cheating

Talking about cheating- what is the cheating situation in China?
I am getting mighty pissed off after I make up two versions of a test ( I am teaching High school) and then half way thru the test I discover kids have swapped versions so they can copy from each other.
Does this ever happen to you guys?

So....BOTH kids got "zero", huh?

Question:

what is the cheating situation in China?

Answer:  A++

Chinese students at college/uni level will usually spend more time thinking of ways to cheat than in preparing for an exam.

From one group of students I learned some of the steps they take in preparing for an exam with a Chinese teacher:

* Students take turns asking a teacher for help with the exam. The teacher may not give them an idea of the actual questions (though this does happen) but may hint at some area they should study. The cell phones then run hot as the 'hints' are pooled by the class.

* Seating arrangements are determined by the location of the top students in the class. Others group themselves around and the answers of a top student get transferred around the group.

* The habits of a teacher are closely studied. It was known that the teacher of Russian liked to read newspapers so they placed a morning paper (one of them got up early to go out and buy it) on his desk. As soon as he picked up the paper pairs of students could start comparing notes for different questions.

I once had to administer a Listening Exam to 180 students crammed into a small lecture theatre - a hopeless situation for a multiple choice test. Two new foreign teachers volunteered to help because they had never seen an exam situation in China and they had to administer exams the following day.

They were stunned by the experience; never had they seen such blatant attempts at cheating. It seemed that the students were used to copying answers in front of supervisors of exams.

When time was up I was ruthless in grabbing answer papers off students. I was met with howls of protest by many. When marking the papers it became obvious that they were the ones waiting to copy all the answers off their friends answer sheet in the 'Copy Time' traditionally allowed at the end of their other exams.         

How can helping someone be wrong?

There is an unbelievable amount of peer pressure for good students to allow classmates to cheat off of them. This includes classmates they despise. This classmate relationship continues forever and major laws can be broken to 'help' a former classmate in business, government etc.

Learning is not a priority, scores are. Teachers will receive more pay if their classes do well and schools more status so they will often turn a blind eye. Parents too because little Zhou can get into a better middle school. A students future earnings is far more closely tied to their scores than their actual knowledge.

Plagiarism has to be explained here. Many students do not understand that it is wrong or even why it is wrong. Nobody owns ideas right? Using other people's intellectual property is not ingrained into Chinese society as wrong.

Short answer - They cheat their asses off.

I once had 5 students in a Middle school class turn in the same essay. One of the students forgot to put his name on it and actually copied the other student's name.

I had to give an exam two weeks ago for a writing class. I understood all the nuances and reasons for cheating. At the same time, I also want to grade them individually to see if they have learned what was tought.

My questions:

1) You will write an autobiography, tell me what your book is about

2) Write a story about one incident

This prevented TOO much copying. Make the test in a way that is personnal.

Another option; Have 4 or 5 questions and asign a different question to the students. I've also switched the order of questions and/or the choices. Its not as much work as you think.

This requires some considerable extra work on the teacher's part, but I usually distribute several variations of the test paper in an exam, number of variations dependent on how many students/ classes are together e.g. 4-5 variations for 3 or 4 classes. I make sure they are randomly distributed throughout the class, and even separate any students that I'm suspicious of. I'm pretty pedantic about the cheating situation here in China, to the point I have sleepless night or nights full of nightmares!

Feels good this semester with just oral English-even then I vary my questions as it's over a couple of weeks.

two years ago I had a writing class where copying was a bit of a problem. mid-term exam was multiple choice, but I made 4 copies of the exam and rotated the answers. One of the answers was, "I don't know, I just copied another paper". Yes, I actually got one student with that.

One of the answers was, "I don't know, I just copied another paper". Yes, I actually got one student with that.

Thats excellent! 

Cheating is everywhere and they are not even good at it. Every class I have get a daily quiz of 10 multiple-answer questions. I wrote 5 different quizzes and handed them out randomly in class, just to see how the cheaters would react. Now, this meant that I got quizzes back where one student had quiz 1 where question 5 was "Who wrote such plays as Hamlet, Coriolanus and King Lear?" and one student had quiz 4 where question 5 was "What is the name of the angel who falls from grace and becomes Satan on Milton's Paradise Lost?"...both students answered the question with one name...Geoffrey Chaucer...the rest of their answers were completely identical, down to spelling errors.
I nearly gave them all a heart-attack when I laid down the rules for the final, written exam:
1. All cell-phones will be confiscated.
2.Students can only go to the bathroom one at the time.
3. Any talking to anyone is equal to cheating and will result in failing.
4. Plagiarism or copying will mean a failed exam.
5. No materials execpt for notes taken in class and a dictionary are allowed.

