October 8, 2013

Test cheating by children of Asian immigrants

Education Realist, who has much experience teaching and tutoring children in Silicon Valley, has an interesting post "Asian Immigrants and What No One Mentions Aloud." She digs into news reports of scandals of cheating on important tests in schools, such as Advanced Placement, and finds a recurrent pattern of disproportionate Asian involvement. 

Now, cheating has been going on for a long time in America. Ted Kennedy got kicked out of Harvard for having an impostor impersonate him on a Spanish test. Fraternities routinely keep files of old tests to familiarize brothers with reused questions. Pushing the ethical envelope to keep football and basketball stars academically eligible is an American tradition.

Still, there seems to be a change going on that institutions like test designers aren't taking seriously enough. You'll notice that the federal government has been devoting a fair amount of resources to changing our paper money repeatedly to stay a step ahead of counterfeiters. I haven't noticed that kind of resolve among testing institutions to come up with technical solutions for this growing problem. 

The foremost problem is a lack of awareness among the media and public.
Teachers will tell you that high achiever cheating has a distinctly demographic tilt, which you can find in the stories if you look for it. Scratch the surface of any cheating story and odds are well above average the school or the class in question is disproportionately Asian. Journalists carefully scrub cheating stories of any racial references—unless it’s rich whites.... 
(Cheating by high ability black and Hispanic students is virtually unknown, both in my own experience and a complete dearth of reported stories. The major cheating scandals involving black and Hispanic students is done on behalf of the lowest performers, usually by teachers, usually being ordered to do so by administrators.)

Or coaches.
Researchers categorize cheating in three ways: impersonation, collaboration, and prior knowledge. 
First, and least likely for Asians in this country, is impersonation, the method used by the Great Neck SAT scandal and the Clarence Mumford case. Cheaters need lots of money, an impostor who can guarantee results, and an anonymous setting. The Mumford case was so extensive, I think, because teacher testing is anonymous and a passing score, as opposed to a high score, was the only thing needed. That, coupled with a whole bunch of existing teachers who couldn’t pass the test. While impersonation is common in China and India, the ETS/College Board spot maybe 200 cases of impersonation a year in the US—at least, they only admit to that many. According to this story, impersonation used to be an issue among college athletes, which makes sense (and would therefore involve low-ability blacks more than Asians). 
The next formal cheating category is “collaboration”, which means that students engaged in the work—test usually, homework almost always—are getting answers from other students also doing the work at that time. We don’t call this “copying” anymore, because getting answers almost always involves the consent and, well, collaboration of the person who has the answers. 
Collaboration stories that hit the news usually involve Advanced Placement tests. “Chaos cheating”, as I call it, is nicely illustrated by the Mills High School story, in which the entire school’s AP scores were invalidated. While the first article only mentions one student with an Asian name, the student site protesting the decision has each student signing in by name, and the names are so Asian it’s funny, making it almost unnecessary to confirm that Mills is 60% Asian. ...
Chaos cheating starts with a school screwup. The school doesn’t enforce security, sits the kids too close together, in circles or facing each other, directly against the rules. I know: what the hell does that have to do with the kids? They aren’t arranging this. At best, some kids are taking advantage of something that they had no control over. 
Except. ...
Then I heard the story [of chaos cheating] several more times from different kids, different schools, different review classes, always involving “Asian” schools or a heavily Asian testing population. I checked it against my white tutoring students, from a wide range of high schools, and the only ones who know of it also went to “Asian” schools. My Asian middle school students don’t know of it. The few Asian students I found who’d never seen it attended majority white or majority Hispanic schools—and they knew exactly what I was talking about, but told me that “wouldn’t fly” at their school. 
The kids who know of it tell me some variation of this: the testers rush into the room as chaotically as possible, pull chairs close together, sit next to a buddy, whine like crazy when the proctor tries to impose seating order. The proctor sighs, exhorts them not to cheat, and pretty much turns over control of the class to the students. At that point, the kids can quietly discuss answers, text a buddy for help, and basically “collaborate” in any way needed. 
Now, any decent, experienced proctor would never allow this. And yet, the “chaos cheating” stories that make the news all involve schools with a long history of high-achieving students taking all sorts of AP tests. The lax administration explanation simply doesn’t make sense.  
(AP Stats is a common cheating test. I mentioned this to a colleague, a third generation Japanese American, and he snorted, “Of course. That’s the math test for Asians who aren’t good at math.” and I suspect that this is, in fact, a good bit of the reason.) 
The Mills students tried to sue. While the effort failed, the decision includes detailed descriptions of Mills, Skyline, and Trebuco testing procedures. It’s very hard to believe that Mills and Trebuco, in particular, were so blatantly incompetent. ...
The third category of cheating is “prior knowledge”—students are aware of the specific content of the test before taking it. Again, prior knowledge cheating occurs in every day classes as a way to get As on tests, as well as national tests. Students take advantage of prior knowledge in school by breaking in or in some other way obtaining the tests ahead of time. Students caught in the widespread cheating scandal at Stuyvesant High had both provided answers for their strong tests and received them for their weak tests—and this NY Magazine article makes it clear that cheating at New York City’s top high school is endemic and common. Notice that none of the schools mention the dominant race of the students involved, but the hints are there and all but one of the example schools are over 40% Asian. The North Carolina school, Panther Creek High School, is only 16% Asian, but it’s in a highly educated area, the students involved were all top-tier, and did you notice the mention of parental pressure? Dead giveaway. Some kids use the TA gig—TA for a teacher, get copies of the tests ahead of time (or in some cases change the grades) and either trade or sell. 
Then there’s the national high stakes prior knowledge cheating scandals, in which the parties get the actual test information, sometimes from the Korean hagwons who pay testers to take pictures of the test ... 
(I’ve been talking about my work for a few months, and a friend just came back from taking her acupuncture board tests, shocked. She noticed all the “Asian testers” (no idea what countries) were disappearing into a large conference room, so she meandered down that way and discovered that they were all in a room with rows of laptops, typing ferociously. They weren’t studying. They were entering the questions for later testers.) 

#18 on Stuff White People Like is Awareness. I'm all for it.

87 comments:

Anonymous said...

"(Cheating by high ability black and Hispanic students is virtually unknown, both in my own experience and a complete dearth of reported stories. The major cheating scandals involving black and Hispanic students is done on behalf of the lowest performers, usually by teachers, usually being ordered to do so by administrators.)"

But if you're only moderately high-achieving as a black or Hispanic, you get all sorts of cookies and prizes. Just look at Barry and Michelle. Michelle the dodo got into Princeton and Harvard Law School!!! So, why cheat? Just being 'good enough' will get you into elite colleges. Just being mediocre will get you into any state college.

But if you're an Asian student, being very excellent may not be good enough. You may have to be very very very excellent to get in.

To be Asian and go to top schools means you have to be much much much better than blacks, much much better than Hispanics, and much better than whites(if both Jews and gentiles are included). So, that fact--along with cultural and social factors--may be pressuring Asians to cheat.

I'm sure there are asshole Asians who cheat just to cheat. But some may cheat because they feel the system is cheating them by allowing only the best of the best of the best Asians to make it to top schools.

In other words, suppose blacks get into an elite school with a score of 70.
Hispanics are allowed in with score of 80.
Whites are allowed in with a score of 100.
But suppose Asians are allowed in only with a score of 130.
When Asians are required to outscore everyone else by a substantial margin for the same reward, some are gonna feel justified in taking certain extralegal measures.

If affirmative action hurts Asians, they are gonna go for affirmative prepping.

On the other hand, Ron Unz's article on Jews and colleges indicates that white gentiles may be discriminated even more than Asians by elite colleges. Maybe white gentiles feel less pressure to cheat since they feel more options are open to them for success. Asians, being timid and geeky, may see higher ed as the ONLY path to success.

Antioco Dascalon said...

