This matches my observations after three years of teaching grad and undergrad students and about ten years of supervising student workers. Plagiarism was rampant and blatant among my students (all grad students) who hailed from China and India, and they expressed shock when I called them on it. I believe that each of them truly believed (s)he had done nothing wrong, but their offenses were serious enough to merit removing them from the degree programs (we gave them warnings instead, on the basis of the cultural difference, but added notes to their files so they couldn’t plead ignorance on a repeat offense).</p>
<p>Outside the classroom, some of my Asian student workers told me stories implying that bribery (another point raised in katliamom’s post) was not just tolerated, but expected outright in their countries of origin.</p>
<p>If I were to teach again, I would start with an explicit presentation on plagiarism, cheating, and academic integrity. And I wouldn’t hesitate to say, “If you are of Asian origin, you especially need to pay attention to this material.” It’s not a question of bias; it’s something that we take for granted, but they weren’t taught.</p>
<p>Off the topic of the post, but perhaps interesting in the context of the thread: In the classroom, my best and hardest working students were mostly members of the US military.</p>
<p>^^^Of course I know all that about Georgia Tech who doesn’t. I was purposefully trying to be an a-s-s.</p>
<p>As to her statement, I said the foundation of racism is prejudice which she clearly shows in the statement I quoted. Therefore if one has prejudiced beliefs I don’t consider it to a parsing of terms to consider them racist. Although in the de jure sense she wouldn’t be racist, de facto her comments are consistent with a racist view of the world.</p>
<p>While I agree with your annoyance with the steroetyping, you don’t really do yourself a service with nasty, elitist comments like this. I assure you that in engineering, Georgia Tech is very well respected. </p>
<p>@fabrizio - if it helps, I have huge respect for GaTech. But I still think that saying that cheating is a way of life in Indian universities is just an unfair statement. Maybe the best way to characterize this issue is to say that cheating is a way of life for some students at ALL universities, just like cheating is a way of life for some people everywhere.</p>
<p>Remember that white kids and African American kids and every other race under the sun will have some people that cheat. Singling out the Indians/Asians in this thread is unfair to India/Asia as a whole because it seems to imply that this is only a problem in India/Asia or that this is a much larger problem there, which we simply do not have the evidence to support.</p>
<p>I’m an Asian student and I was taught about academic integrity from my earliest memories. And I personally would be offended if a professor of mine singled out Asian students and told them to pay special attention to such a presentation. You can’t assume that all Asians come from the same background. I know what you’re effectually trying to say is “If you come from a background where cheating and copying is tolerated, you need to pay attention,” but that distinction needs to be explicitly stated.</p>
<p>In the interest of full disclosure, etc, I’ve been educated in the US. However, if someone said “If you are Asian (or of Asian origin), you should pay especially close attention to this material,” I would consider myself part of the group addressed. Additionally, I know several recent immigrants (some my friends, some barely acquaintances) who treat academic integrity as their highest priority.</p>
<p>I ask that people please refrain from generalizing.</p>
<p>As a second-generation American Chinese who has family members in academe, I’d like to point out that there may be some misunderstanding as to exactly what kind of plagiarism these international students may or may not be doing.</p>
<p>First, a definition - plagiarism is unacknowledged reproduction of another’s work that is passed off as one’s own. With that said…</p>
<p>They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. What happens when Chinese and Indian students, who almost definitely learned English as a secondary language, find themselves unable to express their thoughts to a satisfactory level in English? Isn’t it natural to copy the writing style of a scholar who is able to? Thus, these students basically copy from people who they think write well in an attempt to learn how to write like those people. If they don’t cite the original authors, of course there’s plagiarism involved. I simply want to emphasize that for a lot of these students, they could be trying to “learn by copying.” Their goal is to be able to write like those researchers on their own, and if that’s your goal, you must start somewhere.</p>
<p>How many sentences do you generally speak before mentioning you go to Yale? Aren’t you the same poster who was on here elsewhere, whining about how people perceived you because you are a URM?</p>
<p>Your valid points (IMO) really get obscured by this attitude you seem to have.</p>
<p>[Fabrizio] Irrespective of where naturalized Nobel prize winners might have gotten their education, I believe that there is a case to be made that graduate education, especially at the PhD level, and basic research in general are indeed stronger in the US than elsewhere in the world, Europe included.</p>
