Job Discussion Forums

[jeffinflorida]

I worked at QUANZHOU NORMAL UNIVERSITY for 1 term teaching Business - Marketing to Senior and Junior students.

When I first arrived I was pretty happy with the school and the way I was treated.

By the end of the term I was highly dissatisfied with the school and many students.

The FAO is a 'Little Richard" head. He lies to you with a smile on his face. It is common belief that he taps the phone in the apartments as "clicks" are heard on the apartment phones and he keeps his own room in the teachers building. The school also spies on the teachers - on where they go and what they do. The FAO employs students to report on the teachers and rewards them with trips and better accommodations for their spying efforts. I won't discuss rape allegations but you can read them in other threads.

The school commonly cheats FTs at the end of the contract. I was no exception. At the end of the contract my pay was off by 2000 RMB. After a talk with the vice-dean he admitted it was his "mistake" by shorting me the 2000RMB. However, he argued that the books were closed for that term and he could not pay me until next term. After raising Hell with the FAO Office and making threats to complain to the president of the school I was paid promptly. The TAFE representative was with me and after the meeting he told me that they do this every term to many teachers to try and keep money. This happened to other teachers at the end also, they were cheated.

The quality of education at QUANZHOU NORMAL UNIVERSITY is very low. No surprise, it is all about money. If you can pay you get a degree - it is as simple as that.

CHEATING is an acceptable practice at the university and students caught cheating by teachers face no penalties from the school. I caught several senior students cheating in mid-terms and expelled one of them from my class for lying about his cheating. He has caught red-handed with a dictionary with all the answers written in it. I caught him passing his dictionary to another student during the exam and looked inside of it. We compared the hand-writ ting and it was a perfect match. The school's response was to give him his degree and give him a passing grade in my class - even after I gave him a zero on the mid-term, he never handed in his mandatory assignments, and received less than a 10 on the final.
Many other students were caught cheating and the school could care less. Many term papers and projects were copied from the Internet or we similar or exact to other students.

At the final the students complained that the FTs were distracting them because we were tough on cheating. the vice dean told us not to be so concerned with cheating. The school gave us Chinese teachers to monitor during finals. Some were sleeping, others were reading or doing their school work - very few Chinese teachers watched the students taking the exams. I watched one student cheating during the exam. She had notes under her chair and was reading them during the test. A Chinese teacher walked over to her looked at the note on the floor, smiled, and walked away!!! I walked over took the notes, balled them up and trew them away with a warning to the student that she was lucky I didn't fail her. The Chinese teacher gave me a dirty look.

The students, while nice, have no originality or seem capable of independent thought. They don't try to do their assignments or participate in classroom work. Most of them CHEAT and believe it is ok to do so. When questioned they reply that "CHEATING IS PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE IN HIGH SCHOOL AND UNIVERSITY IN CHINA AND IS THE ONLY WAY TO GET AHEAD. EVERYONE DOES IT AND WE FTs DON'T UNDERSTAND."

The vast majority of students in the BUSINESS PROGRAM at QUANZHOU NORMAL UNIVERSITY are buying a degree and will come out no smarter of more educated then when they went in to the school. Some students speak very little English - even though they are supposed to have 6 years of English before entering the program and are required to take 18 months of English only courses at the school before entering the business program. The "Uncle" system at the school kicks in here as maybe 12 students spoke such poor English and had no business to be in the program as they could not understand anything I said. But,

"THEY PAID THEIR MONEY AND THEY GOT THEIR DEGREE..."

To make matters even worse, when I left my apartment at the school MOD EDIT from the FAO Office comes over to inspect my rooms and treated me very poorly. She yelled at me because I threw out some metal hangers from the wardrobe and told me I had to replace them - these are the hangers that your dry cleaning comes back on... Generally she became a Gestapo Brown Shirt very quickly...

The people in the FAO office have no people skills and treat you very poorly. You are CATTLE to them and their job is simply to herd you and they when they are done with you the smiles disappear...They will nickel and dime you for everything and much of it is a petty nuisance. They are always asking for money and when you question it the answer is always " It's in your contract" or "It's not in your contract".

I recently went to the school to visit a friend. There are only 2 or 3 FTs there. Most left, several broke their contracts and went to better places.

THINK TWICE BEFORE WORKING THERE... my advice.

[Roger]

Your about-face was long, long in coming; well, it is your SECOND comment on Quanzhou Normal University in this vein. We could ask you: what's so special about your former employer? It is a college like hundreds in China... nothing unusual, really.

IT is good that Jefflorida From N.Y., Usania has thoroughly changed his mind. Still, it is important to note that one's first impression is seldom to last until the end. CHina is a nation of appearances, face, make-believe, Potemkin Villages.

It is newbies such as Jeff (when he first arrived one year ago) that make all the wrong noises about their employers: either they hate them from day one, or they give glowing reviews after only 2 weeks, isn't it, Jeff?

And in so doing some of them come down extremely hard on less lucky peers such as that Belgian woman who was the object of an attempt at raping her at Quanzhou Normal University.
Luckily for her, she was a very resourceful woman though no legal action was taken against that man the culprit. Regrettably, however, our Jeff thought he must side with his CHinese emploeyer-friend in pouring water over her observations.

Now we can see that hers were not invented stories. I say to everyone: beware of Quanzhou Normal University! And beware of newbies who dispense their immature opinions after only a couple of weeks or months. .