This fits in with some of your other observations about Asian-Americans. We get a free pass when engaging in pro-Asian American group behaviors, such as organizing to keep neighborhoods from being taken over by crime, loitering, unsightly littering, etc. Or organizing to take over a school to ensure good (and cheap) public education. If someone complains, just say "Japanese Internment" or "Hiroshima and Nagasaki!".
Also, the attitude is "It's game and cheating is part of the game. If they didn't want us to do it, they would catch us and punish us. Anyone else could do it so it is fair."

Anonymous said...

OT:

Alexandre Dugin has a whole lecture series dedicated to "ethnosociology" that I thought would interest some people here...

http://ethnosociology.ru/

blogger said...

I think movies like Red Dawn, World War Z, Contagion, and Olympus Has Fallen has us worried more about being invaded by yellow armies or destroyed by some Asian-originated epidemic than being cheated by Asian geeks.

I guess sensationalism is more fun than mundane problems.

blogger said...

I wonder if the reasons for the cheating is different between East Asians and South Asians.

Chinese and Koreans might just be crazy about exams as their nations are exam-obsessed, almost to the point of autism.

As for Asian-Indians, I know that many of them are convinced that Anglos/whites are a race of pirates and old-boy-network cheaters, and so, it is justified to cheat 'to get even' or 'even things out'. I guess living under British for 200 yrs led to such mind-set.

Auntie Analogue said...


Yet more evidence that the 1965 immigration bill has proven to be an enormous disaster for the United States, for the American people - the original, real, core, historic, Euro-ethnic American people, and for what's left of our republic.

blogger said...

Maybe the media don't want us to dig too deep into Asian cheating since it might lead to discussion of Jewish cheating on Wall Street and homo cheating in the fashion industry.

Maybe there is a kind of wink-wink understanding among various groups:
"we cheat here, you cheat there."

So, Hispanics cheat in crossing the borders illegally, blacks cheat in using government to loot, Jews cheat in finance and law, Asians cheat on exams, homos cheat via the 'gay mafia' shenanigans, and blue blood conservatives cheat via old boys network. Maybe there is a kind of mutual understanding among them all. It's like YOUR PEOPLE corner the fish market, and OUR PEOPLE corner the meat market, and THEIR PEOPLE corner the cheese market.

It's interesting how Jews and white libs are more aggressive and hostile against white conservative masses than against rich white conservatives. Usually, NY Times is more angry with 'rednecks' and 'white trash' in the South than with rich country club white conservatives. The bad guy is the lower class white guy with a baseball cap and pickup truck.

Maybe as long as the rich GOP old-boys-network sucks up to Jews and the globalist agenda(as the Bush and McCain clans have done), maybe they are treated with kid gloves. But all them peckerwoods who get angry about illegal immigration? They are the REAL bad guys.

countenance said...

Re collaboration aka group copying.

Could it be the proctors are themselves Asian?

Now, personal anecdote time.

Seventh grade, science class. I knew this black kid who sat next to me was copying off me during tests, because he wasn't that good a student yet for a few tests in a row, we got the same grades. That and I could see him out of the corner of my eye looking at my paper.

However, I couldn't just tell the teacher, because I was sort of in her doghouse at the time. Or at least I thought I couldn't.

When I was a bit restless one night trying to figure out what to do about it, I recalled my mother's axiom: "Never cheat, because the kid you're cheating off of might be dumber than you." Hmmm, dumber than you. Light bulbs went off.

For one test, I was going to be dumber than him.

But that required me clearing it with the same teacher who was mad at me. Turns out that not only was she not mad at me anymore, she was also suspicious of the cheater's high test grades, but just didn't make anything of the seating arrangement. She approved of my scheme because it would be the final element of proof needed to prove he was cheating, and it would embarrass him so much that he'd never cheat again. The reason I had to clear it with her is that so I could arrange another time to come back and do the test by myself for real.

When we got our test papers back, I got 90, he got 8.

He didn't say one word to me nor even have the gumption to look at me for the rest of the school year. I can only presume he faced some sort of school discipline for the cheating. He was not at that school at all for the eighth grade.

Anonymous said...

"As for Asian-Indians, I know that many of them are convinced that Anglos/whites are a race of pirates and old-boy-network cheaters, and so, it is justified to cheat 'to get even' or 'even things out'. I guess living under British for 200 yrs led to such mind-set. "

Yeaaaah... OOOOK!

So Indian kids cheat because dead Anglos did something to their dead ancestors. Same reason why blacks get to be so violent and have it excused. And why Arabs get to colonize Europe. And the same reason why a functioning fence cannot be built on the Southern border. It all has to to do with dead people doing things to dead people and living people giving concessions to other living people.

YEAAAAAH!

I get it now!

Unknown said...

#18 on Stuff White People Like is Awareness. I'm all for it.

Notice how often Stuff White People Like is very feminine in character. That reflects the reality of the SWPL demographic: the women set the tone for that crowd.

agnostic said...

Not too shocking from the most godless race on Earth. They've made up what huge percent of the world's population, yet never exported a moral, ethical, or religious system?

Large-scale agriculture is the most ruthlessly Malthusian way to make a living, hence it selects for... ruthlessness. Amorality. Ron Unz laid out the basic contours of that environment in an article on meritocracy in China.

Perhaps that's what behind the recent selection in East Asia for genetic variants expressed in the brain -- they're tuning down activity in the moral lobes.

Anonymous said...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/09/science/ashkenazi-origins-may-be-with-european-women-study-finds.html?_r=1&

This study debunks an earlier finding, but we don't say it debunks the entire concept of Ashkenazi Jews.

But, just because the newer science of race has debunked older ideas about race, the PC overlords say the ENTIRE idea of race is bogus.

Consider. The 'out of africa' theory has been revised many times. The theory used to be that there was no neanderthal mixture among modern humans. But we now know differently. But that doesn't discredit the entirety of 'out of africa' theory. Rather, the newer findings revise and improve it.

So, why can't we improve and advance the science of race? Why is it that newer findings on race that overturn older views are said to discredit the ENTIRE view of race?

That is ideology, not science.


Anonymous said...

He didn't say one word to me nor even have the gumption to look at me for the rest of the school year. I can only presume he faced some sort of school discipline for the cheating. He was not at that school at all for the eighth grade.



Wow. Ever wonder sometimes where people like him ended up? Such as, wonder where he is now?

Anonymous said...

For some reason I thought educationrealist was male. Mind blown.

agnostic said...

It's the test administrators who are the closest link to the cheaters themselves. They turn a blind eye to obvious or probable cheating.

Why don't they get weeded out? Well, maybe cheating-friendly test administrators are a feature, not a bug, that attract test-crazy parents who are shopping around for the "best" school for their children.

It's like the "ratings inflation" by credit ratings agencies during the recent meltdown. The holders of the toxic sludge shopped it around to whichever agency would give it the highest rating.

Parents, especially Tiger Mothers, don't want schools to improve their kids as much as possible -- they just want their kids to end up making as much money, in as secure and stable of a job as possible. Receiving high grades and test scores is just a formality that they're happy to apply the "score inflation" pressure to.

"You no let my child cheat? We take our money to OTHER school district! One with better customer service! Where test giver is willing to sacrifice job for students' benefit -- unlike typical SELFISH American worker!"

anony-mouse said...

So those OECD tests you just wrote about where the Japanese and the Koreans demolished the Americans are how authoratative?

Steve Sailer said...

Who knows?

I don't.

Kaz said...

Acupuncture is a career built on fraud. I wouldn't expect any less from these people.

Next you're going to be telling me chiropractors defraud medicare..

Steve Sailer said...

Maybe I got that wrong. I don't know ER, so my assumption could have been all wrong.

I have a strong aversion to revealing any information about anybody who goes by a pseudonym.

vinteuil said...

"Ted Kennedy got kicked out of Harvard for having an impostor impersonate him on a Spanish test."

