My friend makes a living writing these kinds of papers, primarily for Chinese students in Australian universities. He’s brilliant and can write on any subject (often the students provide notes / data, so it’s more about writing than topic knowledge).
What annoys me is that this is rampant, and universities know it (or they’re intentionally being naive). But rather than crack down on those who are paying course fees, plus paying someone else to do their work. It would be nice if they put some effort into finding those who are actually writing all these papers and enabling them.
Make them tutors, professors, ‘student assistants’, what ever. Some people will always cheat, who cares. In the end they cheat themselves, and it’s up to companies to screen people to ensure they actually have the capabilities they require. Rather than spend on removing the cheaters, spend on enabling the honest. Or even better, transfer directly from the cheaters to the honest, which is effectively what happens, but in the shadows.
But for my friend, who is a perfect match for academia, this is his funding model.
I hope one day he can be credited with all the papers he’s actually written.
Studying at University in Australia as an international student is not about the education, its about the immigration pathway it enables. Australia has something like 600,000 international students, second only to the USA, because all international students are immediately given a work visa, and then can permanently migrate to the country fairly easily at the end of the degree. Once you have PR you can access welfare and medicare, and can bring your whole family over eventually.
Yep the whole thing is a total scam. My local Coles (Australian supermarket) is 100% staffed by overseas people who did a degree (mostly accounting from my informal questioning) here in Australia and who got PR via this degree.
It isn't a scam if it is working exactly as intended
It's a backdoor way into Australia that not many Australians know about and nobody rocks the boat on because everybody knows the country needs the migrants and investment.
Ditto with the investment visas. Pretty crazy when at the same time everybody loses their minds over boats with a few hundred people on them
Australia does not need more migrants. Our entire economy is a Ponzi scheme based around immigration driving ever higher house prices. The more the major parties ignore this issue the more power it gives to those on the political extremes.
The issue with the boats is it would not be a few hundred people for very long as the Europeans have found out over the last few years.
We re building masses of houses. The problem is not the building of houses, but the not building of all the infrustructure required to support all the new residents - roads, schools, hospitals, public transport, sewerage, electricity, water, etc.
It is not xenophobia to want to see responsible development where development only occurs when it is supported by the infrustucture. If we can't afford to build the infrustucture then don't create the housing.
Immigration levels are at all-time highs into Australia right now. The #1 source country is India, #2 China. Australia hit 25 million people 33 years earlier than planned, and annual migration levels are about 300,000.
Immigration is achieving the following:
- Lowers wages by increasing supply of labour, including creating a pool of workers willing to be employed at illegal rates - $10/hour. Many workers are willing to work for these rates, substantially below minimum wages, because it is more than they would earn in their home country, and because of promises from the employer that they will sponsor them for permanent residency. (Typically they will be paid correct minimum wage for 20 hours work, but in reality be staffed to work 30 to 50 hours).
- Increasing demand on public services. More people means a greater need for shared services: health, education, public transport, roads, welfare. Considering that the majority (~80%) of new migrants are going to Melbourne and Sydney, two built-up mature megacities of 5 million people, adding more services to these cities is incredibly expensive (eg. a new rail line means tunnelling, land buy-back, extensive shutdowns of existing road and rail etc).
- Increases consumption. This means increased consumer demand throughout the economy, simply based on the higher number of people. However, it also means consumption in an environmental sense: increased demand for water (which we need to desalinate, on the margins), increased demand for food and land (resulting in land clearance), increased CO2 emissions (Australia is a CO2 intensive country), increased pollution and waste.
- Increased demand for land and housing. Young Australians can no longer buy a house in their own country, and home ownership is at historical lows. Huge amounts of houses are being converted to large apartments.
So, if you're a land-owner and business-owner, happy days. You have greater demand for the things you own, and lower wages to pay out. If you're a tradesperson, you're also benefiting a lot from the intense housing and infrastructure construction activity. If you're an average Australian, you have lower wages, higher congestion on public services, increased taxes to pay for those services to be expanded, and no hope (in many cases) of buying your own house.
There is also the added social friction of these two large groups of migrants moving to the country - Indian and mainland Chinese culture is dissimilar to Australian. Already we are seeing neighbourhoods stratified by ethnicity.
Why was beerlord's comment (same depth as this comment) flagged and killed? It was a perfectly reasonable (and informative) comment. Was it not sufficiently pro immigration?
They're not cheating just themselves. The impact of cheating is way more widespread than that. Often if one person cheats off of another student - they both suffer the consequences, if caught. Regardless of the other student(s) being aware someone cheated off of them. If you're doing group work and one person decides to plagiarize the entire group could be in serious trouble with the institution.
It goes further too. It undermines the integrity of the school. Lets say that cheater gets by as you've suggested - now they're in the workforce and their boss realizes they're not very good. This doesn't reflect well on where they obtained their credentials.
Worst is that they took a spot at a university that could have been given to a student that wanted to learn.
You should also evaluate your friendship with this person. You want them to get credit but it annoys you with how rampant it is. I wouldn't associate with someone that was doing this on an ongoing basis.
I'll bring up another reason why this is bad - your friend is writing papers while lacking the technical background of that topic. Sure he has notes and can research but this is not enough. There is a reason why reading webMD and self-diagnosing is not a completely creditable route. Sure your friend might be right, but they also could be wrong AND misguiding people that come across his papers.
In Australia at least, no spot was “taken”. As most of the cheaters are overseas full paying students, and there are near an unlimited number of those places available. (They cost big $$$, as other comments have stated, it’s a track to residency)
But my point is more that, universities could look at the ‘problem’ and contain it internally rather than the current outside model.
University students require some income to survive.
Some students are not capable of completing the work required (or don’t want to).
Some students are MORE than capable of completing their degree, on top of others.
So pair them up. One on one tutoring, paring students who can’t with those that can.
Then at least the students doing all the work get paid and recognised for their capabilities. Those that want a piece of paper can have it.
Without this my friend (and other gifted students) end up working some mindless job for minimal pay to get through university. Who does that serve? If anything it takes an unskilled position away from the unskilled.
There are viable forms of tutoring available for honest students who want to make some income, already, either University funded positions or private tutoring.
