Your Cheating Heart…
Ask any foreign English teacher in China: cheating is endemic here. In my two years of teaching, I routinely caught my students copying each other's homework, baldly plagiarizing off the Internet, surreptitiously hiding their books during an exam, attempting to bully a smarter student into sharing his work, or simply good old-fashioned leaning over his neighbor's desk to see what the answer was.
If I were teaching a course vitally important to their future, then I could at least pinpoint a motivation for their cheating. But I wasn't; my class was merely an extracurricular English test-preparation course that was intended to help them prepare to study overseas. The grades I gave them didn't matter toward their bottom line. They could have failed every test (some did anyway) and not have done much worse than merely wasting their time and parents' money. Yet they cheated, time and again, no matter how blue in the face I got telling them not to.
What to make of this cheating? I can think of a few factors, though none seem all that satisfactory as a causal explanation. One, education in China is heavily test-dependent. Getting into a good university depends almost entirely on obtaining good results on the gaokao (高考), or university entrance examinations. Less gifted students have been known to go to extreme measures to cheat on these exams, and often succeed despite the best efforts of test proctors to catch them. Perhaps, then, this culture of cheating applies even to the most casual quizzes, simply out of habit.
Secondly, education in China emphasizes rote memorization far more than creative thinking. One result is that plagiarism is rampant in Chinese universities, and in many cases not vigilantly policed. A friend of mine once taught a film studies course at a teacher's college in Lianyungang, and she often caught her students plagiarizing what should have been the easiest of assignments: writing a film review. She was flabbergasted that her students thought she couldn't tell the difference between a Roger Ebert essay and a second-year Chinese college students'. On a more mundane level, I often had a hard time getting my students to think up their own examples of grammatical tenets I taught them; most just copied whatever I wrote on the board and left it at that.
A third possibility is the role of "face" in Asian society. Because test results are rarely private here, students have a strong incentive to obtain a good mark as to avoid being embarrassed by a public airing of their score. This factor would suffice for even the most trivial tests, as nobody wants their classmates knowing how badly he did on the test. In addition, a reluctance to see a classmate humiliated would prompt a strong student to help a classmate in need of quick help.
Elsewhere, being caught cheating is far more of an embarrassment than simply doing badly on a test. Here, the reverse seems to be true. What truly seems strange, to, is that I regard Chinese people as being more honest on the whole than Westerners. I wonder if there's a contradiction there or if I'm just missing something.
PS-
I hasten to add that cheating isn't unique to Chinese culture, and my recent test experience bears this out. Two Korean classmates of mine spent the entire test (the teacher was mostly out of the room) whispering to one another, and at times I looked back at them I caught them looking over each other's shoulders at the answers, as if they were collaborating on the test. They saw me looking but didn't seem to care. When I asked them snidely if they were taking the test individually or separately, they shrugged their shoulders and started to talk but I left the room, disgusted.
I know very little about Korean culture, but their behavior during a trivial exam made it seem as if the Chinese example could easily qualify all over the region.
November 5th, 2007 - 16:12
I dealt with that today by saying, “alright, open-book”. I never saw any sense in an open-book test before, but for this class, I’m teaching them writing, not vocab or grammar, so fuck it. If they can give me a coherent piece of writing in English that is not identical to their neighbour’s, sweet. Oh, and for tests I give each writing class a completely different topic and don’t reveal the topic to anyone, including myself, until the minute the test starts (meaning, when the bell rings I quickly think up a topic and write it on the board). Sure, I’m cheating, but how the hell else am I going to stop them cheating?
November 7th, 2007 - 15:35
Ya, I came across that too teaching English Corner on the topic of cheating. Kind of flopped when I asked the class “Who here has ever cheated on a test?” The class of thirty looked at me blankly like it was the stupidest question they had ever heard. Then one took pity on me and said “We all cheat, all of us, its normal.” And they further went on to explain all the ways they cheater and the special techniques. Absolutely amazing! The reasons you provided are exactly what they told me too.
