(Image Credit: Darnok/Morguefile)
"You get what you pay for," the old bromide says, and employers agitating for more H1B visas may soon find this out the hard way.
There has been no shortage of businessmen and right-leaning bloggers complaining that American schools don't produce enough STEM graduates to fill job openings. American students are too lazy, the pudits say, and business needs vast amounts of H1B visas to scoop up the hardworking, eager, talented STEM students from China and India.
But are those students really so hardworking and eager? Or are they just talented at cheating?
Recent studies and news reports are revealing a thriving culture of cheating founded on fake research papers and electronic gadgets.
Cheating has become such a basic part of China's education system that parents and students rioted in Zhongxiang when officials stepped in to stop it, according to the Telegraph:
When students at the No. 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams earlier this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised not by their own teachers, but by 54 external invigilators randomly drafted in from different schools across the county.
The invigilators wasted no time in using metal detectors to relieve students of their mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers.
Apparently, the cheating culture is so deeply ingrained that even parents take part, transmitting answers to their children during exams via various electronic devices. Parents also took part in the rioting when cheating was prohibited:
For the students, and for their assembled parents waiting outside the school gates to pick them up afterwards, the new rules were an infringement too far....
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By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped in a set of school offices, as groups of students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, an angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."
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"There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat." Think about that for a moment. Is that the standard U.S. businesses want in the workplace?
The situation in Indian schools is no better say some reports:
On the first day of the Class 10 board exams, about 200 students were caught cheating at an examination centre in Chhapra, Bihar. All of them were disqualified. Around 100 parents and guardians were reportedly detained for helping them and were later released.
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Many of the students did not even bother to cheat surreptitiously. Only some were caught with hidden notes; others brazenly put them on their desks and copied. Anxious parents did not pace outside. They stood near the doors of the centre and passed on notes to their wards inside.
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Mass cheating was not reported in Chhapra alone. There were similar reports from Shekhpura, Muzaffarpur, Darbhanga, Gaya, Patna, Jehanabad and Bhagalpur in the state.
According to a 2010 story in the New York Times, cheating in China has created a whole new economic sector:
Ghost-written essays and test questions can be bought. So, too, can a “hired gun” test taker who will assume the student’s identity for the grueling two-day college entrance exam.
Then there are the gadgets — wristwatches and pens embedded with tiny cameras — that transmit signals to collaborators on the outside who then relay back the correct answers. Even if such products are illegal, students spent $150 million last year on Internet essays and high-tech subterfuge, a fivefold increase over 2007, according to a Wuhan University study, which identified 800 Web sites offering such illicit services.
A recent report in The Economist examined the thriving market in fake Chinese medical research papers:
The pirated medical-journal racket broken up in Beijing shows that there is a well-developed market for publication beyond the authentic SCI journals. The cost of placing an article in one of the counterfeit journals was up to $650, police said. Purchasing a fake article cost up to $250. Police said the racket had earned several million yuan ($500,000 or more) since 2009. Customers were typically medical researchers angling for promotion.
Many students bring the cheating culture with them when they continue their studies in American schools and universities. Consider this report from George Washington University:
Non-citizen students, who make up about 12.1 percent of the GW student population, were responsible for nearly a quarter of all instances of academic dishonesty last year – the highest percentage in the available data. About 100 cases of alleged academic dishonesty were reported last year...............
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The University statistics mirror a national problem, according to a study presented at a Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education conference this month. International students are also more likely to cheat using technology, such as getting exam answers on the Internet and copying online material without proper attribution, the study found.
Experts point to the relentless emphasis on standardized tests as one culprit. Multiple-choice and short-answer exams are easy to game using electronic gadgets and crib notes.
Gaming the system doesn't produce skilled workers, though:
Junior Arjun Awasthi, an international student from India, said he wasn’t surprised, because his teachers failed to dissuade students from cheating in primary school.
“It is not very ingrained that if you are caught cheating, you are out. In high school, everyone used to cheat. There were not very serious consequences for cheating,” he said of his experience in India. “My experience is that, when I came to GW, I had never written a paper in my life. I think that plagiarism can come into play because people don’t have any clue what they are doing.”
These degree-on-paper-only students might look like a desirable source of cheap, skilled labor, but who will provide the crib notes to keep that new bridge from collapsing? Will there be a relative handy to transmit correct data so that new medicine doesn't wind up being toxic?
Of course, not all Chinese or Indian students are cheaters. My point is that maybe our own schools churn out fewer STEM degrees because they have, well- a culture of honesty. Cheating your way to a STEM degree isn't easily done. And the STEM degrees conferred mean that students have real skills.
Maybe somebody should tell that to industry figures agitating for more H1B visas, like Bill Gates.
But first, someone should tell Gates about Tang Jun, the former head of Microsoft China. Tang Jun claimed to have a doctorate from the California Institute of Technology.
He didn't.
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