Job Discussion Forums

[Tao Burp]

Yeah, I know. This subject is definitely nothing new, so if you want to flame my avatarless @#$ well go ahead and make it burn. After three years, I am pretty much disgusted about the exorbitant amount of cheating that goes on during exams at my backwater college. It doesn't make any difference. You see some students talking during the exam. You warn them, you fail them. Your, ha ha ha, sorry, "proctors" walk around the room like thorazine patients doing absolutely nothing. You find cheat sheets among some students. You fail them just like you did many semesters ago, and yet, you're the bad guy, the evil one. After a while, you want to throw your hands up, and just say, "Okay ha ha ha yes just cheat. I don't care anymore." We use these large answer sheets which make it so so so easy for students to look at other students' answers. Crowded exam classrooms and no standards. Come on, even if you fail them for cheating, they will get another chance to pass the exam before graduation!!! To not graduate, a student has to kill someone. They are assured of graduation from the moment they begin their enrollment. Your fellow Chinese teachers are aware? that you want your exams done honestly, yet underneath you suspect that they resent such honesty being demanded of them. Are you getting the picture here? Sorry, if I am venting, but what are we really here for? IMAGE, but you try to fight that daily; yet I find only a very few Chinese consider my position worthy. The rest have no shame. Maybe it's their culture. Rarely, do I post on this forum, but after today's exam debacle. I had to let it go. Yes, I know we have cheating in other countries, but here it's an epidemic, and just what are we expected to do about it when we are on the outside looking in? What really scares me is that if I stay longer here in China, will I gradually come to accept this cheating and become indifferent to it? Please share. It's been a rough day at the ranch.

[woza17]

One of my friends told me that students actually have exam clothes ones with lots of pockets. I do understand your frustration and I admire you for your principles, you do care. here in Guangdong they don't care so much about your certificates only about your ability, especially the foreign companies. Tell them that at the end of the day its what you know or maybe who you know.
regards cai Hong

[stevey]

[Anne-Marie Gregory]

I'm so glad this has been brought up. I feel it completely undermines all teaching. Hey, you don't need to *pass* any English exams; just cheat. Students sitting the Chinese self-study equivalent of the Open Uni are known for walking in with all their notes, students get substitutes to sit their exams for them, coursework is plaguarised, academics get promoted on the basis of work they didn't write and NOTHING is done about it. I say nothing cos if it was unacceptable to cheat then students would be a lot more crafty about it than they are at present. I've been told (by a foreigner) that as much cheating goes on in the West as goes on here. I refuse to believe this.
It makes cheating on some little FE's exam pretty minor. I was horrified at my last place by the amount of cheating that went on. I realise now that there they made great efforts to reduce cheating, I simply didn't realise what went on in China.
It means that a good student from a poor family, who studies hard to legitimately pass exams, does not get the job they deserve cos some cheating li't b*gg** bribed their way into a 'famous middle school', bought their way into college, got scholarships on the basis of who their parents are and sent a substitute in to sit their college exams....and then trot off to a cushy job while my good students aspire to earn 600RMB a month as a secretary. It's not fair.

[Roger]

It is a face-saving exercise, nothing more. Fortunately, most of them wake up when they have to take a TOEFL or IELTS test - then they have to learn anew. SOme get born a second time!

[Tao Burp]

[Tao Burp]

Sunaru,
Pull yourself together man. It's not the end of the world! Besides it's exam time, can't we bitch about it? Not shocking in the least, just tiring...

[Roger]

I feel the Chinese authorities are fooling themselves quite often. See how often they keep reminding themselves of their "brilliant Chinese culture" and "5000 years of Chinese civilisation"...
Three years ago, I was working in a normal school in Guangdong's countryside. All very nice students, relatively unspoilt and not too wealthy. Just twenty kms away, kids go to school with a mobile phone in their pocket. Not here!
One day, my class was cancelled in extremis. Maybe 500 students crowded into the courtyard. I was told they were in for some serious business: The teachers had found out, yes: found out that their college-age students had been cheating, I repeat: cheating, for ages! This "discovery" left me rather amused. I told my colleagues that since day one in China, I have been aware of "cheating" in every class. The first hint usually comes when you have to put your own students to an examination - who can resist psychological pressure? There is an INCESTUOUS RELATIONSHIP between teachers and their students! I prefer to test students of another teacher, and would love to see my students being tested by yet another teacher! This is how I grew up, and this is what I did when teaching in a Western school in Hong Kong! But it is not what's happening anywhere in China!

