Job Discussion Forums

[flyingscotsman]

So I gave an exam the other day to a class of 45. The school already told me to pass all of them regardless of actual grades.

The school provided two Chinese teachers as monitors.

The students openly cheated their asses off. Of course the monitors did nothing.

All had notes. Some actually opened their books. One student hopped from seat to seat to copy off the others.

I took some notes away but it had no effect.

I walked around for an hour an a half listening to my Ipod Touch and just ignored it all.

if I had any integrity I certainly lost it now.

This school and its students are the pits. They all get a worthless Canadian diploma regardless of what they do or don't do. They don't have to attend class - many don't. few do any work at all.

I often wonder why I am here...

I won't tell you the name of the school but there are some negative posts about it here already - I choose not to comment on what's said as I still work here. The school name shares the same as a large American airline but with a different spelling. Not American, United, or Continental...

[johntpartee]

Yeah, I know. I was told by the FAO at this school in no uncertain terms that the school will NOT fail any students. I can give them a failing grade, but the school will give them a 60 (lowest grade to pass). I have devised a way to stop cheating, although it only works for oral English. The final exam is a conversation with me. Alone. Nobody else is there. I listen for syntax, pronunciation, do they understand me, are we communicating. The score is at my discretion.

[xi.gua]

At my school i've never had to fail anyone yet, my students are all pretty good. It makes me wonder what would happen if someone did fail although my school has openly told me I can fail people. What if someone does fail? Do they come back next term? Seems like they'd be even less inclined to work hard and they would eventually get a pity pass by the school just like kids do in the states just to get them the hell out of school.

[starlight]

Hey Flying Scot ... don't be too hard on yourself.

I think many people face the same dilemma.

I had exactly the same problem when I taught at a uni in Beijing. The young woman was sitting right in the front row and openly sharing her answers with her boyfriend. It was during a final exam.

I told her twice to stop cheating. She just laughed, assuming, I guess, that I'd do nothing. And she just continued pushing her answer sheets right under his nose. And like you, I wondered if I should just ignore it or confront it.

I think it was her damn smirk that was the deciding factor. I picked up her final exam -- and that of her boyfriend -- and tore them to shreds right in the exam room. I then told them both to get out of the exam room 'right now'.

Earlier in the semester I had also written this young woman a letter of recommendation to a university in France.

As soon as the exam was over, I contacted the uni in France and said I was rescinding my letter of recommendation, and I explained why.

For the next two weeks, this young woman wailed, yelled, and sobbed in the hallways, in my office, and even at the door of my flat. She screamed at me, telling me how I had ruined her life.

She tried absolutely everything to try to get me to 'reverse' the situation, including offering me money, telling me her parents were big shots in the Party (like I cared), pleading, threatening to have me fired .....

I finally told her to get stuffed.

In the end, the BJ uni did give her a passing grade and expected me to sign the final grade sheet. I refused. However, the French uni gave her a total thumbs down.

But my decision could have gone either way: ignore (because I had my own reasons for wanting to stay at that particular uni, and, in fact, did so for an additional 3 years before moving on) or confront. It was that final damn smirk that did it for me.

Don't worry about 'losing your dignity'. Students and teachers at your school probably don't know the meaning of the word anyway. Join the human race and allow yourself some slack!

[johntpartee]

[sunnyanna]

College students here in China have to learn that cheating is not okay in much of the Western world. At least in the US, if you are caught cheating (on a test or plagiarism in a paper) you will fail the class and there is a strong possibility that you will be kicked out of school. It's a big deal and Chinese students who want to study abroad need to realize this.

[johntpartee]

What I've noticed is that many of them don't really understand that it's "cheating". They're "helping". I've tried to explain that it doesn't help when they tell someone an answer, it just means they can repeat what they've been told. It doesn't help when you write down the answer for someone, it just means that they can read your handwriting. Sometimes it takes an entire semester before it starts to sink in. An entire semester of me chiding, warning, threatening............

[chinesearmy]

are any of you willing to admit you cheated on any of your tests?

[Trifaro]

I did.

The best part was when I was accused of doing so on a Statistics exam. I did better on the re-exam.

I like to brag that I was smart enough to realize the old Philosophy teacher just rearranged the questions. Some of my "friends" back then simply put, A, B, C., based on the previous years test. I figured it out and put NYC!

[johntpartee]

[kev7161]

When I was getting my BEd, I had a Language Arts block where I had to write a report on my experiences in my classroom practicum. I wrote the way I always do (which in the past I've actually been given an award), yet my professor accused me of copying (from the internet? she never made it clear as these papers would obviously have to be fairly well unique). I defended myself of course, but didn't go overboard with it. Either she believed me or didn't. I got my "A" on the paper.

