My professor friends tell me that Asians cheat more than any other group (though Jews come close).
People in business tell me that the Chinese will try to cheat you every way imaginable.
* I’m sure most of the serious, high IQ Asians students rarely cheat, but test and essay cheating is pretty common among low to mid-level East Asian students and is often excused and covered up by western universities (that’s what Asians have told me anyway). These lower tier students, like their western counterparts, aren’t particularly interested in academic study, and probably aren’t that conscientious, but are under a lot of family pressure to do well. In contrast, mid-level western university students aren’t under so much parental pressure to perform, so they have less incentive to cheat. Higher Asian neurotism levels also probably play a part, since more neurotic students are less willing to get in conflict situations with their parents over bad grades.
* All professors have a different procedure when they receive largely unintelligible papers from Chinese students. International students are often sent to the writing centers which are designed to deal with students that have slightly remedial writing skills.
Many professors will just give a slightly bad grade to papers that look like they’ve been put through google translate if the student has a Chinese surname. From the Chinese students I’ve talked to, this is not a great problem, as their goal in attending an American university, even a regional public university like mine, is to attain social cache back home.
* Japan is culturally unique and quite different in its ethos from other countries in East Asia. Levels of trust are sky-high and dishonesty and corner-cutting is rare and alien to the average Japanese person.
The rest of East Asia and India, however, are a different story. Stories of cheating in SATs and GREs are not just commonplace, the SATs were cancelled in China, Taiwan and South Korea last year on one occasion.
I have met a Chinese “admissions consultant” based in San Francisco who boasted to me that his standard fee is $600,000. He tours the Chinese cities and provinces, meets wealthy families and guarantees “your-money-back” admissions to the top 20 US schools for their precious, mostly non-English speaking, offspring. Everything is taken care of, from tests to applications essays and a verification trail for accomplishment in high-school. He said his success rate is about 95%. Parents I’ve met in India confirm similar services and brokers exist.
For the newly rich in Asia, a placement fee of $600,000 is nothing, and family honor of a kid in a prestigious US school is everything.
* The least corrupt, the most honest, and the most civic-minded country in Asia is without a doubt Singapore. Japan is actually mildly corrupt (about the level of the U.S., Hong Kong, and Ireland). Taiwan and South Korea are somewhat more corrupt than Japan (along Poland, Spain, Czech Republic), but are improving rapidly. China is still a HIGHLY corrupt country (the 2015 Corruption Perception Index rates it next to Benin and Columbia). You can reasonably expect the levels of any type of cheating across these countries to be consistent with the perceived levels of corruption.
As for Asian-Americans, they are likely to cheat at about the same rates as the general population (white, if you will) of similar demographic backgrounds (perhaps little higher due to higher academic pressures, but lower due to lower propensity for rule-breaking/higher conformism – they probably even out). The exceptions would be recent arrivals who still retain values of their homelands. On top of that, the recent Chinese immigrants tend not to assimilate well in cultural and civic aspects (along with Indians and Mexicans/Central Americans per the Manhattan Institute studies), and their cheating rate is probably fairly high.
* The biggest cheaters were not Asians. Not even close. They were invariably athletes… and usually with some connivance of the administration. Mostly blacks with some whites.
Outside of athletes, the usual cheaters I caught were frequently from an upscale background with good connections to the university. They had high pressure, high expectation parents who were successful and who got them out of trouble at the drop of a hat. Most of these students seemed to feel that they deserved good grades, but weren’t all that hardworking. They were pretty smart kids, but also somewhat lazy and unmotivated. But golly they wanted their A’s, no matter what.
The very rich kids didn’t cheat. They just partied a lot and dated very attractive coeds, and just had a good time looking beautiful in expensive cars and clothes. They were okay with passing and couldn’t be bothered to study for A’s or even B’s. They didn’t care enough to cheat, so long as they graduated.
The vast majority of Asian-American students I had kept their heads down and studied hard. They were mostly children of immigrants and didn’t seem to want to blow their chances. Risk-aversion would be the word that captures the ethos.