Your friend may lack the soft skills for tutoring, and definitely lacks the ethics to earn money honestly.
I'm in uni in Australia and the unis will take literally anyone who will pay. There was a leaked report showing they were accepting people with atars in the bottom 15%.
The price necessarily implies there is demand for international students and with that you can conclude that yes, they did take a spot - from another international student.
Worst is that they took a spot at a university that could have been given to a student that wanted to learn.
Gee, I feel like I'm on another planet to people in this thread. Am I super-naïve or something?
What about - worst is, it makes a total farce of the entire university system? Does no-one care about that?? If you can just pay to get someone to write your work, how is that better than a non-existing diploma mill? Isn't the whole idea, to educate people? If they've just paid for a bit of paper, and that's ok, why do we need universities at all?
As a former academic yes the universities know this is happening and apply great internal pressure to ensure it continues so the gravy train keeps going. It is a very bad idea for your career to try to do something about this by identifying the cheats.
The hard sciences are pretty immune to it at the undergraduate level (we have exams), but it is totally rampant in the economics/commerce/arts facilities. Where the hard sciences have issues is at the postgraduate level where you are expected to ensure all your overseas students graduate even if they can't write in English and know next to nothing about the topic. After you have been through an incoherent thesis draft for the fourth time you know it is going to be quicker to just write it yourself.
All models are broken. But if you model most organizations with perpetual boards, as universities do, as partnerships run for the benefit of senior administrators and in the case of universities a handful of powerful faculty you’ll find it’s a pretty good fit.
Do you mean the postgraduate science students? That is a good question, but I can say of science Ph.D students if you come with a scholarship from your home country and can fog a mirror then the Australian universities will accept you.
I should add that some of the best Ph.D students I have worked with were overseas students. It is not that all overseas students are bad, just that the bottom 25% are not capable of doing a Ph.D and yet we still give them a degree.
Yes. There is a very healthy market for every major standardized test (GRE, GMAT, etc.) as well as most (all?) of the major English proficiency tests.
Every security measure I have heard of for western testing within the PRC can be bribed around, and it’s so commonplace that it barely warrants discussion (“of course it happens [eyeroll]”.
I have heard of a few US schools doing on-campus retests for English proficiency, but mismatches are simply met with required ESL courses (paid non-credit, of course). I have not heard of other on-campus testing, and I’m not sure anyone wants it since these students usually pay full tuition.
So you don't think this is bad in any way? That your friend is behaving very unethically? That cheating is fine:
Some people will always cheat, who cares.
I'd rather the next doctor/surgeon I need didn't get someone else to write their uni work, thanks very much. Apart from that I don't want anything to do with anyone that unethical. It's sociopathic.
In the end they cheat themselves
You're most concerned about how their cheating affects the cheater?!
my friend, who is a perfect match for academia
I can't tell if you loathe both academia and your friend's ethics, or neither. Neither, it seems to me. Amazing. Did you cheat too? If not, why not?
It is very much the universities job to screen these people. They put out a credential that says a person learned such and such. If they do not learn anything, then that credential becomes worthless and the universities role is finished.
This is sketchy and unfair to students that actually do the work. But apparently it is a cultural accepted thing to cheat blatantly in china. And Universities are more than likely going to do nothing to stop it because the tuition rate for international students has a much better profit margin than in-state students. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/101323...
You would think that all of this non-learning going on would reflect in the reputation of Chinese labor in some HR network or another, along with other parts of the too-good-to-be-true Chinese economy. But maybe education is just overrated relative to OJT? Or maybe the cheapness of such labor flooding the market outweighs the demand for quality? Or nepotism? Or there's a cost to making such blanket statements publically even if they're "sound" in the "this is a good heuristic" sense?
It's interesting blatant stereotypes about Asian and Asian Americans are thrown around like it's acceptable. Would you ever make statements like "it's cultural acceptable for black community to condone thefts and petty crimes, and politicians won't do anythign because it's inconvenient?"
Just because statistics reveal a uptick for one group, does not make it acceptable for you to generalize. It's a racist remark, just so you understand the unconscious bias
Its not just statistics. Its painfully obvious to anyone currently in uni. Every single person I have seen cheating has been Asian. And the teachers do nothing. Had one guy in my class get caught cheating for the 3rd time and still nothing has happened.
I mean, there are a number of racists things. Saying something like "But apparently it is a cultural accepted thing to cheat blatantly in china" and then "Every single person I have seen cheating has been Asian".
Imagine if someone said something like "Apparently it is culturally accepted thing for cops to shoot black people"
I mean, you can find a ton of examples of this happening, and plenty of examples of nobody doing anything about it. Does that mean it is culturally accepted here?
Lots of people would criticize USA culture by saying something like "Apparently it is culturally accepted thing for cops to shoot black people". Apparently it is, because we do not see any significant changes being made to the training, regulation, or military equipment of police.
This isn't racism. It has absolutely nothing to do with race. Most people who hold this view have no negative views against racially asian people who are culturally north american.
It is culturist (to make up a word). There's a huge difference between this and racism in that culture, unlike race, creates clear statistical differences in behavior.
There are good arguments that discriminating based on culture would have many negative effects, not unlike racism. That as a result of the negative effects we shouldn't treat people differently as a result of the culture they are coming from. Moreover there are already laws in many places attempting to enforce that.
Burying your head in the sand and denying that there are culture differences however is insane. It's entirely obvious statistically, and anecdotally that they exist. Burying your head in the sand is exactly what you (or rather volgo) are suggesting when you are saying that people shouldn't be making statements about the differences between cultures.
Since we are dabbling in anecdotes.. I am not sure if you are including Indians in this "Asians cheat" assertion. This Indian for one was brought up with the philosophy that knowledge / teachers are identical to God. Whether or not I believe in God is a different question. However it was always clear that cheating in exams was not culturally accepted. Not by a long shot. There is an extremely unhealthy emphasis on grades, but cheating in all it's forms was looked down upon.
I'm an Indian teaching Indians in India, and there are quite a few students who don't see anything wrong in cheating. Not to say anything about the blatant cases of cheating and mass cheating in school-leaving exams that regularly make the news in India.
