Anyone would do it.
May 30, 2016 9:31 PM   Subscribe

Chinese students gaming entry into and passage through Western universities The advertisements were tailored for Chinese college students far from home, struggling with the English language and an unfamiliar culture. Coaching services peppered the students with emails and chat messages in Chinese, offering to help foreign students at U.S. colleges do much of the work necessary for a university degree. The companies would author essays for clients. Handle their homework. Even take their exams. All for about a $1,000 a course.
posted by modernnomad (48 comments total) 16 users marked this as a favorite
 
I don't think it' s doing anyone any favors to spend amazing amounts of money to get into a college you're not prepared to do well at. And then spend even more money to cheat while you're there. Somewhere along the line, you're going to run out of options to pay someone to cheat for you (or just run out of money to keep paying for cheating) and then what happens? You get fired from a lot of jobs for being incompetent, I guess?

Ugh, this whole "foreign students are cash cows" thing just gets to me.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:50 PM on May 30, 2016 [4 favorites]


Sometimes I worry that all my students are doing this. They sure aren't attending class or doing the readings. Yesterday at a faculty meeting we heard that on average fewer than 10%of undergraduates are attending our lectures and in an introductory English class in our faculty, with several hundred students, seven downloaded last week's reading.

But they are (mostly) passing, so either someone is doing the work for them, or we have had to drop our standards so low that it's now possible to get a degree without doing any of the work.

From next year we are moving most of our assessment into invigilated in person exams and pop quizzes in class. Which is not ideal pedagogically for teaching the humanities but how else do you make sure they are doing their own work?
posted by lollusc at 10:06 PM on May 30, 2016 [40 favorites]


Bring back oral exams I guess.
posted by dilaudid at 10:20 PM on May 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


From next year we are moving most of our assessment into invigilated in person exams and pop quizzes in class. Which is not ideal pedagogically for teaching the humanities but how else do you make sure they are doing their own work?

I mean do you have discussion sections? Make passing a participation grade a requirement for passing the class? by which I mean something more than just raw attendance...doesn't need to be a quiz, just have the TA/GSI ask questions and call upon each student over the course of the class...even factual questions that have "correct" answers shouldn't be necessary, just any kind of question/answer that demonstrates they are engaged with the text?
posted by juv3nal at 10:32 PM on May 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yes, in class writing and daily quizzes seem to be part of the solution. Sigh.
posted by k8t at 10:35 PM on May 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


This is such a narrative of desperation in trying to get somewhere in this world. While I don't agree with this, I think a lot about how this has to do with the international cultural capital that Western universities accumulate, their own cashcow milking of international students, and how Chinese universities are becoming their own type of dystopia with how they treat their students and curriculums. I still get really sick when I think about how elite US universities here have billions and billions of dollars of endowment, and yet at my alma mater, they spend so little resources on all of us, international/domestic students, faculty.
posted by yueliang at 10:35 PM on May 30, 2016 [13 favorites]


lollusc: "in an introductory English class in our faculty, with several hundred students, seven downloaded last week's reading."

How tough is the download? Mind you not anywhere near the ratio you are experiencing but my experience with moodle in a recent course was downloads were so clumsy that one student would make the effort and then email the file to the other 16 students.
posted by Mitheral at 10:36 PM on May 30, 2016 [11 favorites]


I think a lot of these "students" see their course as a possible back door to immigration. This way, they get to make overseas contacts, and have an item on their CV that says they've lived in a Western country. They might even hope to be offered a job that gives visa status. At the very least this gives options that they and their family might otherwise not have.

There would probably be less fakery if there were other apparent paths to immigration or even overseas residence. I mean, they wouldn't be pretending to study if they could just get a job.
posted by Joe in Australia at 10:54 PM on May 30, 2016 [3 favorites]


I feel for these kids.

And I think the universities are complicit and mostly even grateful that companies exist which will throw a cloak of respectability over what would otherwise be a naked money grab.

