My lazy American students (Boston Globe)

mousegray · December 23, 2009, 12:33am

I think it’s called “tipping”. (Although I’m sure there are instances where it would be illegal to tip, I mean bribe a lay person.)

There is a whole spectrum on the copying vs. cheating scale. It’s not really all that black and white. I don’t have any personal experience teaching engineering to Chinese, Indian or any other Asian students, but I do know that imitation and outright copying are part of the education for artists in many Asian countries. Sometimes I wonder if the concept of “copyright”, for example, might not mean something entirely different in China, apart from legalities. In China, there are entire cities devoted to copying material-- that is the industry of a village. Even in this country, there is rampant copying and outright stealing in many industries.

Anyway, geekmom, it sounds like rather than being told, “If you’re Asian, I’m talking to you”, what the foreign students need is a class in American standards of ethical behavior in university,–complete with specific examples of what constitutes punishable offenses ie what’s considered cheating here.

TheGFG · December 23, 2009, 12:46am

BROAD GENERALIZATION ALERT!!

In my kids’ high school, cheating among Asians is perceived to be commonplace. Since Asians at their high school are often “top” students (many are children of first generation immigrants who are brilliant advanced degreed professionals who came here to work in the IT or pharmaceutical industries), their cheating can have significant repercussions as far as academic accolades and class rank and thus people notice and care. Asians like them cheat because there is so much pressure put on them at home to not only be very, very good, but to be better than anyone else. Beginning in elementary school, you see these kids cry when they don’t get a perfect score on a test. When the teacher tries to comfort them, saying they did very well and 92% is a good grade, they explain that their parents expect better of them and they’ll be punished when they get home. S knew a girl whose parents were so upset they kept her home from school for a whole week to study for SAT’s after she did “poorly” on her first sitting. So the kids like this my children know cheat because it is unacceptable and dishonorable to not do well and since they’re human they’re not perfectly smart or perfectly capable all the time.

Just as many if not more American students cheat, but their motives are usually different. Call it laziness if you want, but they cheat to avoid failing or doing very poorly. Maybe they didn’t feel like studying or doing the assignment, but they’re usually not cheating to try to get the top grade or stay at the top of the class. People don’t care as much when they cheat because nothing much is at stake.

futurenyustudent · December 23, 2009, 1:01am

Cheating happens. American-educated students are just more discrete about it. You’re kidding yourselves if you think American students don’t cheat. I think it’s a fact of life in college, pretty much. And most profs don’t bother to fill in the paperwork unless the act is blatant (i.e. an entire paper is the same verbatim) and the accused gets caught in the act.

I have a rule-anything unsupervised is fair game (i.e. a takehome exam). Even a non-proctored in-class exam. You’re kidding yourselves if you think students don’t work together when you give a takehome exam.

QwertyKey · December 23, 2009, 1:17am

“I have a rule-anything unsupervised is fair game (i.e. a takehome exam). Even a non-proctored in-class exam. You’re kidding yourselves if you think students don’t work together when you give a takehome exam.”

Well I can tell you that all Engineering exams at Michigan are unproctored, and I’ve not cheated, nor have I seen anyone cheat during them. I can also tell you that I’ve not cheated on graded homework, and to my knowledge no one else in most of my classes (see, all but one…) did either.

Sam_Lee · December 23, 2009, 1:25am

What exactly is the point of pointing out Asians students cheat more? Cheating and studying hard aren’t mutually exclusive. Perhaps more Asian students cheat because more of them care about the grades and academic success? Heck, Americans cheat a lot too in certain circles; just look at how prevalent athletes use steroids in bodybuilding, WWF, baseball, NFL? What about all that cheating going on at Wall Street? Sales pitch? Web surfing (while on company’s paid time) at work? Lies from politicians? The point is often the ones that cheat are the competitive ones that want to get the extra edge. It happens to Asians and whites, or any other groups. Speaking of bribery and corruption, Hong Kong, Japan, and Singapore are actually considered more transparent than the US. While India and China are ranked far lower, the notion that all Asian countries are more corrupted is based on ignorance.

futurenyustudent · December 23, 2009, 1:25am

Oh, that’s nonsense. Engineering schools nationwide have the highest rates of cheating of any major, the next highest rate being business. And that’s just from the people who admit to it. There are many more that smartly won’t admit to it.