* Institutes of education should be considered part of a country’s national assets, helping it to keep ahead of its foreign competitors in science and technology. Instead, they’ve become international diploma bazaars, where native students get ever deeper in debt to obtain increasingly useless degrees.
* Back in the late ’90s, my MBA class in the traditional 2-year program at the University of Florida was 10% mainland FOB Chinese students + 5% Taiwanese; all early 20s, right out of undergrad w/o work experience. This was the known ratio for every MBA class. They all seemed competent in “statistics” but were abysmal in everything else, including English competency. Never spoke in class and circulated and communicated (in Chinese) only with the other Chinese students. I did sense some tension between the Chinese and Taiwanese students. The American students dreaded working with any of them on a group project. A few other American students and I wondered how they could comprehend the lectures and readings and suspected that they got some “special” tutorials and “assistance” from the administration. All of them desperately wanted to find jobs and stay in the US, preferably in Florida, and willing to accept any wage; driving down salary offers for the rest of us.
I did, however, get involved in a short fling w/ one of the Taiwanese female students – quite attractive and exotic, and half-way decent English skills. She was an “adventuress” seeking fun and experiences during her stay in America, and ended up marrying a German Deutsche Bank exec.
* In California at least, Chinese cheating is well known and test proctors have elaborate procedures to minimize it.
Thumbprint.
ID on desk at all times.
Only certain makes and models of calculators permitted, and they must be turned over to the proctors before the test to wipe out their memories.
No water bottles with labels. Crib sheets have been found on the inside of labels.
Assigned seats, with Orientals as widely separated as possible.
Bathroom monitors, to avoid note passing in the john.
I can’t recall what else, but it takes about 45 minutes to jump through all the security hoops.
* (1) East Asian IQ is tilted against verbal. In PISA, Chinese performance is much higher than America’s on math and science, but a bit lower on verbal.
(2) The banal fact that English is a foreign language will incur another effective drop of 10-15 points even though English is now generally taught to a respectable level in Chinese schools.
(3) It is entirely logical that there will be a lot of cheating on admissions essays on the part of Chinese applicants bearing in mind the above plus the fact that in Chinese society a US higher education is a highly sought after prestige good to such an extent that even Xi Jinping’s daughter reportedly went to Harvard.
* At the end of the day, whether allowing cheaters or developing bullshit degree programs (The “Studies” of Women, Blacks and Sexuality of all sorts requiring no science, math or history) for morons, the Universities and colleges and their partners the banks, keep that money rolling in.
“Higher education” is the greatest scam ever. They take in minnows that have no place, that are NOT “college material” in the old sense and sell them, at full price, a worthless “Bachelor’s of Science” that taught them no useful and especially, marketable, science at all. I’m sure, paraphrasing Lewis Black, the greediest fuckers in history look at the hucksters of higher education and say, “THAT is really fucking greedy. And I wish I’d thought of it”. EDS and the rest had nothing on the crooked, criminal enterprise of Higher Education. It’s a beautiful, wonderful scam..
So we are surprised at the abject lack of integrity of “Higher Learning” as an instrument? It is crooked top to bottom, 80% of its collective “business” is selling for high cost a piece of paper that has no value to the indebted, now-indentured recipient that “earned” that piece of paper (“it looks GREAT on the wall of Mom’s basement bedroom!”). And we huff and puff in righteous indignation at this? They have to get their out-of-state tuition somewhere, they’ve already grown to outsize proportions and milked out the native minnows. In their greed, they must have MORE suckers, they’ll get them somehow, from somewhere, by all means fair and foul. And so they cheat by allowing cheating. That’s really fucking greedy!
When do we wise up to them?
* I think this post leads to the wider HBD issue of why East Asians tend to do a lot better than whites academically.
I put it down to three main factors:
Introversion – Asians are more introverted and studies show introverts do better academically
Slightly higher IQ (especially in regard to mathematics)
Neuroticism – Asians are more concerned with pleasing parents and fret more about whether or not they will pass their degrees and be able to compete in the job market.