November 23rd, 2007 - 23:07
Very informative comments and long enduring topic.
When teaching a masters degree level course I had student groups of four present several long oral reports, and gave group grade: lets call it a seminar of groups.
I think all were more or less pleased; after three or four weeks,the deputy dean sat in for the remainder of the semester and made to long comments. It began with my being questioned about this “student-centered learning, so the admin knew the idea.
Thats the way I dealt with cheating, in 2002.
Ron Krate
International Professors Project
http://www.internationalprofs.org
info@internationalprofs.org
December 17th, 2007 - 07:41
I found that making the writing assignments personal was a fairly good way to deal with some cheating. Preparing for the ielts this worked some, when they are talking about facts about their family that can easily be checked and stories of growing up .
I was stumped once when one of my students (I was teaching in a second tier Uni) . Confessed that she on encouragement from her head teacher in school exchanged IDs and took the University entrance exam for a classmate. The classmate used her ID and thus she was only able to get into this second tier Uni. She was thinking of going back to her home town and telling people about the teacher and his methods. But she was caught as she could be kicked out of University without a degree and it would be unlikely that there would be enough evidence against the teacher to cause him to lose his job. What advice would you give her in this situation?
December 17th, 2007 - 23:33
I’m very sorry to disappoint with the majority here, but I think it’s the same all over the world: give students the opportunity to cheat, and they will.
My students in Shantou don’t cheat: they simply can’t. Their tests are conducted in classrooms that are big enough to give them each enough space to make sure they cannot whisper to each other nor look over each other’s shoulder. There’s no space to hide anything and mobile phones and the like have to be submitted in front of the classroom before being allowed to enter the class.
I remember when I was a student, we would also cheat whenever we were given the opportunity. Maybe not always for the same cultural reasons as the Chinese, but hey, why make it difficult when it can be done the easy way?
Take the opportunity away and you solve the problem.
Serge Claes,
Oxford Business College
January 4th, 2008 - 08:32
I came here because I have been teaching Chinese students in Thailand, which is a new thing for me at my university (they come here on an International Program). And, while I agree that students the world over cheat when they are given the opportunity to cheat, there is nonetheless a demonstrably far more relaxed attitude towards cheating amongst my Chinese student population than there is amongst my Thai student population – all the academics here, Thais and Westerners alike, have had to completely rethink their exam room strategies, because what was adequate security for us in the past has proved completely inadequate in the face of the Chinese ‘incursion’.
So the point remains, I think, that the degree to which cheating as a practice is culturally endorsed affects what sort of security measures one is required to take (which raises the issues of how this type of cultural endorsement can raise the cost of education – more exam monitors, videos etc. – and lower the quality of the learning experiences one gives students for whom it is not necessary to go to such extreme lengths to manage, or for whom a more standoffish attitude towards students will not serve so well); aiming to find the reasons behind it is still an admirable intention, because defusing those reasons could be argued to be as effective a solution as counteracting them with force.
What are they thinking, to go to another country and cheat far more aggressively in exams there than the natives? This, I think, must be a question of interest for everyone.
Finally, there is one other thing my Chinese students mentioned that I didn’t see in the article – they told me that cheating was also largely a result of the fact that many of our students took a very lazy, or at least lasse faire, approach to their studies, an essential part of which required that they cheat to pass tests in lieu of ever having learned antyhing by which they might have done so legitimately.
And oh, I should mention Korea too – I taught there for three years, and have a very long relationship with the country (fifteen years now, I’m married to a Korean as well), and as far as I could ever tell their cultural endorsement of cheating these days is very low. It’s very tempting to draw comparisons – my Korean students were very lazy to learn, and many of the other things the article says would indubitably apply. But, I think that if a degree of social homogeneity with China lies at the heart of it,they have been fairly successful in removing the cultural endorsement for exam cheating that once existed.
January 23rd, 2008 - 20:57
Hello!
Nice site
Bye