as far as making the kind of money you can make if you are in the club.
Technology and science are certainly important (maybe the most important things). But the people who reap the real rewards of these things are usually not the scientists or engineers.
This system is corrupt beyond words. Maybe they all are, all over the world, in every era of history.
But this place isn't a shining city on a hill.
When you come down to it, you can look at someone else and see that the only difference between you is where you went to school. It doesn't really make a damn bit of difference what you learned there, or how hard you worked.
Because his said Yale, and yours said Oklahoma State you went on two entirely different trajectories in life.
Johnny Chung said something about the white house being like the subway in the 90's, but instead of tokens to get in you used money.
Well we have a similar situation here. If "cheating" is what it takes, you'd be stupid not to do it, considering what the stakes are.
It's the only rational, intelligent thing to do.
We'll never learn. Eventually, our failure to understand history will be fatal.
We sold the dismantled Third Avenue El to Japan for scrap metal in the thirties. They returned it to us in the form of bullets and bombs in the forties.
So, why are we providing the Chinese with the education they need to finish us off?
I'll betcha very few Chinese students in America are immersing themselves in post-modern gender studies and other such crap. Nope. They're learning skills needed to shoot our satellites out, etc.
OT First Jewish president.
compared to scots irish cheating?
Do the Chinese have their own version of Seoul National University or Tokyo University? A Korean or Japanese who's admitted to one of those is pretty much set for life. No need to deal with the inconvenience of dealing with a foreign language and culture.
If there isn't one then I suppose that may partially explain the obsession with top US universities.
And it makes me wonder why they don't have one?
Americans should demand better ethics from the Chinese. Criticism makes people better. The world will be a better place in the future if the Chinese are now shamed into having more of a culture of shame, like the Japanese have.
Is Sailer's wife writing guest posts now?
This is entirely too naive and unrealistic to be Sailer himself.
"... There might well be a cultural disconnect here. "
Yup. Like cl!t-chopping among Somali refugees and Egyptian immigrants, or selling your 12 year-old daughter into marriage to your uncle or nephew.
Whose to say "cheating" isn't as valid a form of work at "non-cheating". That's a very narrow-minded Western-centric way of viewing today's vibrant globalized world.
Welcome to multiculturalism where all cultural and ethnic traditions, behaviors and beliefs are equally valid.
You had better believe they cheat AFTER arriving in the Western schools, not just on applications. I work at a college. You simply cannot shame them about cheating--I have tried! The most you can hope is that the smart ones will not cheat because they don't want to get caught. They don't think cheating is shameful, and we can't change how they feel. Their world views are deeply ingrained.
Many non-westerners (including some people recently arrived from eastern Europe and Russia) tend to see cheating and other forms of corruption as a way of life.
Saudis, for example, simply ignore parking signs at our college. They park anywhere they want, including handicapped spaces. The only recourse is to keep towing their cars away and hope they catch on eventually. But they many never catch on--they probably think they just haven't figured out who the correct person to bribe is.
These sorts of world views are not easily changed, if at all. We should think of this when we allow people from corrupt place to come to the west.
Think about it. If you are a person who would never lie or cheat on an application, you are not going to change and start cheating and lying with impunity just because you move to China. Your morals are part of who you are. It is the same with the Chinese.
When it comes to non-western immigration the corruption the non-westerners tend to bring with them is very bad news for western countries. Corruption will destroy a country faster than anything.
Well, I do think there's quite a bit of evidence of academic cheating in China, but I'm much more skeptical whether it gones on much among Chinese students in the U.S.
First, there have been huge numbers of cheating scandals in recent years, but I've never heard of a single significant case involving East Asian students. Given the absolutely massive parental/social pressure for high academic performance in that community, one would think cheating would be similarly massive, but it doesn't seem to be.
And it isn't just datapoints from the notoriously dishonest MSM. Steve himself lives in the most heavily Asian state in the continental U.S., and over the years he's repeatedly criticized Asian students and their families for all the endless academic problems they cause for their fellow white students, by studying too hard, cramming too much, and taking too many APs. Yet I've never seen him once cite a single example of East Asian cheating, so I suspect he's never heard of any cases from the local school grapevine. Instead, his current concerns apparently derive from reading a big front-page story in the NYT, which is the exact opposite of the usual flow-direction of controversial HBD information.
