My lazy American students (Boston Globe)

[Dbate]

<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>It is not cheating to work together on homework. My friends and I do all the work first, then come together to see if there are any conspicuous differences between our answers, and if so we rectify them by helping each other out. The same is true for labs.</p>

[bruno123]

<p>[Fabrizio] Going back to the Elizabeth Blackburn example, I believe the question is not so much where she got her PhD degree, but where she did most of the research for which she was awarded the Nobel. And the answer for that question is: in the United States ! In fact, Dr. Blackburn has worked in the US (first at Yale, then at Berkeley and UC San Francisco) since she graduated from Cambridge (UK) back in 1975.</p>

[Inkling]

<p>@Dbate - in general I think when people refer to homework “help,” they mean blatant homework copying, at least in the case of this thread. Copying (from what teachers/professors I know have said) is VERY easy to spot on homework. What you describe - true homework help/collaboration, is different.</p>

[trent4332]

<p>I remember when I started college. There were so many choices and decisions to make. Everyone and their dog had advice about what major to pick, what courses to take, and all the fun they had in college. I was a solid C student. I never felt as if I was as smart as everyone else in my classes. Math kicked my butt in every course I took when I was 18 to 22 years old. I was impressed with the professor and their PhDs in subjects near and dear to my heart. The Professors frequently talked the language of their field and I had no idea what they were talking about. This made me feel dumb and stupid and I pulled back and stayed in the back of the class just hoping to pass the class. Foreign students were pushy, rude, and very competitive and often made threats and carried out acts of cheating and intimidation against the American students. I had text books stolen, class notes destroyed and they made sure I did not get much sleep.</p>

[bruno123]

<p>

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).

</p>

<p>It depends on how you define “help each other”. Discussing solutions to problem sets for example ** is not ** cheating, and most professors in U.S universities actually encourage it. Copying your classmate’s solutions on the other hand is obviously cheating and should not be acceptable.</p>

[gthopeful]

<p>

Granted I don’t go to as esteemed an institution as Georgia Tech, but even to me it is obvious that the foundation of racism is prejudice, which is predicated on the extrapolation of the experiences one has with a few members of a group to a whole. I assure you the 50% foreign students who attend Georgia Tech are not representative of the entire population of foreign Indian students and are likely to not even be the best Indian students there are, otherwise they would have gone somewhere better than Georgia tech.

</p>

<p>Look, you’re not taking this the way I intended you to. I have plenty of Indian friends, and I harbor no particular ill will toward foreigners, but different cultures have different standards for what is considered cheating or unethical behavior. When foreigners arrive here, they have no idea the standards that we have, and schools do not make very much effort to get them acclimated culturally, so events like the ones I described happen.</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>

<p>I think you should go see Avenue Q :)</p>

[Senior0991]

<p>^yeah I don’t think gthopeful was being prejudiced at all. I think he was being the opposite, in fact, which is demonstrated by him talking to his Indian peers about the educational attitudes in India. To be prejudiced would be to say that “cheating is a way of life in India because some people I was in a class with cheated.” Note that he didn’t do that.</p>

[Inkling]

<p>I don’t really think anyone here is being prejudiced or deliberately prejudiced. I’m just concerned that the fact that the only groups really being discussed here are Asians and Indians is problematic in that an outsider reading this thread may assume that this applies ONLY to those groups, which is certainly not true.</p>

<p>And I still think it’s more fair to say that cheating is a way of life for people in all races, including India, rather than single out India.</p>

[Jahaba]

<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>Bribery is a crime even if it’s not for a government official. If I bribe a jockey so I can screw up a horse race that I’m betting on, that’s a crime. </p>

<p>

And I still think it’s more fair to say that cheating is a way of life for people in all races, including India, rather than single out India.