I can't say if cheating is more of less acceptable in India than elsewhere, and for sure very many students in India are honest and genuinely interested in learning, but people treating knowledge and teachers as divine is far from reality.
It's also painfully obvious to anyone who lived in large urban centers in US that certain races steal statistically more than other races.
Do you make a comment about that? No, because you have no context and you'll likely be shunned in polite society. You have a James Damore syndrome and probably will not help you in your career
No. What is "interesting" is the blatant disregard for facts because of the association that they have with race.
There is no question at this point that Chinese culture encourages cheating. It has been written about in media, it's all over Amazon, IP theft is a known issue, and it is ALL OVER universities. I regularly had Chinese students sitting in the back of class openly whispering during exams, while professors for some inane reason turned blind eyes. My anecdote is not unique.
Facts do not change simply by being denied, and the fact that a pattern of behavior is associated with a nationality or race does not mean it should be swept under the rug. Problems are only solved when they are identified.
>Would you ever make statements like "it's cultural acceptable for black community to condone it's cultural acceptable for black community to condone thefts and petty crimes, and politicians won't do anythign because it's inconvenient?
If statistics showed such, then yes, any sane person would say that. Also ironic that ignoring only negative cultural differences is a privileged Western affordance - our friends make no such mistakes in China and much of Asia, speaking as someone who lived in the region for years.
Feel free to point out the irrationality of any part of my post.
You are resolving your cognitive dissonance by ignoring documented differences among cultures, which is fundamentally illogical. This seems to be an increasingly common pattern "in the modern workplace" and outside of it too.
What you should instead be doing is accepting that cultures are varied, but individuals must be given the benefit of the doubt in an ethical society.
The irrationality is assuming that you are able to be an impartial observer who can 'regularly' notice 'Chinese students sitting in the back of class openly whispering during exams' and that means that Chinese people cheat more.
We have so much evidence that these sorts of observations can so often be wrong. You are likely to not notice all the majority group people doing this, or at least not connect it as a pattern. Once you have an expectation that Chinese people are cheating, you are more likely to see innocent behavior as cheating, or even if they ARE cheating, more likely to catch them than the white guy sitting next to you also cheating (because you are paying more attention to the person you EXPECT to be cheating)
Now, of course, this could be wrong and your observations could be right. The irrationality comes in assuming you are right just because you observe something.
>The irrationality is assuming that you are able to be an impartial observer who can 'regularly' notice 'Chinese students sitting in the back of class openly whispering during exams' and that means that Chinese people cheat more.
1. You conveniently disregarded my emphasis on the fact that this is an increasingly common collective observation.
2. You cannot explain away every observation of cultural differences by allegations of confirmation bias.
It is absurd that we are supposed to ignore only negative cultural patterns.
Hell, we are talking about a group of people which has been indoctrinated by the Communist Party for decades, from birth for at least a generation. You really think it implausible that cheating on Western soil is culturally acceptable?
none of these examples are isolated incidents, and are patterns in our own culture. And if you live in this system, and the one pattern you observe is that Chinese students cheat, then there is probably some bias in your thinking.
You started this wretched flamewar and now have taken it to an even lower level. We have a high tolerance for assuming good faith on HN, but the stench of prejudice here is acrid.
If you do race war or nationalistic flamewar on HN again we will ban you.
there are facts and there are "facts". If most cheaters are Chinese it does not then follow that most Chinese people are cheaters - this is the fine line between discussing a cultural phenomenon and racism.
eg. it's ok to discuss violence in Black communities and cheating in Asia, but it would be racist to assert that because you are Black/Asian/White you are more predisposed to violence/cheating/racism
I don't see the conflict here. I think it's very factual and true that most Black people are not violent, most Chinese people are not cheaters, and most White people are not racist.
> it's ok to discuss violence in Black communities and cheating in Asia, but it would be racist to assert that because you are Black/Asian/White you are more predisposed to violence/cheating/racism
Your implication is that something cannot be true if it is racist. This is a non sequitor. Race should never have been brought up in the first place.
Drop the bone already, it’s not what he’s been saying. His point, and an excellent, nuanced point at that, is trying to explain that generalizing from limited occurrences within a community as resulting from the fact that the community is X, is racist. In other words I can say that there is a problem of white guys on the internet making arguments like yours and that’s fine, but if I try to extend that to a commentary on white guys as a group it isn’t. Most white guys aren’t disingenuous racists pointedly ignoring what someone else says to cynically repeat their own dogma. It’s the difference between trying to argue that there’s a problem of violence in black communities, vs. arguing that black people are inherently violent.
> there are facts and there are "facts". If most cheaters are Chinese it does not then follow that most Chinese people are cheaters - this is the fine line between discussing a cultural phenomenon and racism.
Nobody asserted that. So why is racism being discussed?
Personally I think all exams or any academic assessment should be open book/whatever. Entire class should be allowed to find solutions together with whatever means possible and there should not be time limit.
I think people mostly waste time at the universities learning things they will forget. Giving students a novel problem to solve and ask them to come back when they find the solution might work better in terms of sticking knowledge. This doesn't necessarily need to be a group project.
It would be great for learning, but requires an enormous amount of work for the academics involved. That side is pretty important in explaining why the system is the way it is. It is due to have some novel ideas injected about how to balance effectiveness and efficiency.
What do you do when large numbers of people don't care, and are content to leech off the few conscientious students who actually want to learn the material? This was a normal state of affairs during my undergrad at a crappy community college and state university. Group projects were a nightmare.
---
The best classes that I've taken have been "Feel free to collaborate, but turn in your own work." It allows people to work together on hard problems, but the slackers still fail.
Interesting - such a bland word, it says nothing. Why not say what you mean. Apparently you find it unacceptable, racist and biased. I find your comment ridiculous. If something the GP said was wrong, say so. You just tried to censor him, successfully it seems. I don't understand either of the sentences in your second paragraph. They both contain dubious, condescending claims. Apparently you are the police for this site. Telling others from on high what is not acceptable, what are their "unconscious biases". Who do you think you are? I don't buy it whatsoever.
Well his statement is definitely excessive, however I would agree that there is a shocking cultural problem with the acceptance of cheating in China.