Anyway, I also had a few bad apples in my normal school that consistently failed in their tests and in the final exam, and I told them I would not let them pass. They took it in a stride, I reported it to the principal, and asked her to decide for herself whether these playgirls (all girls) should pass.
She let them off the hook - imagine, 25 students passed the final exam!

[Atlas]

I have a friend who taught in Saudi, who had an interesting opinion about the students there, and I wonder if something similar is going on in China. She remarked that in that culture, when a fellow student needed help (cheating), it was worse NOT to offer help to your fellow man. China is collectivistic; are the students dispersing responsibility among the group? Relying on others to pull the slack? Used to taking the lazy way out? Is the issue about cheating, or is it about helping others?

Let me put it another way: Psych studies show that people in a tug o' war pull less hard when there are more people pulling with them!

I've known Chinese who are lazy and Chinese who work very hard for genuine self-improvement. Same for Western students. All I'm suggesting here is, there's got to be some reasons they aren't ashamed to cheat. Maybe it's because shame is an english concept.

my 2 cents.

Atlas

[Anne-Marie Gregory]

I was discussing standards in final exams with my FAO. He said that students who fail will not get their diploma. I asked him how many. He said a few. I asked him how many was a few? I said 5 students have such bad English that they don't understand the question, 'What is your name?' He said only 1 of these 5 students is likely to fail.
Many individuals turned up at the end of the semester to sit their exams. I do not know about 1 in 12 of the students sat with me on the finalists' photo bacuase they never attended my classes. This means they turned down the only chance they ever had in their lives to talk to a native speaker!
Progressive people at our college are trying to change things. There's an awful long way to go. And we have provincially 'famous' English programme.

[Anne-Marie Gregory]

Good point Atlas. Chinese students do have a pack mentality in class (helping out a student who's a lazy a**hole with no English for example) and extend this to exams, even though it devalues their own qualifications. I asked a student who is a well-known role model why he sat a national exam for a friend, instead of sitting the next tier exam for himself. He said he did for 'friendship for a hometown-mate', not guanxi. He said he didn't want anything out of the arrangement for himself other than to know he'd helped a friend.

The government should have a big campaign against exam cheating and put propaganda efforts into promoting the idea that cheating goes against Communist ideals....promotion on the basis of merit etc. Maybe they already have....I don't read Chinese.

[khmerhit]

One of the favoured cheating methods in Phnom Penh high schools is to stand outside the examination room and tie pieces of paper containing the answers to rocks which are then thrown thru the window. Culprits include friends and family, including monks. Cheating seems to be an accepted means of earning face and is wholly in keeping with the entire corrupt culture -- a culture that takes many of its cues from China. But who are we to criticize? Western meritocracies are only decades old.

[Tao Burp]

If the student does fail the exam, the score does go on the student's record. Yet beside the score on the student's documents (archives or transcripts), the score from the exam which the student retakes, is also recorded. If, however, the student fails the same exam three times before graduation, then he or she doesn't get the degree. Of course, this is the case for public colleges. Private colleges are a whole different matter. The fact is, that if the student does fail the second exam, then another teacher will be assigned to set the exam with the strong advisement that the exam must be dirt simple to pass.
Employers do check for falsification of archives and transcripts.
As far as cheating, if a student does cheat, and a teacher catches him or her with evidence--cheat sheets, the teacher can turn the exam and the cheat sheet over to the departmental party secretary and suggest placing a citation noting cheating on the student's archives or documents, which can seriously mar the student's future employment prospects, if the student doesn't have good guanxi. I don't do this. I just fail them and leave it at that. Sometimes, I really want to, but given the abysmality of it all. I can't bring myself to do it. So, every semester, no cheating, no cheating , no cheating.....same ol' song and dance.
This is something they don't tell you.
Wow! I did learn something!

[Michael T. Richter]

[Tao Burp]

Michael,
Great response and right on the money. Of course, about ninety nine percent of what you mentioned is definitely the case here too. My students are from the countryside so that accounts for the 1 percent difference.