Uni Exams and CHEATING

[wOZfromOZ]

Just thought I'd do an interim report and give my 2 cents here. I was with a fellow teacher this morning and a Chinese admin staffer invigilating a 3rd year LSR (Listening Speaking Reading) exam.

Compared to the rather messy situation with exam taking when I came to this uni here over 2 years ago the cheating in the exams I'm in is now at ground zero. They come in no one smoking, eating, fooling around, herding, etc and sit in there allocated seats, shutup when required, dont communicate and dont cheat. Also I'm experiencing politeness, with hands up, stop, wait and speak when spoken to etc.

Tell them to stop work and all the pens go down and the papers immediately come in. They remain seated until being asked to vacate the room.

Things are on the up and up!

wOZfromOZ

[Raoul Duke]

I'm at the same institution. While I don't get the genteel behavior Wokka sees, I have never caught anyone cheating here.

We do get plenty of help invigilating (a word apparently too much for my "English" teaching colleague to handle. I've never seen it used anywhere else; it's apparently a la-de-da Commonwealth term for "Watchin' yer ass while yez takes muh test") major exams and there are some pretty strictly enforced rules (no personal belongings at the desk, no phones, etc.) that apply. I also give my Fear Of God^(TM) speech before tests, and am fond of drinking about 40 cups of strong black coffee (since I can't find impure amphetamines or cocaine here) beforehand so that I am wired up to nicely tense and uptight for the testing session. On testing day I am nobody's friend, and I won't trust these guys in a roomful of nuns.

[Hamish]

I just reprinted this and read it to nine dombstruck classes. Students in Baoding cheat more than anybody I have ever seen in my life...even more than I did...much more.

I tried to give them the fear of GOD during my non-stop rants last week.

I had 'em sending me emails asking for forgivness. I gave half a class full of fourth year students zeros for the first half of the year because I caught them cheating. They can't believe it. Nor can they believe that the school is supprting my draconian tactics.

Heh heh.


The Chinese Ministry of Education issued an emergent notice on December 27, 2003 ordering high education institutions to curb cheating in examinations.

Soon after, the ministry issued another writ early this month asserting that any examinee caught bringing cell phones or other communication equipment into exams in the National Entrance Examination to Graduate Schools and the National Self-study Higher Education Examination scheduled for January will be deemed to be cheating.

College students in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, southwest China said cheating is out in the open and unsurprising as in their school open plagiarism and mass cheating replaces previous petty behaviour such as smuggling in notes and passing on answers.

Xiao Yu, a woman college student, said, on condition of anonymity, that she and her roommates had witnessed or at least heard about a lot of cheating.

She went on to say that when she took an exam for an economics course on December 12, 2003 she saw many students occupy “favorite” seats and plant their “friends” around them to facilitate helping each other before the exam.

Zhang, Xiao Yu’s roommate, said when she took an exam the week before she saw examinees displaying what she called “special skills.” They smuggled notes, books and cell phones into the exam. A guy stunned her as he passed his test paper to a woman student in the back row after he finished plagiarizing from answers contributed by other examinees. And what seems more incredible is that the invigilator seemed to turn a blind eye to the illicit behavior.

An officer with the student affairs department of a Guangxi university said that students have began to use “hi-tech” equipment such as beepers, cell phones, electronic dictionaries and personal digital assistants to help them cheat.

The officer also said he once seized thick, smuggled notes from an examinee who confessed at last that he had spent a whole week copying out the notes.

“It’s really baffling to me that a student would rather spend that much time preparing to cheat than preparing for the exam,” he said with a forced smile.

“Those who would rather fail exams than cheat are idiots,” said Liu, a junior. “Today many student’s minds are just not on learning and consequently know almost nothing teachers have taught them. How can they memorize such an enormous amount of knowledge several days before an exam? So, they have to cheat.”

Xiao Lu, a woman student, said that she cheated because she wanted high scores to please her parents.



“So many people cheat in exams, I feel I would lose out if I kept honest,” said Zhong, a foreign language student at a Guangxi college. “In some classes everybody cheats and they would be called hypocrites if they kept upright.”

And there are other students, men in particular, who cheat for the sake of personal loyalty to their friends.

All in all, those interviewed said most students cheated and those who are absolutely honest are small in number.

Some students blame the situation on the lenient attitudes of teachers and school authorities.