Never, in my wildest dreams, could I even imagine doing anything like that.

But Ted Kennedy did it - nobody even bothers to deny it - and is now venerated as some sort of secular saint by what passes for the American left.

OK. Yup.

Anonymous said...

Large-scale agriculture is the most ruthlessly Malthusian way to make a living, hence it selects for... ruthlessness. Amorality. Ron Unz laid out the basic contours of that environment in an article on meritocracy in China.

Chinese agriculture traditionally wasn't "large-scale" like the Roman latifundiae, Medieval feudalism, or the American South. It was decidedly small-scale.

Anonymous said...

If you're not willing to cheat, you don't want it bad enough.

Anonymous said...

Not too shocking from the most godless race on Earth. They've made up what huge percent of the world's population, yet never exported a moral, ethical, or religious system?

Christianity and Islam are the predominant exported moral/ethical/religious systems in the world. They're from Jews and Arabs. So are Jews and Arabs the most godly people in the world? Did exporting these systems have nothing to do with self-interest?

Stirner said...

I always assumed ER was male.

He is definitely non-neurotypical, given his descriptions of how he learned to hack aptitude tests over years of being a testing tutor.

In any case, best for ER to keep a low profile given his forthrightness while being in the educational trenches.

Anonymous said...

Large-scale agriculture is the most ruthlessly Malthusian way to make a living, hence it selects for... ruthlessness. Amorality. Ron Unz laid out the basic contours of that environment in an article on meritocracy in China.

China wasn't pushing Malthusian limits until a few hundred years ago.

I don't think you actually understand what "Malthusian" means.

It's precisely because China and Chinese agriculture wasn't "ruthlessly Malthusian" for such a long time that it started hitting Malthusian limits a few hundred years ago with a huge population.

countenance said...

Anon @ 10/8/13 4:40 PM

Not really a mystery to me, even though I really don't care. At best, menial jobs, at worst, doing life in prison on the installment plan.

Matthew said...

"But Ted Kennedy did it - nobody even bothers to deny it - and is now venerated as some sort of secular saint by what passes for the American left."

Yep, cheating on a test at Harvard was the worst thing Dead Kennedy ever did. Ha.

Leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to drown wasn't even the worst thing he ever did. The man was an asshole who bears perhaps more blame than anyone for this country's decline.

*AND*, as you noted, he is venerated by the Left.

Yes, it does explain a lot about the Left. It explains an awful lot.

If someone complains, just say "Japanese Internment" or "Hiroshima and Nagasaki!".

Yes. A Japanese-American may only have migrated here yesterday, but the moment he's on American soil he's free to hold "Japanese Internment" and past European-centric immigration policies over our head while being instantaneously free of any guilt for starting World War II, the Bataan Death March, the Rape of Nanking, not to mention sexist Japan modern culture or insanely racist immigration policies of present-day Japan. Same goes for Chinese (Tibet, North Korea, Vietnam, foot binding, labor policies, the Great Leap Forward) or India (the caste system) or anywhere else.

The moment an immigrant from anywhere sets foot on US soil, unless he's from Western Europe (esp. Germany) he's allowed to bitch about past American "wrongs" against his people while being innocent his own country was doing to others.

Steve Sailer said...

Blogger Steve Sailer said...

"I have a strong aversion to revealing any information about anybody who goes by a pseudonym."

So, in the name of privacy and freedom of expression, the more confused I am, the more confusion I can spread!

Matthew said...

"If you're not willing to cheat, you don't want it bad enough."

Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Joe Kennedy, and Sheldon Adelson all cheated while building their business empires. Many now "respectable" fortunes were founded on fraud or near-fraud. Knowing when and where to push the ethical boundaries can help you get ahead.

Having been educated in a STEM profession, where so much of what you're learning today is built on what was learned yesterday, cheating isn't a way to avoid work - it's a way to get a bigger payoff for the hard work you've already done.

And I think that's how these Asian students can both justify it and get away with it.

Education Realist said...

I'm not at all sure what led to the "Ed is female" thread that I see floating around the net. I saw Jayman refer to it, I know at least one blogger who routinely refers to me as "she". Most people call me "he". I never refer to my gender. I'm happy to be read, assign me whatever gender you like.

He is definitely non-neurotypical, given his descriptions of how he learned to hack aptitude tests over years of being a testing tutor.

non-neurotypical? Like aspergers? No.

And I didn't learn how to hack aptitude tests. I have always been effortlessly good at verbal tests of all sorts. I learned a lot of math over the past ten years and I'm pretty smart. So once I learned math, I moved pretty quickly into, say, top 10% of college grads.

The cheating that countenance described is called "survival cheating", which is low ability kids copying to survive the class. They are generally uninterested in getting As. They just want out. When I figured this out and started giving several different tests, these kids just start turning in blank tests. They have no plan b. But from that point, you can get them to learn.

On the OECD, the TIMMs, and PISA, and everything else, I'm becoming incredibly skeptical about the results. How can we believe them in conjunction with the cheating stories? That's going to be my next post on this topic. Not sure when it will be.



wren said...



But Ted Kennedy did it - nobody even bothers to deny it - and is now venerated as some sort of secular saint by what passes for the American left.

How many high school teachers lecture the kids on the evils of plagiarism and then later lecture them on what a saint MLK was?

Anonymous said...

Anonymous @ 5:31 PM:
If you're not willing to cheat, you don't want it bad enough

Put other way: "If you're not willing to cheat, you don't want as much as those willing to cheat".

Anonymous said...

Incidentally, China is implementing educational reforms such as no homework for elementary school and fewer exams. It must be because of the cheating there.

http://english.cntv.cn/program/china24/20130901/101515.shtml

"The Ministry of Education plans to lessen the heavy workload. It’s a draft policy, which includes 10 regulations.

One of the regulations states that primary schools may no longer set any form of written homework for students in grades one to six.

Instead, schools should work with parents to organize extracurricular activities and after school assignments, including museum tours and library study.

Primary schools are not allowed to assign written homework to pupils in grades 1-6.They should arrange practical "experiential homework" such as visits to museums or library study.

Parents have given their reaction to the latest regulations.

The draft also calls on schools to reduce the number of mandatory exams, stipulating that unified tests should not be conducted from grades one to three.

In addition, schools are being required to remove the "100 point" assessment system to avoid drawing too much attention to scores.

Teachers should use comments including "excellent, good, qualified and will-be qualified". They should use encouraging words to strengthen students’ confidence.

Reducing the school workload on young children can help to broaden their interests and encourage a more-rounded development and a better adult life. It’s all part of China’s continuing efforts to improve its education system for the future needs of the country."

Anonymous said...

The amount of cheating among European students is also astonishing.

Anglo-Saxon professors teaching at continental universities are in for culture shock.

Anonymous said...

Education Realist argues that most Asian students cheat on tests and that there is a stereotype among college admissions staffs that Asian students cheat and that this stereotype is why Asians are "discriminated against" in college admissions. The former may be true, I don't know, but having worked as an administrator and on admissions staffs, I do know the latter is not true. His argument seems to be that Asian students cheat, therefore the stereotype exists, but it's not the case that the stereotype exists. Perhaps college administrators and admissions staff may hold that stereotype in the future, but they haven't so far.

Anonymous said...

BTW, it's not that there wasn't a stereotype about Asian students. It's just that the stereotype was that Asian students were grinds, and that we wanted "student leaders".

Mike said...

You mentioned Teddy and his Spanish test, so here I go: In 1980 when Kennedy ran against Carter for the Democratic nomination for president, he spoke at Macalester College. I was a sophomore at St. Thomas, one mile down Summit Ave.

There were two signs hanging in the auditorium that day that cracked me up. The first: "Macalester students don't cheat on their Spanish tests." The second: "Ted Kennedy for President, Billy Carter for Vice President, You Drink, I'll Drive"

Anonymous said...