And let’s think this through rationally: if everyone cheats, can you blame someone for cheating? I know I can’t. If everyone cheats, nobody has an unfair advantage. Cheating’s so frowned upon because it gives an unfair advantage to the cheaters. If everyone cheats, the non-cheaters are at an unfair disadvantage.

I’m not endorsing cheating, I’m not saying I cheat, I’m being a pragmatist about it. And no, cheating is not exclusive to Asian students.

When an exam is takehome, I assume definitively that the prof is okay with people working together one it (do they seriously expect you not to? Come on). An unproctored exam you have to take in the room, that is much fuzzier.

navyarf · December 23, 2009, 1:28am

Wow. I am amazed at the hundreds of responses posted in response to this tirade on the Globe website.

For the most part Miller makes unjust generalizations about American students, but she pokes her head into some murky truths behind American students.

Comments.

<ol>
<li>On Cheating. </li>
</ol>

Agreed with TheGFG.

From personal experience (I am Asian), I’ve known a fair number of Asians (international and American-born) and Caucasian Americans who regularly cheat on tests. But they seemed to do it for vastly different reasons. My Asian friends admitted that they cheated partly in response to parental pressure in academics. They studied extremely hard, did the required work, but their grades were not sufficient in their eyes. If their hard work does not pay off, they will go the extra step, which in most cases, is some form of cheating. My American friends admitted to me that they simply did not WANT to do the work required and if they could get away with cheating, what is the harm? To them, learning chemistry was not important at all. They just wanted to pass and get on with life.

Belief in a God did not seem to deter the latter group either (attended conservative Christian school), where prayer was said before tests, and methodical cheating happened right after. Jesus was probably not too happy with that. Confucius most likely would barf at the behavior of his countrymen.

It is a problem in both cultures, but the cause, and potential remedies, are different for each culture.

<ol>
<li>On goofing off in class. </li>
</ol>

If the instructor finds this distracting, he or she should simply state clear rules on the syllabus, and punish offenders accordingly. Mandatory attendance, no cell phones, no latecomers to class, no sleeping, should be the norm, not the exception. Punishments should be severe enough to deter students from pursuing such activity. Again, this will help students succeed in the corporate world, where behavior will result in unemployment. There must be zero tolerance, both for the students benefit

<ol>
<li>On Business-School reqs. </li>
</ol>

Rhetoric is absolutely a necessity for B-School students. They need to learn how to write to be able to communicate effectively.

<ol>
<li>On Americans vs. Internationals. </li>
</ol>

Yes, the American’s seem to be more creative compared to the Oriental cultures which stress rote memorization, but I feel this difference has been exaggerated in our culture. Most of the time you NEED a solid foundation of basic mathematical skills and writing skills in order to succeed in becoming creative and successful. You can’t just run out there and “be creative”. Rote memorization is necessary, especially at lower learning levels. At the graduate level, rote memorization doesn’t work very well.

