41–50 of 127 posts
2) The article didn't hesitate to conflate the events at this one school with the character of the entire country, which, given the disparate scale of the two, seems to be poor journalism. But then again, such articles have come to be expected nowadays.
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…
Entrance exams treat undergraduate admissions as an O(n) problem. As anyone who has worked in undergraduate admissions will tell you, it is far more complex than that. But when n grows prohibitively large, you have to go with solutions that are less than ideal. My alma mater, thirty years ago, eschewed the traditional college application in favor of a more homebrew approach: since it was a small liberal arts college,…
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…
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 distributed filesystem), Akamai, etc.
Once in "the real world", we discover that corporations and governments routinely lie, cheat and steal. Because it's effective. Does anyone honestly think Steve Jobs was averse to sociopathic behavior, or went unrewarded for it? We live in institutions which reward such sheer winning over obeying rules. (Regardless whether those rules are important or terrible.) The people who make the rules themselves are subject to such pressures. The mass of cheaters here on HN simply are too wise to speak up and admit it.
I say that as someone who never cheated on a school test or homework. I don't begrudge those who did, because the mainstream educational systems are disgusting. I have no fear that a cheater will make my worklife hard, because that's what interviews are for. I'm more concerned about play-by-the-rules people who've stuck to conventional wisdom all their lives, and defer to bosses.
"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.
Well, I'm not Chinese, but I think they're right. Fairness requires impartiality, and they're being discriminated against. The solution should be to implement the anti-cheating measures everywhere, not just in a few schools.
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…
This has most to do with the student. If the student wishes to acquire knowledge, most American universities can provide the student with a great deal of knowledge. If you are not at such a university (unlikely, though some schools are significantly weaker in some disciplines than other schools, so YMMV), then such a university is generally just a transfer application away (protip: admissions standards are different…
Having recently been a student in an American university, I found that in a number of my classes, having a wish to acquire knowledge puts you at a disadvantage. When the majority of your peers are "working in a group" (read: academically sanctioned cheating) and you are not, your grade is likely to suffer. I was able to grasp and learn the material better in the long run, but at the cost of not having a great GPA.
This situation forces any student interested in maintaining a high GPA to focus more on the grade and not the material. The delicious irony being that students who are most eligible for graduate studies are those least intellectual.
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…
Really? I'm not sure I've experience of this. Might be a geographic/cultural thing, I guess, but business and governance in the UK doesn't seem to be particularly corrupt.
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…
The way many things work in Chinese societies is deviated far away from common knowledge, moral standard and laws. It is an eternal mystery how and why something is done for anybody outside of certain society. Although schools I attended never encouraged cheating, but the teachers did mention that gaps existed between the social reality and textbooks.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Once in "the real world", we discover that corporations and governments routinely lie, cheat and steal. Really? I'm not sure I've experience of this. Might be a geographic/cultural thing, I guess, but business and governance in the UK doesn't seem to be particularly corrupt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC
See "Money Laundering".
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…
"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." www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/my-articles/engeduc/ARUSSIAN.PDF The article is about a Russian mathematician who starts teaching in American universities. The same thing already happens in America with these 'business calculus' courses.
1. Grade inflation.
2. Bell curves so that a certain percentage of students must pass.
3. Student evaluations and students voting by enrolments that discourage tough/realistic marking.
4. Marking of courses is controlled by the teachers of the course. Thus the teachers are in effect assessing themselves.
5. In some countries students who pay full fees are marked easier than those who have government funded places.
Hiring people in IT, I was amazed to find that a high percentage of people who have passed programming courses are totally incapable of writing a working program.
So let us not be too scornful of the Chinese.