Let's start this year, on March 28, with the first Reuters story about the Chinese SAT
Xingyuan Ding is a sophomore at the University of California, Los Angeles, one of America’s most exclusive public universities. In applying to schools, the 20-year-old from China took the SAT college entrance exam four times.
He had an advantage on his final try: a booklet compiled by a Shanghai test-preparation school he attended.
His study aid was far more valuable than the practice questions that students in America use to prepare for the SAT, the standardized test used by thousands of U.S. colleges to help select applicants. Known in Chinese as a jijing, the booklet was essentially an answer key. It revealed words from the correct responses to multiple-choice questions that had appeared on past SATs - many of which would be used again on the exam Ding took.
Thanks to the booklet, Ding said he already knew the answers to about half of the critical reading section of the SAT when he took the test in Hong Kong in December 2013.
“I felt really lucky,” Ding said.
His score on that section? A perfect 800, he said...
...The College Board, the not-for-profit organization that owns the SAT, has acknowledged widespread problems with test security in Asia in recent years. Since October 2014, the New York-based organization has delayed issuing scores in Asia six times and canceled an exam sitting in two locations there – steps the College Board takes when it has evidence that test material has been exposed to the public.
But the breakdown in security is more pervasive than the College Board has publicly disclosed, Reuters has found. In addition to the security-related incidents the College Board has announced, the news agency identified eight occasions since late 2013 in which test material was circulating online before the SAT was administered overseas...
...A confidential PowerPoint presentation reveals that College Board officials had documented widespread security problems in June 2013, shortly after canceling a sitting of the SAT in South Korea. The PowerPoint, reviewed by Reuters, shows that half of the SATs in inventory at the time had been “compromised”...Even so, College Board officials confirmed that some portions of those tainted tests were later administered overseas. And the College Board took no steps to restrict testing in China, the SAT's largest market by far, even as it tightened security in smaller countries where exams had leaked....The main reason that tests are so easily "compromised" is that test questions in the SAT's are reused. I guess the college board finds it to be too troublesome to rewrite exams. For this reason, we all had to sign a box before the exam saying that we would not discuss the questions on the exam. On this topic:
Recycling enables cram schools to gather reading passages and questions from past tests, then figure out the answers and package that material for their clients to study. The information comes from many sources. Test-prep centers have associates take the exam and memorize what they’ve seen. Some people even photograph the test booklet. The cram schools also analyze test information that American teenagers share on Internet forums. At times, cram schools have obtained actual SAT tests.
A guy with a Jewy-sounding name runs a test-prep center in South Korea, and says the following:
“Basically, the only way to survive in the industry is to have a copy of the test” in advance of a sitting, said Ben Heisler, who offers test-prep and college-consulting services in South Korea.
“It’s like doping in the Tour de France,” Heisler said. “If you don’t do it, someone else will.”
The article concludes with a nice-sounding quote from a good goy:
“It is hurting all students when someone cheats on any aspect of their application,” said Douglas L. Christiansen, dean of admissions at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and chair of the board of trustees at the College Board. “It is displacing someone else.”
Aww. That's nice of you to say. Or should I say, that's very white of you to say. Too bad these Asians just don't think that way.
March 28 was a double-feature. There was another article on the internet about Asian SAT cheating. It opens by explaining the process of mining for data on a past SAT and then reconstructing it. The result of the effort is the following:
The first file, offered free by a Chinese online test-advice company called SAT Helper, reconstructs one version of that day’s exam booklet. It had a 52-question reading section with five text passages – including the Chavez letter and the plate tectonics essay.
The second document was shown to Reuters by a Chinese tipster who had warned the College Board last year about security breaches. It contained images of another version of the March 5 test. Among its reading passages? The Chavez letter, the baby-fat paper, the plate tectonics piece and the Chabon novel...
...What has made such breaches especially damaging in recent years is the College Board’s routine reuse overseas of SAT test material previously given in America. The recycling of exam items has enabled test-prep operators to provide international students an advance look at reading passages, grammar problems and other material that may be on future tests. Sometimes, the cram schools even create answer keys for their clients...
