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India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

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Re: India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

#51

Post by JustSomeNobody »

rayiner wrote: post #41
JustSomeNobody wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not clear on how what the Indians are doing affects the GPA of the Chinese or Americans in your example. Do they blow the curve, maybe? Also, Americans tend to put individual before group. I wonder if your example isn't so much cheating as a difference in culture.

It undermines the moral fabric of the society. It's not a coincidence that in India (or Bangladesh, where My family is from), you have to bribe someone to get your phone hooked up.

Ok, but I still am not clear about how this would affect the GPA of students who don't cheat.

Re: India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

#52

Post by koyote »

eitally wrote: post #15

The problem is that if you have 1.4 million people to compete against in your state and you know the authorities don't really care if you cheat, then you absolutely have an incentive to cheat. This is a political & cultural problem, but is absolutely solvable. In my graduate program (~60 people) at a top tier US engineering school, about 10% were Chinese, 80% Indian, and 10% American. The Indians did all their work a…

I always found cheating to be much easier at US universities than back in the UK. Although maybe this was only my personal experience.

In the US you could often sit anywhere you liked in exams and have anything on you (cheat sheets were allowed for many exams, which I thought was an interesting concept to say the least).

In the UK, at least at my university, you had to leave all of your belongings by the side of the room and were only allowed a pen (and whatever else you needed for writing). Even your pockets had to be empty. It was also in a massive room with empty desks around you and a massive amount of space between every student as well as a handful of supervisors walking around making sure nothing fishy is going on. It definitely felt like a much more serious event than any exam I ever took in the US.

Re: India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

#53

Post by keerthiko »

GordonS wrote: post #12
ghost91 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't know Capgemini is doing much outsourcing in India. A lecturer at my university is by Capgemini. Do you have any more good stories?

It's technically a French company, but they have an incredible 50,000+ employees in India. There was one development candidate I was interviewing who was speaking to himself in hushed tones, during the interview '...google...sql join...', 'YES, YES, JUST A MINUTE SIR', '...next page...no, no..ah..' etc. Quite ridiculous. I have to interview about 20 shortlisted people to find 1 decent developer. Problem is it's diffi…

Normally I would say "what's wrong with knowing what to Google for and getting the right answer in a short enough time span to seem like a reasonable response to your dev question" since that's how many devs (who actually get stuff done) work. However, it's hilarious because the internet speeds are so slow in India that they probably would be better off actually spending the time in front of a reference book than waiting for their browser to crawl through Google.

Re: India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

#54

Post by qzcx »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #31
eitally wrote: post #15

The problem is that if you have 1.4 million people to compete against in your state and you know the authorities don't really care if you cheat, then you absolutely have an incentive to cheat. This is a political & cultural problem, but is absolutely solvable. In my graduate program (~60 people) at a top tier US engineering school, about 10% were Chinese, 80% Indian, and 10% American. The Indians did all their work a…

I'm not clear on how what the Indians are doing affects the GPA of the Chinese or Americans in your example. Do they blow the curve, maybe? Also, Americans tend to put individual before group. I wonder if your example isn't so much cheating as a difference in culture.

Yeah, they would blow the curve. Most university require professors to have a certain average GPA for a given class. If all of the cheaters pass with flying colors due to cheating, then the people who would have looked good otherwise, now seem average and get a C instead of the A they deserve.

Cheaters, whether American or Indian or Chinese, ruin the educational experience of college. Universities really should take it much more serious than they currently do.

Re: India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

#56

Post by ern »

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #31
eitally wrote: post #15

The problem is that if you have 1.4 million people to compete against in your state and you know the authorities don't really care if you cheat, then you absolutely have an incentive to cheat. This is a political & cultural problem, but is absolutely solvable. In my graduate program (~60 people) at a top tier US engineering school, about 10% were Chinese, 80% Indian, and 10% American. The Indians did all their work a…

I'm not clear on how what the Indians are doing affects the GPA of the Chinese or Americans in your example. Do they blow the curve, maybe? Also, Americans tend to put individual before group. I wonder if your example isn't so much cheating as a difference in culture.

In the case of Microsoft Exams (at least when I took them a few years ago), I had the sense that there was an "arms race". Questions were made more difficult and obscure than they needed to be, in order to drive pass rates down...when the real issue was braindumps and more blatant forms of cheating in some parts of the world. Which creates more demand for braindumps.

I wouldn't be surprised if college instructors start doing this as well-make exams tougher to compensate for cheating, rather than dealing with cheating head-on.

