China Threatens Jail Time for College Entrance Exam Cheaters

There has been an underlying stigma that foreign students are all rampant cheaters whose parents go out of their way to get their kids into the best universities in the utmost unethical way. Although some of this may be true, cheating is an omnipresent endemic true not only on foreign but domestic grounds; therefore, it is not fair to say that it is within a certain culture that this behavior is appropriated or accepted. In reading articles like these, people forget to feign that most foreign students can’t afford to bribe state officials for answers or afford ghost writers to take their tests and that it was actually their own heart, sweat and tears that got them to where they are today. Not only so, but it has been getting harder for Asian-Americans to get into American universities, where schools are in a bid to diversify their student population, putting even more strain on Asians or Asian-Americans to get higher grades and to get that 1600 on their SATs. So, to say that some cultures “do not value integrity and conscience as we do” is, in my opinion, a brazen statement.
On a more related note, I do admire China’s attempt to uphold a sense of social justice and equality for all, however, I still believe that a seven year jail sentence is much too severe a punishment. Surely, suspending all scores and expelling the student would be a severe enough punishment seeing as failing this “life determining” test is alarming enough on its own.

Yet when the foreign students go to the US and cheat aggressively, no one seems to care? I guess the American universities want the out of state tuition the foreign students pay rather than integrity, ethics and honestly within their hollowed walls.

Should be disgusting but apparently an example as to what is to come as the US loses its once sacred world leadership role.

Widespread cheating among US universities has devalue the domestic education diploma mills.

Cheating is endemic not just in China but also in India. One major problem is lack of fear for the consequences, but it also makes you wonder about the culture. Perhaps some cultures simply do not value integrity and conscience as we do. It's why these societies are such corrupt dog eat dog, unpleasant places to live. Sadly this culture is now being imported into the US through mass immigration.

Colleges in the US know that there is rampant cheating from foreign students from lying about their grades, extracurriculars, recommendations, ghost written essays to cheating on the SAT, TOEFL, GMAT, GRE, followed by rampant cheating once they get in. All our colleges care about is the cold hard cash these students bring in. Our colleges are part and parcel the o this whole cheating culture. At least China is trying hard to deter it, our colleges happily take the cash and look the other way, just like our government happily grants the EB5 visa and green cards to China's most wanted corrupt elites as long as they pay $500k. Our colleges and government need to do our part to stop encouging cheating and corruption in third world countries.

This is the logical conclusion to an educational system built on testing---race to jail.

Kinda reminds me of the story of Hung Hsiu-ch'uan. He was an unhappy exam taker from the hinterlands who started the Taip'ing Rebellion. And so it goes.

So glad that China’s anti-corruption program has spread from civilian government to military to big business to education and now to students. To me the student part of China’s anti-corruption program is the most significant. If Chinese students grown up cheating in exams, then China’s anti-corruption program will never succeed. I truly wish China great success.

I fear some of those cheaters has brought their habits into our universities.

The examination system in China began in Tang and Sui dynasty (600 AD) and it was one of few channel for the child of a poor family to become the ruling elite and to glorify and turn around family’s name and fortune. “It takes 10 years studying by the window in the cold winter night to achieve the ultimate goal of honoring your family” and this veneration can be seen today by tourists on the vivid inscription on many ancient village gates. The infatuation and adoration with the success of examination have created the art of cheating by using a “hired gun” and cheat sheet of various kinds, leaking questionnaire through bribe and etc. Special actions with severe punishment are required to stem this unacceptable and harmful custom.

“Because the punishment is so severe, no one will want to say anything.”

Well, the general idea is, if you're not a cheater, you have nothing to worry about. I don't know if anyone really can complain about that, in ensuring fairness of the system. For those who are worry, they are worried for getting caught, and they should be.

Given the fact that cheating on such important exams requires a lot of premeditation and absolute disregard for rules and regulations, how can NYTimes say that imprisonment is overly harsh?
In the United States, where harsh legal punishments were routinely doled out for small infractions such as online bullying, jaywalking, disorderly conduct, etc., cheating is also punishable by imprisonment. In fact, a few Chinese students were prosecuted and imprisoned for cheating on standardized tests in Pennsylvania. Given that cheating on such college entrance exams are lucrative activities for criminal elements, how can criminal punishment not be justified?
Another case of Americans' self-righteous value system transposed onto other cultures and other countries.

Another law on the books in China where the " rule of law " so often touted by PRC media rags means absolutely nothing . Everyone cheats in China in so many ways every day that it is not thought of as cheating .