UC Davis, for example, admitted the student who was the main subject of the article despite having in hand proof of the fraud he was attempting to commit, and only expelled him after they realized Reuters had obtained the emails the whistleblower had sent Davis exposing the fraud!
posted by jamjam at 11:23 PM on May 30, 2016 [11 favorites]


But they are (mostly) passing, so either someone is doing the work for them, or we have had to drop our standards so low that it's now possible to get a degree without doing any of the work.
A third, more optimistic possibility is that the actual learning happens in ways that have very little to do with either lectures or assigned readings. Perhaps our students no longer feel compelled to pretend to value everything a school assigns them in the way that we did. (This possibility is more optimistic with regard to the future of humankind, but rather bleak for those of us who enjoy traditional classroom teaching. Still, it's not obviously wrong, nor inconsistent with my own distant experience as a student.)
posted by eotvos at 11:29 PM on May 30, 2016 [1 favorite]


Yesterday at a faculty meeting we heard that on average fewer than 10%of undergraduates are attending our lectures and in an introductory English class in our faculty, with several hundred students, seven downloaded last week's reading.

Seven hundred students in an English class ... how does that even work? Are there discussion sessions?

I know it's not a realistic solution for every university student in the world, but I feel really lucky I went to a small college where the biggest class I ever had was maybe 50 students. Most classes were more like 10-25 students and had participation as a part of grading, which really deters a lot of absenteeism. I was a pretty aimless freshman and probably would have skipped a lot more classes if there were 300 students in all of them.

I think most students that age probably need more guidance than they get at most universities, and it seems like this would be doubly so for international students who are learning in a second or third language and dealing with culture shock as well. We call 19-year-olds adults but they're still teenagers.

And then also, I wonder how many people learn effectively through lectures. I have had some really amazing teachers and professors in my life, and a really good lecturer can teach a lot, but I personally learn much better through discussion or reading, and lots of people learn better hands-on.
posted by lunasol at 11:33 PM on May 30, 2016 [5 favorites]


These universities are knowingly selling out their own reputations. And the thing is that selling out is a zero-sum game. Every bullshit diploma you give out to a student who shouldn't even have been admitted eats away at your legitmacy. Which as a degree-granting institution is the only thing you really have to sell, at least for these prices.
posted by 1adam12 at 12:43 AM on May 31, 2016 [11 favorites]


Several hundred students, lunasol, not seven hundred. And if the Sydney university I'm guessing lollusc teaches at is anything like the one I learn at, there is probably one lecture to the entire cohort, and then much smaller tutorials where the students can discuss the readings and lectures with a person on the teaching staff.

Yeah, people don't do the readings. I'm in a humanities subject and people just don't. It's a shame because it leads to really dull discussion in the tutorials. The unit coordinators had a stab at fixing it by requiring students to make specific reference to the readings and the lectures in the midterms and write about how the lectures affected their understanding of the readings. It sounds like a swathe of people did really badly as a result, but maybe you've got to set that example. Personally, I liked it: it made me attend all the lectures and tutorials, something I don't always do.
posted by Panthalassa at 12:43 AM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


FYI, UC Davis under Katehi's leadership also started the 2020 Initiative. It was supported by President Napolitano as a way to secure more funding for the UCs to admit for domestic students, by basically admitting more international students. All of these are super dubious claims that the State of California government is trying to dispute now.

UC Davis is also my alma mater, hahahahaha. I declined to mention it the first time, out of anonymity wanting, but tbh, that place is such a weird place that I have both fond and outraged feelings about. They spend so much time recruiting international students to pay the outrageous fees, and yet they have underworked, underpaid student employees work on retention and recruitment for marginalized students in California. Yet services and staff are lacking for all students, and I'm not surprised that there were only 7 admissions officers as cited in this article. There are way too many students for the amount of staff that directly serve students, yet we keep hearing about the hiring of new admin in some other random part of campus. It's panoptic.
posted by yueliang at 1:28 AM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


I mean do you have discussion sections? Make passing a participation grade a requirement for passing the class? by which I mean something more than just raw attendance...doesn't need to be a quiz, just have the TA/GSI ask questions and call upon each student over the course of the class...even factual questions that have "correct" answers shouldn't be necessary, just any kind of question/answer that demonstrates they are engaged with the text?

Yes. One large lecture and then 25 student max tutorials. And we are trying to avoid participation marks because they are so subjective. It's hard to make sure unconscious bias isn't affecting your perception of people's contributions. And there's different cultural and gender norms to contend with.

