Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

smh.com.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 127 posts

Re: Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

#81

Post by miguelrochefort »

leke wrote: post #42
tzs wrote: post #3

For those who haven't read the article yet, when they say "fight", they mean actual physical fighting: > By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped as students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, more than 2000 people had gathered, smashing cars and chanting: ''We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.'' Cheating in China goes way beyond cheating to get into school. Two years ago, t…

Yes, we have this scheme in our Finnish polytechnic. Regardless though, people still do it and try and get away with it. Sometimes they don't even try and make any small changes to the original document. I have no idea why they do it -- perhaps they don't believe the system will catch it?

People plagiarize because doing the actual work is soul-crushing. How motivating is it to read a bunch of high quality work, put them together and produce a mediocre work? It's not motivating at all, and people simply try to stay sane.

Re: Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

#82

Post by lgieron »

eigenvector wrote: post #38
istorical wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a spring 2013 undergraduate in CS, and this goes on in America just as it does in China. (the entire process is a charade.) I will admit it without hesitation. It's incredibly interesting that not a single party in the process sees actual knowledge as the value gained. Everyone sees the piece of paper as the value: the box that's checked. How long can such an illusion continue? Your guess is as good as mine. At t…

At the engineering school I graduated from in Canada, which is ranked in the top 20 worldwide, cheating was prolific with nearly all unsupervised work being gratuitously plagiarized. Although supervised examinations accounted for at least 50% of each grade, any student who didn't cheat and wasn't also very, very bright probably lost at least half a letter grade on their CGPA as a result. It was common for me to do we…

In my engineering school in Poland everyone was given a different assignment, so copying off other students was not possible. Other pathology occured though - since most of the tasks were group assignments (with the usual group being 2-3 people), it was common for a group to just divide the workload among its members across multiple courses, which in practice resulted in a possibility of getting a grade for course x on which one didn't do any work (because he was busy doing group's assignment for course y). The cool unintended consequence of this was that the whole studies were a multiyear training ground in team organisation and negotiations, which is arguably worth more in real life than some of the highly theoretical courses.

Re: Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

#83

Post by miguelrochefort »

Sven7 wrote: post #12
dmoy wrote: post #2

This is going to take a long time to change for the better. My Chinese friends who don't cheat because they actually want to learn stuff definitely complain a lot about the rampant cheating. If you want to get into and finish Uni completely legit, you have to work way, way harder than everyone else :\ And you will end up doing worse than people who cheated and got away with it, just have to suck it up. There's a lot…

Cheating is always going to exist in highly competitive environments. Confusing kids in such environments with excessive focus on honesty and integrity can put them at a serious disadvantage. In my experience, irrespective of country or culture, most people (even those that have cheated) inherently want to be fair and that sort of balances the equations out over the long term.

Sounds exactly like those people who want to make privacy a right.

Re: Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

#84

Post by miguelrochefort »

ishansharma wrote: post #39
anon-cheater wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a great system, but unsustainable for the volume, you are right. As a non-cheater who has been blessed with a lot of academic success, this article upsets me so much. my academic success has been dearly earned and I feel like cheaters completely undermine my efforts. True, cheaters don't have the knowledge and maybe I am a step ahead of them, because I actually put in the effort. But still, it feels like some…

Same here! It feels bad when people think that cheating is a RIGHT! I'm from India and 70% of people in my class think that cheating is fine. They'll copy assignments, cheat in tests and even exams. Though situation is not so bad here that people DEMAND for cheating but everything else is same. I guess this is because of society and pressure. I don't know about China but in India, professions are like fashion. When d…

How does it feel like when people think that privacy is a RIGHT?

Re: Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

#86

Post by miguelrochefort »

redbit wrote: post #23

"We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat." I can't imagine how people can say it out their mouth. Just like when someone kill, due to fairness you kill too. I am a Chinese, and I feel shame on this kind of Chinese logic. They use wording like fairness, human right not seek for proper, but their benefit, I have see too much ridiculous in my homeland.

What do you think of the "right to privacy"? Isn't it as ridiculous as a "right to cheating"? I mean, they're both dishonest ways to reach fairness.

Re: Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

#87

Post by wtrk »

Volpe wrote: post #78
wtrk wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheating is not endemic within the gaokao system because, as a testing regime, it's excessively vulnerable to cheating. It's not any more cheatable than the SAT, GREs, or other standardized entrance or aptitude exams. Mainland Chinese society at all levels is thoroughly corrupt and its pretty much impossible to achieve what a reasonable observer would recognize as a materially successful life within the PRC without b…

This feels like a massive over generalisation (given the size of china)... Any kind of evidence of this?

Can I provide evidence to prove to you that my generalization is accurate?

Can you prove to me that Antarctica exists? That there were ever dinosaurs? If I'm intent on not being convinced?

Come to China for an extended visit. Reside in one region for a while, then move to another for a bit. Repeat that process a few times until you're satisfied. Being able to read and write Chinese (simplified characters) and speak Putonghua (or, if you stay in one place long enough, the local dialect) would probably speed things up for you.

Even then, you could (if you were determined enough) maintain a conviction that you had just had a run of bad luck in terms of the places you'd chosen to live and the people with whom you'd happened to interact.

I don't know how much time you'd have to spend here to be satisfied.

Re: Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

#88

Post by cscurmudgeon »

calibraxis wrote: post #43
anon-cheater wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a great system, but unsustainable for the volume, you are right. As a non-cheater who has been blessed with a lot of academic success, this article upsets me so much. my academic success has been dearly earned and I feel like cheaters completely undermine my efforts. True, cheaters don't have the knowledge and maybe I am a step ahead of them, because I actually put in the effort. But still, it feels like some…

I get the impression that these people are fighting for the right to have more decent lives and better schools. If so, organized cheating is a cost of the unequal system they live under. Reminds me of Basho's chief architect (the Riak company), who advised at Ricon's closing keynote that you should lie and misrepresent yourself to anyplace doing interesting things, as he did at Apple (where he got to write a distribu…

This is why we have a crappy world: the tragedy of the commons.

Re: Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

#89

Post by Volpe »

wtrk wrote: post #87
Volpe wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like a massive over generalisation (given the size of china)... Any kind of evidence of this?

Can I provide evidence to prove to you that my generalization is accurate? Can you prove to me that Antarctica exists? That there were ever dinosaurs? If I'm intent on not being convinced? Come to China for an extended visit. Reside in one region for a while, then move to another for a bit. Repeat that process a few times until you're satisfied. Being able to read and write Chinese (simplified characters) and speak P…

I do reside (a lot of the time), in GuangZhou, and whilst there is certainly people who are like that, I know a lot who aren't. (Much like any other country).

So I have a counter proof that your generalisation is too broad, hence why I asked for you to clarify.

My take is, (having travelled a fair amount within china). That China is very different depending on which region you are in (much like the US is). So alarm bells ring, when I see people making broad statements such as "Chinese are all corrupt".

You are essentially saying that some weird twist of the CCP causes corruption in the society, else how do you explain Taiwan, and HK? Is that what you are meaning to say? That is an interesting thesis.

Re: Chinese students and families fight for the right to cheat their exams

#90

Post by e3pi »

"...Mr Li had confiscated a mobile phone from his son and then refused a bribe to return the handset.

Cohen Bros' A Serious Man, deftly sounded this Asian custom as a passing grade bribe into a mixed-metaphor with 'Schrodinger's Cat', all the while quantum engineer uncle Arthur's Mentaculous, returns a fortune.

Post reply on HN