Foreign Students Seen Cheating More Than Domestic Ones

If a native students finds it hard to graduate school she&#x2F;he might drop out of collage but a foreign student who&#x27;s struggling can&#x27;t just drop out. Dropping out often means going back home as a giant failure. It&#x27;s a much bigger pressure.<p>I&#x27;m not saying it&#x27;s fine if they cheat. I&#x27;m also not ignoring the cultural differences. This is just another way of seeing this phenomenon.

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.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;t get caught).<p>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.<p>What I&#x27;m describing could be seen as a difference in cultural norms too, but there&#x27;s a huge gap between not believing that you&#x27;re cheating and not knowing how cheaters in America get caught.

Anecdotally as a TA this absolutely matches what I&#x27;ve seen. I think it is cultural combined with courses being much more difficult if you don&#x27;t speak English well.

The idea of academic cheating being bad is not a universal value.<p>In Soviet K-12 it was more like in NASCAR - cool in moderation so long you don&#x27;t get caught. Don&#x27;t know about college.<p>In fact there is no word for [academic] &quot;cheating&quot; in Russian.<p>Wonder how it is in other cultures.

I think it&#x27;s very important to note that foreign students are not representative of immigrants as a whole.<p>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&#x27;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.

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&#x27;t find an incentive in working hard for an examination based on a rote pattern, and the &quot;smart&quot; ones follow suit leading to a culture where honesty in examinations isn&#x27;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 &quot;acting smart&quot; 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.

In Russia 9 out of 10 students are cheating on exams, The vast majority of young people especially in smaller cities don&#x27;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

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.

As a former foreign student in the US, I take some offense at the generalization of all foreign students as cheating.<p>Now I couldn&#x27;t read more than the initial lines of the article since I didn&#x27;t have an account, but judging from the comments here there was no distinction between the type of foreign students.<p>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&#x27;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.<p>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.

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Homework&#x2F;project outsourcing is also rampant.

They are speaking mainly about cheating by Chinese students (and also Indian ones) in the article. No data about the other foreign students?<p>[edit] Is it because Chinese and Indian students represent the bulk of foreign students in the US?

School teachers call it &quot;cheating&quot;.<p>Management calls it &quot;cooperation&quot;.<p>Our school system preps kids in a way that is different than how we work. Or at least the best way to work.

personal story 1: Back then at college I was once a grader for a computer science course. I reported two students&#x27; projects that matched all too perfectly and turned out one student tricked another into giving the project as a &quot;reference&quot; 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&#x27;s academic path was basically over due to the cheating incident.<p>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&#x27;s name is our TA&#x27;s name, saying that we needed to submit the project through email by midnight. Some of us grew suspicious that the sender&#x27;s email address was a gmail account and did not end with &quot;.edu&quot;, and the deadline never changed on the official course calendar. It turned out it was indeed someone that faked TA&#x27;s identity and sent out those emails, since anyone who enrolled in the class can see their classmates&#x27; 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)<p>As a former grader to many college courses, cheating involves a mix of both international and domestic students. If one&#x27;s educational background does not stress the consequence of cheating, he&#x2F;she is likely to cheat. In this case, some cultures do not really punish students for cheating aside from scolding.<p>Also, giving some 5.1&#x2F;100 or 1&#x2F;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&#x27;s just some cheating is more clever than the other.

&gt; averages don&#x27;t represent correlation<p>what does this even mean?<p>&gt; and massive aggregate numbers tell us nothing about any member of the population<p>sounds like someone cheated their way through statistics class.

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.<p>They have little basis: The statistics are almost meaningless; averages don&#x27;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.<p>I never thought I&#x27;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.<p>(Admittedly there&#x27;s a chance of something more substantive beyond the headline and pre-paywall paragraph I can read, but I still can&#x27;t imagine anything can justify that headline or the inept use of statistics to justify it.)<p>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:<p><i>Foreign Students Five Times As Likely To Cheat In College</i>

Title should be &quot;Foreign Student Seen &#x27;Innovating&#x27; More Than Domestic Ones&quot;.

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

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Or more likely to be inspected.