Do nations cheat on IQ tests by telling the "will-be qualifieds" to stay home, or do they just throw out their scores?

goatweed the lesser

CJ said...

I haven't noticed that kind of resolve among testing institutions to come up with technical solutions for this growing problem.

I was involved in the pilot testing for the so-called New Generation TOEFL test, an online version of the English-language skill test. ETS went all out to discourage cheating -- large banks of questions, different selections of material for test-takers that came up randomly so people in a common test room would all get slightly different versions, scrambled answers so that a,b,c and d would appear beside different answers even in the cases where students got the same questions. This was about ten years ago, so ETS was very aware of this problem then. Since then I belive that they have, at least for a time, suspended administration of the test in South Korea.

The phenomenon of students writing down as many of the test questions as they can remember immediately after the test is known as a "braindump". Google it and you'll find all kinds of stuff online, particularly for Microsoft certification tests. This is a social activity among East Asian students. I get the impression that anybody who was a "good guy" would participate, and anyone who wouldn't would be considered a selfish weirdo.

Test invigilators of language tests like the TOEFL or IELTS soon learn to watch for students taking notes during the tests that they try to take with them afterwards. Writing down all of the answers on a piece of notepaper and then transferring them to the optical scan answer sheet at the last moment is another favorite. BTW I've observed all this personally.

Anonymous said...

This is bullshit. Well of course Asians are going to be more represented in high-achiever cheating cases. That's like accusing Whites of being more represented in NHL penalty minutes.

http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/09/06/20361014-survey-42-percent-of-harvards-incoming-freshman-class-cheated-on-homework?lite

That's 42%. Even if every Asian kid, who make up 20%, cheated, that still leaves 25% of incoming freshmen who've ADMITTED to cheating. Let that sink in for a minute.

Pressure, whether self-imposed or from parents, has more to do with cheating than anything else. That Asians think educational attainment is more important than sports is generally a good thing. No, I'm not condoning cheating, but anyone should be able to recognize that when big prizes are at stake, a certain percentage of people will cheat to get it.

Claudia Zhao (Stuyvesant) said...

I don't know if Asians are disproportionately more likely to cheat but I wouldn't trust the one you call "Education Realist." For one thing the blog post is high on polemics and innuendo and blame but sorely lacking in real data. My casual experience has been that Asians are not more likely to cheat, at least I have't seen it.

I also wouldn't put too much weight on a blog post created by someone anonymous.

Full disclosure: I am Asian.

Anonymous said...

The cheating catches up with them eventually, on the job, with their colleagues, customers etc. Particularly in this age. If you are honest and have integrity, you will stand out.

TomV said...

As a slacker Asian who never studies in groups and prepares minimally for standardized tests* (two free sample tests for my GRE), I wish there was a way to signal that I'm not "one of those." I'm actually underperforming!

* There's something distasteful about cramming for those, although my perspective might be different I didn't tend do well naturally.

Anonymous said...

I'm prepared to believe that most Asians cheat or cheat more than other people in school or whatever it exactly is that Education Realist is trying to insinuate, but he doesn't have much of an argument. And his claims don't seem very plausible.

He claims that there are three kinds of school cheating: impersonation, collaboration, and prior knowledge. Strangely, he dismisses the first kind, impersonation, and claims that most Asians are engaging in collaboration during major exams and have prior knowledge of major tests. He says that collaboration takes the form of "chaos cheating" in which the Asian students essentially take over the classroom during the test and talk out loud, form circles with their desks or huddle together, text friends, leave the room in packs, etc. Apparently the proctors are completely overpowered or are too "inexperienced" to know any better. Which is strange, since you don't need proctoring experience to know that students aren't supposed to take over the class during a test. This isn't just sneakily breaking a few rules. This is chaotically taking over the classroom. Apparently it's like Lord of the Flies when Asian kids take tests.

The "prior knowledge" method seems more plausible, especially for school subject tests, but most high schools don't have student TAs (teaching assistants, like in college) that can pilfer tests relatively easily, like in the story he links to. It usually isn't easy to steal tests from teachers. As for "prior knowledge" of a major test like the SAT, cameras and phones are not allowed in the testing room, different versions of the test are administered in the same room, different versions are administered at different sites, previously unadministered tests are administered on different dates, etc.

If most of them are cheating, I suspect it's mainly through impersonation, which Education Realist dismisses, simply because in my experience test proctors weren't very vigilant about scrutinizing the IDs of test takers. They do know that test centers are not supposed to descend into "chaos", however. This is in line with what the SAT and ACT have actually done recently to curb cheating, namely requiring students to submit a photo of themselves when they apply for a test:

http://fox13now.com/2012/03/27/sat-act-institute-tough-new-measures-to-prevent-cheating/

jody said...

east asian insularity, obsessive studying to the exclusion of everything else, as well as cheating rings, were one of the reasons cited by some of my students in indiana, as to why they didn't want to go to an ivy or MIT. they'd go to the campus, do the tour, come back, and declare that they were not even applying and instead would attend one of the state universities.

having dealt with these issues with east asians in high school, they didn't want a repeat in college. not all of them felt this way but it was a recurring theme, which kept a certain percentage of ivy caliber high school kids from indiana out of the ivys. i'm sure it's similar for many states in flyover country.

"The cheating catches up with them eventually, on the job, with their colleagues, customers etc"

well they are doing the cheating to get that first job, to be one step ahead of their competitors the moment they leave the university and hit the job market for that entry level position.

as long as they can get a good first job, that's what counts to them. cheating won't help them beyond that, which may partly explain the 'bamboo ceiling' effect.

i'm friends with a chinese guy from LA, second generation, who graduated from UCLA last year, and is already going through this process. although he wasn't a cheater in high school or college, just a good student who earned his grades and got that good first job, he's already being passed by european guys who are better at work, and are getting the promotions over him.

we talk about it sometimes. he's not bitter, and mainly accepts that they're better at their jobs for various reasons, and academics don't have much to do with job performance or success in his field. he recently got his first promotion so it's working out ok for him.

jody said...

"Seventh grade, science class. I knew this black kid who sat next to me was copying off me during tests"

this happened to me in 4th grade, except the guy was one of my friends, so i just let it go. but i knew he copied off me during a test because i got a near perfect score except for one question wrong, which was the same result he got on his test. at first i was like "oh that's crazy sean you got the same one wrong" then later i was thinking and realized what actually happened.

after that i made sure i wasn't near sean during tests. in 5th grade is when the school district introduced tracking so i was never in an academic class with him again, only art, shop, gym class, general stuff like that.

i'm not sure if he graduated high school. i remember him being there in 11th grade, in one of the art classes, but i don't remember him during 12th grade and i don't remember him making the diploma walk at graduation. maybe he was there, but i don't have a concrete memory of him getting his diploma.

i do remember him being in trouble of being flunked out of school for missing too many days. one semester in 11th grade he had missed like 24 days of school and the school district just automatically failed you if you missed 26 or 28. that might have been what got him.

i've also had african guys offer to pay me to do their homework for them, because they knew me and they knew i was smart, but easy to approach and they didn't mind asking me since i was friendly with lots of the africans. the last time that happened was 7th grade or so, because by the time junior high was going, i barely associated with any of these guys anymore. by high school the only time i socialized with any africans was with guys on my sports teams.

with africans who cheat, in my experience it's mostly to get through basic low level public school stuff. most africans are not college material and those who are, are not engaging in organized cheating on standardized tests. they're the only african in a class of europeans and east asians, and they're on their own. there was an african guy in our high school who had an IQ above 140 and i knew him fairly well and i don't believe he was a cheater.

Anonymous said...

east asian insularity, obsessive studying to the exclusion of everything else, as well as cheating rings, were one of the reasons cited by some of my students in indiana, as to why they didn't want to go to an ivy or MIT. they'd go to the campus, do the tour, come back, and declare that they were not even applying and instead would attend one of the state universities.

having dealt with these issues with east asians in high school, they didn't want a repeat in college. not all of them felt this way but it was a recurring theme, which kept a certain percentage of ivy caliber high school kids from indiana out of the ivys. i'm sure it's similar for many states in flyover country.