Somewhere else on this forum there is a "This is China" thread...well, when it comes to my class and cheating, it is not China...it's Squirrel-Land and I am the Grand Panjandrum

The methods may be different, but the mentality of the students is the same in the US.

When I caught students cheating on exams, I took their papers away and told them that they failed.

How can helping someone be wrong?

There is an unbelievable amount of peer pressure for good students to allow classmates to cheat off of them. This includes classmates they despise. This classmate relationship continues forever and major laws can be broken to 'help' a former classmate in business, government etc.

Learning is not a priority, scores are. Teachers will receive more pay if their classes do well and schools more status so they will often turn a blind eye. Parents too because little Zhou can get into a better middle school. A students future earnings is far more closely tied to their scores than their actual knowledge.

Plagiarism has to be explained here. Many students do not understand that it is wrong or even why it is wrong. Nobody owns ideas right? Using other people's intellectual property is not ingrained into Chinese society as wrong.

Short answer - They cheat their asses off.

I once had 5 students in a Middle school class turn in the same essay. One of the students forgot to put his name on it and actually copied the other student's name.

This, all of it.

My school has a dual diploma program with an American high school, so we're taking cheating very seriously now. We had midterms a couple of weeks ago and before exams we had a meeting outlining when we should do if there was cheating and how important it was not to let them cheat. Four students were caught cheating and I actually caught two of the four personally. The Chinese teachers who were co-proctoring with me were totally uncooperative when it came to turning these kids in to the administration. They either didn't want the kids to hate them or they were lead teachers and felt that having cheating students from their classes would reflect poorly on them. One of the Chinese teachers (a "ban zhuren" or lead teacher for a class)was so upset that I'd caught one of her students that she tried to downplay the cheating and when that didn't work she finally told the administration that if we punished this girl for cheating she might kill herself so we shouldn't punish her. These weren't foreign teacher exams either, I was proctoring a Chemistry exam and a Chinese teacher's vocabulary exam.

The point is that sometimes you'll find yourself fighting a real uphill battle with the cheating and you might not always find Chinese teachers or administration willing to take cheating seriously. It is a huge problem here and no matter how much you try and emphasize to your students, so many of them just don't see why they shouldn't cheat and when the Chinese teachers don't care about cheating either, it is a hard lesson for them to learn. I teach kids who are headed to America for college though so it is really important that they understand how serious the consequences of cheating are in American schools. Some will get it I suppose, some won't.

There's nothing quite so much fun as 2 or more versions of a multiple-guess test with the questions in the same order and the answers in slightly different order. 

Alternatively, leaving an "answer key" laying about that is correct for the super-easy questions on the first page of an exam and 100% wrong for all subsequent pages can be fun too.
 

I don't understand why (or how) people can spend time preparing multiple choice exams--making up two or three wrong answer for EVERY question?  You're doing at least 2 or 3 times as much work as the student!

Essays written during class time work for me.  For whatever reason, there isn't too much copying.  There can be a lot of regurgitation of content, but that's dealt with by giving separate scores for content and for style--regurgitated essays frequently have little content relation to the topic so they're easy to mark down.

Actually, as a teacher I've never liked setting or caring about homework either.  Since it seems to me one only sets oneself up for a difficult classroom experience if one walks in needing some work outside of class to have been done, one shouldn't set homework.  You can police what students do in the classroom--outside of the classroom they're on their own.

It helps immeasurably if students will read stuff for themselves or practice on their own time.  And it seems to me that Chinese students do do that.


I have a suspicion however that this kind of classroom approach suits only people who approach the classroom as I do.  And that goes for students too--not all of them can cope with a teacher who doesn't set homework and doesn't monitor step-by-step achievement.

OMG it is all so familiar! I have also had kids give in a project copied including the other student's name. And Kangaroo I do the Mysterious Big X on the paper if I catch a kid talking, so obviously students are the same the world over.They definitely all sit around the strong students on exam day. And I am considering next test writing their names on the versions I give them so they can't switch papers when my back is turned. But as you all say,they spend far more time and effort cheating than they would need to just study the material that it never fails to astound me.

I don't understand why (or how) people can spend time preparing multiple choice exams--making up two or three wrong answer for EVERY question?  You're doing at least 2 or 3 times as much work as the student!

Student answers during classroom discussion provide more than enough sources for terribly wrong answers.  Multi-guess tests are quick and easy to grade compared to fill in the blank, essay, etc.  They also provide easy ways to lay lethal traps for cheaters.

During the Year of Hell teaching at middle schoolers at Satan Community School in the USA, I'd make a second version of a multi-guess test, set those on the bottom of the stack, and would then walk down the rows handing out exams instead of handing a stack to each row.  The little monsters who liked to cheat the most got dealt exams from the bottom of the deck.  The look when one of them scored 10% and the person they copied from had 90% was priceless.