ANTI-GLOBALIST EXPATRIATE, who lives and works in Asia, writes:

Organized cheating on academic tests takes place all the time in Asian countries; accounts of wholesale cheating in China have received mainstream press attention, but it’s common throughout the region. The most common methodology involves students using mobile phones or small radio transceivers with earpieces to get test answers from someone located nearby who has copies of the tests, stolen or obtained through bribery from teachers and school administrators.

In the few instances in which teachers try to stop students from cheating (probably because the parents in question hadn’t paid the requisite bribes, or because the local government feels the need to make an example due to press mentions of rampant cheating in their areas), there’s generally a bad reaction from parents. 

Note that parents are saying, “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.” In Asian societies, where parents routinely are expected to pay bribes to school administrators and teachers in order to ensure that their children are admitted to schools, and that they receive passing grades, this sort of perverse logic is actually valid, within that context.

My guess is that a substantial number of the children involved in this cheating scandal are Asian, and that their families knew or suspected that the ‘tutor’ they hired planned on employing the same kind of espionage-like methods to ensure that their children received passing grades. Cheating amongst Asian students in the United States is widespread, and is a reflection of their cultural values. (See here, here and here.)

The fact that the parents of a child implicated in the scandal above lawyered up, instead of shaming their child into coming clean, suggests to me that this family is Asian. My parents would have forced me to confess and to take the consequences of my actions, had I done such a thing; when I explain that to Asians, at first they don’t believe me, and then when I persist, they think my parents must have been crazy, as they themselves would do anything and everything to protect a family member from the consequences of his actions for any crime up to and including murder.

— Comments —

John writes:

We’re always hearing that East Asians have a higher average IQ than whites. I wonder if Asians are cheating on those tests too.

Aditya B. writes:

I must say that I laughed my head off reading about Chinese “students” rioting for the “right” to cheat in the interest of “fairness.”

I am constantly reminded about the so-called “Model Minority” which seems to include Indians, and the white obsession with importing them en masse even though, as some of your more astute and experienced commentators have remarked, that they are far from Model. And one billion Chinese and one billion Indians hardly constitute a “minority.”

Are you familiar with the Matthew Marthoma case? First, this “model minority” student forges Harvard Law School transcripts, then, after his rustication, he joins a (notoriously) corrupt Hedge Fund where, of course, he defrauds the company and clients through insider trading. Real peach. The Harvard Cheating Scandal even prompted some serious soul-searching in India (because a large number of students must be Indians and other minorities as evidenced by the refusal to identify the cheaters by race) which you can read (and weep thereafter) here.

I have an old British book on Evidence in India. The Author warns the neophyte Indian practitioner to accept Indian testimony with a truckload of salt since Indians don’t take oaths or the concept of perjury with any seriousness. And that mentality encompasses all Religions and Castes. Indians are, intrinsically, a dishonest people.

I am hoping for a resurgence of a semblance of Sanity and Self-Respect among whites. When will they learn that most of us are mere mimics? Indians and Asians haven’t invented anything of any real significance. They have committed massive industrial espionage and are simply mimicking the West. Even on a micro-level, Indians and Asians haven’t introduced any innovation in any field (except Bose, perhaps, in acoustics) that would warrant the lavish praise accorded to these people.

I suspect the dirty little secret is that whites, the ones in power, know what’s up; but they want white-collar coolies. Whites do the work, “model-minorities” the white-collar grunge work, and the very same whites reap fabulous profits. It’s a classical example of short-term thinking. They sacrifice years of research (by allowing non-whites access to the same and opportunity for espionage) in favor of short-term profits. This is one of countless reasons why the West is doomed.

Paul L. writes:

While I agree that the Chinese have an incredible propensity for cheating that stands on its own, I would like to say that a great contributing factor is the cynical nature of many Asian societies, of which China is probably the worst. Entry into a ‘good’ University is entirely contingent on one’s performance in a single entrance exam. Living a middle class life is contingent upon getting into these universities. Entrance exams in the Sinosphere usually fail to make any attempt to measure the logical or analytical aspect of a student’s mastery of any subject. This dates back to the thousand-year-old imperial exams.