</p>

<p>Yeah. Honestly, I’ve never actually seen like a legitimate study that tried to compare ethnicity to reported academic dishonesty. Might be a cool idea for a senior thesis, or maybe even a Major at Dartmouth.</p>

[Zenbadabing]

<p>Americans? Identity crisis? Hm, I don’t think that sounds quite right. More like the culture of false expectations and instant gratification that has embedded itself in the lifestyle of westerners. Want to get some work done? Stop playing World of warcraft. There are infinitely more Asian students in china who flunk out of school not because of their diligence, but lack thereof. The article is shortsighted, and fails to take into account the fact that most of these overseas students are enrolled in these American students because they were probably in the top 1% of their classes. We all know how difficult it is for international students to secure acceptance at even a tier 3 university in the states. And as far as Babson is concerned, it’s, quite frankly, not very competitive- so expect slackers, because they make up a majority of the undergraduate class.</p>

[umcp11]

<p>“I don’t think that sounds quite right. More like the culture of false expectations and instant gratification that has embedded itself in the lifestyle of westerners.”</p>

<p>Doubtful…</p>

<p>Idk about Babson, but at least at my university (run of the mill flagship state uni I guess), there are a LOT of people who did AMAZING in hs and worked REALLY hard…I think that is the case at any college…and then when they come to uni, something changes in their performance.</p>

<p>That is usually the case for students asking for extensions/etc. They weren’t asking for allowances all through HS, at least in my experience knowing some people like that.</p>

<p>Just look at all the people who lose their scholarships, do poorly at their safeties, what have you…I do believe something is going on and I don’t believe its chiefly to do with “laziness”.</p>

[fabrizio]

<p>I agree that there may be self-selection bias involved, but even though Babson College is not my school, I feel that there is no need to be dissing the College itself.</p>

[geek_mom]

<p>

@fabrizio

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.

Let me clarify, fabrizio. The cases I handled included term papers and “open notes” exams. The students’ exams included responses that consisted solely of whole paragraphs copied word for word from Wikipedia, complete with diagrams also copied verbatim, without attribution. The papers were similar – whole passages copied verbatim from online sources, which I usually discovered by spot-checking unique phrases in Google. One (charming, lovely, intelligent) Chinese student handed in a paper that was a completely incoherent string of passages copied from multiple online sources, none of them attributed and most of them irrelevant to the assignment. When I discussed it with her, she broke down in tears and explained to me that she’d been ill for a while, hadn’t understood the assignment, and had panicked and grabbed whatever she could. We talked it through and she gave me a rewrite that was her original work and was relevant to the assignment. In that class, the content was much more important than the English.

@fabrizio

First, a definition - plagiarism is unacknowledged reproduction of another’s work that is passed off as one’s own. With that said…

Definition accepted. I think you’ll agree that the examples above do fit this definition.

@fabrizio

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.

The place to “start” is not with assignments for credit in graduate-level courses. And there’s a big difference between imitating someone’s writing style and copying his work verbatim to present as your own. I don’t think we disagree on this point, but the students I had to call out for plagiarism did not grasp this difference. One of them argued with me for quite some time, insisting that his professors at his undergrad college in India had drummed it into his head that his own thoughts were worthless and he must always cite the work of experts who had preceded him. That is a cultural difference, although I think this particular student was overstating things a bit (example: he didn’t cite stuff, he just copied it).</p>

<p>In most cases, these students didn’t seem to have intended to cheat. They did not consider their behavior to be “cheating.” They had been “raised” with different rules, and my class was their first which involved significant writing – hence the first time this issue cropped up in their experience. That’s why they got second chances. And that’s why I would make a point of covering this material up front.

@Dbate

It is not cheating to work together on homework. My friends and I do all the work first, then come together to see if there are any conspicuous differences between our answers, and if so we rectify them by helping each other out. The same is true for labs.

