One thing I frequently hear foreign teachers in China complain about is cheating. It’s almost as if they were totally unfamiliar with this concept before they came to China. Let me put things into perspective here.
Chinese students cheat. Apparently they have been doing this for quite some time, because in the Capital Museum in Beijing is a student’s cheat sheet from the old Imperial Examination. But American students cheat, too. The difference seems to be that the Chinese students are more likely to get caught. All this really tells me is that Chinese students are not as effective at cheating as are their American counterparts.
I’ve been in the teaching business for some thirty years, and, quite frankly, the cheating I’ve seen in China doesn’t come close in either quantity or sophistication to the cheating I’ve seen in America. Let’s start with one hard fact. Studies have been done asking American students whether or not they have ever cheated. Since these surveys preserve the student’s anonymity, there is a pretty good chance they are a fairly accurate reflection of reality. Basically, the studies tell us that nearly all American students admit to having cheated at some time in their academic career, and some do so quite regularly.
Back when I was a graduate student the campus bulletin boards were full of notepads advertising papers “for research only.” Despite this disclaimer, it was obvious that the student was purchasing someone else’s term paper to submit as his own work. I experienced some of this personally because I always assigned a 10-page research paper for students in my Ancient Near East & Greece and my Ancient Rome history classes. Imagine my surprise when a student whose classroom performance indicated he was about as intelligent as a houseplant submitted a paper worthy of a Pulitzer! Of course today the Internet has replaced those notepads stapled to bulletin boards. However, today there also exists technology making it possible for a teacher to determine whether or not a student paper was obtained from an online databank or plagiarized from some published source.
Plagiarized term papers, stolen examinations, and students peeking at their neighbor’s answer sheet are but the tip of the iceberg. I was once a professor at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale. I had a friend there who had never attended college, but who made a decent living writing master’s theses and doctoral dissertations for other people. All they had to do was submit the topic, a few sources, and a one-page sample of their writing style, and my friend did the rest. So I know for a fact that there are people with SIUC doctorates and masters degrees who never actually earned them. I rather doubt that my friend was the only person in America with such a lucrative business, nor that Carbondale was the only school in America producing unearned graduate degrees. It seems that every year we are treated to yet another example of some big-name academic who got his/her job on the basis of phony credentials. I believe the former president of no less an institution than Yale University recently resigned when it was discovered that her resume had been a fraud.
So when you put it into global perspective, the fact that one Chinese student at Sias University wrote the answers to his exam on the back of his girlfriend’s neck and then sat directly in back of her during the exam should not be too shocking. What is more shocking is the extent of corruption rampant throughout our society, or rather, throughout the entire world. I have often said that for every example of corruption or dishonesty I have ever experienced or heard about in China, I have personally witnessed something at least as bad in America. The fact is that people are pretty much the same wherever you go in the world.
October 20, 2008
Gary L. Todd, Ph.D.
Professor of History
Sias International University
Xinzheng, Henan, China
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