I'm in a bit of a different situation that most of you here as I teach primary grade 6. However, even at this grade I have the cheating (although not during tests - - my class is very small so I can monitor them very easily). I've told all my students time and again that copying from one another is not going to help them in any way on a unit test and, by the way, I have super powers and can tell when someone has copied from another. I have two boys who get passed from year to year even though they are failing all their subjects, mine and their Chinese courses. The school is well aware of it, the parents are well aware of it, their classmates are well aware of it, but nothing is done about it.

[7969]

[MisterButtkins]

Like one of the above posters, I give oral tests that are pretty much impossible to cheat on. 1 student comes in at a time and I ask them questions. If it's a lower or intermediate level class the students get a list of the questions ahead of time, and I pick like 5 off the list I write (50 or so) to ask. The kids who prepare do well and the kids who don't care get 60's.

flyingscotsman, your story about ripping up the girl's test is awesome. It is like, one of my dreams to do something like that to a student who just doesn't understand that what they are doing is wrong. People at normal jobs might think about telling off their boss or freaking out on a customer like that guy on the Jet Blue flight did. I think about tearing up the test of a student who has cheated or bribed people through school their entire life and never does any of the work. You sir, are my hero.

[igorG]

Giving out exams in such classrooms, academic programs, or schools as our OP has mentioned, is just like shooting yourself in a leg. On mainland, it's tough to find a job on which our position are not compromised at some point, and so it's really important we get it all clear prior to assuming our posts wherever we are and that with both our employers as well as students. Getting paid for administering meaningless exams is not such an issue till the students realize you are getting paid for the next one and next one again. Personally, I would only give meaningless exams, if I told my students what the tests were for.

Now, it is my experience and knowledge that on mainland China teachers are to pass their students after the lessons have been provided. This means that if the students fail then, the teachers have not done their jobs and so failed with students together. Few local teachers risk their positions.

Having said that, I see a great difference in between local and foreign teachers and it comes with the respect. Local teachers are a lot more respected than foreign teachers are. FTs have to work quite a bit harder to gain the respect, which often has to be supported by the local schools administrators/teachers. Roles we assume also are not exactly the key to local students success and we all should realize that too.

On the end, sadly enough, there are scores of international programs that do whatever they can to survive on mainland. Putting "international" on any school's door is just a great marketing strategy around here. In our countries across the oceans, there are so many educational institutions that await so much for their "victims" to pay for skyrocketing tuition fees there and rich foreign students are a fantastic prey.

[brsmith15]

To you all, remember TIC. Even their revered Kung Fu Tse advised that copying was o.k. That's why if you list all the 4,000-5,000 inventions from about 1750 to now, you won't find a single contribtion from China. In the many hundreds of Nobel Prizes given out, the US has had about 390 and China only 6 -- and look what they did to their last recipient.

Did I ever cheat? Yeah. Once. It was my senior year in a 5-year engineering prograsm at Northeastern U. in Boston. The idiot registrar made a mistake and gave us 7 courses. Seven!! Try that on today's students. And the moron wouldn't remove the course even though we were ONLY supposed to take six or even five courses.

The seventh was Advanced Atomic and Nuclear Physics and the goon that taught this horror waltzed into the classroom on the first day and announced that "I am Dr _____ from CalTech and this course will be second to none in the country." If "second to none" meant unintellgible, he was right. 22 out of 45 seniors were failing the course by the next to last week. Then I got a call from one of my fraternity brothers who had been working as a janitor. He'd been cleaning the physics lab and happened to look in the waste basket -- dust bin to you Brits. And in it -- guess what -- was the final exam for our course. "Would you like this?" he asked. Would I want to see the Dean washed down the Charles River wearing 200 libs of weight belts? I called my classmates and we got together at my apt in Boston that night. Because I was fairly bright, I worked out all the problems, but I warned the guys who were flunking not to suddenly come up with an "A" exam. Because I was running a straight "B" I could go for an "A" but not my frat brothers. So that was it. One time and one time only. Everyone passed and to this day, even though I've written two books on theoretiical particle physics, I can't remember a single thing from that terrible course.

I've often wondered over my 12 years here that if Chinese students spent as much time studying and learning as they do figuring out ways to cheat, would things be better for them? And........what kind of future will these cheats have in our ever-expanding and global world,

Would you...if you were in such a position.....hire one of these guys?