So Chinese students in China seem to cheat quite a bit, but the ones in America don't, which seems a bit of a puzzle. But once we analyze the issue from an HBD perspective, matters become much less mysterious. Consider that one of the major traits of East Asians is their strong social conformity. Since today's China seems to have quite a lot of low-level corruption, Chinese raised in that environment tend to conform to it, hence the academic cheating. However, Chinese growing up in America tend to live in professional/middle-class environments, in which corruption and cheating are usually regarded in a strongly negative light. Hence, they conform to this social tendency, and are very unlikely to cheat at school.
My guess would be that the Chinese students who come to the U.S. for college might fall somewhere in the middle, greatly reducing any cheating tendencies they might have if their American classmates don't, but still being much more likely to cheat than American-born Asians, whose social imprinting began at a much earier age.
We should also consider that there are all sorts of horrific cram-stories always coming out of Japan, Korea, and Taiwan, but I almost never hear about widespread cheating, so the elites in those countries have probably eradicated it from the local culture, and China will likely do the same within a generation or so.
I think HBD is useful in clearing up all sorts of social anomalies.
Apparently the quality level of these PRC students is quite high, despite the methods they use to get into US universities.
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/12/human-capital-globalization-and-physics.html
That proves it, The Bell Curve is specious!*
(at least the part about Asians being smarter than whites, the rest is, of course accurate.)
In response to gumm, about limiting affirmative action to blacks, I would say that black political leaders would oppose that for a very practical reason.
The reason is that in order to take money and jobs (especially government jobs) away from white people, you need a big anti-white coalition.
If that coalition includes blacks, Hispanics, other recent immigrants, gays, the poor, Jews, government employees and women, it is a majority and the coalition can take whatever it wants.
But in order to keep each member group of the coalition happy, goodies must be distributed to each member group.
Polls show that white women are now leaving the coalition and trending back toward the GOP. Perhaps that is why Democrats are now doubling down on abortion rights and deliberately mixing it up with the Catholic church.
Maybe Obama will soon come up with another bone to throw to white women. The women's vote can usually be won just by convincing them that your candidate is the "nice one" and the other candidate is the "mean one."
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/apr2007/bs20070430_110466.htm
Cheating scandal at top B-school back in 2007. All international students, mostly Asian with a few South Americans.
It's mostly about finding students who'll pay the full sticker price and a bit about the school getting to brag about how cosmopolitan is is.
For most of the Asians, their English is so bad the Americans can't figure out how smart they really are. The temptation to cheat for them here must be huge, however, given the heavy workload and their limited English.
Oh, would the world not be better if the Jews had a culture of shame?
Guess your not going to bring this up, no?
Is America such a virtuous culture that punishes cheaters? Or does America have a double standard when Americans cheat. America loves to frame China as currency manipulators while forgetting that "Dollar Hegemony" is a currency manipulation in and of itself.
In a world where countries are being owned and bankrupted by Goldman Sachs should the world really emulate Japan which did as we wanted and saw their economy crash as a result?
I went to school with plenty of regular white kids. Everyone cheated in my school to some degree.
"Why do Chinese care about US status contests?"
Maybe a funny paradox is at work here. Chinese respect US college degrees cuz the assumption is 'chinese system is corrupt, American system is clean'. So, American degree is more valuable. BUT, the paradox kicks in cuz so many Chinese are CHEATING to attain 'clean' American degrees.
The report from my friend's children who are graduating/graduated from a Bethesda MD high school is that the Chinese students there cheat like mad - not the Chinese-Americans but the immigrants/temporaries, who cheat both as to legal residence and in academics.
The report isn't sour grapes; one of my friend's children was just accepted to an Ivy League.
Lots of Chinese-Americans in our district, few recent immigrants or temporary residents, and my children haven't noticed cheating - just ambition, drive, discipline, hard hard work, and parental pressure.
I don't understand what Steve means of "demanding better ethics from the Chinese". How about demanding a better ethics from American students. Many of those personal assays in American college admission are full of bogus and unverifiable claims and accounts. The system here is ripe with scandal and manipulation. Just because such a drawback, the Chinese did away reference system for college admission long ago. Cheating in American school system is so much more rampant than the Chinese system. Chinese now find the loopholes in our soft and subjective system. It is going to be exploited just as the same way as by ourselves.
Indians cheat a lot too.
(Several comments and no one has mentioned it).
Indians should be shamed along with the Chinese.
