
Foreign Students Seen Cheating More Than Domestic Ones - jimsojim
http://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-more-than-domestic-ones-1465140141
======
msoad
If a native students finds it hard to graduate school she/he might drop out of
collage but a foreign student who's struggling can't just drop out. Dropping
out often means going back home as a giant failure. It's a much bigger
pressure.

I'm not saying it's fine if they cheat. I'm also not ignoring the cultural
differences. This is just another way of seeing this phenomenon.

~~~
impish19
I'm pleasantly surprised to see the audience on HN be aware and considerate of
the socio-cultural differences.

To add a few other points to the list -

1\. The pressure is also to literally survive, and can sometimes extend to
their families. It's not uncommon to find Indian students coming to the US to
alleviate their families' financial condition by studying here and
consequently getting a job here. A lot of times their families would have
mortgaged their apartments/houses to get a loan to fund the education. I was
such a student about 3 years ago. If I would have failed, not only would my
parents not have an apartment anymore, but it would also be difficult for us
to survive as a family (my parents earn very little). I realize this was a
calculated risk and no one forced me(us) into it, but it was very pressuring
regardless.

2\. While cheating is frowned upon at a run-of-the-mill Indian university,
it's not dealt with as severely as at American universities. Consequently it
can be a little like you were careless enough to be jaywalking in a foreign
country you're visiting and finding out they're going to imprison you for it
later.

3\. The immigration rules here don't help as well. You have a limited amount
of time for which you can stay in the US after finishing up studies to find a
job. Failing to find a job in that time results into having to go back.
Sometimes you have to go back even if you found a job but didn't get through
the H1 lottery.

Let me firmly state that having said all of that, I don't condone this
behavior, and am unreservedly against it. I'm just glad people here on HN
already have additional perspective into why this happens and I'd just like to
add to it since I feel I can.

~~~
freshyill
American universities are very upfront about their strict academic honesty
policies, so it's not really analogous to jaywalking.

~~~
Balgair
Maybe, maybe not. As with most very diverse things: it depends. Yes, googling
for the honesty policies is easy, if you know they are typically referred to
as the 'honor code.' I would imagine that a fair percentage of US and foreign
students would be confused as to what 'honor' has to do with cheating though
("Like, chivalry is dead, bro"), but that is not an excuse. And to be fair,
even though the honor codes are strict, does not mean that the cheating is not
rampant. A friend's wife taught a lot of Chinese nationals as a grad student
and she said that they cheated a lot. However, that was not due to
maliciousness or ignorance. They knew it was 'not kosher' to cheat, but back
in China it seems that these kids has the same 'don't cheat' policy but if you
believed in that, you were totally screwed and the cheating was seen as a
necessary evil by people at all levels of society. You had to hide it, but
everyone knew everyone else did it. Now to these 17/18 year old kids newly in
the US, they did not expect the system to really be any different (think back
to yourself at that age). And typically it is not. You only get punished if
you get caught. There really are no downsides for them. Yeah, sure, some
scapegoat is made every once in a while, but how is that different than the
way China works anyways? The only difference here is that you don't have to
bribe as much. I mean, the average grade at Harvard is an A- [0], how could
you NOT think that cheating is rampant at the very highest levels? Sure, they
call it 'grade inflation', but a rose by any other name smells just as sweet.

[0][https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2015/05/27/harvard-
cl...](https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2015/05/27/harvard-class-with-a-
average-not-worried-about-grade-inflation)

~~~
argonaut
Students are told about the honor codes. It's not something you have to look
up.

Grade inflation has nothing to do with cheating - that's just more FUD. If a
class curves to a B, and everyone cheats, the average grade is still a B.

------
dcre
This article spends way too much time on badly substantiated differences in
cultural norms, and not nearly enough on the differences in incentives and
skills between international and domestic students.

English skill is an obvious one the article talks about, but along with that
comes an understanding of what is likely to get caught by a professor. In
other words, domestic students don't cheat as much not because they believe in
norms against cheating but rather because they understand better that they
will probably get caught, or they understand better how not to get caught (so
they don't get caught).

The article discusses incentives as well — the risk of getting sent back to
China and never coming back — but fails to consider that that risk is
precisely what might make getting good grades more important for foreign
students than domestic ones.

