Job Discussion Forums

[kathleen]

YOUR EXPERIENCE WOULD SEEM TO SUGGEST THAT FAILING IS A BIG LOSS OF FACE IN ALL THESE CULTURES AND THAT CHEATING IS JUST ACCEPTED.

Thanks for your input.

[yaco]

Maybe this explains why so many students recieve 59 % when they do CET Band 4 and Band 6 examinations.

[kathleen]

I teach a graduate class that I developed called "Business Communications for Software professionals." My students are very bright software engineers at one of the top technical schools in the country. Some of them speak, understand and write English pretty damn well. Others are at a very low level, nevertheless they all passed CET 6. With such a range, I teach to the middle-high level of my class and give the really bright ones more challenging assignments, which they welcome. As for grading, I make the lowest grade a 60 and try to grade relatively from that point. There is no benefit in failing these guys; they are already in grad school and they are not English majors.

In my experience CET exams mean nothing. They are easy to cheat on, the answers are widely available in advance and these memory robots just memorize the answers in advance. Also, College English for non-English majors in this country is essentially a two-year, test-prep course for this exam. The more students pass, the better the teacher looks. Also, the grading is decidedly unscientific; nothing like the ETS here in China. Passing CET does not mean you can speak or understand even basic English.

Sorry, I've gotten a little off topic here.

[Hamish]

[Bertrand]

Do they cheat? With abandon! Remember, there is only ONE thing a Chinese person is afraid of, namely, being poor. EVERYTHING else is acceptable. How do you expect the kids not to cheat when all they see and take in is their own elders also cheating? Anyone who has ever spent time in China will have experienced people pushing to the front of a 'Q', treading on a few old ladies in the process; going through red lights; etc., etc. I mean, come on! The Chinese even cheat when they smoke; I have NEVER seen a Chinese person smoke. I've seen plenty of Chinese put CIGARETTES IN THEIR MOUTH but never have I seen a Chinese person TAKE THE SMOKE DOWN. Rather, they just blow it straight out.

In fact, the principal reason why China is still at the stage of 'development' that it is (and will be for ever more) is because no one follows the rules; whatever they may happen to be.

[hubei_canuk]

[Sunpower]

Yeah, I remember back at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Can. some of the people I knew in my first year in residence being put on Academic Probation.

Shitt, I'm sitting here laughing to myself as I type this!

Can you imagine a Korean, Japanese or Taiwanese student being put
on "Academic Probation?"

In fact, I was just talking to one of my co-workers who is Chinese and went to university here in Taipei.

She told me she liked, 'Playing' rather than studying. Those are were pretty much hern exact words.

She said she has already forgotten most of what she had learned while earning her BSc in Chemistry.

She still graduated with that BSc in Chemistry and couldn't tell you much about the discipline, I would imagine!

Aha, haaa!
It's pretty screwed up.

[Sunpower]

[Roger]

"Losing face" IS SUCH A CONVENIENTLY Chinese fear that we are at times unable to see that CHinese very well shame one another in public. The slightly tottering restaurant car attendant on the Kunming-Guangzhou train got a serious dressing-down in full view of passengers by a smartly-dressed, youngish and fat superior; the old man actually CRIED! Have you ever witnessed such humiliation in the West?
Or the young karaoke girl: Her boss took her to the door of the parlour; there in full view of patrons he scolded her loudly, swearing and shaking his fists but not touching her. Then he left her standing at the door; She was crying too, in her uniform, while customers were streaming in and out.
Or that American teacher: I don't know what he had done wrong, but he was hauled into the principal's office and made to stand in the presence of the students of one of his classes. The principal asked the students to criticise "the foreign teacher" so "he could learn from his mistakes" (I later read minutes that a fellow American had written down). The CHinese students did not need any encouragement - they flung verbal rubbish at the poor man such as he probably never had heard before! In the minutes it said that the most recurrent complaint had been that he was "not sensitive enough to CHinese culture...".

Incidentally, the students at that school were rather afraid of this principal (there were four of them); she probably played with their fears on that occasion, knowing that from time to time she must give her students a chance to vent their own frustration with the school's machinations.

Come to think of this: It seems that only CHinese can "lose face"; do we have one to lose?

[Hamish]

[quote="Sunpower"]

[Sunpower]

I agree, John. You gotta set a precedent.