Hardworking and family oriented doesn't necessarily mean honest.
" Universities are probably well aware of the problem because of the all the grad stufents with near perfect TOEFL scores who don't speak English."
Exactly. I once was in a class where a group of Chinese students walked in, confused. They thought it was their English tutor class. I know this because the professor was Chinese and had to talk in mandarin to them. The School required 640/680 TOEFL minimum and these kids wouldn't have been able to get 400.
Cheating and shame cultures go hand in hand. It is actually *guilt* cultures that have lower rates of cheating.
Why?
Because if nobody catches you, there is no shame. The opposite, in fact.
With guilt, however, God sees all, so you can't ever get away with it. Somewhere, in the back of your mind, you always know you're being judged whether the people around you see it or not.
Americans cannot stop Chinese cheating or have any more than a superficial influence on it. It is so pervasive that the only way to deal with it is through actual personal experience with the Chinese in question. Hence the concept of "guanxi" -- connections. If you don't know a Chinese person, you simply cannot trust them. However, if you do take the time to get to know them personally (it takes a while), they are amongst the best and most gracious people in the world. Where informal institutions are concerned, I'm afraid the situation is hopeless.
It's simply a very, very different culture, but it works pretty well for the Chinese.
Still relevant to the HBD crowd, which is mostly ignorant of East Asian nature:
Why East Asians are so unconscientious and disagreeable?
They really are in a league of their own for the world when it comes to abysmally low levels of conscientiousness and agreeableness.
I am Lugash.
@swimming swan
I'm not sure our sentiments match.
Steve's view that China should change its view of itself to suit American interests is rather naive, assuming it wasn't delivered with irony.
Some self criticism by America's cultural, business and government elites would be a good thing. Some frank talk about the disastrous Iraq war, the credit bubble implosion and how globalization/deregulation/immigration has been disastrous for the bottom 90% of America would be a good thing. Charles Krauthhammer would be a good place to start. ;)
I am Lugash.
The Koreans have a very strong culture of shame. Suicide rates are through the roof with a lot of farewell notes siting shame of some sort.
However, even though our cultures would agree about what's "good" and what's "bad" behavior, more or less, the perceived magnitude of shame or pride assigned to a lot of behaviors is very different. Koreans cheat, lie and advertise blatantly false information all the time to get ahead. When you catch them in an outright lie (which I have many times while living and working in Korea), they aren't embarrassed. If an American would get caught lying in a professional situation, he would turn red and start to back paddle, claim misunderstanding in order to explain the lie away or be mortified and apologize endlessly all the while assuming that the professional relationship is severely damaged. In Korea, they would smile and start a discussion about the possibility of keeping the old terms of agreement, even with this new information being out. Most of the times I'd witness them lie to each other or to me, it would be about something that was bound to become apparent very soon. No big deal. You still sign the contract with us, right?
But the majority of Koreans would be upset to learn that someone considers them dishonest. They just define dishonesty differently. For example: they don't steal. Al all. Ever. You can leave your wallet on a table of a fast food restaurant for a few hours everyday, and it will be there each time you come back. I've seen older people take out and count large wads of cash in crowded subway stations, quite often. Also, any suggestion of sexually illicit behavior is extremely shameful. Yes, there are brothels everywhere, but you DON'T want to be implicated in any such activity. A huge percentage of folks stay in loveless, sexless marriages because if they divorce, other parents will not let their kids play with the divorced couple's kid. A cheating wife, or a wife who fell in love with someone else and initiated divorce for that reason could not possibly be a sympathetic character in Korean television.
Number One son say, "The sure way to be cheated is to think one's self more cunning than others."
Oh wait, that was actually La Rochefoucauld.
"Criticism makes people better"...
It's obvious you've never worked with black guys Mr. Sailer.
a culture of shame, like the Japanese have.
"Japanese culture of shame"? Those words spell "suicide" in my mind.
From the article linked to in the above comment, "Obama is the best thing Israel has going for it":
"The in-depth feature said that Obama's policies regarding Israel were the diplomatic equivalent of 'tough love' – which it said Israel needed, despite its reluctance to accept it."
Yeah, the Israel lobby is famous for its openmindedness regarding "tough love" towards Israel. There's just nothing they love so much as on-target criticism of Israel's shortcomings, since it offers Israel the feedback it needs to improve.