I speak Mandarin and have lived in China, my partner is Chinese. I was shocked during her undergraduate and masters to see just how often cheating took place. Of her close ~8-10 friends, every single one paid for their work to be completed on multiple occasions. It was cheap and quick, and justified with things like “I have to go see a friend for a week, but I need to have the paper written by Thursday”. Costs for most pieces was in the region of $70-120.
The cultural attitude is that cheating is only bad unless you’re caught. Otherwise you’re cunning and able to succeed using any method; everyone does it so there’s nothing wrong.
My partner proofreads theses at an hourly rate well below market (students are broke. Predating on them at the closure of their study feels bad) and still can earn more than these quoted costs, fixing English language mistakes. Which makes me wonder how good the originals are, since it takes literally hours to correct semantic and syntactic confusions even by experienced domain-specific-language aware authors. (And yes, she has been asked to write from scratch for some clients and yes, she always declines)
TL;DR USD1,000 seems too low for writing a doctoral thesis. You can barely proofread one adequately for this, sometimes.
Yes.. the paywalled article is from China. Thing is.. Chinese PhD and masters students are cashed up. The good ones studying overseas are my partners main clients, seeking help with english as a second language.
These bad actors are paying for a Chinese thesis written inside China. Maybe competition keeps prices down.
Even at Ivy League universities, many native English speakers can't reliably write coherent paragraphs. Yes, it is mind-boggling, but this is my experience even in junior and senior level history seminars - and history majors have to read and write considerably more than many other majors, so presumably ought to be relatively practiced at writing by that point.
I think part of the problem is that students feel pressured to write Academic English as opposed to regular English and they contort their thoughts in the process of doing so. It happened to me while I was in university and didn't know better.
> This would be illegal in many economies,is grossly unfair and probably racist.
It's actually not illegal to not accept somebody based on them having a degree from a university of poor renown. It's called "qualification" and you can discriminate upon it all you want. It's also not unfair. Unfair would be accepting degrees from any place that hands out degrees like candy. It's also not racist, a lot of Chinese parents send their children to study abroad because they know Chinese universities suck. Those foreign degrees open up a lot of doors, both abroad and domestic.
> Plus, the rate of Chinese IPR and future knowledge is huge. Do you e.g. want to miss out on Chinese PV and wind and emerging battery know-how?
What's your point? Hire Chinese with junk degrees now so that you magically get to profit from future Chinese innovations?
a lot of Chinese parents send their children to study abroad because they know Chinese universities suck
I'm told the value of a British degree, once highly prestigious, is rapidly declining in China due to the number of degree mills (ex-polys) we have here churning out degree certificates as fast as they can cash the tuition fee cheques.
My time is actually more valuable than this. There are signals available to them to show they take original work seriously and are bucking their cultural trends of cheating academia to get worthless degrees.
> Universities ... are just squeezing out the last juices from the dying industry.
I agreed up to this point. Can you say more what you mean? University education is a dying industry? What about the massive and growing legislative requirements for degrees in all kinds of occupations?
I would say the advent of the internet has really changed how information is valued in society. Prior to this universities were places where critical thought and an discussion of new ideas could be formed.
The current situation is that it is more like institutions whoring out their brand names instead of fostering minds (Harvard lol)
In the past, the universities did well by mere fact of self selection since most people didn’t need college degrees to do well. Only the intellectually curious ventured in.
What I imagine happening later is that things will turn more into a guild model. Where you must have a certain level of competence / reputation to join.
This comment was probably specifically referring to universities specifically in the US.This is probably more specific to the US, where university was historically a means of socializing and networking for the sociopolitical elite and has since turned into an indicator of class or status. A lot of people are going into university because that's just what middle and upper class people do - a lack of a university education imparts a big cut in terms of status. Legislative requirements for degrees means that someone needs to study for 4 years (most of which will be on topics unrelated their job) otherwise they're locked out of employment options. People are forking over tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars mostly because society expects them to.
I think more and more people are realizing that the benefit of a university education isn't very good for the cost. Don't get me wrong, it is a positive return on investment, but it could probably be better structured as a vocational school for most people. If my parents didn't pay for my education, I probably would have tried doing a coding school and going directly into the workforce. I learned a lot of cool stuff in university, and attending a prestigious school opened up many opportunities. But most of the former was irrelevant to my job, and the latter is basically just an elaborate means of signalling status (which, while it definitely helped me I fundamentally don't think it'd be fair to hire a university grad simply for being a university grad if a non-grad as the same or better skills).
Not just that, github is abused in china now, you pay and they will set up a repo for you, star it for you, so you can show your potential employer "your" github repo, it's a business operation now.
There is another group of people that will take the phone interview and the remote online coding test for you until you get an onsite interview, since not all phone interview has video chat. That too helped quite some to get accepted into good companies eventually.
Yeah so do all these fucking bootcamp graduates who copypaste their classmates' code into new repos and star each other. Always ask the candidate to walk you through the repo line by line!
"Sorry about this but we've had some candidates passing others code as their own. So we've been asked to take all candidates through some code line by line. Such a pain but we have to do it unfortunately. Ill try and get through quickly. You dont mind do you?"
And if there is a need for follow up, some variation of "we quite clearly are interested in you and value your time since we spend actual engineer hours walking through your code.
What would be disrespectful was if we ignored all your hard work and hired someone not half as good as you because they had more glowing reviews or more stars on their repos."
Obviously I'm no hiring manager, but often a bit of honesty goes a long way.
A bad employee in a small company (or organization of any type) can do a lot of damage. It is negligent to hire someone who hasn't proven they can do what they claim, and negligent for a manager to not verify they aren't doing the work they claim to be doing.
People, in general, like to talk about themselves, and engineers like to talk about their own code. "See this if statement, well there's a funny story behind that...".
A few years ago I interviewed a candidate who mentioned Github on her CV but no actual URL. What's your username on there, I asked, let's look at some of your code. She refused and said she didn't want me to look at it. Then why did you mention it on your CV I asked? Because she was told she had to, she said. All in all a weird experience, probably for both of us.
Really? That sounds super stress free for me. Maybe it's just that I'm super confident about my own code and know it inside out? A white board test on the other hand would literally cause me to run away...