This sounds made up. Asians are around 25% of the student body at MIT. And under 20% of the Ivy League.

as long as they can get a good first job, that's what counts to them. cheating won't help them beyond that, which may partly explain the 'bamboo ceiling' effect.

i'm friends with a chinese guy from LA, second generation, who graduated from UCLA last year, and is already going through this process. although he wasn't a cheater in high school or college, just a good student who earned his grades and got that good first job, he's already being passed by european guys who are better at work, and are getting the promotions over him.


If he's a non-cheater hitting the "bamboo ceiling", why would he be "already going through this process" of cheaters hitting the "bamboo ceiling"?

Anonymous said...

If most of them are cheating, I suspect it's mainly through impersonation

If most of them are cheating through impersonation, who's taking the test for them? How many times could a genuine 1500+ scorer impersonate a high school senior? And at what reward would they take this risk? I'm not saying it doesn't exist, just that the number is likely to be very small.

Anonymous said...

i'm friends with a chinese guy from LA, second generation, who graduated from UCLA last year, and is already going through this process. although he wasn't a cheater in high school or college, just a good student who earned his grades and got that good first job, he's already being passed by european guys who are better at work, and are getting the promotions over him.

we talk about it sometimes. he's not bitter, and mainly accepts that they're better at their jobs for various reasons, and academics don't have much to do with job performance or success in his field. he recently got his first promotion so it's working out ok for him.


He graduated last year and he's already gotten promoted? And he's gotten passed over for promotions? Does everyone get promoted where he works or something?

jody said...

"And his claims don't seem very plausible."

that braindump stuff, where they immediately exit the testing room and run to another room and furiously begin writing down as many test questions as they can remember, is standard operating procedure in many hagwons.

steve even posted about the kaplan method, which relied heavily on this.

"This sounds made up. Asians are around 25% of the student body at MIT. And under 20% of the Ivy League."

what sounds made up about it. a high school or university which is 25% east asians means that the math centric classes are going to be borked by grinders.

it's not made up at all. the high school was about 20% east asian, then the kids went on their ivy/MIT/stanford/cal tech tours and saw that the universities were about the same, and said no thanks. the kids who didn't want to deal with the asians again usually decided to go do their engineering degree at state U, where there are less east asian grinders who do nothing but spend 8 hours a day studying, torquing the grading curve and making all the other students' lives miserable.

they're not afraid of the east asians intellectually. they already got high SAT math scores and took AP calc and got a 4 or a 5. what they want to avoid, what they do not like, is the atmosphere that a concentrated group of east asians brings to their daily lives in their chosen academic fields, turning college into a crushing grind for minimal gain - a small advantage in entry level job hiring.

Anonymous said...

"It looked like the kind of hitech kit you’d find in a James Bond movie – a shirt with tiny
buttonhole cameras sewn in, a microphone and a small earpiece.

Yet this was no spy film but part of a sophisticated scam to help Chinese immigrants cheat their ‘Britishness’ exams and stay in the UK. Husband-and-wife team Steven Lee and Rong Yang would give the equipment to fellow countrymen and sit in a car outside transmitting the test answers via radio airwaves."


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1085750/Chinese-fraudsters-used-hidden-cameras-microphones-help-immigrants-cheat-Britishness-exams.html


"A Chinese interpreter was jailed today for helping more than 100 learner drivers cheat on their theory tests. Allyson Ng, 45, charged £110 to get Mandarin speakers through the written part of the UK driving test. A court heard Ng was cheating by telling candidates when to use 'dui' the Mandarin word for 'yes' on multiple choice questions.

But bosses at the Driving Standards Agency became suspicious of the number of Chinese learners queuing up to hire Ng for their theory tests. She was arrested at Cardiff theory test centre on 18 October 2012.

An investigation team analysed a random sample of 27 recordings of Ng’s translations and found they were all fraudulent. And the agency believes some candidates never bothered to learn the Highway Code because they knew Ng would get them through."


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2384969/Allyson-Ng-Chinese-interpreter-helped-Mandarin-speaking-learner-drivers-cheat-test.html

Anonymous said...

what sounds made up about it. a high school or university which is 25% east asians means that the math centric classes are going to be borked by grinders.

It sounds made up because at MIT all the classes are "math centric" and in the Ivy League white students aren't underrepresented in the math and science fields nor do they underperform Asians.

jody said...

"If he's a non-cheater hitting the "bamboo ceiling", why would he be "already going through this process" of cheaters hitting the "bamboo ceiling"?"

i said it partly explains it. the implication being that academic achievement is good for that first step out of the university, and that's about it. you get the 0.5 higher GPA. you get magna cum laude instead of cum laude. and so forth. you get to put that on your resume and the other guys don't.

whether you got it from sheer hard work and talent or a little bit of cheating is not important, because that stuff is irrelevant after 5 years. nobody cares what your GPA was by the time you're 27 and you've had a job or two. then what matters is how you did at your job.

my buddy from UCLA got better grades than a lot of his co-workers. and yet they're outperforming him at his job. because his work is not particularly related to taking tests at UCLA. if his job was taking tests at UCLA then he'd be outperforming them. but it's not. his job is delivering results for his company and some of the other guys are better at this than him. guys who didn't get grades as good as him in college.

if academic tests describe ability and aptitude for life in general, and the test scores say east asians blow everybody away, then they should deliver on that potential continuously all throughout life. they should be in the lead at every point. if they are crushing everyone in high school at age 18, they should be crushing everyone at work at age 30.

except, that's not what we usually observe. especially with the chinese. they do ok, but nothing like what their academic test scores would predict. one reason is because most jobs are not 'Study this book then take a test on it.'

Anonymous said...

what sounds made up about it. a high school or university which is 25% east asians means that the math centric classes are going to be borked by grinders.

It sounds made up because there are more whites than Asians at those schools and they don't underwork or underperform Asians. Bill Gates was doing 30 hours of homework a week for a single math class at Harvard to get a B:

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/05/paul-allen-201105?currentPage=all

Greg said...

"a crushing grind for minimal gain"

This has always been Asian's main advantage - the willingness to do this - and has been noted as such throughout the centuries of European contact with Asians. We shouldn't be too hard on them for this. If this is how they wish to prioritize their lives let them - I suspect they do this out of a feeling of intense competitive envy with white people. Once this gradually fades, they will settle down into that wonderful indolence and refined hedonism that Europeans who first came into contact with Asia found so refreshing, and that is the other side of Asian culture that we rarely see, but is just as characteristic, and can become prominent again under the right conditions.

While current Asian grind behavior obviously has deep roots in their culture as well, and is no less an authentic expression of timeless Asian tendencies, representing perhaps some of the worst sides of the Asian character, we have to remember that Asia is still recovering from the shock of contact with the West and a huge part of their behavior today is a result of that rather than timelessly Asian - is it any wonder that certain less appealing aspects of their culture that are nevertheless useful might become artificially prominent and fall out of balance with the other, more appealing side of the culture that has historically acted as a countervailing force?

Asians grind behavior is a classic display of social aspirant behavior - and for the past 150 years at least status anxiety is what has characterized the Asian relationship to whites.

Give them time to mellow out - another 100 years or so.

Anonymous said...

I'm not at all sure what led to the "Ed is female" thread that I see floating around the net. I saw Jayman refer to it, I know at least one blogger who routinely refers to me as "she". Most people call me "he". I never refer to my gender. I'm happy to be read, assign me whatever gender you like.

People actually think Ed Realist is a woman?

I think that would require either having read precious little of his work or having never actually met a female member of Homo Sapiens before.