[cj750]

Right you are Roger..and not only the newones but all who post here have there own reason (and agendas) for offering advice and any one who sez they know about China is lying...to themselves...a reader should take all advice here with a grain of salt...never beleave anything you read but instead use it as a guide line to find your own answers...some who have trouble with one uni will be thick as thieves with another ..and as the learning curve is accomplished..fewer will offer such "certain" advice..as they relize that conditions change way to fast to offer anything as a standard..or a truth...

[Mideatoo]

[jeffinflorida]

Gee can you believe that word made it back to me that the school is not happy with my post?

[Brian Caulfield]

I am tired of hearing about cheating from teachers and Chinese students . You can only cheat the bad teacher . If you don't know your students ability and can't spot the monkey business when you invigilate , then find a new gig . When you see something don't say anything make a note on the exam and mark them down. When they complain tell them why they got the low mark .

[chinaboytian]

I was going to start a thread about student cheating on tests, but I will just post to this thread, since it concerns Fujian Province.

An hour away from this school, near the village of Ma Jia, lies a private, for-profit institution known as Yang-En University. I taught there all kinds of English and also Marketing, for one year.

I was disgusted with their culture in Fujian, a CHEATING culture. When I sat in with exams with a CHinese teacher, he looked the other way. Even the dean, after my complaining, told me to tone it down, even he did not care that the students cheated on mid-term or final exam, probably most of these teachers cheated their own way through high school and college.

I was very strict, to the amazement of students. When I busted them, told them to go home, they got a zero for the exam, they never admitted guilt. Chinese always denied any cheating. They cheat right in front of the amazed foreigner and have no shame at all.

One class at Yang En was what I call the "Hoodlum Class." They cheated in classical Chinese culture--a collective culture where the whole class cheated together. I had an exam where there were essay questions. I told them there would be certain questions on the test, so what did they do? They all got together and wrote out essays on blank sheets of paper.
They sometime during the test, they slipped these pages into the test papers, taking them out of the inside of their desk or the girls took them out from their purse. Then they handed in these pages. But the pages were a different size paper from the stapled test papers which I had handed out. How stupid now creative, how dumb? They must think I am a monkey moron. Deans in the school did not care. Still these students got to graduate from the school. They only cared about the money, the kuai that these students were paying, about 6 thousand kuai per year at the time.

The other classic example of cheating is on the Business English exam. Three hundred students were involved in this exam.. I walked into the large auditorium classroom and immediately asked students to change their seats, I suspected something was wrong. Nobody moved. I repeatly asked different students to move to another desk. Still nothing happened. After a long time, some of them stood up, with the desktop in their hands, a detachable desktop, and moved to another desk seat. Then I really knew something is wrong. Turns out the students had all come in very early before the exam was scheduled to start, and sat and wrote in ink all the English formulas and expressions covered in the class, wrote these notes on the light gray-colored desktops. Ha Ha. Those who had written all over these desks, I took away their papers and they got a zero for the final exam, much to the protest of many boys who swore they did nothing wrong. Although I knew half of them had done it, I only failed eleven students out of these 300, most of them the "hoodlum" boys in the classes who never hit a lick. How surprised they were. Evidently no Chinese teacher had ever cared about their cheating, so Foreigner's ways were very new to them!

So ends a sad tale of another culture, one where lying and cheating seem to be part of the culture. I may get flamed for this, but this is my perception of this particular part of China. WHen I went to the north of CHina, the cheating rate was about one-tenth of the cheating rate at Yang En. Incidently, the attitude of students at this school was very poor and most were lazy. From what I gather this school was a last resort for students who had not passed the admission to get into a standard Chinese government university.

[Malsol]

[jeffinflorida]

During a final exam a girl had written all the answers on the wall next to her desk!

An Aussie teacher caught her and seeing it was my exam she asked me to handle the situation.

I walked over to the girl, a Very Pretty Chinese Goddess, and asked her if she wrote on the wall. With a big smile on her face she answered YES!

What was I to do! Fail her? Of course not! But I did fail the ugly boy who had the answers written all over his hand!

But Seriousely, it didn't matter what I did because they all passed anyway...

May I have a banana now Please Dean...

[Malsol]

[jeffinflorida]

[Brian Caulfield]

Don't get your hairs up . Westerners cheat also . So we invigilate better , but most universities have students write papers . We pay someone to write the papers for us . You'd do the same if you went to middle schools and high schools with 70 students packed in a small classroom . They learn like in Korean Japan and Taiwan that if you don't cheat you get behind . I have heard this from many doctors here .

[7969]

[Roger]

In order to beat cheats you have to be a little more imaginative than the students are, and they are not too good at that.
In my childhood our teachers knew how to avoid being duped, so I learnt from my childhood teachers!

In my exams - which I hold in spite of myself since I believe teaching is one thing, and giving exams should be left to other professionals, just like in the industrial world that produces household appliances that have to be tested by authorities before they may hit the markets! - I give each student a different assignment so that no two students can help each other. That's what I do both in writing and in speaking classes!

[Brian Caulfield]

The best way to catch em is to put out five different exams with the same questions but in different order . Watch the hands come flying up . The students know what is going on and the ones on scholorship must protect themselves by writing the wrong answers and then at the end put in the correct ones . The best way for us to cover ourselves is to only give oral exams