Of course I've never coded in a professional capacity, so don't mind me if I said something stupid.
Bootcamp graduates come in many flavors: no college, some college, and college graduates. Some have a CS background, some others don't. Some have working experience, some others don't.
Just wait for hardware to get fast enough to do deep fakes in real time - they'll sit the video interview for you and fake your face and your voice at the same time.
This is a problem from the top down. Even Xi Jinping's doctoral thesis contains plagiarism, and it's possible that the whole document was written by someone else.
I'm amazed that somebody outside China picked that up!
But yeah, that is symbolic of the cohort that Bo and Xi led.
Jiang and Hu era was a period of a relative meritocracy, with such shit not being tolerated, or at least not highest levels. But yeah, being anticommunist while being a communist party general secretary wasn't likely to be a working arrangement.
Mainland China has education all backwards, children get tons of pressure during primary and secondary education, to the point of them commiting suicide.
Then, when it's about university education, it's all business. Parents pay good money for their children's "education", so they expect good grades. Universities compete for students, not the other way around. It's a racket.
My stance on that: ex-bloc countries have that¸ I tell you as one who did part of my high school in Russia. Weak students cheat, strong students cheat, and only few cranky principled oddballs reject the system and shout "Hey you, ex university prof, throw whatever you want at me, I'll solve it and shred it to pieces" - those being universally hated for "making life harder for everybody"
My mom once had fun listening to shitty talks from parents of other students along the lines "hey, can you tell your boy to quiet down a bit, he raises the plank to high for the rest of the class"
You can understand weak students' reasons: they simply can't do it otherwise. But why do strong ones cheat? That what dazzled me about Russians, and Russia in general. What that was is the gigantic, monstrous, totally pathological fear of failure that permeates country's "socially endowed classes."
And secondary to that is the element of social pact: when pupils with excellent marks begin cheating and copying from one another, they begin to embrace the "omerta" created by this, sealing their social contract with their peers.
Most rich, powerful people in Russia teach their children very intentionally to behave along the lines - get close and sycophantic with others privileged people. And you know, to infirm young minds, the reasoning that any privilege one gets in life is through joining some "exclusive social clubs" of other privileged people, is hard to challenge, especially when this comes from their parents.
And after some time, their children become completely accustomed to not to taking upon any challenge straight, because they genuinely believe that even simplest things in life are not doable without tricks, cheats, and favours from other power powerful people. This is the culture in which social elites in Russia grow up.
After being around mainlanders for 11 years while working in electronics, I feel it is very much the same for them. For both of above reasons, people from both nations are extremely afraid of challenge, and more so when you deal with people higher up on the social ladder.
Thank you for this comment. Useful analysis, even if a bit overly broad.
One can only speculate how much for the former USSR this has to do with the trauma of the crazy nineties.
Nineties has nothing to do with it, that's more of Brezhnev's doing, and some extend Stalin's. Whenever there is a talk of socially endowed classes, that pretty much means ex-communists, and officials' families.
The amount of genuine self-made men who got to any level of prominence in society is so small, they never influenced the societal dynamics in any perceivable way.
Such are still being looked at as if they are some kind of space aliens by regular people.
One certainly could see continuity between this behavior in the Soviet era and the nineties.
In the Soviet days, I guess not seeking connection meant a less interesting social position. In the post-Soviet days, if I hear my friends from the former USSR, it could mean getting close to startvation.
Can't say the same, my parents were ones of few people making 6 digits in early Russia. Mom working in one of first foreign banks in Russia as a de-facto CTO, and father having a trade company. Opportunities were there, no way to deny that. People who report stories of near starvation genuinely "had to work hard" to get to that near starvation point. Even dockers and labourers in my father's company in Vladivostok had few hundred buck net per month salaries in 1996.
Ones who got to that point probably were commies themselves, or were the type of people "sitting around and waiting money to suddenly fall upon then from nowhere just for that, and a nice diploma they had" as they did back in "good ol soviet times"...
> Can't say the same, my parents were ones of few people making 6 digits in early Russia. Mom working in one of first foreign banks in Russia as a de-facto CTO, and father having a trade company. Opportunities were there, no way to deny that. People who report stories of near starvation genuinely "had to work hard" to get to that near starvation point. Even dockers and labourers in my father's company in Vladivostok had few hundred buck net per month salaries in 1996.
Good for them.
> Ones who got to that point probably were commies themselves, or were the type of people "sitting around and waiting money to suddenly fall upon then from nowhere just for that, and a nice diploma they had" as they did back in "good ol soviet times"...
That sounds like a generalisation with very little empathy.
The people I have in mind are not ethnic Russians. They didn't live in Russia. One of them had their parents deported to Siberia by the Soviets. Neither of them were in the Komsomol. One of their children was born in 1990. The only serious employer in their city stopped paying wages for months on end. If/when paid, they received 120€/month (early 1997) - for skilled masters degree work. They simply didn't have any buffer to escape the mess. They were definitely not the only ones...
Like everything. These methods will work for a while until they won't. Employers aren't stupid. They will eventually catch on once enough people are doing it and then they will just be more aggressive in their the application process. Probably more on-site interviews. More computer based exams and so on that you can't cheat through.
I don't really condone this but the world simply doesn't reward original work. This is particularly true in corporate world. The whole concept of Modern China is built on technology transfer so I don't know why we are so surprised to find that plagiarism is commonplace there. That said, it is not easy to come up with original thoughts and ideas especially in a world where it's become increasingly difficult to "think" in isolation.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 168 ms ] threadWhat annoys me is that this is rampant, and universities know it (or they’re intentionally being naive). But rather than crack down on those who are paying course fees, plus paying someone else to do their work. It would be nice if they put some effort into finding those who are actually writing all these papers and enabling them.
Make them tutors, professors, ‘student assistants’, what ever. Some people will always cheat, who cares. In the end they cheat themselves, and it’s up to companies to screen people to ensure they actually have the capabilities they require. Rather than spend on removing the cheaters, spend on enabling the honest. Or even better, transfer directly from the cheaters to the honest, which is effectively what happens, but in the shadows.