Anonymous said...

they're not afraid of the east asians intellectually. they already got high SAT math scores and took AP calc and got a 4 or a 5. what they want to avoid, what they do not like, is the atmosphere that a concentrated group of east asians brings to their daily lives in their chosen academic fields, turning college into a crushing grind for minimal gain - a small advantage in entry level job hiring.

And they know this as high school seniors? I think you're projecting.

Cail Corishev said...

"I was involved in the pilot testing for the so-called New Generation TOEFL test, an online version of the English-language skill test. ETS went all out to discourage cheating -- large banks of questions, different selections of material for test-takers that came up randomly so people in a common test room would all get slightly different versions, scrambled answers so that a,b,c and d would appear beside different answers even in the cases where students got the same questions." -- CJ

Thanks for that background. Here's the question that raises for me: with thousands of questions, and test randomization that means even someone with the questions and answers in advance would have to memorize the questions and answers themselves -- rather than memorizing "A, B, D, B, A, C, C" or putting dots in the plaid on your shirt to match the circles that need to be filled in -- at some point, doesn't the ability to memorize enough answers to do well on the test indicate pretty high intelligence in itself -- maybe even as much intelligence as it would have taken to learn the subject in the first place?

To put it another way, how many answers about a subject do you have to memorize before you've learned the subject? After all, some subjects pretty much are learning the answers to questions. Take history, for instance: at below the college level, it's mostly memorizing the answers to questions the book and teacher raise in class.

If an American history test drew 100 questions randomly from a pool of 10,000, and you got access to the pool in advance and were able to memorize 9000 of them so you could score over 90%, wouldn't you know American history pretty well at that point?

I realize it's not quite the same with something like math where it's more about figuring things out than memorizing facts, but even there I'd think that if you're able to game the test, you're probably smart enough to get a good score anyway. I suspect this really only matters for the very top scores, and that only matters because higher education is entirely out of control and over-valued.

Anonymous said...

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115090/tribute-stanley-kauffmann

Bill said...


Anonymous said...

Education Realist argues that most Asian students cheat on tests and that there is a stereotype among college admissions staffs that Asian students cheat and that this stereotype is why Asians are "discriminated against" in college admissions. The former may be true, I don't know, but having worked as an administrator and on admissions staffs, I do know the latter is not true. His argument seems to be that Asian students cheat, therefore the stereotype exists, but it's not the case that the stereotype exists. Perhaps college administrators and admissions staff may hold that stereotype in the future, but they haven't so far.


You are talking about undergraduate admissions and Asian-Americans, I think. For graduate admissions and Asian-Asians, what you are saying would be insane.

Cail Corishev said...

"This is in line with what the SAT and ACT have actually done recently to curb cheating, namely requiring students to submit a photo of themselves when they apply for a test:"

But don't they all look alike to us?

I'm probably naive about this stuff, since I went to a small school and there really wasn't the obsession about perfect test scores back then. You wanted to get a good score to get into a good college, but there wasn't the same awareness (at least in this area) that a few extra points could make some big difference.

I was a straight-A student and the top student in the history of my school, but no one approached me and asked me to impersonate him. Back then, I probably wouldn't have -- not being too moral, but being afraid to get caught. Now, I'd do it for $100 and for kicks, assuming getting caught wouldn't mean an actual arrest. I guess you could say my respect for the educational system has dwindled, and it wasn't exactly strong back then.

Cail Corishev said...

'If he's a non-cheater hitting the "bamboo ceiling", why would he be "already going through this process" of cheaters hitting the "bamboo ceiling"?'

Maybe the people who hired him saw him through an "Asian=smart" filter, and started him at a level higher than his actual skills merited, so it's taking him longer to improve enough to move up.

Cail Corishev said...

"having dealt with these issues with east asians in high school, they didn't want a repeat in college. not all of them felt this way but it was a recurring theme, which kept a certain percentage of ivy caliber high school kids from indiana out of the ivys. i'm sure it's similar for many states in flyover country."

The Asians are part of it (especially in STEM fields), but they're part of a general sense of foreignness. When a kid from flyover country visits a major college on one of the coasts, it seems like everyone's foreign and speaking another language, or is stupidly rich so hanging out with them burns through a semester's worth of the kid's spending money in a week, or has green hair and a face full of steel, or is flamboyantly gay/trans/whatever.

Not that flyover country is still Normal Rockwell, but you can go days around here without meeting anyone like that. Then to be dropped into a dorm where everyone seems to be that way and you're the weirdo....that's just not attractive for a lot of kids from here.

Discard said...

You can tell something about cheating from the countermeasures of the test givers. Regarding impersonation: When I have taken teacher certification test in recent years, we all had to place our drivers' licenses on the desks and leave them there the whole time. Regarding Oriental cheaters, Los Angeles test proctors, all of which were Black females and thus immune from accusations of racism, would separate all Orientals from one another. I recall the looks of dismay when this happened.
These are security policies, not the whims of proctors. The higher up were responding to patterns of behavior, not the odd incident.

agnostic said...

' There were two signs hanging in the auditorium that day that cracked me up. The first: "Macalester students don't cheat on their Spanish tests." The second: "Ted Kennedy for President, Billy Carter for Vice President, You Drink, I'll Drive" '

LOL. Back when young people had a healthy dose of disdain for their superiors. But still in more of a roasting than a vitriolic tone.

Anonymous said...

that braindump stuff, where they immediately exit the testing room and run to another room and furiously begin writing down as many test questions as they can remember, is standard operating procedure in many hagwons.

steve even posted about the kaplan method, which relied heavily on this.


Education Realist doesn't talk about the method of immediately exiting the testing room and running to another room to furiously write down as many test questions as can be remembered as part of his claim or insinuation that most Asians cheat. I think he has talked about it in the past, but not in this post. Rather, he says that they're taking pictures of the test during the test with their cameras or smartphones, which aren't allowed in the testing rooms. Neither of these methods seem very plausible as part of his claim. Cameras and phones are not allowed in testing rooms, different versions of the test are administered in the same room, different versions are administered at different sites, previously unadministered tests are administered on different dates, etc.

The "Kaplan Method" appears to have involved getting the basic form or type of the questions in a time when they were less commonly known or public. That's not the case today, where the forms of the questions (i.e. sentence completion questions, reading comprehension questions, etc.) are public knowledge and most test takers are aware of them.

Anonymous said...

a high school or university which is 25% east asians means that the math centric classes are going to be borked by grinders.

I don't see the relevance to MIT, which grades by mastery, not curves, and which limits admission to only those it thinks can do the required work, which includes calculus a semester beyond the AP BC sequence and calculus based mechanics and E&M.

Anonymous said...

as long as they can get a good first job, that's what counts to them. cheating won't help them beyond that, which may partly explain the 'bamboo ceiling' effect.

Cheating isn't specific to school. It's a general activity that garners rewards in any kind of activity or domain. Are you saying that cheating doesn't exist in the professional or corporate world? Or that Asians don't cheat in the professional or corporate world? If they're such cheaters in school, why wouldn't they cheat after school?

Anonymous said...

So basically test cheating countermeasures had to be invented when Asians started immigrating.

Art Deco said...

ext you're going to be telling me chiropractors defraud medicare..

Where I am from, chiropractors take a lengthy run of courses, are state licensed, and have been receiving referrals from orthopaedic surgeons for about 25 years now (as do physical and occupational therapists). H. L. Mencken been dead a long time, fella.

Piper said...

Chiropractors are quacks. Their "education" is bogus. Their claims are bogus. Their rare successes are all placebo- effect. Of course chiropractors get referrals from orthopedic surgeons: that is the fastest way to clear the malingerers and hypocondriacs out of the real doctor's waiting room. It's pretty funny, watching the fake patient and the fake doctor try to con each other!

Cail Corishev said...

"Chiropractors are quacks. Their claims are bogus. Their rare successes are all placebo- effect."

