China Diaries: Beating the cheats

Jan 3 2008 by Christian Saunders, Western Mail

MOST people outside Asia have preconceived ideas that Chinese students are all hard working and diligent.

They certainly like to nurture the image. You could be forgiven for thinking that this, combined with the Chinese obsession with maintaining honour and “face” would mean that cheating in the classroom just wouldn’t happen.

On the contrary, cheating is rife. I would even go so far as to say that it is an inherent part of student culture in China, and only recently have universities and colleges begun cracking down on it.

The problem is especially noticeable in exam situations, where the pressure to pass with a good mark can be immense. Togetherness and camaraderie come to the fore and students do all they can to help each other, one even going as far as confessing, “during exams, it’s us against the examiner.”

For research purposes in several of my classes I used cheating as a discussion topic. It soon emerged that even though they were reluctant to talk about it at first and acknowledged that it was fundamentally wrong, it is nevertheless considered acceptable behaviour among students in China.

Some students see it as a comfort blanket or safety net, while others think of cheating as a life strategy, the challenge being to not get caught.

The general attitude seems to be that it doesn’t matter how you get the required results – just that you get them.

Therefore copying answers and sharing information by any means they can is widespread. You’d be surprised by how much they can fit onto an eraser – which is the time-honoured tradition of smuggling notes into exams.

Some students use modern technology to their advantage, a current favourite being to take photographs of exam papers on their mobile phones and sending them to their friends. Hidden electronic transmitting and receiving devices are also popular. The Chinese press recently reported an instance where one such device exploded while in use, hospitalising a student.

Cheating has become such an issue that some universities have installed CCTV cameras and sophisticated mobile phone signal-blocking equipment to combat the problem.

They also impose stiff penalties on those caught as a deterrent to others. Some Beijing universities require students sitting exams to sign a “pledge of credibility”, a written assurance they will not try to cheat. Those that refuse to sign the pledge are automatically barred from sitting the exam.

Unfortunately, too many students are still prepared to take the risk.

The irony is that if they invested as much time and effort in actually studying for their exams, as they obviously do in finding new and inventive ways to cheat, then they wouldn’t even need to cheat in the first place.

Rules on cheating have to be particularly stringent at the Flying College where, as the students are training to be commercial airline pilots, public safety could be at risk. Personally, I would never want to be on an airplane where something goes wrong in the cockpit and the pilot doesn’t know how to rectify the situation because he cheated his way through all his exams.