What I'm describing could be seen as a difference in cultural norms too, but
there's a huge gap between not believing that you're cheating and not knowing
how cheaters in America get caught.

~~~
ljf
On a similar note, I can't find the study now but I've seen the pretty much
all social stratas and races commit crimes at the same rate. It's just that
'we' care about policing and charging 'others' more than ourselves.

As an example, heading East out of London the motorway is often heavy with
speed cameras and often police cars (poorer end of London) . Heading West into
the Cotswolds (the rich area) , there are few cameras and a high level of very
fast speeding. But if you looked at a study it would appear that those from
the 'poorer' areas committed more 'speed crime' as those are the only areas we
are effectively policing.

I wonder if those looking for cheating also start from the position that
foreign pupils are more likely to cheat and therefore spend more time looking
for cheating?

~~~
argonaut
This makes no sense. At a given university, foreign and domestic students _go
to the same university_ and take the same classes. At best, you might argue
bias with foreign-sounding names, but that would be an _extraordinary_ claim
to make and would require extraordinary evidence to explain away a 5x
difference in cheating.

~~~
ljf
Extraordinary?

[http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/02/16/study-finds-
invest...](http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2015/02/16/study-finds-investor-
bias-against-foreign-sounding-names/)

[http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html](http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html)

[http://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/oct/18/racism-
discrimi...](http://www.theguardian.com/money/2009/oct/18/racism-
discrimination-employment-undercover)

And again that is 5x more discovered cheating, what number of cheating
occurred undiscovered for all groups? I'm not saying people don't cheat,
because they do, I'm saying look at the environment to understand what other
impacts on the number might occur.

~~~
argonaut
One will note that you didn't respond to my first point, which is that your
actual argument (about unequal resources devoted to policing cheating) is
wrong.

So if you are going to argue the point that there is bias against foreign-
sounding names, _enough bias to explain a 5x gap_ , you'll need more than
roundabout inference and implication. Extraordinary evidence means direct
evidence, not links to employment-related articles.

------
selectron
Anecdotally as a TA this absolutely matches what I've seen. I think it is
cultural combined with courses being much more difficult if you don't speak
English well.

~~~
astav123
Back when I was a masters foreign student, I had ousted another foreign
student who stole my assignment and submitted it as their own. But later I
learned how their family had been in poverty and that his parents had done
everything possible to get their son out to higher studies in the US and I
felt really bad. Life's just more difficult for the average foreign student
overall from the small sample space I experienced. That doesn't make it right
but the values of right and wrong are somewhat skewed when it comes to
survival.

~~~
caseysoftware
Here's a fun aspect:

At most schools, if you know of cheating and _don 't_ report it, it's a
violation of their honor code which will get you punished.

Whether it was "justified" cheating or not, it is cheating. Even if you don't
want them to get in trouble, don't let yourself get screwed in the process.

~~~
argonaut
I've never heard about that, and I graduated from a top college fairly
recently, which leads me to believe this is not true of _most_ schools.

------
gleb
The idea of academic cheating being bad is not a universal value.

In Soviet K-12 it was more like in NASCAR - cool in moderation so long you
don't get caught. Don't know about college.

In fact there is no word for [academic] "cheating" in Russian.

Wonder how it is in other cultures.

~~~
sotojuan
Anecdotal from my experience with international students:

In my college most of them went back to their countries to work in their
parents' or relatives' companies (sometimes). It seemed like getting a US
degree was the important part, not learning the material. With a US degree,
they got a ton of interviews and jobs where they learned on the job. I know
for a fact my US degree would put me at a super high advantage back in my home
country, even if I knew less than people there.

~~~
hackuser
> It seemed like getting a US degree was the important part, not learning the
> material

I think this describes very many students of many backgrounds.

------
smt88
I think it's very important to note that foreign students are not
representative of immigrants as a whole.

At many schools in the US, foreign students are not eligible for financial
aid. The students who are able to attend school are often wealthy (sometimes
extremely wealthy), and they're in the US to check a box. They come for the
diploma and then return home to do... something. They care a lot less about
actually learning anything than a student who actually needs the degree to get
by in post-college life.

------
feigenbalue
One of the reasons why cheating is rampant in India is because the examination
system in most colleges is mind-numbing and uncreative. The intelligent
students don't find an incentive in working hard for an examination based on a
rote pattern, and the "smart" ones follow suit leading to a culture where
honesty in examinations isn't important. I have seen a few of my Indian peers
be able to appreciate the difference in the testing methods and change their
attitude accordingly. But the "acting smart" mindset is set in far too deep in
most of the students who just care about getting good grades. Having said
that, I think improving the vetting procedure for the entry of international
students is necessary; and sadly that does not seem to be in focus due to the
revenue that students from foreign countries bring in.