So policy requires that assessment is blind marked/cross marked/marked according to very objective and pre-distributed rubrics etc, and that there are mechanisms for students to contest grades. None of which are really doable with participation marks unless it's really just a mark for attendance and nothing else.
posted by lollusc at 3:00 AM on May 31, 2016 [3 favorites]


None of which are really doable with participation marks unless it's really just a mark for attendance and nothing else.

Given Facebook et al's intensive work on facial recognition, I'm really surprised we don't have some sort of objective classroom-participation measuring software yet. Given a set of ~30 individuals (who usually sit in the same seats!), how hard would it be to record the classroom view via webcam every class, ID an area of the screen tagged to each person's face, then have the software track the total amount of time (or total non-continuous periods, etc.) that each person's mouth was moving? You can think of various ways small errors could be introduced, but as a broad metric for self-correcting instructor bias, justifying scores to students, etc., it seems like it'd be useful.
posted by Bardolph at 3:46 AM on May 31, 2016


Somewhere along the line, you're going to run out of options to pay someone to cheat for you (or just run out of money to keep paying for cheating) and then what happens? You get fired from a lot of jobs for being incompetent, I guess?

You're making a huge assumption about the applicability of college to most jobs. It's the same assumption that a lot of jobs make, and it's at best about 20 percent true.
posted by Etrigan at 3:47 AM on May 31, 2016 [9 favorites]


Meanwhile, the fashionable status symbol for Russia's oligarchs is PhDs, obtained by hiring academics to ghost-write their dissertations.
posted by acb at 3:50 AM on May 31, 2016 [4 favorites]


"Bring back oral exams I guess."
This is less crazy than it sounds. European institutions have, since the beginning, had a lot more to worry about with students using their fluency in foreign languages along with foreign cultural ties to cheat - and oral exams are how they deal with it. You can't fake being brought in front of a professor and being asked to stand and deliver like you can an essay, which you can economically simply translate yourself in your own voice from a source in your own language's academic tradition, or a written exam you can get creative with.
posted by Blasdelb at 3:51 AM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


I live in China and can forgive any Chinese student almost any act to not have to live here.
posted by lometogo at 3:52 AM on May 31, 2016 [8 favorites]


Blasdelb: You can't fake being brought in front of a professor and being asked to stand and deliver

But you can have someone else go in your place. Chinese people are always being told that Caucasians can't keep them apart anyway, so it sort of makes sense...
posted by Too-Ticky at 4:20 AM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


how hard would it be to record the classroom view via webcam every class, ID an area of the screen tagged to each person's face, then have the software track the total amount of time (or total non-continuous periods, etc.) that each person's mouth was moving? You can think of various ways small errors could be introduced, but as a broad metric for self-correctin

I'm pretty sure the quality of a student's participation is often inversely correlated to how often their mouth is moving.(Same goes for the instructors too, probably.)
posted by lollusc at 4:21 AM on May 31, 2016 [8 favorites]


I always find these articles frustrating because it's not as if I don't think similar things are going on with academically inept, domestic students with sufficient financial resources, but we don't talk about it. Fabricated transcripts, perhaps not, but the rest of it, definitely. And you can creatively massage the high school transcripts. My high school abolished class rank my freshman year (15+ years ago) because a B average was solidly in the bottom half and it hurt those students applying to college--of course, the grades had inflated to make transcripts look good to colleges in the first place. That was a mostly upper middle class public school. At smaller, private schools there's more incentive to get creative on an individual level (and one assumes less ability to resist pressure from parents).

I do know someone who caught a ringer in a final exam. Bizarrely, the actual student had shown up a few times, so quite how he thought an entirely new person would go unnoticed, I don't know.
posted by hoyland at 4:32 AM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


When I was in graduate school the TOEFL, SAT, and GRE cheating by Chinese students, along with other faked application materials, were talked about by faculty as an open secret that everyone knew about. I never saw anything myself, other than that many of the Chinese graduate students I met clearly didn't have even functional spoken English, but they still may have had enough to get a decent written test score and the people I knew personally were obviously smart and dedicated. I didn't have much interaction with Chinese undergraduates; the foreign students in the classes I TA'd were mostly from Europe, SE Asia, India, and the middle east, and were overall much better prepared than the US students.