If true, that puts them one step above the MDs who charge a lot more to hand out statins, cholesterol meds, and other harmful medicines and advice. At least a placebo is harmless.

I go both ways on chiropractors. I've been to a couple who could explain to me exactly what they were doing in manipulating certain joints, and I could tell when it helped (and when it didn't). However, I've seen many others who were more showman than healer, or who were into loopy New Age stuff like color and sound therapy (and generally charging through the nose for it). You definitely have to do your homework and use good judgment when dealing with them. But then that's true of all doctors, no matter how much government or industry oversight there is over them.

Vets seem to be the only ones who aren't usually trying to rip anyone off -- and that probably applies mostly to livestock vets, not so much to the pet specialists.

Anonymous said...

But don't they all look alike to us?

You usually need a photo ID to enter the testing centers, and while proctors do check for IDs, they don't necessarily carefully examine IDs either. They do know, however, that test takers are supposed to be taking the tests by themselves in silence and are not supposed to engage in "chaos cheating" or have their smartphones with them to text or take pictures during the test. This is why it's strange that Education Realist basically dismisses the "impersonation" method of cheating altogether and says it's the other forms taking place. The impersonation method seems more plausible. Ed Realist's claim would be more plausible if he added that proctors were being bribed or something to allow "chaos cheating", because ignorance on the part of proctors about "chaos cheating" not being allowed is just not very plausible.

Education Realist said...

This is why it's strange that Education Realist basically dismisses the "impersonation" method of cheating altogether and says it's the other forms taking place. The impersonation method seems more plausible. Ed Realist's claim would be more plausible if he added that proctors were being bribed or something to allow "chaos cheating", because ignorance on the part of proctors about "chaos cheating" not being allowed is just not very plausible.

I said it wasn't a big problem in this country, and that wasn't my opinion, but the word of the College Board, who records about 200 events in the year--and I did leave the possibility open they were lying.

I am talking about high school tests. The major SAT impersonation fraud occurred because the kids scheduled their tests at schools where they weren't known. For hundreds or thousands of kids a year to coordinate impersonation would be impossible, and it would also eventually be picked up on.

Besides, if impersonation was a big issue, Asian parents wouldn't be spending millions on test prep. If I'm wrong, you'll notice Asian test scores plummeting now that the SAT is undergoing tougher security.



Impersonation is a HUGE issue in China, Korea, and India, and when the SAT is allowed there, it wouldn't surprise me if there were impersonators taking tests. It's still an issue with the TOEFL, although they've put in security measures to prevent the fraud on second and subsequent attempts. No way to stop it on the first try, though--at least not last I read.

I don't know why you say I'm "claiming" anything. I provided cites from lawsuits, even, that clearly document the behavior I'm talking about. In general, I'm pointing things out that lead to the stereotype.

Here's the question that raises for me: with thousands of questions, and test randomization that means even someone with the questions and answers in advance would have to memorize the questions and answers themselves -- rather than memorizing "A, B, D, B, A, C, C" or putting dots in the plaid on your shirt to match the circles that need to be filled in -- at some point, doesn't the ability to memorize enough answers to do well on the test indicate pretty high intelligence in itself -- maybe even as much intelligence as it would have taken to learn the subject in the first place?

Sure. Watch someone with average intelligence try to do this and it's ugly. But they don't learn the subject.

And as I've written, high verbal scores are much rarer in every race than high math scores. Simple memorization doesn't do the job for verbal any better, and often worse, than it does for math.

Anonymous said...

Besides, if impersonation was a big issue, Asian parents wouldn't be spending millions on test prep. If I'm wrong, you'll notice Asian test scores plummeting now that the SAT is undergoing tougher security.

Presumably, if any method of cheating were a big issue, Asians parents wouldn't be spending millions on test prep.

The tougher security the SAT is implementing appears to be to curb impersonation:

http://fox13now.com/2012/03/27/sat-act-institute-tough-new-measures-to-prevent-cheating/

I imagine that's because that's the most common method of cheating, not "chaos cheating". You could say that the SAT is possibly lying about a massive "chaos cheating" problem, but I don't see how that makes the claim more plausible. What could possibly make the claim more plausible is that the Asians are possibly bribing the proctors or perhaps threatening them with violence, since it's highly implausible that proctors are unaware that "chaos cheating" is not allowed and that the proctors themselves are unable to counter the "chaos cheating". Even if a proctor were physically unable to prevent an unruly pack of Asians from "chaos cheating" during a test, all the proctor would have to do is report the incident after the test and the scores would be invalidated.

Education Realist said...

I imagine that's because that's the most common method of cheating, not "chaos cheating"

Did you actually read the piece? Chaos cheating occurs during AP testing, normally. I specifically said that I could only find one instance of chaos cheating (collaboration) in the SAT. AP testing is done at the school level. Impersonation is impossible.

I don't think collaboration is a big issue in SAT cheating, nor do I think impersonation is a big problem. Prior knowledge cheating would be the method of choice for the SAT, and that is occurring, although on what scale I don't know. Overseas, it occurs a great deal.

You also appear to be missing the point. I am not saying "all Asians cheat" or even "all recent Asian immigrants cheat", nor am I claiming that the SAT is rife with cheating.

Anonymous said...

The main problem with assertions or persistent speculations like the ones made by Sailer and some "race realists" regarding alleged Asian propensity for cheating is that they are completely devoid of any statistical evidence.

Sailer mentions scandals, newspaper stories and the like, which may only confirm the selection biases of the said media rather than a more objective measure of actual reality.

Furthermore, definitions are very fuzzy here. "Asians" as all of the readers here understand encompass a vast range of peoples, genetic lineages, cultures, economic development levels and so forth.

As that multiculuralist Jared Taylor will tell all of us, young Japanese go through the ritual of reporting cash found on the street to their local police stations. After the last catastrophic tsunami, millions of dollars worth of cash found on washed out homes, building and streets were picked up by strangers and reported to the authorities. These are not the kind of people who would display high propensity for violating rules.

Since direct statistics on cheating may be hard to obtain, proxy measures may have to be used. A good one, in my view, is the Transparency International's Corruption Percention Index. This shows that some Asians (Singaporeans, Hong Kongers and Japanese) rank top twenty in the world (ahead of our United States) in terms of being uncorrupt while upper middle level development East Asian tigers such as Taiwan and South Korea place in the top fifty. China and India rank at 80 and 94, respectively, befitting their middle develoment level. The likes of Burma and North Korea rank almost dead last.

Now I will do some speculations of my own. My suspicion is that the propensity for cheating among some Asian-descended students in the United States may be above average.

Part of the reason may be that cheating in general is a relatively high IQ, high drive activity (people who do not care do not care enough to cheat and dumbt people who cheat are caught more often).

Another contributor may be the intense amount of pressure these students face combined with lack of other opportunities that more establshed ethnic stocks (Jewish, WASP, etc.) may enjoy (family connections, art school, spending a gap year in Europe building "life experiences and what have you or in the case of lower class rural whites the military, sports, farming/trades).

Yet another variable may be what I would call the general culture of immigration itself, in which immigrants tend to avoid "big" violations of laws and norms (hence foreign-born Mexicans in U.S. have far lower violent crime rates than Mexican-Americans born here) while engaging in "small" violations (e.g. cash payments devoid of taxes) that are less likely to go undetected at a higher-than-average frequency.

Whereas these small violations among, say, Salvadoran immigrants may manifest as tax avoidance, parking violations and such, they may emerge as test cheating among Asian ones (earlier immigrants like Italians and Jews were at one time also notorious for running low- to mid-level financial scams and garnered shifty reputations that have since subsided greatly).

JN

Anonymous said...

Did you actually read the piece? Chaos cheating occurs during AP testing, normally. I specifically said that I could only find one instance of chaos cheating (collaboration) in the SAT. AP testing is done at the school level. Impersonation is impossible.