My Chinese wife got ( before we met ) a so - called Masters in Business Administration degree from small , inconsequential " university " in Wales that has established a program with a local college in Hainan . Basically she showed up for the lectures , paid the money and made a trip to Wales to collect her fake " MBA " .

Her son from a previous marriage would have scored poorly or just so-so on the gaokao , so like anyone else whose parents who can scrape up the money , he was sent to university in Australia where he also got an on demand " MBA " from a university that needs foreign student dollars .

Most executives in China owe their employment to family connections or doctored resumes .

The article does not mention that most of the Chinese universities that these kids almost kill themselves to get into are not worth a bucket of warm spit . You can count the number of excellent universities on one hand in this country of 1.3 billion .

The " economic miracle " of China is a house of cards . Once cheap labor disappears and factories all move to Vietnam , Cambodia and Myanmar , the house of cards will begin to collapse . All of those millions of middle and upper class incompetent execs with paper mill degrees won't have the foggiest of what to do .

Why not 100,000 multiple choice questions.

At each test centre a computer generates 1,000 questions.

Would that not solve the problem ?

The opening line reads -
”A cheater in China used to have it easy: His family might be subjected to a harsh scolding, and his exam results might be thrown out. Now, a student caught cheating could face a prison sentence.“

Yes, a new law is taking effect. No, the treatment for cheaters before this law was not that light. When caught, cheaters were regularly barred from entering any school for life. The new law probably makes the punishment more universally and equally applied.

Cheating among high school students is not unique to China but the significance of doing well on the gaokao certainly is. A lingering facet of the old meritorious advancement process in theory the gaokao opens multiple options for money making by opportunists with a trick. Good to see government attempting to level the playing field. What number is better than seven, any suggestions? Certainly conveys the message do your own work.

If you passed and enforced a law like that in the U.S., you'd need a prison the size of a fairly large city.

I would suggest Singapore style caning in addition to prison sentence. Cheating, corruption, fraud, mysticism needs to be beaten out of society if a society is to become civilized and respected. The college exam is very important to Chinese social mobility especially those on the lower end of the scale. Fairness must be maintained so the poor will have the same chance as the rich in life. A meritocracy would not success if the good are replaced by the bad and unscrupulous.

Using Harvard as an example. Once a premier institution where only the best of the best gets in is now filled with students that cheated on the admission process. Falsified high school grades, nonexistent club and extracurricular activities, loopholes such as ethnic based, income based, sexual orientation based quotas. Is it any wonder the hard science Harvard colleges are filled with Chinese, Indian and Europeans that excel because they didn't take shortcuts?

Since imprisonment in on the table, wouldn't it be easier to have students strip naked, enter individually assigned cubicles, and use only resources provided by the college (pen, paper, calculators, etc.) (serious about 2 out of the 3).

You can't even get 7 years in the U.S. for committing rape, even some murders carry sentences less than 7 years. This is ridiculous. For cheating on a test? Every single U.S. citizen has cheated on an exam for the last 200 years. We'd al be in jail perpetually. I just don't see how this law will work, the only thing that's going to happen is an influx of non violent criminals in Chinese prisons or a generation of kids too afraid to go to school period.

What if someone is accused of cheating when they really didn't, but got sentenced to 7 years? Dumb law, really, really dumb law. Nonsensical.

I understand where China is coming from since they have a large population to regulate. But 7 years in prison is unjustifiable maybe 7 years of community service ?

I teach Chinese immigrants' kids English on Saturdays. Families just expect their normal children to be mini-Einsteins while ignoring other basic childhood needs. For example, I only noticed one Asian kid among 10 soccer fields at my kids' practice. It's all work and no fun. The only joy the boys seem to get is playing Mindcraft while the girls get piano lessons. Sports? Nope! It'll be a sad day when today's Chinese kids realize that their straight As only land them menial jobs at the corner store because their parents failed to get them involved in North American culture and because they have absolutely nothing in common with the locals. But if they go back to China, they can pass the gaokan but remain foreigners in their parents' homeland.

WSJ reported last week that Asian international college students are 5x more likely to be cheating than domestic students. After attending a Big Ten and later an elite east coast private college, I can assure it's more like 20x. Administration look the other way because they want that China, Indian, Middle East gravy train to keep flowing. These kids cheat to get accepted, and once on campus they have surrogates attending their classes, they pay people to secure exams early, pay firms to type papers -- even foreign TAs grade domestic kids poorly and give 100% scores to their countrymen! As of 2015, 1/4 of the undergrads at Michigan State and Univ. of Illinois are Asian internationals!

Dig deeper, NYT. This is a higher ed epidemic.