Re: India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

#57

Post by GordonS »

keerthiko wrote: post #53
GordonS wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's technically a French company, but they have an incredible 50,000+ employees in India. There was one development candidate I was interviewing who was speaking to himself in hushed tones, during the interview '...google...sql join...', 'YES, YES, JUST A MINUTE SIR', '...next page...no, no..ah..' etc. Quite ridiculous. I have to interview about 20 shortlisted people to find 1 decent developer. Problem is it's diffi…

Normally I would say "what's wrong with knowing what to Google for and getting the right answer in a short enough time span to seem like a reasonable response to your dev question" since that's how many devs (who actually get stuff done) work. However, it's hilarious because the internet speeds are so slow in India that they probably would be better off actually spending the time in front of a reference book than wai…

I've no issue with using Google (or whatever your favourite search engine happens to be) in day-to-day work. But in an interview setting, and especially for extremely basic questions, it's completely inappropriate.

Regarding Internet speed, India has seen phenomenal infrastructure changes in the past decade. Internet speed in this particular office in Mumbai is very fast.

Fast connections are available in major cities, for consumers as well as businesses. There are a number of ISPs in Mumbai offering ADSL and FTTH connections (I've only just got FTTC where I am in the UK!).

Re: India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

#58

Post by keerthiko »

Anonymous9723 wrote: post #49
eitally wrote: post #15

The problem is that if you have 1.4 million people to compete against in your state and you know the authorities don't really care if you cheat, then you absolutely have an incentive to cheat. This is a political & cultural problem, but is absolutely solvable. In my graduate program (~60 people) at a top tier US engineering school, about 10% were Chinese, 80% Indian, and 10% American. The Indians did all their work a…

I decided to post this anonymously. I am a professor at a major CS program in the united states. And we have a very serious cheating problem with indian students. It's clearly cultural. We also see cheating at a fairly high rate among the chinese and students from a handful of middle eastern countries, but the indian students are way out in front: it drives our indian faculty nuts. It seems that indian students have…

I was a (top 1%) student all the way through high school in the Indian education system, and our oppressive educational environment makes it far too stressful to perform within our parents' expectations. Even the top students collaborated with each other and "cheated" to ease the stress on ourselves. We also felt bad for weaker students who were struggling with material and being left further and further behind, without being given any time to actually understand the material, having to spend all the time memorizing stuff they didn't get so they could spew it out on exams, and would help them out too.

Tired of that system, I went on to attend Olin College of Engineering [0] in the US, the complete opposite end of the spectrum. I wrote a grand total of 1 time-constrained, closed-text written final exam in my 4 years there. Not a student, myself included, ever "cheated" at Olin, even though I had developed a habit of taking whatever means necessary to score higher on exams.

I realized that the reason why cheating didn't make sense at Olin was because everything I could have wanted to do to score higher was already allowed. I think the real solution is to build team-oriented finals and exams, with peer evaluation taking a sizeable chunk of the grade distribution, such that there is no longer an action that can be considered "cheating". In the real world, whether it's academia or industry or research, you are allowed to do anything that doesn't harm someone else to reach the answer you seek. I don't see why collaboration between students should be discouraged. Plagiarism is a different issue, and that can be addressed differently.

[0] http://www.olin.edu

Re: India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

#59

Post by eep_opp »

Anonymous9723 wrote: post #49
eitally wrote: post #15

The problem is that if you have 1.4 million people to compete against in your state and you know the authorities don't really care if you cheat, then you absolutely have an incentive to cheat. This is a political & cultural problem, but is absolutely solvable. In my graduate program (~60 people) at a top tier US engineering school, about 10% were Chinese, 80% Indian, and 10% American. The Indians did all their work a…

I decided to post this anonymously. I am a professor at a major CS program in the united states. And we have a very serious cheating problem with indian students. It's clearly cultural. We also see cheating at a fairly high rate among the chinese and students from a handful of middle eastern countries, but the indian students are way out in front: it drives our indian faculty nuts. It seems that indian students have…

I don't get it. Call them out. I hated dealing with the cheating at my school. I hated that their GPA got them the same considerations as mine.

The worst part was the lazy faculty that did nothing. I built a bit of a reputation around publically reprimanding students in class when they acted like brats. This was not my job and it alienated me from much of the of the student body.

Unfortunately I had to do it because my class would have never moved forward. So I guess it's not just my school? Professors have lost control all over and simple things like cheating have some kind of grey area?

FYI: Mostly Americans at my school.

Re: India students caught 'cheating' in exams in Bihar

#60

Post by kamaal »

Smaller depiction of a larger malaise. Indian education system is simply the tip of the ice berg. The government and educational systems are just the small front face of corruption, that is in the Indian society today. The corruption you see in the form of exchange of money is minuscule when compared to moral corruption which has infected everyone here.

Unfortunately you are likely to face far more worse kind of corruption even at workplaces, even in Multi national corporations in India. Religious, linguistic and regional politics is very common. If you are really hard working and productive, expect yourself to be exploited. You will go on working only to find worthless people get promoted and rewarded. Every single section of the India society is simply looking for a easy way to get ahead even if that means blatantly cheating your way through. Given these circumstances its hardly surprising why good people just want to move out settle outside India.

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