~~~
studentrob
> I think improving the vetting procedure for the entry of international
> students is necessary; and sadly that does not seem to be in focus due to
> the revenue that students from foreign countries bring in.

Agreed. I think there's an opportunity for someone to come in and one-up the
SAT or ACT with a better vetting procedure for international students.

------
usaphp
In Russia 9 out of 10 students are cheating on exams, The vast majority of
young people especially in smaller cities don't care about actual learning of
a subject, most of them do it only for a degree. No wonder they continue doing
the same when they came to USA

~~~
xo5050
the russian kids are probably not that much different from the american kids.

------
bArray
Five times more likely to cheat or five times more likely to get caught? I
think this says more about a growing culture of people who take short-cuts
than it does about people.

------
jernfrost
As a former foreign student in the US, I take some offense at the
generalization of all foreign students as cheating.

Now I couldn't read more than the initial lines of the article since I didn't
have an account, but judging from the comments here there was no distinction
between the type of foreign students.

In the name of political correctness I think one is generalizing across all
foreign students, when there are wide varieties between the subgroups. I was a
foreign student from Norway e.g. who studied with a lot of Indians. We have
very little in common culturally and certainly with respects to the view on
cheating. My impression was that cheating was endemic in India and while the
Indians I knew were very nice people, they cheated an awfully lot. I simply
don't think they viewed that as that bad of a thing to do. More than half I
could actually see cheating through the exam. Others paid for homework.

Of course we also had different incentives in that my life did not depend that
much on my American exams. For many Indians it could make the difference
between poverty or wealth.

~~~
rdtsc
As a former foreign student in a CS / CE degree in US, I don't take offense at
all.

A large proportion of students are from China. The article does focus more on
those students. I think if you add India in the mix, that would overwhelm
statistically all the other countries (South America, Africa, Europe etc).

> I take some offense at the generalization of all foreign students as
> cheating.

Where did you read that? Can you show the quote where it says "all foreign
students are cheating". I couldn't find it directly, or implied.

> when there are wide varieties between the subgroups.

They are wide variaties. But surely you don't believe their is a proportional
representation from all the countries (if there are 100 students, they'll be
10 from Norway, 10 from India, 10 from Bolivia 10, etc). You are from Norway,
I was from Europe as well. On average most students would probably be from
China and India though.

~~~
jernfrost
I believe you miss the point. Stating that foreign students cheap more,
implies that simply being foreign is what increases your chance of cheating.
When in fact it would have been more accurate to say 3rd world students cheat
more. Of course that wouldn't have been politically correct so it gets watered
down.

The reason this matters is that e.g. in Japan, foreigners are described as the
source of all sorts of problems, because yes statistically speaking if you
throw everybody who is a foreigner into one group and run statistics on them
they are significantly overrepresented on a number of bad things.

That means you would struggle with getting things like an apartment because
simply being foreign labels you.

I guess in a screwed up way some people might thing this is a more democratic
form of racism.

But I don't think it is a step forward when we "democratize" prejudices by
creating artificial groups of people and discriminating based on that.

Would it somehow be more fear if we in Europe regarded the US as dangerous as
Mexico because we artificially picked the whole of north America including
Mexico to make generalizations about everybody living there?

~~~
rdtsc
It is a correlation based heuristic. Quantifying and splitting countries into
1st, 2nd, 3rd world would be a bit too much. Where to make the cut-offs? As a
cohort, and looking simply at correlation being a foreign student in US seems
to be correlated with cheating. And I speak this as a former foreign student
as well.

> Stating that foreign students cheap more, implies that simply being foreign
> is what increases your chance of cheating.