It is surprising just how pervasive and sophisticated cheating on this exam is in China. Before reading the entire article I mentioned the headline to a friend, and she asked, "How do you even cheat on an exam like that?" The answers - companies created to transmit answers, pen cameras, tank tops with built-in receivers - were shocking, and serve to reinforce the widely held view that Chinese corruption is endemic and so ubiquitous that no aspect of their culture seems to be exempt.

Jail sentence for cheating students is too harsh, even for China. How about bar cheating students from taking the exam again for a few years and send them to trade schools or apprenticeship.

Such draconian measure is a sign of frustration at a large scale problem. It's as if cheating at exam in China has become an addiction. China should learn the lesson from American Justice system: they jail young pot smokers under the misguided War on Drugs, crowding the jails and destroying young lives. Meanwhile cheating bankers and corrupted officials in USA and China are free to continue their business. Injustice is the cause of future unrest.

Does anyone know whether this law applies to tests taken by Chinese students seeking admission to a US COLLEGE, tests like the TOEFL, SAT, GRE? With many years of experience in admissions at all levels of US universities, I can assure the readers that the cheating described in this article isn't limited to the internal exams described in the story.

Good.

Cheating among high school students is not unique to China but the significance of doing well on the gaokao certainly is. A lingering facet of the old meritorious advancement process in theory the gaokao opens multiple options for money making by opportunists with a trick. Good to see government attempting to level the playing field. What number is better than seven, any suggestions? Certainly conveys the message do your own work.
In graduate school at Berkeley a graduate student appeared who spoke very little English but would work mathematical jargon into all answers that conveyed little but the papers he showed the faculty were brilliant, then one day a visiting scholar from Taiwan was shown one and said, “I know this work.” His colleague in Taipei. Someone should have caught fellow at the gaokao level.

Good article on Chinese societal and education problems from Sinosphere for a change; maybe there is hope... 呵呵

This seems a little harsh but maybe not since cheating seems to be a real problem in the 高考 akin to other societal corruption and something needs to be done about it to clean it up. It's not clear, from the article, what the actual extent of the problem really is however.

Before we noobs in the west decry the harshness of the cheating penalty, recall that the Chinese have had more than 2000 years of experience with a universal examination system required to serve in the imperial bureaucracy .

I am guessing that over the centuries the Chinese judged the positive aspects of a common culture outweighed the negative aspects of 'hive mind' single-culture thinking.

Imagine the difference in the field now if presidential candidates had to get at least a C grade on a universal exam covering natural science, political systems, cultural diversity, constitutional law, macroeconomics and modern military strategy.

Well, that should separate the wheat from the chaff..

One way to stop cheating is abolishing the test and make entrance into college only based on grades in school. If you are a good student you go, if not, there won't even be a way to cheat. Unless studying is considered cheating.

In the past few decades cheating has risen sharply in China, with weak enforcement. The problem is deeper than the Gaokao, though cheating on Gaokao has a corrosive effective on society. But in the same period hundreds of Chinese scientific journal articles have been withdrawn from western journals, once found to be fraudulent. A researcher at a prestigious Chinese university announced (and was praised in the Chinese press) that he had made first completely-Chinese chip. Shortly after it was produced, it was found to be a fraud. The stories go on. Whether online or in the market, Shanzhai products (fakes) are easier to find than real ones. In Beijing there is even a market to buy used western wine bottles, which are then refilled with shanzhai wine and sold as fine Bordeaux. Cheating and covering it with bribes, are not disdained, and rarely punished. How did a culture based on ethical works of Confucius and Buddha be amoral today? In part because of the the Cultural Revolution. In his final grasp for power, Mao banned western cultural influences to enforce Chinese Socialism. Schools closed for a decade. Confucius and Buddhist philosophies were wiped out, and their devotees were beaten or killed. All that was left was "Socialist Ethics." But sadly, Marx was an economist, not an ethicist. Anyone who reads the Little Red Book knows Mao was neither. The result today is a society that is morally adrift, without a system of ethics as a guide. Of course they cheat on the Gaokao.

The importance of China's college entrance exam far outweighs the SAT. The hardest years of academic study in China are the high school years. The number of talented students is high. The number of spots at good universities is low. The entrance exam can make or break a high school student of high aptitude who has been working obsessively for years. I don't know about throwing cheaters in jail, but cheating on the test is most definitely a crime.

Well, you really can't expect people not to cheat on a test when it's so hard to make in the world they live in without doing when on the Gaokao. When college is a must for anyone who wants to live a better life, as it is here in Korea and in China, there's really no stopping it, people will cheat.