But for my friend, who is a perfect match for academia, this is his funding model.
I hope one day he can be credited with all the papers he’s actually written.
It's a backdoor way into Australia that not many Australians know about and nobody rocks the boat on because everybody knows the country needs the migrants and investment.
Ditto with the investment visas. Pretty crazy when at the same time everybody loses their minds over boats with a few hundred people on them
The issue with the boats is it would not be a few hundred people for very long as the Europeans have found out over the last few years.
It is not xenophobia to want to see responsible development where development only occurs when it is supported by the infrustucture. If we can't afford to build the infrustucture then don't create the housing.
Immigration is achieving the following:
- Lowers wages by increasing supply of labour, including creating a pool of workers willing to be employed at illegal rates - $10/hour. Many workers are willing to work for these rates, substantially below minimum wages, because it is more than they would earn in their home country, and because of promises from the employer that they will sponsor them for permanent residency. (Typically they will be paid correct minimum wage for 20 hours work, but in reality be staffed to work 30 to 50 hours).
- Increasing demand on public services. More people means a greater need for shared services: health, education, public transport, roads, welfare. Considering that the majority (~80%) of new migrants are going to Melbourne and Sydney, two built-up mature megacities of 5 million people, adding more services to these cities is incredibly expensive (eg. a new rail line means tunnelling, land buy-back, extensive shutdowns of existing road and rail etc).
- Increases consumption. This means increased consumer demand throughout the economy, simply based on the higher number of people. However, it also means consumption in an environmental sense: increased demand for water (which we need to desalinate, on the margins), increased demand for food and land (resulting in land clearance), increased CO2 emissions (Australia is a CO2 intensive country), increased pollution and waste.
- Increased demand for land and housing. Young Australians can no longer buy a house in their own country, and home ownership is at historical lows. Huge amounts of houses are being converted to large apartments.
So, if you're a land-owner and business-owner, happy days. You have greater demand for the things you own, and lower wages to pay out. If you're a tradesperson, you're also benefiting a lot from the intense housing and infrastructure construction activity. If you're an average Australian, you have lower wages, higher congestion on public services, increased taxes to pay for those services to be expanded, and no hope (in many cases) of buying your own house.
There is also the added social friction of these two large groups of migrants moving to the country - Indian and mainland Chinese culture is dissimilar to Australian. Already we are seeing neighbourhoods stratified by ethnicity.
You have to pay 100K AUD for bringing your parents.
It goes further too. It undermines the integrity of the school. Lets say that cheater gets by as you've suggested - now they're in the workforce and their boss realizes they're not very good. This doesn't reflect well on where they obtained their credentials.
Worst is that they took a spot at a university that could have been given to a student that wanted to learn.
You should also evaluate your friendship with this person. You want them to get credit but it annoys you with how rampant it is. I wouldn't associate with someone that was doing this on an ongoing basis.
I'll bring up another reason why this is bad - your friend is writing papers while lacking the technical background of that topic. Sure he has notes and can research but this is not enough. There is a reason why reading webMD and self-diagnosing is not a completely creditable route. Sure your friend might be right, but they also could be wrong AND misguiding people that come across his papers.
But my point is more that, universities could look at the ‘problem’ and contain it internally rather than the current outside model.
University students require some income to survive.
Some students are not capable of completing the work required (or don’t want to).
Some students are MORE than capable of completing their degree, on top of others.
So pair them up. One on one tutoring, paring students who can’t with those that can.
Then at least the students doing all the work get paid and recognised for their capabilities. Those that want a piece of paper can have it.
Without this my friend (and other gifted students) end up working some mindless job for minimal pay to get through university. Who does that serve? If anything it takes an unskilled position away from the unskilled.
Your friend may lack the soft skills for tutoring, and definitely lacks the ethics to earn money honestly.
Gee, I feel like I'm on another planet to people in this thread. Am I super-naïve or something?
What about - worst is, it makes a total farce of the entire university system? Does no-one care about that?? If you can just pay to get someone to write your work, how is that better than a non-existing diploma mill? Isn't the whole idea, to educate people? If they've just paid for a bit of paper, and that's ok, why do we need universities at all?
The hard sciences are pretty immune to it at the undergraduate level (we have exams), but it is totally rampant in the economics/commerce/arts facilities. Where the hard sciences have issues is at the postgraduate level where you are expected to ensure all your overseas students graduate even if they can't write in English and know next to nothing about the topic. After you have been through an incoherent thesis draft for the fourth time you know it is going to be quicker to just write it yourself.
I should add that some of the best Ph.D students I have worked with were overseas students. It is not that all overseas students are bad, just that the bottom 25% are not capable of doing a Ph.D and yet we still give them a degree.
Every security measure I have heard of for western testing within the PRC can be bribed around, and it’s so commonplace that it barely warrants discussion (“of course it happens [eyeroll]”.
I have heard of a few US schools doing on-campus retests for English proficiency, but mismatches are simply met with required ESL courses (paid non-credit, of course). I have not heard of other on-campus testing, and I’m not sure anyone wants it since these students usually pay full tuition.
Some people will always cheat, who cares.
I'd rather the next doctor/surgeon I need didn't get someone else to write their uni work, thanks very much. Apart from that I don't want anything to do with anyone that unethical. It's sociopathic.
In the end they cheat themselves
You're most concerned about how their cheating affects the cheater?!
my friend, who is a perfect match for academia
I can't tell if you loathe both academia and your friend's ethics, or neither. Neither, it seems to me. Amazing. Did you cheat too? If not, why not?
Or..It's OK because a lot of people do it?
Just because statistics reveal a uptick for one group, does not make it acceptable for you to generalize. It's a racist remark, just so you understand the unconscious bias
Imagine if someone said something like "Apparently it is culturally accepted thing for cops to shoot black people"
I mean, you can find a ton of examples of this happening, and plenty of examples of nobody doing anything about it. Does that mean it is culturally accepted here?
Maybe it is culturally accepted in China to cheat? Do you know? Is a statement racist if it is true?
It is culturist (to make up a word). There's a huge difference between this and racism in that culture, unlike race, creates clear statistical differences in behavior.