They said not every teacher is strict and there are always some teachers who like to “wink” at cheating.

Also, many schools give only small punishments to cheating students, which actually encourages rather than deters cheating.

Ms. Zhang, a college student who will graduate this summer, said that she has a classmate who received a punishment of a one-year graduation suspension for cheating when she was a freshman but will now graduate like her classmates this summer. This happened because the school authorities arranged an extra exam for her with the excuse of “restudying the course.”

Sources with Ms. Zhang’s school said that the purpose of punishment is to educate and a student’s future could really suffer if they were actually suspended.

Some interviewed students said that they are not really afraid of punishments from schools because their senior fellow students tell that teachers eventually pardon everybody and cheating records are never included in personnel files as is threatened in school regulations.

In Xi’an, the city famous for its terracotta warriors and horses, flyers for recruiting substitute examinees in the National Entrance Examination appeared in local universities this month, offering 2,000 yuan (US$241.92) for each course. It’s reported that most imposters are current graduate students.

In 2003, disclosure of test papers happened at two national examinations: the National College Entrance Examination in June and the College English Test Band 4 in September.

In the wake of rampant cheating on campuses, some local education authorities and universities also launched crackdowns.

The Education Department of southeast China’s Jiangsu Province said this month it would bring university heads to account for serious cheating incidents.

In Chengdu, southwest China’s Sichuan Province, the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China published the names of 41 students, including an MBA student, who cheated in recent examinations on its intranet and dismissed 17 of them.

(China.org.cn by Chen Chao and Daragh Moller, January 14, 2004)

[Raoul Duke]

One thing I'll hand to SILC....Final exams have a strict seating chart prepared by the university. Students must sit in their assigned spot with their photo ID card sitting out on the table before them. These cards are randomly inspected by the invaginators throughout the exam. Invigilators had been selected from the clueless, airplane-glue-sodden administrative staff, but this seems to be giving way to proctoring by actual teachers.

I sometimes think SILC is an acronym for "Should I Leave China?", but there is much worse to be had out there. Kind of frightening, really.

[wOZfromOZ]

Hamish
Interesting article ! - thanks for sharing that one.

This cheating thing is not quite so institutionalised as some would paint it though. My wife's experience in the late 80's at a university in Shanghai was a little different. She said she and her friends never cheated and absolutely loathed anyone who did. Some apparently who did temp fate and found themselves caught out were delt with severely. (whatever that means)

cheers mate
wOZfromOZ

[Steiner]

I think "dealt with severely" means that the cheaters had to listen to a ten minute lecture on what bad students they were.

I wonder what made the administration and government finally decide to crack down on cheating, at least in word. I suppose all those in power now got there by cheating somewhere or everywhere along the way. Perhaps they see it as a way to safeguard their jobs.

In any case, good job on adding this appropriate smiley:
China makes Dali seem normal and humdrum. Real surrealism is much better than painted surrealism.

[Roger]

In my English LIterature class I held 9 years ago, I quickly learned my ropes.
From my first test on, I would hand out different questionnaires to students so that not any two sitting side by side had the same ones.
It soon got me intro trouble with the pwoers-that-were.

On the other hand, I allowd them to use their textbooks so they could reference their answers by quoting from the text. I also alllowed them to use their dictionaries because my thinking was that only idiots are too lazy to look the spelloing of a word up.
Strangely enough, these freedoms were not viewed benignly. I was told that was not acceptable...
Whereas my anti-copying measures were equally frowned upon!

Ah, Raoul: What's an "invaginator"?

[Raoul Duke]

Roger said:

Ah, Raoul: What's an "invaginator"?

Good catch, Roger! Of course I meant 'invigilator'.

[Wolf]

I instilled the Fear of God into my students about cheating on my exams. Well, first off, for my converstation classes I made them speak for their exam, so not too many ways to fake that one.

For my literature exam, I was allowed to be an invigilator. There were also 2 Chinese invigilators per room. As I was the one who corrected all the bloody papers later, I have to say that it seemed that either no one cheated, or they had all suddenly gotten better at it. I also gave only short answer questions which I hope were based on the term's work.

I try to make it clear that a)in MY class there is no cheating b) I usually don't fail students who bother to try and c) their grades will be meaningless if they try to get work in foreign companies. Actual langague ability will be important then, not how much wool they tried to pull over my eyes.