The feeling by faculty at that time was that the university was openly closing its eyes to the issue in order to get applicants who would pay full price. But faculty were certainly complicit -- PhD programs that I saw tended to have two tracks, one for people headed for "real" academic careers (whether in the US or other countries) and another for the students who had been sent there, usually by the government ministry or school where they worked, to get a degree before returning to their jobs; those students were held to much lower criteria but would not get the references or support needed to apply for academic jobs.

But you can have someone else go in your place. Chinese people are always being told that Caucasians can't keep them apart anyway, so it sort of makes sense...

There were anecdotal stories of this, especially from big intro classes that served as gateways to a major. I never saw even a hint of it, but I don't know how serious they were about cracking down on cheating in the big lecture classes, and what things students would do to pass.

I do know that the pressure on some of the foreign students to pass was intense, and there were some very sad suicides and mental breakdowns while I was there of people who were failing classes and didn't feel that they could return home without the degree. So I can understand how a person in that situation would pay a bit of money to solve the problem, get the degree, and return home as a success.
posted by Dip Flash at 4:39 AM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]


Seven hundred students in an English class ... how does that even work? Are there discussion sessions?

It works pretty well just about everywhere outside of the United States.

For some reason good American schools are incredibly restrictive - they produce fewer and fewer students the larger their endowments and higher their status.

McGill, Canada's Harvard of the North, has an enrollment of almost 27,000 students. Harvard itself? 6,700.
posted by srboisvert at 5:05 AM on May 31, 2016


McGill, Canada's Harvard of the North, has an enrollment of almost 27,000 students. Harvard itself? 6,700.

McGill isn't Harvard of the North. If you're talking about where rich & powerful Canadians send their kids, Harvard is the Harvard of the North. McGill is a good university with a person's name (rather than a location name), so Americans think it must be an elite university.

One of the things that I think works really well about the Canadian system is that we don't have elite universities. Our highest ranked universities are so large that they are open to students from diverse backgrounds. In term of research rankings, the University of Toronto is the highest ranked in Canada. The enrollment is over 50,000 undergraduates.
posted by jb at 5:31 AM on May 31, 2016 [11 favorites]


A third, more optimistic possibility is that the actual learning happens in ways that have very little to do with either lectures or assigned readings. Perhaps our students no longer feel compelled to pretend to value everything a school assigns them in the way that we did.

I think a lot of people see a bachelor's as a means to an end. I'm all for different learning styles, but I don't think they care too much about that.
posted by krinklyfig at 6:18 AM on May 31, 2016


People have been gaming the education system for ages because unfortunately most employers HR departments really are just pushing credentialism which then means that it's incumbent on managers to quickly discern when new employees might have stellar credentials but are honestly completely unprepared for the workforce because either they went to a diploma mill or they are getting into good schools but completely coasting.

The US has largely abandoned the 1 big lecture + discussion group / lab model because it sucks as a teaching and learning experience. Students don't come to class (because the test is 100% from the lecture notes) and because there are so many student the bulk of the exams are multichoice because even short answer exams would be massively difficult to grade and vulnerable to instructor bias if professors are using GTAs to grade exams.

Plus simple regurgitation of facts on an exam does not require comprehension or actual learning of the materials as it can all just be done with rote short term memorization if not active cheating. Considering most professors don't create a new exam for every semester or they reuse test questions there has been a massive cottage industry in test banking for ages. I'm not really surprised it's gotten more high-tech and money-centered after all taking SATs for other people has been a thing for decades.

I tend to prefer project based learning because it tends to simulate modern working environments but it also has the challenges of a small group of individuals typically having to do the majority of the work. That and most people still don't do the reading or participate much in class. Of course with mixed gender classes you also have the participants in most discussions also typically being dominated by loud douchey guys.
posted by vuron at 6:30 AM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


The US has largely abandoned the 1 big lecture + discussion group / lab model

It has? Not at my institution.
posted by soren_lorensen at 7:16 AM on May 31, 2016 [4 favorites]


The US has largely abandoned the 1 big lecture + discussion group / lab model because it sucks as a teaching and learning experience. Students don't come to class (because the test is 100% from the lecture notes) and because there are so many student the bulk of the exams are multichoice because even short answer exams would be massively difficult to grade and vulnerable to instructor bias if professors are using GTAs to grade exams.

