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Roger · Joined: 19 Jan 2003 Posts: 9138

So long as memorising factoids and pure data amount to the highly-respected notion of "education" the Chinese will only excel at beating control mechanisms rather than learning how to solve other problems.

Exams should not test whether a student has absorbed all that his or her textbooks contained; they should test their problem-solving ability! This is particularly true in foreign-language acquisition testing!

tw · Joined: 04 Jun 2005 Posts: 3898

Another cheating tool I've found students using is online translation sites, e.g. Google's online translation. I have discovered some students are writing their exam dialogues in Chinese first, then using Baidu or some other web site to translate the text into English. Of course, the result is very much incomprehensible and is beyond the worst Chinenglish imaginable.

The dialogue topics I gave them are based on what they've learned in the second half of the term, so there isn't anything new at all. The only thing they really have to do is putting sentences similar to those in their textbook into logical sequences to create a short dialogue based on a specific situation. Sadly, most of them are dumbfounded because (1) they don't know HOW to think (or just don't want to think), (2) most of them never took the lessons seriously and (3) most of them haven't been reviewing what they'd learned. Now, facing their final examination in a couple days, some if not many are opting to find the quick and easy way out.

Ah yes, Chinese education system. Give what the teacher wants without having to put in any real efforts. Of course, it doesn't help when many teachers give verbatim questions directly out of the textbook. Have you heard of the students who DELIBERATELY chose the wrong answer to avoid getting 100% on the examination to avoid raising suspicion?