It's just one more way in which Israel is unique in its sterling national character, and humble despite being the moral beacon to the world.
It's pretty obvious that unqualified Chinese aren't going to benefit from Ivy League educations at least not in this country. The people who attend elite schools are already advantaged or highly intelligent so you'd never be able to tease out the statistics that would back up your claim that graduates of such institutions are set for life. Having met very few Harvard graduates where I live which is far away from the Northeast also tells me that where you go to school gives you connections in regions of the country near your school more so than elsewhere. I've noticed that professors from the top schools aren't evenly distributed throughout the country either. There are very few Harvard and Princeton grads among the professors at 2nd and 3rd tier schools in my state. University of Chicago, on the other hand, is surprisingly well represented even at noncompetitive colleges.
The Ivies seem to have specialized somewhat as well: Harvard known for lawyers and theologians; Johns Hopkins world-renowned for medicine; Columbia famous for psychology. Upon the occasion of your training in a scientific field that becomes obsolete, I've no doubt you're luckier if you're already close to retirement age. Some career paths seem to require Ivy credentials so you are right about those, others don't, however, which means going to a lesser known school that is famous for a special program may give you a greater advantage.
Let's be a little more realistic about the shameless promotion of Ivy Leagues, i.e. your job prospects are grim anywhere else. It's just not true. Many universities have higher entrance requirements for some departments than others (I bet this is true for all) so could be ranked higher for some programs than their overall competitiveness level. More knowledge about the various majors at better uni's could get a kid with the aptitude into a program that guarantees career success much more so than a BA in anthropology from Princeton.
With regard to the Chinese vs Japanese thing, there really does seem to be something quite important going on there.
In certain ways, with regard to civilized behavior, the Japanese and Chinese could hardly be more different. The Japanese are almost excessively polite and self-conscious, and observe the amenities of civilization and social order to a tee. Indeed, they seem more so than the politest of all European societies (the Scandinavians, perhaps? or the British of yore?)
The Chinese, in contrast, seem crude, loud, unconcerned with politeness, can't maintain a queue, concerned only with their own welfare, and otherwise rather "uncivilized" in the relevant sense. In short, they seem worse in these respects than any European culture I can think of.
I don't know whether its genetics or culture, but it's hard to think of European cultures so dramatically different as these two Asian cultures/people.
Like they say, "if you are not lying, you are not trying."
"The world will be a better place in the future if the Chinese are now shamed into having more of a culture of shame, like the Japanese have."
Can you shame people who don't have a culture of shame into acquiring one? (I'll sell you an essay on the subject for 5,000 clams).
The schools are complicit in the cheating because they know that Chinese cheat like crazy once they get in. The must also ignore the SAT scores (unless they cheat on those too) and the poor language skills of the Chinese students. All the schools really care about is the money and prestige. Surely most of the Chinese cheat their way to success during and after college. no honor among crooks.
BUT I won't worry until Asians learn to write software, rather than stealing it from us.
AND when they learn to think for themselves instead of acting like lemmings. The only thing the chinese are good at is making money, NOTHING ELSE. And I know a ton of chinese having recently escaped silicon valley.
I once caught a chinese job applicant cheating on her resume and she was surprised that I didn't hire her anyway.
hey, it's just a sample of how the competition operates across the board, no holds barred.
better get used to it and learn to fight the same way
I can't help thinking that if we didn't have SATs we'd have to rely more on grades, interviews and writing samples. Interviews alone would keep Chinese frauds out of the running.
You can easily take an IQ test to find out if you're smart enough for a school or career path anyway. In order to be fair, academic performance plus national standardized tests in the discipline the student intends to pursue plus extracurriculars indicating good time-management skills should be what's emphasized. It's kinda hard to say that a person of any race or background who fails to know the specifics on an AT was the victim of cultural bias.
Schools can also limit the number of foreign nationals in their student body by claiming to be a resource for Americans or whatever. Right now colleges want tuition dollars so much they're willing to push American citizens aside for their own survival. Ironic, isn't it, that the professor class being historically too pure for capitalistic endeavors are responsible for academic policies that allow foreigners to dictate what is taught and get preferential treatment all so the intellectual elite can continue to get paid for their elaborate hobbies.
...these students are becoming a big source of revenue for the schools, and the school administrators aren't too particular about whether this group meets their admissions criteria. The cheating may not even be necessary.