...“We’re working against cartel-like companies in China and other countries that will stop at nothing to enrich themselves,” said John McGrath, the College Board’s senior vice president for communications and marketing. “These bad actors will continue to lie, cheat and steal to the detriment of students who work hard and play by the rules.”
Reuters even made a podcast about these findings here. It is pretty well-produced. He explained some new stuff. For example, it apparently is very hard for the College Board to enforce copyright laws in Asia.
There is also an article about an Arizona congressman who demands the Department of Homeland Security fix the problem of Asian SAT cheating.
The SAT is just the beginning of the cheating. The entire academic process is a farce. Special Report: Industry helps Chinese game their way into and through U.S. colleges gives some examples:
Coaching services peppered the students with emails and chat messages in Chinese, offering to help foreign students at U.S. colleges do much of the work necessary for a university degree. The companies would author essays for clients. Handle their homework. Even take their exams. All for about a $1,000 a course.
For dozens of Chinese nationals at the University of Iowa, the offers proved irresistible.
“Test-taking services. Paper-writing. Take Online Courses for you,” says the social-messaging profile of one Chinese coaching outfit used by Iowa students, UI International Student Services. A pitch emailed from another business ended with this reassuring claim: “Your friends are all using us.”...
...How about a money-back guarantee if you are not happy?
University spokespeople declined to name the students or comment on their nationality, citing academic privacy laws.
But those familiar with the investigation said that most, perhaps all, of the cheating suspects are Chinese nationals. They stand accused of cheating in online versions of at least three courses, including law and economics. Three of the Chinese suspects admitted to Reuters that they hired Chinese-run outfits to take exams for them..
At the University of Washington, the University of Alabama and Penn State University, for example, students received Chinese-language advertisements by email this semester from unnamed firms. The pitch: Students could raise their grade point averages and graduate early if they hired the outfits to take classes and do assignments for them. The ads, reviewed by Reuters, offered a money-back guarantee. Students who didn’t get As would get refunds.
This article drops a few new bombs about lying on applications, something akin to what I have personally seen with Chinese students faking their resumes:
In addition, Reuters has identified companies in China that help students contrive their entire college application – embellishing or ghostwriting application essays, doctoring letters of recommendation from high school teachers, and even advising kids to obtain fake high school transcripts. Other providers continue the illicit assistance after admission, such as those that performed coursework for hire in Iowa City.
The article gives an anecdote of how this system works:
To help those students succeed, a multi-faceted industry is taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the U.S. higher education system. For colleges, vetting the applicants who use these services can be daunting. The case of Xuan “Claren” Rong shows why.
A native of Shenzhen, a city of about 11 million people on the Chinese mainland near Hong Kong, Rong spent part of high school in America. He entered the MacDuffie School, a boarding and day school in Granby, Massachusetts, as a ninth-grader in September 2011.
“He seemed to be a diligent, hard-working kid,” said Steven Griffin, MacDuffie’s head of school. Trouble was, “he was in the middle of the pack in terms of his grades,” Griffin recalled. “Apparently that was not good enough for his family.”
Reuters reviewed Rong’s transcript at MacDuffie, which the school verified as authentic. It shows his overall grade point average as of April 2014 was 2.8 out of 4 – about a B – though it was marred with Ds in Latin and Physics. Rong was supposed to graduate in 2015 but dropped out after his junior year.
In March 2014, he became a client of Cunshande, a company that helps Chinese students get accepted to top U.S. colleges. Cunshande, also known as Transcend Education, is located on the 25th floor of an office tower in the financial district of Shenzhen.
A receipt shows that Claren Rong’s parents paid about $13,700 to Transcend. With the company’s help, Rong applied to at least 15 U.S. colleges, emails reviewed by Reuters indicate. He was accepted in 2015 by the University of California, Davis.
In March 2015, more than a hundred U.S. colleges began receiving emails from an anonymous former Transcend employee. The emails included details about 40 Chinese applicants, including Rong.
“I am writing this e-mail to inform you that the student Xuan Rong … under the influence of Cunshande, a company which ghostwrites applications for Chinese students applying to American universities, committed application fraud,” the tipster wrote to some of the schools.
Rong, the tipster alleged, claimed in his college applications that he attended a Chinese high school in downtown Shenzhen, where he maintained an A average his sophomore and junior years. In fact, the tipster said, Rong was attending MacDuffie in Massachusetts.