There are good arguments that discriminating based on culture would have many negative effects, not unlike racism. That as a result of the negative effects we shouldn't treat people differently as a result of the culture they are coming from. Moreover there are already laws in many places attempting to enforce that.
Burying your head in the sand and denying that there are culture differences however is insane. It's entirely obvious statistically, and anecdotally that they exist. Burying your head in the sand is exactly what you (or rather volgo) are suggesting when you are saying that people shouldn't be making statements about the differences between cultures.
I can't say if cheating is more of less acceptable in India than elsewhere, and for sure very many students in India are honest and genuinely interested in learning, but people treating knowledge and teachers as divine is far from reality.
Do you make a comment about that? No, because you have no context and you'll likely be shunned in polite society. You have a James Damore syndrome and probably will not help you in your career
There is no question at this point that Chinese culture encourages cheating. It has been written about in media, it's all over Amazon, IP theft is a known issue, and it is ALL OVER universities. I regularly had Chinese students sitting in the back of class openly whispering during exams, while professors for some inane reason turned blind eyes. My anecdote is not unique.
Facts do not change simply by being denied, and the fact that a pattern of behavior is associated with a nationality or race does not mean it should be swept under the rug. Problems are only solved when they are identified.
>Would you ever make statements like "it's cultural acceptable for black community to condone it's cultural acceptable for black community to condone thefts and petty crimes, and politicians won't do anythign because it's inconvenient?
If statistics showed such, then yes, any sane person would say that. Also ironic that ignoring only negative cultural differences is a privileged Western affordance - our friends make no such mistakes in China and much of Asia, speaking as someone who lived in the region for years.
You are resolving your cognitive dissonance by ignoring documented differences among cultures, which is fundamentally illogical. This seems to be an increasingly common pattern "in the modern workplace" and outside of it too.
What you should instead be doing is accepting that cultures are varied, but individuals must be given the benefit of the doubt in an ethical society.
We have so much evidence that these sorts of observations can so often be wrong. You are likely to not notice all the majority group people doing this, or at least not connect it as a pattern. Once you have an expectation that Chinese people are cheating, you are more likely to see innocent behavior as cheating, or even if they ARE cheating, more likely to catch them than the white guy sitting next to you also cheating (because you are paying more attention to the person you EXPECT to be cheating)
Now, of course, this could be wrong and your observations could be right. The irrationality comes in assuming you are right just because you observe something.
1. You conveniently disregarded my emphasis on the fact that this is an increasingly common collective observation.
2. You cannot explain away every observation of cultural differences by allegations of confirmation bias.
It is absurd that we are supposed to ignore only negative cultural patterns.
Hell, we are talking about a group of people which has been indoctrinated by the Communist Party for decades, from birth for at least a generation. You really think it implausible that cheating on Western soil is culturally acceptable?
it's not common to see similar anecdotes and think "we" are cheaters:
https://www.plagiarism.org/article/plagiarism-facts-and-stat... https://www.quora.com/Everyone-is-cheating-in-my-AP-Chemistr... https://abc13.com/education/nearly-entire-class-caught-cheat... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfqFEiP10_E
people cheat. wells fargo, mlb, cycling, track and field, doctors, prosecutors.
not only the employees, athletes, and students, but the ceo's, refs, judges, coaches, and the teachers cheat too:
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/04/why-te...
none of these examples are isolated incidents, and are patterns in our own culture. And if you live in this system, and the one pattern you observe is that Chinese students cheat, then there is probably some bias in your thinking.
If you do race war or nationalistic flamewar on HN again we will ban you.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
eg. it's ok to discuss violence in Black communities and cheating in Asia, but it would be racist to assert that because you are Black/Asian/White you are more predisposed to violence/cheating/racism
The fact that a conclusion is racist does not mean it is factually incorrect.
This isn't about what is "OK", this is about what is true.
> it's ok to discuss violence in Black communities and cheating in Asia, but it would be racist to assert that because you are Black/Asian/White you are more predisposed to violence/cheating/racism
Your implication is that something cannot be true if it is racist. This is a non sequitor. Race should never have been brought up in the first place.
Nobody asserted that. So why is racism being discussed?
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The best classes that I've taken have been "Feel free to collaborate, but turn in your own work." It allows people to work together on hard problems, but the slackers still fail.
Interesting - such a bland word, it says nothing. Why not say what you mean. Apparently you find it unacceptable, racist and biased. I find your comment ridiculous. If something the GP said was wrong, say so. You just tried to censor him, successfully it seems. I don't understand either of the sentences in your second paragraph. They both contain dubious, condescending claims. Apparently you are the police for this site. Telling others from on high what is not acceptable, what are their "unconscious biases". Who do you think you are? I don't buy it whatsoever.
p.s. I submitted Hofstadter's amazing Person Paper on here yesterday, no-one commented. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18044595
Edit: Now I'm flagged too, within a minute of posting.
I speak Mandarin and have lived in China, my partner is Chinese. I was shocked during her undergraduate and masters to see just how often cheating took place. Of her close ~8-10 friends, every single one paid for their work to be completed on multiple occasions. It was cheap and quick, and justified with things like “I have to go see a friend for a week, but I need to have the paper written by Thursday”. Costs for most pieces was in the region of $70-120.
The cultural attitude is that cheating is only bad unless you’re caught. Otherwise you’re cunning and able to succeed using any method; everyone does it so there’s nothing wrong.
As absurd as this sounds, my sense is that there's a similar impulse behind more banal grade inflation at elite American Universities.
TL;DR USD1,000 seems too low for writing a doctoral thesis. You can barely proofread one adequately for this, sometimes.
These bad actors are paying for a Chinese thesis written inside China. Maybe competition keeps prices down.
Sounds like we should do that with the students as well.
Plus, the rate of Chinese IPR and future knowledge is huge. Do you e.g. want to miss out on Chinese PV and wind and emerging battery know-how?
Use the interview to weed out fakes. Don't make sweeping assumptions which risk self harm.
It's actually not illegal to not accept somebody based on them having a degree from a university of poor renown. It's called "qualification" and you can discriminate upon it all you want. It's also not unfair. Unfair would be accepting degrees from any place that hands out degrees like candy. It's also not racist, a lot of Chinese parents send their children to study abroad because they know Chinese universities suck. Those foreign degrees open up a lot of doors, both abroad and domestic.
