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Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

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Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#71

Post by cortesoft »

briandear wrote: post #50
whooshee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are not afraid to calling out cheating. Yes, there are Chinese students do that. People are just not that into overgeneralize a giant group of people.

Is it over-generalizing when there is a cultural predisposition around it? Making generalizations about a culture when an element of that culture is the target of the generalization seems fairly reasonable. As always, “it isn’t everyone,” but the exceptions prove the rule.

Well, part of the problem is that humans are pretty bad at accurately assessing frequency within groups. You seem pretty certain that there is a ‘cultural predisposition’ to cheating, but I have only heard anecdotal evidence.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#72

Post by jerkstate »

kasey_junk wrote: post #57
briandear wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did they cheat or did they study together?

Cheat. Had literal cabinets full of test answers & assignments. Though frankly there were shops near campus that sold such things as well.

Cabinets full of test and assignment answers was one of the selling points of the frats at the engineering school I attended.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#73

Post by hnaccy »

cortesoft wrote: post #71
briandear wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it over-generalizing when there is a cultural predisposition around it? Making generalizations about a culture when an element of that culture is the target of the generalization seems fairly reasonable. As always, “it isn’t everyone,” but the exceptions prove the rule.

Well, part of the problem is that humans are pretty bad at accurately assessing frequency within groups. You seem pretty certain that there is a ‘cultural predisposition’ to cheating, but I have only heard anecdotal evidence.

>A Wall Street Journal analysis of data from more than a dozen large U.S. public universities found that in the 2014-15 school year, the schools recorded 5.1 reports of alleged cheating for every 100 international students. They recorded one such report per 100 domestic students.

>Students from China were singled out by many faculty members interviewed. “Cheating among Chinese students, especially those with poor language skills, is a huge problem,” said Beth Mitchneck, a University of Arizona professor of geography and development.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-...

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#74

Post by tjr225 »

briandear wrote: post #50
whooshee wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are not afraid to calling out cheating. Yes, there are Chinese students do that. People are just not that into overgeneralize a giant group of people.

Is it over-generalizing when there is a cultural predisposition around it? Making generalizations about a culture when an element of that culture is the target of the generalization seems fairly reasonable. As always, “it isn’t everyone,” but the exceptions prove the rule.

We're just going off of random internet strangers ideas about Chinese culture here. Personally, I would need much more information before I decided this was "the rule."

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#75

Post by jerkstate »

thatfrenchguy wrote: post #19
blahblahblogger wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I’m sad at myself for feeling “well yeah not unexpected” > Because it’s only 1/1000000 people that do this that will cause prejudice and disdain for all the good actors. Damn I came in here to say the same thing and feel sad at myself now too. So not to be racial but from an American standpoint I liken it to hiring an American who happens to be Chinese versus an engineer from China. For the first, they are American…

That's true for any nationality though. And Snowden was American and technically fled to Russia ?

That's quite a stretch in your comparison there, I don't think that stealing industrial trade secrets for profit is the same thing as whistle-blowing the fact that tinfoil hat sci-fi conspiracy theories were actually being carried out by the US government.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#77

Post by pvg »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #66
pvg wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really. People don't get tossed out of school for plagiarism because they're violating someone's copyright. In fact, you don't need the notion of intellectual property at all to have the independent notion of academic integrity - one is significantly older than the other.

My high school calculus teacher put a copyright on his exams. He didn’t need to—copyrights are implicit. But it communicated the point.

Your high school calculus teacher wouldn't have flunked you if you copied your neighbour's exam answers because you were violating their copyright. They'd have flunked you because you cheated. If someone in Ancient Egypt sent their cousin to sit the Obelisk Chiseling Guild exam for them and got caught, same thing. None of this has anything to do with 'intellectual property'.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#78

Post by walkadder »

sjroot wrote: post #11

Disclaimer: I am speaking from personal experiences and know that, despite these experiences, there are tons of Chinese engineers who work their ass off and maintain great professional integrity. That said...my experience with Chinese graduate students has been incredibly disappointing. While they made up the majority of our graduate computer science program, most had no respect for academic conduct guidelines. I exp…

Where I work, we've had a problem with Chinese engineers sharing our internal interview question bank (with answers) to their friends, along with coaching for other interview types. They then refer their friends and get the referral bonus when they join.

It's now roughly 50% Chinese and this has caused some issues, although it's not something that can be discussed.

Re: Ex-Apple Employee Stole Secrets for Chinese Firm, U.S. Says

#80

Post by jessaustin »

arbie wrote: post #48
melling wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was in graduate school about 25 years ago and several Chinese students got caught cheating on the compiler project. I always thought this was a bit strange because I’m sure most software developers could transform a piece of source code so that it would not appear to be a copy.

Colleges now have sophisticated software to catch cheating even in computer programming courses. I believe they compile down to an AST, and then compare for similarities.

The college I attended had this 25 years ago...
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