It is cheating to work together in this manner if the prof says you’re to complete the work on your own. Otherwise, good on you. I encouraged my students to compare notes and consult with one another because the discussion and sharing of viewpoints helped them get a deeper understanding of the material. That wouldn’t be the case in every subject.</p>

[greenwitch]

<p>According to “Diplomas and Dropouts”,(a report that came out last spring), Babson graduates 89% of it’s freshman class within 6 years, not 4. Still, that’s a good percentage for a school they categorize as “very competitive”.</p>

[fabrizio]

<p>Re 93</p>

<p>I agree that your examples definitely count as plagiarism as I have defined it. Any copied material should definitely be cited to avoid plagiarism, and I think it is fair to offer second chances due to potential cultural differences.</p>

[Weskid]

<p>We’ve discussed selection bias, and I agree that that is probably a huge factor here. People have mentioned that, on a whole, international students are going to have to be very high achieving to get into any American Uni. I think that is a large part of the selection bias. But there is another factor as well, at least from what I’ve picked up talking to international students.</p>

<p>Coming to America for college is seen as a big opportunity, but it also comes at a cost. You have to come to a new country with what is often a very different culture, you can’t see your family and friends from home very often (many international students go home twice a year or less; some can go for years without going home if they get American internships over the summer), you have to struggle with a language that isn’t your native one. The kind of person who is willing to take all that on will tend to be the kind of person who then works hard to make the best of the opportunities they are given.</p>

<p>Meanwhile, for many Americans, going to an American college is just what you do after high school. Some take advantage of it, others not so much. </p>

<p>Also, the author doesn’t take into account that “special admits” like athletes and legacies are almost all American students. That is not to say that all athletes or legacies don’t work hard or can’t work up to par, but that might also be a factor.</p>

<p>Although this is only anecdotal, another factor in my experience is that many international students tend to be well off (which makes sense: they need to be able to afford flights over, many schools don’t give much aid to international students, etc), and those that aren’t tend to be exceptional students who have gotten scholarships. You are, at least in my experience, less likely to find an international student working 30+ hours a week just to pay tuition; that kind of extra-curricular burden can make college a struggle for many American students.</p>

[expatme]

<p>I don"t particularly like the term “lazY” as used in the title, because it sets off a defensive reaction of then “justifying” why the International students may be seen as more directed.</p>

<p>However, I think that anyone on this forum is from an educated enough background to recognize that the level of American education has been slipping and sliding. This is documented by reading and math scores, at the minimum. (and no i do not believe in teaching to the test just so our scores look better) I think however that there is room for improvement; there is room to recapture the idea that GOOD education,QUALITY education should be available to all. We don"t need to find excuses for why these students seem to have generally poor time management skills, attention spans or dedication to learning. We need to look at ways to improve the system so that someone coming out of the education system and qualifying to go to school such as Babson would in general have the skills and the drive to succeed. I seriously doubt that this professor wrote this article based on one class, one semester. Someone mentioned without using the word that many American students feel entitled to their college education. This sense of entitlement needs to be mixed with an understanding that their access to higher education is a blessing that shouldnt be taken for granted.</p>

[MD_Mom_1]

<p>Around here, students are passed through high school, and if they are not the top students, they think that just attending class and breathing will get them through college. I teach transitional English at the community college level and I can say my job is secure. My biggest observation is that kids just want the grade; they don’t see the value in learning. Oh, and this semester, the students I caught cheating included three Americans and one immigrant (Nigeria).</p>

[brysia]

<p>In very many countries cheating on tests is a commonly accepted practice and teachers look the other way while cheating is going on. In majority of countries students study much more than in the USA. American kids are involved in sports, activities, have part time jobs, etc. In Asia and in Europe students study, that is it. They study a lot!</p>

[Pizzagirl]

<p>

Most domestic US students outside the top 25 major research universities or the equivalent top LACs probably fall in the “average” or “below average” bracket in High School.

</p>

<p>That’s a ridiculous statement on its face. Do you know how many colleges / students there are in the US? To say that only the top 25 unis / top 25 LAC’s define “above average” is ludicrous.</p>