Somehow institutions across Europe (and no doubt elsewhere) manage that model without multiple choice exams or exam paper reuse. They're generally marked independently by more than one person, too, with systems in place for handling marks (and markers) outside the norm.

All of the things you say are a consequence of the big lecture/small tutorial middel are not in fact necessary consequences of it at all, nor an argument against it.
posted by Dysk at 7:23 AM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


Somehow institutions across Europe (and no doubt elsewhere) manage that model without multiple choice exams or exam paper reuse.
Not everywhere in Europe. Here in the Netherlands multiple choice exams are very common. I was rather shocked about that when I went back to school. It's not just introductory courses either, even master's programs have them.
posted by blub at 7:38 AM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


Seconded, yueliang.

"Yet services and staff are lacking for all students, and I'm not surprised that there were only 7 admissions officers as cited in this article."

I was flabbergasted they had seven. So many. Admissions is one of the more privileged areas under the Katehi reign, so they actually have more staff than most areas are allowed any more.
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:38 AM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


Lecture/ discussion format and multiple choice exams are absolutely the norm for introductory courses (and a lot of intermediate courses) at the US institution at which I work.

I'm going to have to think a bit about how much and what I want to say about this! I guess one thing that I'll say is that I truly believe that the vast majority of international students at my institution don't cheat, and my sense is that they typically work a lot harder than domestic students. There are obviously some glaring problems, and I don't want to gloss them over, but I am worried that this will increase stigma on international students from China, and I don't think that's the right lesson to take from all of this.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 7:59 AM on May 31, 2016 [5 favorites]


I agree with hoyland that the cheating that I observe and hear about at my institution is not limited to any one student population. Mostly what I deal with is run of them mill copying of quizzes and homeworks (with and without the cooperation of the copyee) and copy-paste paper "writing". I also had a pretty devastating case of a student trying to "help" a classmate by sharing a term paper "for reference" which then was turned in virtually unaltered by both students. We did have a student caught cheating with a smart watch during finals this semester, so yay! now we have to make them take off their watches.

Students who have completed our English for non-native speakers program generally are among my best students because the program includes a focus on speaking and writing in a profession alway at the college level, giving them skills that many of my other students lack.
posted by hydropsyche at 8:07 AM on May 31, 2016


My high school abolished class rank my freshman year (15+ years ago) because a B average was solidly in the bottom half and it hurt those students

Yeah, my high school was so small we rarely had a graduating class in the triple digits. If the overall class performance was good, it was easy for a great student to not be at the top of the class; if the overall class performance wasn't as good it wasn't that hard for a student with lower grades to not be that near the bottom.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 9:10 AM on May 31, 2016


I will add to this by saying that this is not just something that happens for colleges. I taught at a tier 2-3 boarding school for a few years (great place, but I'm not going to kid myself that we were getting the children of captains of industry, but then again we didn't have a history of sexual abuse, so that's a plus) that really pushed for all its students to at least apply and be accepted at 4 year colleges/universities, even if they did not attend. I remember being pulled in to help with an interview of a Chinese student who showed up speaking very little English. We had an ELL program, but he didn't have enough English to even participate in that. It became obvious that someone had done the phone interview for him and had written his application material. I don't know quite how they expected him to go to the school, as it was really small and required constant interaction with the staff and other students. In the end, we decided that we couldn't actually teach him, the level of English education he needed was too extensive for him to get anything out of any of the courses. I felt really bad, given his trip to the middle of the US from China and his family's sudden need to figure out where he was going to go to high school on a last minute notice. On the plus side, he was the exception to the Chinese students who got into the school.

(If it's obvious from this comment, I wasn't teaching English or composition.)
posted by Hactar at 9:19 AM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


When I was in graduate school the TOEFL, SAT, and GRE cheating by Chinese students, along with other faked application materials, were talked about by faculty as an open secret that everyone knew about.

It's not even a secret. At one point, GRE refused to stand behind Chinese test results because the cheating was so bad. The Chinese applicants/cheating mills figured out they'd gone too far and now they submit more "realistic' GRE and TOEFL scores.