> Plus, the rate of Chinese IPR and future knowledge is huge. Do you e.g. want to miss out on Chinese PV and wind and emerging battery know-how?
What's your point? Hire Chinese with junk degrees now so that you magically get to profit from future Chinese innovations?
I'm told the value of a British degree, once highly prestigious, is rapidly declining in China due to the number of degree mills (ex-polys) we have here churning out degree certificates as fast as they can cash the tuition fee cheques.
My time is actually more valuable than this. There are signals available to them to show they take original work seriously and are bucking their cultural trends of cheating academia to get worthless degrees.
Source: I know someone who does this for loving. Plus there are a ton of services online advertising these services.
Universities know this. They don’t care. They are just squeezing out the last juices from the dying industry.
I agreed up to this point. Can you say more what you mean? University education is a dying industry? What about the massive and growing legislative requirements for degrees in all kinds of occupations?
The current situation is that it is more like institutions whoring out their brand names instead of fostering minds (Harvard lol)
In the past, the universities did well by mere fact of self selection since most people didn’t need college degrees to do well. Only the intellectually curious ventured in.
What I imagine happening later is that things will turn more into a guild model. Where you must have a certain level of competence / reputation to join.
I think more and more people are realizing that the benefit of a university education isn't very good for the cost. Don't get me wrong, it is a positive return on investment, but it could probably be better structured as a vocational school for most people. If my parents didn't pay for my education, I probably would have tried doing a coding school and going directly into the workforce. I learned a lot of cool stuff in university, and attending a prestigious school opened up many opportunities. But most of the former was irrelevant to my job, and the latter is basically just an elaborate means of signalling status (which, while it definitely helped me I fundamentally don't think it'd be fair to hire a university grad simply for being a university grad if a non-grad as the same or better skills).
What if the customer is unattractive or otherwise not their type? Or the wrong gender?
Master degrees make a lot of money for the universities. On paper there are strict antiplagiarism rules but in practice many get away with it.
There is another group of people that will take the phone interview and the remote online coding test for you until you get an onsite interview, since not all phone interview has video chat. That too helped quite some to get accepted into good companies eventually.
That seems a bit much, you're liable to scare away good talent that way.
"Sorry about this but we've had some candidates passing others code as their own. So we've been asked to take all candidates through some code line by line. Such a pain but we have to do it unfortunately. Ill try and get through quickly. You dont mind do you?"
What would be disrespectful was if we ignored all your hard work and hired someone not half as good as you because they had more glowing reviews or more stars on their repos."
Obviously I'm no hiring manager, but often a bit of honesty goes a long way.
And it can lead to very interesting discussions, you learn a lot about a candidate that way.
People, in general, like to talk about themselves, and engineers like to talk about their own code. "See this if statement, well there's a funny story behind that...".
A few years ago I interviewed a candidate who mentioned Github on her CV but no actual URL. What's your username on there, I asked, let's look at some of your code. She refused and said she didn't want me to look at it. Then why did you mention it on your CV I asked? Because she was told she had to, she said. All in all a weird experience, probably for both of us.
Of course I've never coded in a professional capacity, so don't mind me if I said something stupid.
https://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/plagiarism-and-xi-jinp...
But yeah, that is symbolic of the cohort that Bo and Xi led.
Jiang and Hu era was a period of a relative meritocracy, with such shit not being tolerated, or at least not highest levels. But yeah, being anticommunist while being a communist party general secretary wasn't likely to be a working arrangement.
What an irony.
Then, when it's about university education, it's all business. Parents pay good money for their children's "education", so they expect good grades. Universities compete for students, not the other way around. It's a racket.
My mom once had fun listening to shitty talks from parents of other students along the lines "hey, can you tell your boy to quiet down a bit, he raises the plank to high for the rest of the class"
You can understand weak students' reasons: they simply can't do it otherwise. But why do strong ones cheat? That what dazzled me about Russians, and Russia in general. What that was is the gigantic, monstrous, totally pathological fear of failure that permeates country's "socially endowed classes."
And secondary to that is the element of social pact: when pupils with excellent marks begin cheating and copying from one another, they begin to embrace the "omerta" created by this, sealing their social contract with their peers.
Most rich, powerful people in Russia teach their children very intentionally to behave along the lines - get close and sycophantic with others privileged people. And you know, to infirm young minds, the reasoning that any privilege one gets in life is through joining some "exclusive social clubs" of other privileged people, is hard to challenge, especially when this comes from their parents.
And after some time, their children become completely accustomed to not to taking upon any challenge straight, because they genuinely believe that even simplest things in life are not doable without tricks, cheats, and favours from other power powerful people. This is the culture in which social elites in Russia grow up.
After being around mainlanders for 11 years while working in electronics, I feel it is very much the same for them. For both of above reasons, people from both nations are extremely afraid of challenge, and more so when you deal with people higher up on the social ladder.
The amount of genuine self-made men who got to any level of prominence in society is so small, they never influenced the societal dynamics in any perceivable way.
Such are still being looked at as if they are some kind of space aliens by regular people.
In the Soviet days, I guess not seeking connection meant a less interesting social position. In the post-Soviet days, if I hear my friends from the former USSR, it could mean getting close to startvation.
Ones who got to that point probably were commies themselves, or were the type of people "sitting around and waiting money to suddenly fall upon then from nowhere just for that, and a nice diploma they had" as they did back in "good ol soviet times"...
Good for them.
> Ones who got to that point probably were commies themselves, or were the type of people "sitting around and waiting money to suddenly fall upon then from nowhere just for that, and a nice diploma they had" as they did back in "good ol soviet times"... That sounds like a generalisation with very little empathy.
The people I have in mind are not ethnic Russians. They didn't live in Russia. One of them had their parents deported to Siberia by the Soviets. Neither of them were in the Komsomol. One of their children was born in 1990. The only serious employer in their city stopped paying wages for months on end. If/when paid, they received 120€/month (early 1997) - for skilled masters degree work. They simply didn't have any buffer to escape the mess. They were definitely not the only ones...