Sheesh, that's a lot of Chinese people pouring into California. What a travesty.
The kid's father's reaction?
“We just wanted to get in a better school,” he said. “It’s normal. Anyone would do that.”
I'm not telling you, cheating is normal for Asians. And the Asians themselves say the exact same thing.
Admissions offices often lack the staff to pursue such red flags. At UC Davis, where Rong was admitted, 68,519 people applied to attend the school this fall. One of every five were international students. The school has just seven admissions officers on staff to vet those 13,560 international applicants.That is a lot of Chinese students.
But are Chinese people more likely to cheat than others?
In 2015, 4,540 international students were enrolled at Iowa. Of those, 2,797 were from China. That’s 9 percent of the school’s student body. Most or all of the students accused of cheating are Chinese nationals.One way of cheating that I heard about when I was in school is surrogate test-taking. This article covers it.
The contractor discovered that students taking online classes had other people take their exams for them, he wrote. ProctorU is able to monitor students through the cameras mounted in the computers used to take the test. In checking the faces of the exam-takers against the identification photos of the legitimate students, ProctorU came to believe that imposters had stepped in for the students. It then alerted the university.
It isn’t clear if the university has identified any of the ringers, known as “gunmen” in China. But the three Chinese students interviewed for this article mentioned several services they had used. The students spoke on the condition that they not be named.
One, a third-year transfer student from a Chinese university, said UI International Student Services took a midterm exam for her in March. In a series of Chinese-language messages via the WeChat app, UI International confirmed to Reuters that it has provided “substitute” course-taking services to students at the University of Iowa. But contradicting the student, UI International denied taking exams for students and said none of its clients had been accused of academic fraud.
This article has more information, all from admissions of Chinese students who had been caught and expelled.
Reuters has a few more articles, from an article about Chinese test centers using SWAT teams to arrest students cheating on the gaokao, their entrance exam, to an article about the cancellation of an ACT in South Korea and Hong Kong due to news that the test prep agencies had hacked and leaked the exam beforehand.
This stuff goes on and on. I am just looking at news from one single site. And this site only looks at egregious kinds of cheating. The worse kind of cheating is the way 80-90% of Chinese students will all copy their homeworks and essays and keep a backlog of tests from previous years. They can get through school effortlessly, doing little actual work and memorizing exam questions from the backlog, which are usually recycled just like the SAT.
Why do they cheat? People talk about the students being under pressure fro parents, but I doubt it is the parents. I think the culture simply values success much higher than is imaginable to people who are not Asian. The overwhelming goodness of worldly success overwhelms the badness of cheating.
Chinese mothers cheering for their kids as they take an important exam
When worldly success is so important, and so good, who can blame someone for breaking a few rules to make it happen? Wouldn't anybody do that? It is perfectly understandable!
“We just wanted to get in a better school,” he said. “It’s normal. Anyone would do that.”I am scared to criticize this cultural norm regarding cheating and ambition. If it works within China, maybe it is a good idea. But one thing I do know is that the Chinese are one of the people groups who are fine with using dishonesty and ethnic networking to get ahead in life. Such people are particularly harmful to others in a multicultural society.
The Chinese care far more about worldly success than whites ever could. I do not think whites are particularly lazy; many whites work quite hard in whatever job they settle into. In America, it is more accurate to say that we are anti-ambitious than lazy. Country music, punk/rock, evangelical Christianity, hipster culture, frat culture, and more are all similar in that none of them really encourage excellence, and instead they all encourage people to be satisfied with a simpler life. Whites simply do not move mountains to get rich; we criticize whites who try to get ahead in life as "stuck up" and "overachievers."
Even disregarding differences between whites and Asians in IQ and intelligence, the massive difference in drive for success between whites and Asians is enough to ensure that very few whites will be able to access interesting, high-paying, high-status jobs in a multicultural America. Well, Jews will protect their place through ethnocentrism, but white, hispanic, and black goys will be relegated to lower classes.
And so it will not be conservatism, white supremacy, or racism, but forced integration of incompatible peoples, that will inevitably bring a global racial caste system.
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