China steps up crack down on hi-tech exam cheats

Electronics in education.

This reminds me of when I was at school. There was one lad who was severely dyslexic, so the school gave him a laptop to work on. This was fine for making notes in class, but proved a bit of a problem when it was prohibited from the exam hall and he had to write with a pen for the first time in years.

It is endemic in education in China at all levels

Though I am not Chinese, I live and work in China, teaching in various universities. This report does not surprise me, though the extent of cheating in China is far more extensive than one might guess at first. In my classes and exams, cheating is done routinely, so much so that my Chinese academic colleagues often have given up trying to deal with it. If cheating is found out, and the students ejected from the examination room (as I have done), the reaction is often outrage and an explanation that I am not used to the way things are done in China: universities apparently do not take cheating as a serious issue.

Even though the courses I teach are overseen by a non-Chinese educational body, if I pointed out how much cheating is done, they would react appropriately, and the courses would be withdrawn, which leads to many being reluctant to lose their livelihood of teaching because of this (even I have this pressure on me, so I have tried to use softly-softly approaches, but being too outspoken against it leads to universities generally being unwilling to employ you at all)

Many of the students I teach hope to go to the UK and USA to study further. I have tried to tell them that, within 5 minutes of beginning an exam, almost all of them would have already been failed in the UK and USA because they talk openly with each other, go out dialing numbers on their phones (they are not banned in universities), and, if you are attempting to supervise an exam on a course you have taught, they openly ask you how to answer a question, and say to each other in Chinese how you are a bad teacher of you refuse to help them.

For these reasons, I am deeply sceptical of all results on applications tyo study in the UK now, and even think that the so-called highest educational achievements in the world claimed to be coming from China cannot be believed because the endemic nature of cheating in school exams means that I cannot be sure the results were achieved without cheating (which the report agrees can be very sophisticated and subtle).

Why has this come about? It is the end-result of enormous pressure being put on students from parents, and, more importantly, from teachers who will be fired if their performance (the number of students who get very high scores in exams) drops below a certain level. In essence, cheating has become a means by which students can cope and survive an extremely abusive system that they are forced to go through. That means, even when those pressures are removed somewhat, as at university level, the cheating idea is so ingrained they just do it as normal behaviour.

Obviously, for all the above reasons (I have Chinese family by marriage I am responsible for in China), I am being anonymous here.