Again, look at the sciences, math, and engineering graduate students in the U.S. A great majority of them are foreign. They built up a solid base through learning (often through rote memorization) quantitative skills which prepare them for the next level of creating and asking the big questions. Most American’s find the quant section of the GRE a challenge. My mother, a humanities graduate student in the 90’s, who I would consider weak in math, thought the GRE quant was a joke.

iowejf · December 23, 2009, 1:32am

even then this is more of a stereotype than truth. i go to NU and my freshman roommate was from korea. i, like everyone, was fully aware of the hardworking asian stereotype but thought nothing of it until it became clear how much he and his insular group of about 30+ korean internationals defied it. none of them seemed to take academics very seriously; my roommate skipped class all the time, and earned very mediocre grades.

firehose · December 23, 2009, 3:58am

I find all the complaining about generalizations and stereotypes hilarious. On this topic generalizations and stereotypes are all we have to go off of. The thread title is a generalization so of course we are going to be making tons of them. We are just trying to figure out what is happening on a whole. It is not helpful when every time someone says something like “American students are lazier than Asian students”, it is countered with an anecdote saying “I have met plenty of hard working Americans and lazy Asians”. Of course there are always exceptions to generalizations, but I trust that most people here are intelligent enough to acknowledge their limits. This was not directed at any one person since some anecdotes are very insightful, it is more just that I am tired of people getting scolded for generalizations.

On a side note,
@mousegray and whoever else was discussing bribery
“Quote:
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…?
I think it’s called “tipping”. (Although I’m sure there are instances where it would be illegal to tip, I mean bribe a lay person.)”

Bribing outside of government hands is most defiantly illegal in the United States and is not the same as tipping. Tipping is something that is a reward for doing your some sort of job that you already have a responsibility to do. For example, I tip a waitress for providing me with a good service. However, she should have provided me with a good service anyways since that is part of her job description.

Now lets look at an example of bribery outside of the government. Let’s say I am a representative of a company who is looking to build a factory. I am in charge of choosing between two builders for the job. One of builders tries to give me (not the company but me personally) money under the condition that I choose him for the job. This is illegal.

The above example may not be perfect since that bribe would be awfully easy to see, but it nevertheless gets the point across. It is illegal to give a person of authority any sort of gift that causes him/her to have a conflict of interest. The tip is fine since it is it does not cause the waitress to have a conflict of interest with her employer, but the representative of the company would have a conflict of interest between what he has agreed to do for his company (make a decision that is wise for the company) and what he has agreed to do for the builder.

No intention of hijacking the thread, but I thought it was important to clear up the bribery misconception.

calmom · December 23, 2009, 4:07am

Going back to the article that started this thread, I figured that if this prof was going to write an article dissing half of her students, I’d check to see what her students say about her. I figured that disengaged students are often a sign of an uninspiring teacher – the students that teachers brand as “lazy” are often simply bored.

My own kids have had teachers they rave about and they will eagerly jump through hoops for, and profs they complain about and then end up foisting their sloppiest, most rushed work for. The bad work is not a sign of laziness – it’s usually a sign of disrespect for the teacher, typically brought about by the teacher’s own practices. (They rationalize: the teacher’s an idiot, so why waste time on her assignments).

So I checked the author’s page at [Kara</a> Miller - Babson College - RateMyProfessors.com](<a href=“http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ShowRatings.jsp?tid=1228585]Kara”>Kara Miller at Babson College | Rate My Professors)

There were 4 comments when I checked, all posted the same day (12/22) – so I figure some of her students were prompted to post after reading the article. I expected to see a litany of complaints, but was somewhat surprised to see a balance of mixed reviews. (They either love her or hate her):

OK… well mixed reviews aren’t that unusual; actually fairly typical for profs who evoke strong responses in their students. But since this thread has meandered through discussions of cultural expectations of Asian students and selection bias, it occurred to me that there may be something cultural involved here as well.

So I’ve got a hypothesis based on my own stereotype:

In general, American students expect classrooms to be participatory and engaging. They expect that their questions and opinions will be welcomed, and feel it is perfectly o.k. engage in dialog with their instructors and challenge or debate their teacher’s opinions and conclusions.

In many countries overseas, particularly in Asian countries, classes are conducted quite differently - students are expected to sit politely, listen and take heed to what the professor says. It is considered the height of rudeness to openly disagree with a teacher or to interrupt a lecture with probing questions.