Contrary to popular belief, I don’t think it’s due to superior levels of personal conscientiousness. When the social pressure is off, East Asians are just as likely to slack off as whites are.
* My observation is that Japan was a noticeably less corrupt place to work in (as I think you allude to in one of your other posts) than many other countries in East Asia. While the exam system is Japan is as high-pressure as in China and cheating may indeed be a concern for their educators, it did strike me as to how little of an issue honesty at a simple, civic level was in Tokyo. A large scale cheating scandal would be a surprise.
Tokyo is famous for its lost and found facility, where you have a reasonable expectation of finding a lost umbrella or a wallet-which makes it a bit different from Singapore and Hong Kong in that micro-level, granular detail regarding interpersonal honesty.
Equally, the newspapers in Asia have never, to my knowledge, reported cheating scandals from Japan. They do, however, report them from China, Taiwan and South Korea. Not to mention India. I mentioned the cancelling of SATs last year, which happened for the June test date.
Singapore, though, after 50 years of strong top-down rule, feels similar to Japan-honest in its day to day texture of life and transactions. But I (or the locals) could never imagine that a lost wallet would be invariably be returned to lost and found.
Also, I think it is important to note that the growing industry in Asia surrounding admissions to college in the US is a phenomenon only for a few hundred thousand Asians, solely among the well-to-do who can shell out the $75k+ that it takes. For these people, a lot of social cachet and face seems to be at stake. Nonetheless, that displaces a few hundred thousand American citizens of lesser means, which is a fundamental problem of fairness in education that needs to be fixed.
It is beyond shortsighted for America to fail to fix the spiraling cost of college education and instead have its colleges resort to a strategy of excluding US citizen applicants in favor of full-fare paying foreigners.
But I dare say if you cut off the flow of foreign funds by the simple expedient of limiting student visas, college costs will start to come back in line.
* I think selling degrees to foreigners is a great way for our poor country to make some money.
But on a couple conditions.
1. Tuition for grandparents-born-here-Americans (“citizens”) is free for real subjects and minimal for others like philosophy, history, etc.
2. The foreigners are in their own tracks, or ideally their own separate universities (at least, their own division of an existing one) so they do not crowd out Americans or make it harder for them to register for needed classes.
3. The foreigners are required to leave the country immediately upon graduation, or the university must pay a fine equivalent to all tuition and fees received.
* I live in NJ in neighboring town to a very large Asian population. The schools in that district are considered stellar and Asians trample each other to find real estate there. The schools on paper have very high test scores but the locals that I know in the dwindling white population are very unhappy and there is more than meets the eye. Folks report rampant cheating in the High School among the Chinese students, significant jockeying by the parents to obtain prior test answers, they actively promote it in the family. The whites have consistent arguments with the school board as athletics are cut in favor of more money for G&T programs, mind you these whites are not dummies but are looking for the right balance for their kids. Also, so much homework is given that many of the white parents leave the district on that issue alone as the Chinese kids have zero social life. High levels of stress, depression and bullying exist as these asian strivers are driven to the edge. The most interesting aspect is that there is reverse racism now against the white minority, white kids unable to compete academically or willing to cheat are ridiculed openly. What I find interesting is that college acceptance from this High School is only 85% which is below my district which is 95% and my district has few Asians. My only guess is these kids are burning out, moving to China? Puzzling.
* Recently USC passed UCLA on the average SAT scores of it’s incoming freshman. I don’t think this had ever happened before. While affirmative action certainly had a role, the bigger role was all the high SAT scores of the foreign students. SC probably knew there was a lot of cheating but it is sort of beneficial. SC gets to charge a high tuition and claim they have a very smart class of incoming students which helps it’s rankings. Why would anybody want to expose cheating?
Of course, the UC is also in on the scam with an ever increasing number of foreign students as well.
* I was in Urumqi on a motorcycle tour and walking the back streets. Suddenly a little boy ran out of a shop, pulled his pants down, squatted on the curb, and dumped one in the gutter. He pulled his pants up and ran back into the shop.