But still doesn't work in my experience but only helps a bit.

I have no ultimate control over the grades my students get.

If I fail them they still get bumped up to passing grades.

And they will cheat like you wouldn't believe at my school and were like that, I've been told, even before I got there.

And yeah, I agree, there are a lot of slimey pr*cks back in Canada and the U.S. too!

[arioch36]

the truth for me is that it has been no problem stopping cheating in my classes. i could be wrong, but I have had many students go out of their way to say how happy they are for they that. In other clases they are expected to cheat.

I think a large part comes from a non-competitive, sate run beauracracy. Forget the communist label. Not part of the picture. For two generations many people in China have relied on the government for a living. And much of the money they made was by reselling things the government paid for, etc.

Is this any different from the west? Not really. My sister has been on welfare for 16 years, has lots of great stories to tell. you know ,back in the old days, before the republicans ruined the welfare gravy train, a woman would get pregnant every 3 years, by a different man. Tell welfare they didn't know who the father is to get the money. Then they would tell the man...give me $100 a month, ot I will tell welfare that you are the father, and then you will have to pay $200 a month. Get food stamps, sell them 60 cents to the dollar. If they really got hungry, go to the local church pantry. Cheating is a way of life.
How about the Senator ?Rostenkowski" from Illinois, I believe. Made hundreds of thousands of dollars by getting stamps from the post office for free, for his mailings, and then selling the stamps. Of course, we have enron Enron. france has it's own current "oil" "Enron" debacle. The list goes ever on. How many of you have ever taken the "five-fingered discount" at your palce of business.

I think in OZ/US/UK we do have the fundamentals of a bible based outlook, where such things are considered sins, morally wrong things. This may be politically incorrect, but even for aethists, non-believers, or bible haters, do you realize how much of your moral outlook in life come from your culture's foundation of the bible as a cornerstone?

Unfortunately, China is in a moral vacuum right now. People no longer look to Mao for moral/spiritual guidance. You know, seriously, your students grandparent would say prayers to Mao every night, read his red book every morning, like some people used to read the bible.

Some of us don't take teaching seriously. I'll tell you, all of you, you have a big impact on these students. They are dying inside for moral guidance. Many of them don't cheat because they want to, but because they don't know how not to. Many of their teachers are just going through the motions. dong bu dong?

Even as I write this I feel regret, because as I write this, I know it's true. I have been a poor teacher this year. When the darkness is very great, even a small light is very bright. God will hold me accountable for being a piss-poor teacher this year. When I get to heaven he'll slap me around, and say why were you goofing off, you had a chance to make a difference just by being upright. Maybe I've been here too long, and can't see the difference enough. Maybe I've hade my eye too much on making money. Maybe I've just been lazy this year

I know that in my personal experience, practically everytime I have punished a student for cheating, or rebuked them for not sitting up and listening in class, they have reacted with a good spirit. The large majority of my students are a cheerful bunch that are a pleasure to teach. But they never had parents (being in classrooms all their life), they have little or no moral/spiritual guidance from their leaders, who all to-often have no real interest in education. This is too deep, getting to scary.


Say, "Goodnight dummy"

Okay,

goodnight China

[hubei_canuk]

[quote="RogerCome to think of this: It seems that only CHinese can "lose face"; do we have one to lose?[/quote]
====================================
Yes, IMHO, yes.
It is a universal human trait. I can see it develop without even any socialization (influence of culture), it is natural.
I used to work for mega-corpoprations in Canada as a Systems Analyst. Most of the big uppity-ups had this face thing. Powere really corrupts the development of character. Noticed it in uni and community college as well.
However in the chinese model there are added factors in the socialization.. mostly education in a goldfish bowl and pressure cooker (crowded classes of 75) as well as pressure to conform. The result is almost mental illness, it's crippling. It goes far beyond any practical function.
It's crippling in the intellectual function. One neds to communicate what one knows and what one doesn't know, one needs to aggressively crystallize this to others in order to advance to the next stage of new knowledge or problem solution.
This basic process of communication is the foundation of that phrase "Western (or American) know-how".

[hubei_canuk]

[Roger]

The school in question was the Guangdong Foreign Languages Normal School, the year was perhaps 1993; I worked there in 1994, and I learnt this from an American teacher who had by that time spent 7 years at that school.
He showed me those minutes.