The graduate program I admin for has very selective admissions (we eliminated the two track system Dip Flash mentions back in the 1990s). For all international admits, but particularly Chinese, faculty are very skeptical and look for students from programs they know, do Skype interviews, and so on. But international students are common in our grad program and we have really done well with our admissions there.

On the other hand, having a large percentage of international undergrads is something much newer for American universities. The university I work for has also been pushing hard on international undergrad recruits and the % of international students in our undergrad programs has dramatically increased. Our most successful international undergrads are the sponsored students - sent by a government or industry scholarship usually. They're pre-screened before they apply here, they're given extra preparation by their sponsors, and many of them a highly motivated to do well because of financial bonuses for GPA, and better jobs waiting for them at the end.

Chinese students aren't usually sponsored students though, and some faculty have reported networking among them to take "easy" classes and large scale coordinated cheating attempts. I don't think we've had that in our major, but I have seen that most of our Chinese undergrads really struggle and usually are not among our most motivated or engaged students. I think, whatever the expectations of their parents, they're either not prepared enough for our program and/or their priorities are not on studying.
posted by Squeak Attack at 9:54 AM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


My experience teaching composition and working in the writing center at a large, urban public university with a sizable population of international students--many from China--is that, on balance, the international students appear to put noticeably more effort into their work than do many of the students from here.

I know that there was a recently a big scandal at my university similar to the one described in the article-- it involved students from China whose work in on-line classes was being done by paid stand-ins--but I've never personally seen anything quite so systematic as that.

Mostly what I see are students busting their asses to master both the language and the material, after having been set up to fail by two broken systems: one in their home country that pushes them to get a degree in the US even if they don't have the language skills, and one here that is so eager to get the international tuition dollars that it turns a blind eye to the well-known gaming-the-TOEFL that Dip Flash mentions above.

Yes, I do from time to time get essays that are blatantly not written by the student in question, but that is both rare and easy enough to spot; not only do I have my students do plenty of in-class writing, but also, many of the assignments I give them are both idiosyncratic and personal enough that they can't just find something to copy or purchase online.

(I've never had any problems with impostors taking exams for students because I don't give exams. Exams--certainly in my field, and, frankly, in most fields--seem to me to be largely-pointless exercises in education-as-banking-transaction. By and large they appear to test little more than a student's ability to temporarily store and retrieve facts, and isn't that what we have computers for?)
posted by dersins at 9:56 AM on May 31, 2016 [2 favorites]


Background:

I started back to school later in life at a community college. While there, I took honors classes, tutored English, volunteered to help ESL students in the language lab, and worked with the disability center on various tasks.

I transferred to an elite school with an honor code.

I did graduate work at a large UC school that included Teaching Assistant (TA) for the large introductory classes (2-400 in the lectures, ~20 in the individual classes I TA'd).

I never saw the behavior mentioned in the community college or elite school. That said,

--The international students I encountered in the community college were all struggling with English to a degree. But just the fact that they were taking the "remedial" English classes to gain the skills necessary to take the main (required) English class...and then visiting the tutorial centers for help told the story for me.

--At the elite school (I am assuming it is not proper to name schools to avoid sidebars and divert the discussion), the students were indeed high caliber. A few sometimes struggled with verbal communication, but they worked hard, asked for assistance, and their papers (I tutored again) were exemplary. I realized that they just worked very hard, asked for and attended any support networks available, and that was how they got through.

--At the large UC school, cheating and non-attendance was a regular issue. It was not particular to any ethnic group, gender, or any other group/cohort.

Personal note: it was a shock to go from a school with an honor code where professors would hand out exams, then say "I'll be in my office if anyone has a question" then leave the room--to go to the large UC school where backpacks had to be checked, bulky clothing and hats removed, seating spaced, then proctored the entire time (with proctors randomly walking among the students taking an exam). Again, that told the story for me....

Gist: the wealthy and elites in any culture have always used shills, cheats, gaming the system, surrogates, connections, etc. to buy their way to any degree/position they desire. I never saw that behavior at the college or elite side of the (imaginary) US college/university systems scale, I only saw it in the gigantic diploma mill schools with large class sizes.
posted by CrowGoat at 10:12 AM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


In grad school, I had a “rotation” in our University Writing Center, and whenever you got another grad student coming there for help on a paper it was almost guaranteed that they would have a hard time speaking English, and that they expected you (the tutor) to fix/write their paper for them.