So here’s the hypothesis:

What if we have a professor who is well informed and highly opinionated about the subjects she teaches (rhetoric and history), and gives long lectures filled with factual detail, and later gives tests and assignments that are based mostly on regurgitating what has been covered in class. To the international students who are used to being taught in an autocratic manner - - she seems great. She knows her subject, she covers a lot of information in class, and her expectations are clear – study and memorize what she has taught, and answer exam questions geared to eliciting the same material. Plus, she’s a lot nicer and friendlier than the teachers were in their home country – so they are happy and engaged.

But to the American students – this same teacher might seem deadly boring. They’d see her as someone who drones on and on about her own views, never giving credence to the opinions of the students, focused far too much on details rather than exploring the broader ideas or connections suggested by the material. They might feel patronized by writing assignments and exams that simply asked for repetition of superficial information they had learned in class rather than giving them an opportunity to explore their own ideas. So they’d start trying to get away with as little work as possible.

I’d note that in the article, the teacher complains of the inability of American students to find foreign countries on a map. This is the type of detail-oriented superficial knowledge highly valued by some teachers and in some cultures… but may seem trivial and irrelevant to American students more interested in exploring broad themes and concepts than memorizing facts like world capitals. In other words – the American students might expect that at a college level they will be exploring the how and why of things, whereas the immigrant students might be very happy to focus on the what, when, and where of things.

(I’m a how & why person myself – I tend to agree with Einstein that its a waste of brain power to memorize stuff that can easily be looked up).

Northstarmom · December 23, 2009, 4:13am

What the author probably doesn’t realize is that only the smartest and most highly motivated foreign students come to the U.S. to study. I didn’t realize this until I spent a couple of weeks volunteering in a developing country from which some of my top college students had come.

The students in the elementary/middle school that I volunteered with were the most rowdy, undisciplined, lazy, disinterested students I had ever seen – including when I had volunteered in inner city schools in the U.S. The rare exceptions stood out, and those were the students who’d get to go on to high school in a neighboring city.

The vast majority of the students, however, were destined to end their education at about 8th grade and to live hardscrabble lives in which they had children by a variety of partners, something that was the norm in that village.

One of my friends – a college professor – came to the U.S. to attend college. He was sponsored by his entire village in a developing country, which had picked the smartest youth in their village to send to college in the U.S. In return, he was expected to financially contribute to the village after he got his education.

He excelled academically here even though he was working at least 20 hours a week washing dishes and cleaning up in a restaurant. He told me that he had to excel – his entire village was depending on him, and if he hadn’t done well, he would have been so ashamed that he would have felt that suicide was his only choice.

These examples show why the foreign students described in the article did so well. The same would be true if we were sending our very top American students to study abroad. In fact, I’d imagine that our Rhodes Scholars probably are standouts at Oxford.

Northstarmom · December 23, 2009, 4:20am

On the subject of cheating and foreign students:

"Most of the concerns surrounding international students and cheating center around plagiarism, a form of cheating that’s all too common among American undergraduates, some of whom say they were never taught what was legitimate and what wasn’t. But while international students certainly are far from alone in cheating, their circumstances are often unique, and international student advisors and experts cite a whole host of specific reasons why international students might knowingly or unknowingly circumvent the system.

Foremost among them is that the Western style of citing sources isnt universal: Greenblatt points out that many Asian students, for instance, come from educational systems in which the norm is to repeat back a textbook or a professor verbatim (without a citation), as a sign of respect to the source of knowledge. In collectivist cultures, adds Petra Crosby, director of international student programs and a lecturer in the cross-cultural studies concentration at Carleton College, knowledge is often viewed as a shared endeavor, so copying doesnt always encapsulate the same connotation. Not to mention that knowledge itself can be defined differently, at least as far as whats common and doesnt need to be cited: Whats common knowledge in Indiana can, after all, be substantially different than what’s common knowledge in India.

