Job Discussion Forums

[daveups]

I'd still like to hear from the OP on how the school responded to his "failures".

[Fred Smith]

First my complaint to the Chinese tafe dos at the school about rampant cheating and how the Chinese teachers sent to proctor the exams was met with laughter.

He thought it was extremely funny that I cared that his teachers did nothing to stop cheating in my exam.

According to tafe guidelines the 5 students caught cheating will not graduate. The students who failed will get another chance at the exam.

But I will change the exam and making it more challenging to the students, reword the questions and the order of the exam and substitute questions.

My stand is still the same - if they get less than 50 I will fail them even if it means they don't graduate.

I have no empathy for students who do nothing for 10 weeks and expect to pass simple because they think they should.

Regarding the toughness of the exam all exams get sent to Australia for validation to make sure they meet the learning objectives so the exam was not too hard - they students are too stupid and lazy

[Hansen]

Fred, If you took your "stupid and lazy" students to the U.S.A. Oz, or the U.K., instilled in them the legitimate reasons for academic excellence, gave them parents who were successful university graduates themselves, and offered a host of real life examples on the benefits of diligence and honesty, they would probably be gaining admittance to the better schools in those places, on their own merit.

[The Ever-changing Cleric]

[Hansen]

While your correcting exams, I'm playing swords. Wheee!

[beck's]

When I was in China I attempted to give a take-home/essay/exam to my 4th year English lit students. It resulted in blatent copying. They were shamelesslycopying right in front of me just before the assignment was due.

What got to me was that they were doing the assignment on little scraps of paper, many with the Hello Kitty logo.

From then on I kept a seating plan. Every time a student got up to speak I put a small coloured dot (different colour for each week) by their name. At the end of the course the student with the most dots got the highest mark and so on. Students with no dots failed. No complaints. Every class students would come up to the front to look at the dots. It was a great motivator, encouraged competition and solved the cheating problem.

What seriously gets on my nerves is when liberals here in Canada complain about the lack of doctors and other professionals and tell me that we should get our doctors and other professionals from developing countries. They have no idea about educational standards in these countries.

[Hansen]

Beck Your observation about recruiting health care professionals from other countries is right on. Not only the education but the integrity of the "professional" is a serious issue. In health care, for example, a certain level of forthrightness and honesty is expected when health care providers make notes in the patient's chart.

The accuracy of these notes is crucial to other professionals involved in the care of the patient. Since most of these people are challenged when truth about anything is an issue, it would be very difficult to allow people who are pathological liars to document care in a legal record.

Even if they manage to pass the exams to provide health care in another country, there is no exam, short of a daily lie detector test, to determine how well they fulfilled their responsibilities. Since many of them figure it is wrong to not lie when the lie will advance their own interests, even a lie detector may not be useful.

[sharpe88]

It depends which university you are at.

[themanymoonsofjupiter]

[sharpe88]

Erroneous generalization. Visa students who come to Canada for school find maths and science a breeze. The kind of professionals who get into Canada are very highly skilled. I would chance that the average TEFLer does not have the equivalent of a top 10 Chinese university education.. and no cheating and laziness is not accepted at those kinds of institutions.

Of course, the kind of uni that would hire the average (unqualified) TEFLer is another matter.....

[lpm782]

Um, you might want to go over your notes about Chinese students finding math and science a breeze.

I've seen more than one Mainland Chinese student be kicked out or drop down to a MS degree when they arrived in the States.

1. The best students (Chinese) seem to come from Taiwan/ HK. When I was at SIUE, I was talking to one of the faculty members and he mentioned that the people from HK/ Taiwan were "lovely people." But lately they had been getting idiots from the Mainland and so they started taking fewer of them.

2. If you took the top 1% of Chinese people, you would have something like 13.5 million people. That is equal to something like 45% of the population of Canada. Is it really all that much to say that the top 1% of Chinese people are equal to the top 10% of Canada?

3. It is also not an erroneous generalization to talk about the idiocy of Chinese doctors. Less than 1/5 of Chinese doctors have the equivalent of a bachelor's degree. And my experience going to Chinese doctors is that if they aren't downright incompetent, they aren't thinking any further than what is the most expensive scrip they can write. I once got an infection for which fluoroquinolones were not effective (and I later found out that this was known to God and anyone else who took 90 seconds to look on the internet).

Recently, I also busted my hand in a fight and saw a couple of doctors. The first wanted to do a 20,000RMB surgery and keep me in the hospital for 9 days. The second wanted to do a 5,000RMB surgery-- for a joint that turned out to not even be dislocated or need a surgery.

Keeping corrupt, sloppy, incompetent, dishonest Mainland Chinese doctors out of their country would be the best, highest ROI that any country could possibly take.

But that doesn't change the basic advice: Since there are many other thousands of universities here that produce subpar students, the best thing to do is make the class as easy as possible. MOD EDIT

[Hansen]

I'd like to here more about that fight.

[alter ego]

[Silent Shadow]

[Down Home]