Not quite. The article does go into more details showing that a large number
of foreign students are Chinese. So it is not as simple as being from another
country. Being a foreign student in US doesn't imply being a random sample
from all of the world's countries. India and China account for the majority of
students and the article does focus on China quite a bit.

> When in fact it would have been more accurate to say 3rd world students
> cheat more

Ok thinking about it some more. Isn't that more problematic. Is China a 3rd
world country? What does 3rd world even mean anymore? Wouldn't that be deeply
insulting to them?

> That means you would struggle with getting things like an apartment because
> simply being foreign labels you.

I would struggle, agreed. But that is their country and if a simple heuristic
works for them, well it works for them. Perhaps expanding energy and inquiring
what country tenants are coming from or white/blacklisting nationalities,
religions, countries and managing rules based on that is just too troublesome
so they look at a general correlation.

> I guess in a screwed up way some people might thing this is a more
> democratic form of racism

It is not quite the same. Unless it is really about another persons' skin
color. But it is not, it is about cheating, crime, and so on. It so happens
that is also correlated with certain nationalities, cultures or skin colors.
Haven't been to Japan. Maybe they are really that racist, but I wouldn't be
surprised if landlords just don't want to get ripped off, and managing profits
and risk is what they worry about.

> Would it somehow be more fear if we in Europe regarded the US as dangerous
> as Mexico because we artificially picked the whole of north America
> including Mexico to make generalizations about everybody living there?

Fair to who? Maybe it would be fair to you if say you were flooded by lots of
people from North America who committed crimes, picked pockets, stole, started
fights in the street, threw trash all over. It might not be fair some people
from US who don't behave that way typically, but the world doesn't operate on
fairness.

------
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------
sul4bh
Homework/project outsourcing is also rampant.

------
programLyrique
They are speaking mainly about cheating by Chinese students (and also Indian
ones) in the article. No data about the other foreign students?

[edit] Is it because Chinese and Indian students represent the bulk of foreign
students in the US?

~~~
rdtsc
> No data about the other foreign students?

Because after those 2 major groups are accounted for, others are an
insignificant proportion. Those minorities could be more honest than the
domestic students, statistically it wouldn't matter much.

------
anotherhacker
School teachers call it "cheating".

Management calls it "cooperation".

Our school system preps kids in a way that is different than how we work. Or
at least the best way to work.

~~~
freshyill
They have cooperation in schools too.

~~~
anotherhacker
Yes, and any progress they make at it is instantly destroyed by the notion of
competition. There might be a lesson where students work together, but then
they all take tests individually.

Schools don't even know what they are doing. This should't be a surprise. It
is a system. A system cannot understand itself.

------
stuffedBelly
personal story 1: Back then at college I was once a grader for a computer
science course. I reported two students' projects that matched all too
perfectly and turned out one student tricked another into giving the project
as a "reference" and ended up copying the whole thing. My college has zero-
tolerance policy towards any kind of cheating, therefore the cheating student
was booted out. These two seemed to be close friends and it was probably
devastating to their mutual trust and friendship, not to mention one's
academic path was basically over due to the cheating incident.

personal story 2: I took a CS course with a Matlab project as the final
project. When it was close to the deadline many of my classmates including me
got an email from our TA, at least the sender's name is our TA's name, saying
that we needed to submit the project through email by midnight. Some of us
grew suspicious that the sender's email address was a gmail account and did
not end with ".edu", and the deadline never changed on the official course
calendar. It turned out it was indeed someone that faked TA's identity and
sent out those emails, since anyone who enrolled in the class can see their
classmates' email addresses if shared. There were still some students who
finished the project early and ended up emailing their project to that fake TA
account. The perpetrator was never caught. (If you are from my university and
majored in CS, you probably heard of this incident. It caused quite a bit of
stir)

As a former grader to many college courses, cheating involves a mix of both
international and domestic students. If one's educational background does not
stress the consequence of cheating, he/she is likely to cheat. In this case,
some cultures do not really punish students for cheating aside from scolding.

Also, giving some 5.1/100 or 1/100 ratio is pointless. Wait until you get your
PhD and you will know academic dishonesty happens all the time regardless of
where you are from. It's just some cheating is more clever than the other.

------
toehead2000
> averages don't represent correlation

what does this even mean?

> and massive aggregate numbers tell us nothing about any member of the
> population

sounds like someone cheated their way through statistics class.