A dean of a very large, well-known state university recently told me foreign students are what's keeping in-state tuition affordable. They not only pay out-of-state rates, but aren't offered any financial aid. They're just about the only students on campus paying full freight.
Of course, he thought this was a Bad Thing for US competitiveness. We give them dollars for cheap stuff, they use the dollars to get the world's best education for their brightest kids who go home knowing how to make better, cheaper stuff to sell to us.
I'm not so sure its so bad. Is trading advanced degrees for cheap stuff really such a bad deal? I've survived 54 years without an Ivy League degree, but I can't imagine doing without my $65 microwave!
Steve why are my comments not being posted? Do you manually screen comments and if so what did I say that could have possibly caused offense?
Some of these countries are our enemies. China, Russia most of the middle east. I wish we would severely restrict their citizens' immigration, access to US institutions like education, and even our prisons. 'Cept Gitmo of course.
"With regard to the Chinese vs Japanese thing, there really does seem to be something quite important going on there."
Chinese is a big country so we must be careful not to generalize.
In the UK EU students pay the same fees as native Brits. This means they get a student loan to cover tuition fees and living costs which they do not have to pay back until they graduate and start earning.
75% of East European students, who now make up about 10% of all students, do not pay anything back.
Our education system is being bankrupted.
RB London
What's the difference between smart people cheating and dumb people cheating?
Dumb-people-cheating is like inflated Atlanta school test scores.
They involve people who really know nothing acting like they know something.
It could be some of the Chinese cheating is smart-people-cheating. Most of the applicants may well be pretty smart and have academic credentials in stuff like math, science, and literature(in their own language). But since they don't know English all that well and don't know the culture of the essay system--the stuff colleges look favorably upon in the essay--, they might need experts to do it for them. After all, if a Chinese applicant wrote, "I respect American political philosophy, especially ideas of Steve Sailer...", I don't think Harvard is gonna take him(even if he wrote a really good essay).
I say scrap the whole essay thing. I heard in CA, it's mainly a weepy soap opera hardship pleading contest. So, if a student got crappy grades but writes a long boo-hoo essay about how he or she got backtracked because he or she hung around with the wrong crowd and suffered so much--basically implying "I'm black hanging with blacks" or "I'm a Latino hanging with Latinos"--, then he or she will get extra consideration from the admission board.
"If an American would get caught lying in a professional situation, he would turn red and start to back paddle, claim misunderstanding in order to explain the lie away or be mortified and apologize endlessly all the while assuming that the professional relationship is severely damaged."
This wasn't the case with Obama.
And how many Wall Street sharks and crooks had to fess up and face up to what they did? Do they even show any remorse?
" Duke of Qin said...
Steve why are my comments not being posted? Do you manually screen comments and if so what did I say that could have possibly caused offense?"
Because Steve is allied with the Duke of Zhou.
Oops, meant *impersonal* not "informal" institutions.
Well no matter how my comment was magically eaten I will briefly summarize it for you.
There are two major push/pull incentives for the rampant "massaging" of Chinese applicants to U.S. schools. The first is that the placement agents have a significant financial incentive to get these children placed and qualifications be damned. The second is that the schools too have a financial incentive to take their parent's fat tuition payments.
The Chinese educational system is a perpetual motion machine that gradually grinds down students as they constantly struggle against one another for supremacy. It's akin Soviet-American arms race substituting hours studying for nuclear weapons. It's a merciless system that rewards failure with humiliation and destitution.
The Chinese students that end up at American Universities for undergraduate study are not middle class, rather they are the exceptionally affluent. These students are generally those who were ground up by the Chinese education system and could not make it into a prestigious Chinese university (Beida, Qinghua, Fudan, etc) and would otherwise be forced to settle for a mediocre Chinese school but had the fortune of wealthy parents who are able to buy the cachet of a Western degree.
The English ability of the majority of these students is absolutely atrocious and is a huge handicap. It's akin to taking US students who studied the mandatory foreign language requirements in high school and sending them off to a French Ecole.
For all the problems of the Chinese educational system, it does have one redeeming feature in that the Gao Kao is the paramount decider of a student's future. The Gao Kao is essentially the SAT injected with steroids that lasts for a grueling 9 hours that is designed to separate the wheat from the chaff. For all it's faults and criticism, it is the most objective measure of student capability and is not subject to outside influence.
