Blame system, not students, for frequency of cheating

By James Palmer Source:Global Times Published: 2012-10-31 20:40:04

 

Illustration: Liu Rui
Illustration: Liu Rui



Editor's Note:

Chinese students are applying to US colleges in greater numbers than ever before. But after a series of recent media exposes, US schools are becoming increasingly skeptical of Chinese applicants' claims. According to a 2010 report by student-orientated social network Zinch China, 90 percent of recommendation letters are fakes, 70 percent of application essays are written by somebody other than the student, and 50 percent of grade transcripts are fabrications. Who's to blame? Can US schools take measures to prevent it? The Global Times invited two commentators to contribute their thoughts.

View Point: Slacking cheaters end up harming everybody's chances

 

Chinese graduate students once enjoyed a happy reputation in the US. "Give me five graduate students, at least three of them Chinese!" as one scientist demands in the TV series Futurama. But their good name has been badly corroded recently by a series of scandals involving faked applications and false claims.

In my experience, Chinese students going overseas generally fall into two camps. There're the hard-working, smart ones for whom it's a natural next step in their academic progress.

And then there're the rich kids whose parents want them to have the status of going to a foreign school. Quite often they've blown the national college entrance examination, or gaokao, which remains notoriously tough and very hard to bribe or cheat your way around, and so an overseas university is their best option. 

The rich kids generally don't have the chops to get into a good US school themselves, and so frequently resort to faked information, dubious agencies, and other fraudulent means to get through. I have friends who make a decent living just from writing the personal essays for such students. 

This doesn't always work; take the recent lawsuit in Hong Kong, where an irate pair of parents are suing an admissions agency that took them for a startling $2.2 million, promising their kid a place in Harvard.

But unfortunately, even the genuinely talented students also sometimes resort to cheating. Most of them are graduate students, and fraud is rife throughout the Chinese academic system.

Students regularly take exams for each other, there's little invigilation, professors foist their duties off onto graduate students, teachers claim credentials they never earned, academic papers are routinely plagiarized from Western sources and passed off as original work, and laboratory results are faked to get funding.

This isn't the norm everywhere, of course. There are honest and professional people doing first-rate work in Chinese universities, both students and teachers. But it's all too common.

A US friend doing graduate work in a top Chinese school, for instance, recently told me that two of his classmates had returned to the US early in disgust at the prevalence of faked results in their labs, which made it impossible for them to work.

Cheating becomes the norm at times, and that carries over to applying to foreign schools. But that's only one side of the story. The other is the byzantine nature of the US college application process itself.

Unlike in China, where the gaokao is kept deliberately simple in order to reduce the possibility of fraud or nepotism, US schools evaluate prospective students on a complex range of criteria. These include interviews, extra-curricular activities such as charitable work, a variety of possible examinations, recommendations, and personal essays.

This system can be difficult to navigate even for Americans. One reason for the increasing dominance of Ivy League schools by the children of the privileged is because their parents have the social connections and nous to steer their way through the applications process, or the money to hire consultants and tutors to help them do so. And the truth is often bent in the process.

Outright fraud is rare, but a one-time visit to a soup kitchen can easily become a commitment to helping the homeless, and essays can be selectively "edited" by parents or tutors. 

Chinese students come into the process as outsiders, stumbling through a flurry of forms in a second language, without the ties or connections to give them a leg up. We can't approve of their cheating. But we can see where the roots of it lie.

The author is a copy editor with the Global Times. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn



Posted in: Viewpoint

blog comments powered by Disqus