Thus success in these exams and indeed in life, is disproportionately contingent upon massive amounts of rote memorization of facts and solution algorithms. In many circumstances, cheating or behavior that is very close to it is basically a requirement for success because of the grading rubrics. For example, essays are graded not on the quality of the writing and its response to the prompt, but on how closely the essay followed an elaborate and entirely arbitrary set of criteria that was not contained inside the prompt and was thus hidden from the student. Basically the only way to succeed in this is to obtain access to the rubric, memorize it and then either practice writing essay in a very stilted and unnatural style. Furthermore, the stakes are generally so high that taking a principled stand is suicidal. In Singapore, we used to have government exams for ten-year-olds that would basically ruin their futures and bar them from seeking anything better than menial labor for life if they failed to do well in them. One of the question sets required students to arrange jumbled words to form sentences. The problem is that this word jumble would frequently yield multiple semantically valid and grammatically correct sentences, of which only one was acceptable as an answer for reasons that are entirely arbitrary. So students would seek the questions in advance and memorize them. This was extremely hard work, such that students would spend every waking hour doing this for years before and exam –at age ten. Given this context, I will not speculate on the extent to which the Chinese behavior is trained by their system; some of it probably comes from something deeper.

I have to ask: What would you do if you were in these people’s shoes and it was your ten-year-old or your 18-year -old? I would hazard to guess that very few people would stand before this kind of government on bended knee to offer up his children as a sacrifice to the pretense that the exams are anything better than an arbitrary means of population discipline. It is a no-win scenario. And this is how it begins. Give it a few generations and everyone who can afford to cheat is going to do so out of habit, regardless of whether the system is fair or not.

At the same time, many Asians recognize, at least on some level, that this situation (mirrored in every other aspect of life) is pure, Kafka-esque insanity. This is why, no matter how much economic progress takes place in their home countries and how much wealth they have amassed, there is no shortage of Singaporeans, Koreans and Chinese people wanting to emigrate.

Laura writes:

Paul makes good points. Regarding his last statement, I wonder how many of the many Asians who have emigrated to America might have worked to change this “Kafka-esque” system if they had been forced to stay and deal with it.

Anti-Globalist writes:

In response to Paul L.

I agree 100 percent with everything Paul L. says.

My larger point is that Asians in the United States (and in other Western countries) culturally import this cheating behavior from their home countries and continue to indulge in it, even though they’re no longer living under a system in which 10-year-olds can ruin their career prospects by scoring poorly on arbitrary tests.

Although we seem to be moving in that direction with nonsense such as ‘Core Curriculum.’

My guess is that since Asians are disproportionately represented in high-achieving schools, and since they’ve a cultural predisposition for cheating, that Asians are at the heart of most, if not all, high-profile cheating scandals taking place at high-achieving schools (just as high-profile cheating scandals at low-performing schools generally involve blacks, and usually are instigated by black school administrators and teachers seeking to raise poor test scores of underperforming black students).

Laura writes:

Asians import a different mentality regarding education. This mentality is not bad in itself, and I cannot say how much of it is derived from recent cultural experiences in Asian countries and how much is the reflection of innate characteristics, but it clashes with tendencies and cultural inclinations of whites. Asians approach education as technicians mastering the rules and highly conscious of their place in competitive rankings. Whites are more individualistic and questing. The Western study of literature is for most Asians a waste of time. In contrast, the study of Western classical music is highly compelling because it appeals to their desire for technical mastery.

Paul L. writes:

I will add a few more things to the discussion about Asian cheating:

I don’t think Asians have been doing too much cheating on clinical studies into IQ. I will however say that, China and Singapore’s “representative” samples for the PISA education standards test are usually the top 3% of students. Cheating in these tests are also pretty common among certain Western countries like the U.K. where the Labor government was eager to hide the massive drop in standards over the course of their rule and indeed some school districts in the U.S.–Its just that some Asian countries are much more indecent at the extent of their cheating. One way to tell if someone else is cheating is if I’m cheating and he’s beating me!

I think that for many Asian countries, especially Singapore, fighting the system is futile because the system has very powerful ways of destroying people who don’t fall into line. The moral only way to fight and win is to leave. Most people in these systems cheat and participate in the madness. In some sense, they help keep the system the way it is. They are too lost in the struggle to gain an advantage in this system to fight it. For those who do, the government and the society will tear you apart and do so in a manner that makes your ensuing problems look very much like they are your own fault. If you do not encourage in the practice of dishonesty in learning or outright cheating, your children will have their future’s destroyed. If you are politically opposed to the government, in Singapore, the government will work to wreck your business or destroy you with lawsuits, while the rest of the population is too busy struggling to hang on to their place in society to mobilise to help you even if they agree with you. In China, I imagine they might use blunter methods. Curing this Chinese insanity is a more intractable problem than curing Western liberalism. The modern left can barely claim to be 100 years old. This problem has been around the Chinese for as long as the dirt.

With all that said, I don’t think it is true that Asian have invented nothing. The vast creative engineering output of Japan is quite amazing and in some areas, absolutely surpasses any country on this earth. Yet their education system has quite a few of the pathologies of the Chinese system, though one notable difference is that the Japanese do stress genuine learning and analytical thinking to a degree that would terrify the Singaporean government. Maybe that makes all the difference.

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