<p>The article seem to focus on the cheating culture quite substantially. Cheating to gain admittance and cheating once they are here. REinforces the first hand stories I have heard from kids who have studied in China.</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/the-china-conundrum.html[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/the-china-conundrum.html</a></p>
<p>Very interesting read.
Selected comments from this long article:
</p>
<p>If the students from China have not integrated well with the rest of the student body, then the colleges have only their [the college’s] greed to blame. </p>
<p>The colleges turned a blind eye in admitting full-pay applicants who were committing fraud in their applications. Would they have been as accommodating to in-state applicants?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Come on Mr. Tom and Ms. Karin, you should know he is Mr. Fan, not Mr. Yisu.</p>
<p>The title of the article is: The China Conundrum.</p>
<p>I just don’t see the conundrum. There’s no riddle here, just a deliberate strategy to enroll more full-pay students. </p>
<p>The suggestion that colleges accept the cheating kids from China to achieve the colleges’ diversity goals is bunk! There are lots of Asian American kids that they reject for the same diversity reason.</p>
<p>Somehow, this story doesn’t bother me too much. The really fraudulent students end up paying big bucks for a year (or more) of remedial English classes, which may not do them any good. The colleges that are doing this have to deal with all the problems. Maybe they deserve each other.</p>
<p>If you read the whole article, the focus seems to be more the financial boon the Chinese kids bring to the universities, not the issue of cheating, and the cultural differences that make it difficult to integrate these kids.</p>
<p>@Hunt,
I didn’t notice in the article any mention of the cheating kids being tossed out for misrepresentation in their applications.</p>
<p>The cultural difference is greatly exacerbated by inadequate English ability. These kids should demonstrate English proficiency BEFORE they are admitted, not after they are admitted.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t have the gall to go to college in France w/o a command of French, if I knew the curriculum would be conducted in French</p>
<p>Why should they be tossed out as long as they are shelling out thousands of bucks for remedial English classes? After that, the college gets another chance to determine if they will be accepted into regular classes.</p>
<p>Leaving aside the ethics of the situation, of course.</p>
<p>
Exactly. Lets have someone write the applicants essay, doctor their application and maybe cheat on their TOEFL test. Then hope they learn enough English in their cram course over the summer to survive in a US college/university. Colleges want students to be able to succeed, graduate and be supportive alums. If they arent able to succeed in school due to language challenges, this would be a foolhearty strategy. That said, previous administrations were providing financial incentive for colleges to accept more international students. Talk about enrollment management.</p>
<p>It the ethics I’m concerned about. If an in-state student gained admission and it was later discovered that he/she fraudulently checked a racial category or lied about in-state status, you think the college would look the other way?</p>
<p>The amount of cheating described in the article is astonishing!</p>
<p>
Is it a full-pay student or not? Seriously, I don’t think they would.</p>
<p>But I do think this situation is a little more complicated. I question whether the Chinese students who do this even know (at least until they come here) that they are doing anything unethical. Rather, they are being packaged by consultants. Heck, the students can’t even read the admissions materials, or the essay they supposedly “wrote.” Also, the students may not, within their cultural setting, think there is anything unethical about this in the first place. So it seems to me that the colleges are really asking for this situation.</p>
<p>Like GMT, the lack of ethics worries me. If (and that is a BIG “if”, I don’t have the facts), one of these students knowingly participated in fraud to get admitted, seems to me his judgment and ethics would be sufficiently shoddy for him to cheat in class, too. So my kid has to compete against such cheaters in her coursework? Hope my kid’s college is trying hard to screen out students who knowingly cheated on their applications.</p>
<p>Hearing the American college officials dismiss the monetary incentive and the fraud as essentially ‘a little bit of corruption’ is like hearing the old cliche ‘being a little bit pregnant.’ There’s no such thing. The present program of recruiting Chinese students is either corrupt or it isn’t.</p>
<p>My guess is that this problem with application fraud and poor and incomplete assimilation by these particular Chinese students into American university life will only get worse as long as this phenomena is driven by money, willingly paid by foreign parents whose kids cannot get into oversubscribed and elite universities in their home countries. So why not head to America where the wheels can be readily greased for you with few questions asked?</p>
<p>Let’s say you live in China. Your English isn’t that good, but you’d like to go to college in the U.S. What do you do? Well, you find out what others do, and what they do is hire somebody to manage the process for you. It’s that guy who’s the real cheater–and that’s the guy the colleges are playing ball with. Of course, some students may know that they’re perpetrating fraud as well. But I suspect they’re just told that this is what everybody does.</p>
<p>It’s clear to me from the article that these fraudulent students are holding back the other students. Why else would professors have to lower their standards on the way they teach. </p>
<p>This article does not paint the University of Delaware in a very good light.</p>
<p>The Ivy League schools also have this fraud problem – in spades! So much so, that the Ivies are now forced to send out to China interviewers who actually sit with the applicants to see if they can speak English and now give written exams in order to actually determine whether the kid can write English (at least well enough to have written his own essay). It is easy to cheat in China: pay for the best transcript, pay for the best recommendations, pay for invented ECs, pay someone to take your SAT, etc. etc. Since the Ivies (like most colleges) have relied on the essential honesty and integrity of the applicants, they are being shamefully gamed by the Chinese. It is a total embarrassment. Some colleges want the full-pay Chinese and it doesn’t matter to them that the Chinese cheated to get there. The stories are not apocryphal: many, many Chinese out and out cheat their way into the Ivies and the Ivies are way too embarrassed to say anything about it. But, as I have noted above, they are now expending significant admissions dollars and efforts to protect themselves – about time!</p>
<p>You make some great points Hunt. What we in the U.S. ordinarily think of cheating is not considered malevolent at all in China. The author’s point about the concept of intellectual property and the distain for individuality and individual creativity in China bears this out. But I’d feel better about having these particular students at U.S. universities if they exposed themselves more to American philosophical ideals. They don’t have to agree with, but since they came here for an “American education” they should listen to and learn from us.</p>
<p>@Hunt,</p>
<p>“Your English isn’t that good, but you’d like to go to college in the U.S. What do you do? Well, you find out what others do, and what they do is hire somebody to manage the process for you. It’s that guy who’s the real cheater”</p>
<p>There’s no entitlement to an education in the U.S., just because “you’d like to”. Heck, I like France and would love to go to college there, but if the curriculum is in French and I’m not proficient, then I have no business being in a university there. </p>
<p>You give these kids a pass because you say they probably can’t even understand the application because it’s in English. Well, maybe a kid needs to be able to read/understand the application first. </p>
<p>I’m not trying to pick on China. I don’t think a kid from France who isn’t proficient in English has any business being accepted into a U.S. college either.</p>