Language barriers can also prevent students from fully understanding codes of conduct, and students feeling isolated in their classrooms not only by language but also by different teaching and learning styles may not be so inclined to contact faculty or other academic resources with their concerns about proper practices until its too late. Plus, of course, desperation can feed into cheating, and the stakes for international students struggling in their courses are often particularly high. In addition to understanding that international students may be somewhat confused about the norms of scholarship, that international dimension may also play out as the added pressure of doing well so they will not lose their visas, says Timothy Dodd, executive director of the Center for Academic Integrity, at Duke."

[News:</a> Cheating Across Cultures - Inside Higher Ed](<a href=“http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/24/cheating]News:”>http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/24/cheating)

But, to put things into perspective:

“While about 20% of college students admitted to cheating in high school during the 1940’s, today between 75 and 98 percent of college students surveyed each year report having cheated in high school.”

[Cheating</a> Fact Sheet - RESEARCH CENTER - Cheating Is A Personal Foul](<a href=“http://www.glass-castle.com/clients/www-nocheating-org/adcouncil/research/cheatingfactsheet.html]Cheating”>Cheating Fact Sheet - RESEARCH CENTER - Cheating Is A Personal Foul)

DocT · December 23, 2009, 7:45am

I teach engineering classes and every semester I have students cheating on both exams and homework. Sometimes its difficult to prove especially with homework. I expect that the students will work together on the homework but I also demand that each one of them understands the work. What I typically do is I have my students volunteer (or I pick them) to work out the homework at the board. It becomes very obvious and painful for some of them when it is clear that they don’t have a clue even though they’ve worked out the problems correctly on their turned in assignments.

Inkling · December 23, 2009, 8:38am

While the rest of your statement may be true, it’s certainly not nonsense to assert that professors expect students to take non-proctored exams without cheating.

UMich professors aren’t stupid; if they expected cheating, they’d stay in the room. And for the record, to my knowledge most students don’t cheat on those exams. But there are definitely some that do. I know a couple of them.

Queen_s_Mom · December 23, 2009, 8:58am

That depends. D currently has a high school take home exam. She got a phone call yesterday from friends who were doing the test together and she refused to participate. The group of friends includes Asians and non-Asians, so I really don’t think that has much to do with anything.

However, what I found interesting is that these are the top students in the class with the best grades. They will get into the top colleges and cheat their way through them as well. I think the increasing emphasis on grades and scores, with the concomitant minimization of class room discussion has led to rampant cheating. The payoff is just too great, the risk of getting caught is minimal, and the consequences of getting caught (at least in D’s high school) are almost non-existent.

Northstarmom · December 23, 2009, 10:36am

“I have a rule-anything unsupervised is fair game (i.e. a takehome exam). Even a non-proctored in-class exam. You’re kidding yourselves if you think students don’t work together when you give a takehome exam.”

During my one year as a grad student at Stanford – where students could take their exams wherever they chose – I never saw nor heard of anyone cheating.

shawbridge · December 23, 2009, 10:46am

Back to the work ethic part of the article, she’s talking about something important and real, but only part of the picture. Our educational system is three-tiered: 1) a vicious meritocracy at the top (say 10%) who vie for super-selective schools and super-selective grad schools; 2) a painfully mediocre middle that I’ll discuss below; and 3) schools in urban and poor rural areas that suffer from malign neglect and disinterest.