The U.S. system of relying on recommendation letters, application essays, and GPA are purposefully design to be "holistic", in other words they are in effect designed to admit unqualified applicants for the nebulous affirmative action calculations and henceforth are easy for Chinese students to game.
The problem of poorly qualified but wealthy Chinese students washing up at Western schools has a simple two step solution, so simple in fact that the reason it has not been taken likely means that no one wants this "problem" solved.
Base admissions of Chinese students to U.S. Universities on the same guidelines as Chinese universities. This means adopting Gao Kao scores instead of recommendation letters, essays, and GPA's. The second is a face-to-face (or webcam-to-webcame) test of a students English language proficiency.
I wonder what these rates are in America? I'm not convinced Americans are that ethical about college applications anymore either. - Steve.
Is that Americans or 'Americans'?
I, for one, welcome our cheating Chinese "cognitive elites." Of course, they're far too "cognitively elite" to be expected to reciprocate and offer tests for us to game to get their goodies.
And the number of Chinese students who should be allowed into US colleges is?
For myself, I see no reason why it should be anything more than zero.
Well we have a similar situation here. If "cheating" is what it takes, you'd be stupid not to do it, considering what the stakes are.
It's the only rational, intelligent thing to do.
Overthrowing our hostile (alien & native alike), repealing all so-called "anti-discrimination" laws, expelling all the illegals, and ending all immigration is the only rational, intelligent way forward.
So yeah, I'm all for what's rational & intelligent.
(What's rational about letting in people we only hold to lower standards is beyond me)
whites are intellectuall inferior to asians
Which is why millions of them would like to move here, yet in their homelands they keep it Yella, and Whites wouldn't move there in significant numbers if they could.
I think you mean a culture of guilt. It is precisely a culture of shame that allows cheating to keep occuring. As long as you're not caught, who cares?
There have been some pretty big SAT cheating scandals.
There was one recently on Long Island and one at an exclusive all-boys DC area prep school 8 years ago:
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/11/23/sat-cheating-scandal-widens-as-20-students-charged-in-new-york/
http://www.washingtonian.com/articles/people/6462.html
I wonder if the Chinese have been doing this kind of thing too or if they've been sticking to fake recommendation letters and transcripts.
For most of the Asians, their English is so bad the Americans can't figure out how smart they really are. The temptation to cheat for them here must be huge, however, given the heavy workload and their limited English
In theory they should not even be in US colleges with such poor English.
I've seen these foreign students turn in garbage for their English and elective assignments, and get B's for it. That's hardly fair to the native Americans.
the "Chinese people" don't care about US Status games. The PRC does. The goal is to infiltrate every single aspect of US society in order to have influence over US policy towards China. the PRC decides who gets to go to Elite US schools. Parents work with "agents" all right. Dissidents aren't coning here. The ones coming here are designed to stay. Credentials from the Elite schools mean they can work in government, work in investment banks, work at think tanks, law firms, work in hollywood.
And then you graduate, and then what?
You're a Chinese with a prestigious degree.
You can't get a job in the US since no one apparently understands your English.
And you probably can't get a good job back in China (at least not based on the prestigious degree) since everyone there realises you simply gamed the system-and don't know what has been going on in China for years.
And haven't a lot of Chinese noticed that its the dropouts (Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg) who do the best?
PS How does any of this hurt the US?
Cheating is a huge problem throughout all of China and Korea, probably Vietnam as well.
The GRE has been banned in China, and so the Chinese travel to Vietnam to take it so that they can benefit from the forums that post the answers to questions.
And it's fairly certain they cheat over here, too. Lots of anecdotal evidence. Several Asian students have told me of AP tests in which the students openly discuss answers back and forth. I was pretty shocked, as Ap tests are heavily proctored in my district, but I've heard of it enough times to doubt it.
I'm fairly certain that SAT scores taken in Asia involve cheating, although I think it's harder to do over here.
No, there's not nearly as much cheating here in the US, and not very much among non-Asian populations. The SAT cheating scandal was Iranian-American down the line, last I read. I was surprised, as I was prepared to believe it was just rich white kids. But apparently not.
anony-mouse: And then you graduate, and then what?...You can't get a job in the US...you probably can't get a good job back in China
Well, someone earlier pointed out that most of these students tend to be the dimmer or lazier children of ultra-wealthy Chinese families. Makes sense, since the average Foxcon assembler probably can't afford to pay $150,000 for her son's college. They're probably from the 0.1% or more likely the 0.01%.