<p>Going back to the point I made earlier, I feel that most top students in Europe, or indeed even in some bigger Latin American economies like Brazil, have little incentive to come to the U.S for their undergraduate degrees. First, U.S bachelor’s degrees are considered “shallow” by UK or continental European standards, especially because of their liberal arts orientation and lack of in-depth specialization. Second, undergraduate education is MUCH cheaper at home for a EU citizen than it would be in the US (that’s true even in England and more so in the continent). </p>
<p>Conversely, US PhD degrees are normally perceived by many European or Latin American students to be “deeper” than the ones they could get in their home countries and research facilities and funding are also perceived to be better in the US. Therefore, many top EU or Brazilian students for example, who choose to get their bachelor’s degrees at home, opt instead to apply to graduate school in the States. Since international PhD students at top US universities (at least in science and engineering) typically get generous financial aid (full tuition + stipend) , money is not that much of an issue as it is for undergraduate students. In fact, when financial aid in the form of fellowships or assistantships is factored in, it may be actually more advantageous from a financial point of view to be a PhD student in the US than in the UK for example (the same argument might not apply to Germany though, where doctoral candidates are reasonably well paid).</p>
<p>Well I have two distinct personalities. One of them is an a-s-s the other is a whiny URM, it just depends which one I choose to demonstrate at any given time. For this instance I chose the former. :)</p>
<p>“I once witnessed such a talk given to incoming Russians. One of the items discussed: do not offer money to police officers if they stop you for speeding this is totally expected in Russia, here it’s an offense that could land you in jail.”</p>
<p>“I volunteer in a neonatal ward. Same hospital, same doctors, same nurses. I LOVE Asian and African babies because they can’t wait to learn to crawl to the potty. You can see them tugging at their own little diapers, trying to change themselves. The American babies just lay there peeing and pooping and whining if you don’t change their diapers for them. What a sad commentary on our culture.”</p>
<p>“I don’t know whether to say if she’s bad at rhetoric because her argument is so poor or if she’s good at rhetoric because she got printed in a major newspaper. Probably the former”</p>
<p>ROFL</p>
<p>“Outside the classroom, some of my Asian student workers told me stories implying that bribery (another point raised in katliamom’s post) was not just tolerated, but expected outright in their countries of origin.”</p>
<p>Bribery outside of government hands isn’t illegal in the United States to my knowledge. So I suppose it’s tolerated here too… Though that might be called something other than bribery…?</p>
<p>I could tell stories of people copying others homework during class the day it’s due, and sneaking it in there with the others right after class before the professor takes them. Yeah this happened all the time in high school amongst everyone of all races, in college it seems to be almost exclusively Chinese immigrants.</p>
<p>Either way, as I said before, much harder to cheat on a test. I’m not too concerned about what cheating goes on, it’s just not important enough to stop.</p>
<p>Unfair? Sure. Prejudiced? Sure. Racist? No. That’s all I’m saying. Racism is a very strong charge, and under my definition, for any statement to be racist, it has to imply that one racial classification is inferior or superior to other racial classifications purely on the basis of racial classification.</p>
<p>Re 73</p>
<p>Oh, lest I be misunderstood, I’m not questioning the excellence of our system. I was merely cautioning against holding up some Nobel Laureates as examples of our system’s greatness when they may have been wholly trained outside the United States. The way I see it, it doesn’t make sense to list Elizabeth Blackburn, a 2009 American Nobel Laureate, as proof of why our system works because her training is from Australia and the United Kingdom. But, it’s fine to hold Jack Szostak, who shared a Nobel with Blackburn and Carol Greider, as an example of the strengths of our system because Szostak earned his PhD at Cornell, an American university. Thus, even though Szostak was born in the United Kingdom and earned his B.Sc in Canada, you can still cite him as an example because he completed his terminating degree in the U.S.</p>
<p>Cheating is a problem in my university with international students that are in groups having the same major (mostly pre-pharmacy). They do not just help each other in finding jobs, and studying, they also help each other in homework, labs, and exams (mostly prof fault for not caring). This is just how they survive in the foreign country where so many things are different, expensive, and high expectations back home for them to succeed.</p>
<p>I disagree to use such a lax standard for interpreting racism could potentially offer a free pass to prejudice, and prejudice when allow to fester will only lead to racism. The solution to preventing racism is to deconstruct the foundation by which racism is established.</p>
<p>If it ever becomes acceptable again to malign an entire group of people, then it will only lead to a slippery slope where people will begin to view those beliefs as legitimate and acceptable, which will only eradicate the gains, in terms of alleviating racism, that our society has worked so hard for over the last fifty years.</p>