The same critique would apply. I took AP tests in high school, and they were proctored by the teacher for the specific AP class. It doesn't seem very plausible that AP teachers, most of whom are presumably white, would be unaware that "chaos cheating" is not allowed or would condone "chaos cheating" during the tests. Unless there was some serious bribery or threats of violence or something, which don't seem very plausible either.

I don't think collaboration is a big issue in SAT cheating, nor do I think impersonation is a big problem. Prior knowledge cheating would be the method of choice for the SAT, and that is occurring, although on what scale I don't know. Overseas, it occurs a great deal.

Impersonation strikes me as much more plausible as the main method of cheating. Prior knowledge would entail taking pictures of the tests during the tests or writing the questions down after the test. The latter strikes me as especially implausible as a significant method. There's not much you're going to remember about specific questions aside from the form or outline of the questions, which are already known. And different tests are administered.

You also appear to be missing the point. I am not saying "all Asians cheat" or even "all recent Asian immigrants cheat", nor am I claiming that the SAT is rife with cheating.

Your point is that college admissions staff members and administrators hold a stereotype that Asian students cheat on the SAT, AP tests, etc. A stereotype is supposed to hold for the majority or reflect the average. It's a general notion.

Anonymous said...

Speaking of Asian stereotypes, anyone see the film "Akeelah and the Bee"?

To me, this seems to be the perfect post-modern American racial morality tale.

Protagonists: a poor, underprivileged black girl tutored by a caring black intellectual.

Sidekick: a Hispanic kid. Humorous, slightly obese and affectionate. Good at spelling but not THAT good.

Villains: a rich Asian father who drives his son mercilessly and his son (said to be "Korean" in the film; played by one Sean Michael Afable who is said to be Euro-Filipino) who cheats but comes over to the light at the end and finds friendship with the protagonist.

The best part: The various characters in the neighborhood boo at the TV when the Asian (or white-Asian mix) student appears on TV. Even another Asian hates him and sides with blacks ("He's Korean, I'm Chinese!").

This film should be shown to all immigrants to this country so that they can quickly grasp the racial hierarchy of this country and the attendant correct feelings regarding the same.

JN

Education Realist said...

Unless there was some serious bribery or threats of violence or something, which don't seem very plausible either.

Which is what I said. And yet, I provided a lawsuit decision that described on the record what took place. You'll have to wrap your head around reality.

And no, my point was about first or second generation Asian immigrants from Korea, China, and India. Which, if you had any idea what you were talking about, is not all Asians or even close. It's a big group, though.

As for the rest, you don't know what you're talking about and I've wasted enough time watching you repeat yourself. The fact that you personally don't find something likely should be considered evidence in favor of its existence.

Anonymous said...

Which is what I said. And yet, I provided a lawsuit decision that described on the record what took place. You'll have to wrap your head around reality.

Your claim is that there is the stereotype, and you imply that the stereotype exists because it's true. If you're going to claim that the stereotype is true not because of "impersonation" or some other method of cheating, but because significant numbers of proctors, most of them presumably white, are being bribed or threatened with violence, then I find that to be not very plausible.

As for the rest, you don't know what you're talking about and I've wasted enough time watching you repeat yourself. The fact that you personally don't find something likely should be considered evidence in favor of its existence.

I do know what I'm talking about. And yes I do find that something like "chaos cheating" being more common than something like impersonation and significant numbers of white proctors being bribed or threatened with violence to allow "chaos cheating" to be not very plausible. You're not arguing for mere existence. You're arguing that it's more common than impersonation and that it occurs enough to justify a stereotype you claim that college admissions people and administrators hold.

Unknown said...

Steve, I don't understand why you are attracted by such heresy. A lot of the stories in the writing is what she heard. There was no investigation. Whole thing reads like a concocted propaganda from a prejudice person. These stuffs should have no place in your website. There is no journalism value here.

blogger said...

"Steve, I don't understand why you are attracted by such heresy. A lot of the stories in the writing is what she heard. There was no investigation."

That is the problem. There is no investigation. We need investigations into this, Wall Street, Hollywood accounting, illegal border crossing, and etc.
But so much of it goes unnoticed.
So, our own only recourse is to rely on hearsay and anecdotes.

We need a sweeping investigations of all the rot that happens in our society, but our cult of tolerance discourages us from looking into such things, especially if related to minorities and liberals.
This is why those jerks who pulled 'hate pranks' at Oberlin did what they did. They knew they'd be slapped on the wrist.

Ours is turning into a very corrupt society.

Anonymous said...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204791104577110870328419222.html

Chuatics is now a chop-shtick.

Anonymous said...

These are not the kind of people who would display high propensity for violating rules.

The shame-guilt culture gap is probably relevant here.
East Asian cultures (and probably South Asian cultures too) farm out a lot of their monitoring of their moral behavior to the mass.

When Asians are found cheating, I am sure their shame is much higher than among Whites who have cheated. When Asians are not discovered as cheaters, their guilt is surely far less.

In the US, many Asians are very much more strongly part of their nuclear family, as a community, than the wider community (more so for Chinese, less for Filipinos, for instance). The parents aren't going to shame the child for cheating the community and the community's disapproval doesn't matter to the child, and the child feels less guilt than a White kid would, so there is not such a really big incentive not to cheat.
That said, cheating is hard and risky, so I think few of any group do it, not enough to particularly distort performance stats.

(Incidentally I assume shame-guilt difference is probably because
shame is cognitively simpler than guilt (only Europeans tend to have strong guilt norms, while most cultures have strong shame norms) and leaves more brain resources for spatial abilities or whatever else Asians needed more

or because Asians had more "closed" societies where they stayed close to their parents and kin, so didn't need to monitor themselves, because they had trustworthy folk around, who wouldn't just try to shame them manipulatively).

Anonymous said...

they are a bunch of memorizers,they have no ability to dream and make the impossible a reality like white men.they have to use whiteys schools whiteys computers and steal whitey's life and future.go back to plowing your rice paddies,i read on here some idiot saying that Asians have to cheat because in order for an Asian to get into a prestigious college he must be better than the best ,oh yeah all Asians are so brilliant you have to rise above the other Asians....lol....you morons come under affirmative action with admissions and scholarships,when you don't deserve them,you have never beern oppressed in America.whites continue to come up with the groundbreaking inventions,while Asians re engineer and steal whiteys r&d .good grades don't make you smart,bill gates dropped out of college so did steve jobs,because the college institutions are all set up for free thinklng realists to fail and minorities and women to succeed especialkly nowadays its reached ridiculous proportions.so the cheating is just an extra little assurance for Asians to overcome the bigotry of this white society,so really they did nothing wrong white people are to blame.i have watched the bay area become a breeding ground for Asians over the last 20 years and I want out of here badly,they took a great place and fukd it all up,they can't drive cars and they are very unfriendly...all their minority status freebies should be scrapped after all theyre the majority here in California,and i'm sure many other formerly white places until this illegal wave of yellow locusts swarmed down on our beloved bay area.you can't get a job here unless you speak figgin Chinese or indian,all the employees at many businesses are all Asian the don't allow you the same benefits of diversity once they are in charge.white people need not apply.now they seem to think they are smarter than us,and made silicon valley what it is today....lol....I read the remarks on these Asian high tech blogs,they are full of themselves,well invent something of worth then.quit following white people around hijacking our towns and cities.whoever said you were welcome lied.

Anonymous said...

It's probably just because the Asian minority in this country are predisposed to taking these tests in the first place due to parental pressure. If a greater % of the cheaters are Asian relative to their overall population, it may be because a greater % of Asians take the tests relative to their overall population.

I'll leave an example of mass cheating that, by numbers, almost no minorities took part in.

Night Land Navigation at Platoon Leader's Course Juniors, 1st Increment, Summer of 2012 at United States Marine Corps Officer Candidate School aboard MCB Quantico. How do I know? I was there. And the CO sent almost half of the candidates packing permanently.