We live in a town with a very good public HS (and relatively affluent, educated parents). Teachers have lots of interactions with parents – both good in supporting the school and the kids education and bad in helicoptering. Even in this town, many parents are as interested or more in the kids’ athletic prowess than in their academic performance (reflecting a flaw, I would argue, in the admissions policies of our selective schools that were developed as a way to perpetuate anti-Semitism among the Ivies, but that’s another discussion). But, many of these teachers began their career at schools in lesser school systems and tell me that they are unused to parents caring and being actively involved. Parents cared, if at all, about athletics, and kids went through the motions of academics and parents did not care that kids did not care. Effort levels were typically not high. The teachers are thrilled to be at our school. However, even at our school, there is intense effort at the top and kids go to the Ivies, Amherst, Williams, MIT, Stanford, the Claremont Schools, etc. The honors part of the school has better placement than my daughter’s private high school. But if you drop down a couple of levels, you get kids who don’t always hand in their homework and don’t work particularly hard in studying for tests, etc. but whose parents dutifully went to all soccer matches. I think that the professor at Babson is seeing lots of those kids, who never felt that they had to put in serious effort in school and whose parents didn’t make the effort a priority.

As an employer, I see the same things (again with a small sample). At the high level, I hire kids from the vicious meritocracy, and they are unbelievably hard workers who try to do a super high quality job (some engage in a lot of political game-playing as well, but that goes along with the territory for high performers). I see no distinction in effort between US and non-US kids. At a middle level, I’ve had both US and non-US kids and do see a major difference in work ethic between the US kids and the Indian/Chinese. However this is not uniform, my best employee of all time was a UMass Amherst grad from a working class family who kept thinking and trying to improve things, not only solving problems but putting in place systems to prevent future occurrences, and one of my was an Indian kid who went to Babson and just didn’t seem to have the horsepower. There is a bit lower level of creativity in the Chinese group, but the work ethic has been fabulous. At an admin level, I’ve got only Americans and the work ethic is decidedly mixed. Some fly out the door at 5.

I have a small sample view as an advisor to companies around the world. I was once stuck at a company in the Midwest for a couple of weeks, reviewing very sensitive documents that could not leave the office. As someone whose work experience has been in Boston and New York, I would work well into the evening. I got help from the employees there, who were usually competent, thoughtful and fundamentally really nice people. All church-going folk, no ethnic folks among them. Their primary interests seemed to be family and Nebraska Cornhuskers football. I had to prep for the latter prior to trips there or I wouldn’t be able to participate in lunch-time conversations. On my first day of that two weeks there, at 5:10, I walked out of the conference room I was working in to discover that everyone on the entire floor was gone. The most dangerous place to be in that town was probably at the exit of the building at 5:01. Born and bred as part of the vicious meritocracy, that was stunning to me. IIt turns out that these employees won’t fly on Sunday for a business meeting on Monday, so you can only have them come to you on Tuesdays through Thursdays. So, these guys work pretty well, but if the dog ate their homework or the IT systems are having problems that prevent them from delivering a result, they’ll still go home at 5 and finish it the next day. Not what I’d ask for from a vendor. But, I think that the work ethic I saw from mid-level management there is just an outgrowth of the kind of thing the professor sees at Babson. And, it is probably their kids (or the equivalent) that the Babson professor sees.

So, the work ethic problem, in my mind, is American, but not limited to kids. But, I don’t see it at the top, in the meritocracy, but below that, in middle management, and often even worse at the admin levels. There are many good people at all levels, but I do think that we have, as a country, become to feel entitled to a level of material satisfaction without being willing to put in the effort and creativity that are needed to generate it. The kids at Babson are just one example of this disconnect.

lake42ks · December 23, 2009, 10:52am

Students at good schools don’t cheat. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why many cannot get in. Just maybe.

bruno123 · December 23, 2009, 11:13am

I believe the honor code is taken very seriously in some schools and, generally speaking, students there don’t cheat in non-proctored in-class exams or take-home exams.

b_r_um · December 23, 2009, 11:23am

I have had at least 20 take-home exams in my first five semesters of college, most of them open-book unlimited-time exams (sometimes even open-library or open-internet). On the few exams that had a time limit, I am aware of one or two instances where a student has worked beyond the time limit, but that is the only “large-scale cheating” I know of. I have yet to notice collaboration on a take-home exam.

My lazy American students (Boston Globe)

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