Except we were specifically prohibited from “fixing” papers for clients (just the term we used, it was free) of the writing center. So you would spend up to two hours with someone who struggled with the language, who kept telling you to rewrite their paper, except you couldn’t, so you’d give a lesson on pronouns and ask them to fix it, and it was sheer grinding misery for everyone.

The flip side is that I once had a student from China who could barely speak or write English in one of my composition classes, but out of a class of native English speakers he was the only one who tried to engage with the class writing projects seriously. Since grammar/spelling/punctuation were only about 10% of the grade for that course, he did fine in the class, because he was doing excellent work rhetorically, he just had trouble getting the words down.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 11:22 AM on May 31, 2016 [1 favorite]


The US has largely abandoned the 1 big lecture + discussion group / lab model because it sucks as a teaching and learning experience. Students don't come to class (because the test is 100% from the lecture notes) and because there are so many student the bulk of the exams are multichoice because even short answer exams would be massively difficult to grade and vulnerable to instructor bias if professors are using GTAs to grade exams...Considering most professors don't create a new exam for every semester or they reuse test questions there has been a massive cottage industry in test banking for ages

Sounds like you went to a pretty dreary institution, but they're not all like that. I don't think I took a single multiple choice exam in my entire four years of college.

Treat education like a commodity to be mass-produced in a factory environment, it's unsurprising that the students don't value it in itself and thus are more willing to consider various forms of manipulating the system. I mean, society itself does that enough. When the institution surrenders, who is to tell the students that there's value in learning for its own sake?
posted by praemunire at 11:54 AM on May 31, 2016


The US has largely abandoned the 1 big lecture + discussion group / lab model because it sucks as a teaching and learning experience. Students don't come to class (because the test is 100% from the lecture notes) and because there are so many student the bulk of the exams are multichoice because even short answer exams would be massively difficult to grade and vulnerable to instructor bias if professors are using GTAs to grade exams...Considering most professors don't create a new exam for every semester or they reuse test questions there has been a massive cottage industry in test banking for ages

I mean I guess subjectivity and bias were a risk, but we kind of just accepted that as par for the course when I did my English undergrad...it didn't stop some of the finals from consisting of essentially 3 essay questions and nothing else...this was all back in the late 90s tho so maybe everything is different now and kids git off mah lawn etc.
posted by juv3nal at 6:19 PM on May 31, 2016


The emperor cannot be examined.
posted by clavdivs at 7:47 PM on May 31, 2016


These specific colleges are fucking shitty.

They bring in international students--with overwhelming awareness that their transcripts are fake (high school transcripts do not exist in Chinese schools) and that their standardized test scores are compromised--because international students are full pay.

Then they put them in ginormous lecture classes with online or take-home exams.

Surprise, surprise!

Fuck you admin-bloated shitty universities.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 10:44 PM on May 31, 2016


How does a high school transcript not exist in China? Because they're turning in some kind of equivalent list of what they've been doing for the last four years with some sort of grades attached. Even if it's not classic American high school, it's some kind of equivalent to that?
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:51 PM on May 31, 2016


No, they don't have them in China. Transcripts are not part of Chinese secondary education or university admissions. They simply manufacture them, usually out of thin air. It's not even expensive.

(I work in this industry in Asia and have been interviewed repeatedly by the journalist(s) who wrote the FPP link)
posted by Joseph Gurl at 12:17 AM on June 1, 2016


Joseph Gurl, given that there are no transcripts, how would a student who is looking to honestly start at a college without taking the Gaokao go about applying? Is there no record of their performance in classes?
posted by Hactar at 8:30 AM on June 1, 2016


Well, I'm in Korea, not China, so I don't know the specifics (and the vast majority of kids I teach who live in China attend international schools there), but I believe they just manufacture a "transcript" with accurate info. All transcripts from regular Chinese schools are manufactured, though, and it's trivial to have them say whatever you want.
posted by Joseph Gurl at 12:17 AM on June 2, 2016


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