~~~
dang
Please don't respond to a comment you think is wrong by getting personally
nasty. That's worse than being wrong, and takes things further in an unwanted
direction.

Edit: Your comments have been breaking the HN guidelines egregiously and
often. We ban accounts that do this, so please read the rules and follow them
when commenting here. That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at
all.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html)

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844948](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11844948)
and marked it off-topic.

------
hackuser
Regardless of the prominence of the source, this is xenophobic stereotyping.
They are painting every person in a large, incredibly diverse group (at every
school in the United States, and including every foreign student from every
country in the world, Canada to Angola to China to Andorra!) with one broad
brush. The headline itself is absurd, inflammatory sensationalism.

They have little basis: The statistics are almost meaningless; averages don't
represent correlation and massive aggregate numbers tell us nothing about any
member of the population. For example, the average wealth of 999 bankrupt
people and Bill Gates is $75 million, a number which tells us nothing about
anyone in that group.

I never thought I'd see something like this from the WSJ, or say that one of
their stories should be removed from HN, but I flagged this one.

(Admittedly there's a chance of something more substantive beyond the headline
and pre-paywall paragraph I can read, but I still can't imagine anything can
justify that headline or the inept use of statistics to justify it.)

EDIT: Thanks for the suggestions on the web search (which I should have
thought of). It turns up this headline too, in the Daily Caller; great job on
spreading this story with your excellent journalism, WSJ:

 _Foreign Students Five Times As Likely To Cheat In College_

~~~
pcr0
Click on the "web" link to get past the paywall.

~~~
hackuser
Thanks for the suggestion, but for some reason it didn't work.

------
takshak
Title should be "Foreign Student Seen 'Innovating' More Than Domestic Ones".

------
brianmcconnell
Cue Donald Trump In 3...2...1

------
x5n1
-

~~~
smt88
Original parent comment which has now been removed:

> _In software and programming it matters little if you cheat. It works or it
> 's shit. It's easy to tell the difference. And it's pretty easy to fire
> interns or juniors, etc. Not only that but you don't really learn how to do
> jobs anyhow._

Every single sentence in your comment is ludicrously false.

> _In software and programming it matters little if you cheat._

What if you steal software from your old employer? What if you hack a
competitor? What if you base your entire project on something that you can't
legally use, and then you're sued?

Outside the corporate/legal world, there are still areas where cheating is
very harmful. Violating open-source licenses, pretending someone else's work
is your own, etc. The open-source world works (when it does work) because of
transparency and something like the honor system.

Cheating matters a _lot_ in software.

> _It works or it 's shit._

That is just complete, utter nonsense. There is a _huge_ spectrum from "good"
to "shit", and "working" begins near the "shit" end.

> _It 's easy to tell the difference._

If it were easy to tell the difference, you could just throw a junior
developer into a management role. Lots of juniors have the people skills and
organization skills to manage a small project, but they don't have the
experience to know which practices are OK in the long-run and which practices
aren't.

Object-oriented programming is a great example. Many programmers in the FP
camp think all OO programs are shit. Many of them took years to come to that
conclusion.

If it's so easy and clear-cut, why is there little agreement on what makes
good software and what doesn't?

> _And it 's pretty easy to fire interns or juniors, etc._

Not in the US and most other developed countries. Firing people is risky and
expensive. I worked for a company that was sued by an ex employee for a
completely bullshit reason, and the company lost $400k in legal fees that they
could never recover because the employee didn't have that kind of cash.

> _Not only that but you don 't really learn how to do jobs anyhow._

You don't learn how to write code for a living, but you do learn time
management and people skills, which are much more important anyway. Most
coding work at most companies only requires an average worker. Would it be
better to have people with amazing skills doing 100% of the work? Yes, but
there aren't enough of them.

What differentiates all those average people is whether they work well on a
team, how well they manage their time, and how well they learn. All those
things are learned in college, and all of them are undermined by cheating.

------
partycoder
Or more likely to be inspected.