So they just go home and get a job in dad's big company, and have a fancy foreign diploma to hang on the wall and brag about to their friends. Presumably, it's just a wealth status-symbol like driving a Porsche or something, except even costlier.
Since Chinese universities apparently are more meritocratic and less corrupt, they could only have gotten into the lower-tier ones and everyone would have snickered at them for being so dumb and lazy. But no one in China has ever heard of the ones they attended in America, so they can claim the college was really great and prestigious, and maybe people will half-believe them.
Plenty of academic cheating by East Asians in Aust/NZ too, particularly plagiarism. One excuse I've heard is that copying from respected scholars is seen as a form of reverence in Confucian culture.
"But no one in China has ever heard of the ones they attended in America, so they can claim the college was really great and prestigious, and maybe people will half-believe them."
Because no one in China would google "us college prestige"?
Weird. I just googled that just to be sure that my sarcasm was legit, but I left the quotes on, and four of the five websites that come up are Chinese or Indian.
Losers need to accuse winners of cheating in order to prevent depression.
http://www.economist.com/node/21546027
Increasingly, the Chinese have more money to spend than the Americans. And they have more on their minds than studies. “They are now the popular ones, getting the American girls,” says Mr Meyer. “The Chinese students, I think, have more confidence than American students in general.” Based on his experience
"Well, someone earlier pointed out that most of these students tend to be the dimmer or lazier children of ultra-wealthy Chinese families."
Yes, but they outperform average US college students in courses where English language ability is not of primary importance (i.e., STEM).
http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2011/12/human-capital-globalization-and-physics.html
China has a First World IQ but a Third World culture.
My daughter, a fairly recent university graduate in East Asian Studies, told me that Asian students cheat like mad.
But my favorite East Asian cheating story is "the largest organized cheating incident in recent UCLA history": Korean students cheating in an Uzbek language class!
http://www.dailybruin.com/index.php/article/2001/05/professor-files-suit-against-u
My experience in high school is that Asians often take SATs for one another, and many recent immigrants are too old to be attend the regular schools that they attend. In college, I sat next to an Asian guy in a history class, and a different Asian guy would show up for tests.
I don't claim that Asians are stupid, but I tend to question the hype.
More smug westerners collectively patting themselves on the back for being so morally superior.
In many ways, easterners are more honest in not pretending to follow certain moral codes.
Westerners will more likely find a unpopular one among themselves, to punish as a sacrifical scapegoat for the same sins as the holier-than-thou Boy Scouts that do the punishing.
In certain ways, with regard to civilized behavior, the Japanese and Chinese could hardly be more different. The Japanese are almost excessively polite and self-conscious, and observe the amenities of civilization and social order to a tee. Indeed, they seem more so than the politest of all European societies (the Scandinavians, perhaps? or the British of yore?)
The Chinese, in contrast, seem crude, loud, unconcerned with politeness, can't maintain a queue, concerned only with their own welfare, and otherwise rather "uncivilized" in the relevant sense. In short, they seem worse in these respects than any European culture I can think of.
China = Matriachal in the past
Japan = Patriarchal in the past
--You can't get a job in the US since no one apparently understands your English.
obviously you've never been to a US university. or silicon valley.
the chinese born grad students and profs are unintelligible, but the school doesn't care. their IT and sw programmers cant be understood either but the employers don't care.
Candid_Observer
"I don't know whether its genetics or culture, but it's hard to think of European cultures so dramatically different as these two Asian cultures/people."
Perhaps you may want to take a look at East Germany vs. West Germany?
I don't know who is more amoral: the cheating Chinese, or the backwater state schools that feel no shame charging them forty grand for a degree that is (hopefully only) 80% fluff.
Maybe America can find some other worthless items to get the Chinese to buy at top dollar!
Chinese cheat like maddd!!!!!!
The students are a community and they work together on major school projects, they have old exams from past chinese students, and they also cheat on tests!!!! This is unbelievable, what they are getting away with. They are damaging the schools they are attending and harming the integrity of other students work. They also have solution manuals to every major text book, so assigning homework is a joke!!!
When will professors wise up?
I worked with Chinese immigrants and they are very hard to understand, they confuse their american colleagues by making everything very complicated. This is especially true in coding or programming work. They write a 1000 lines of code, when it should only take 100. Catch my drift.
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