Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jernfrost | Hacker News Reader

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As a former foreign student in the US, I take some offense at the generalization of all foreign students as cheating.

Now I couldn't read more than the initial lines of the article since I didn't have an account, but judging from the comments here there was no distinction between the type of foreign students.

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'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.

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.

As a former foreign student in a CS / CE degree in US, I don't take offense at all.

A large proportion of students are from China. The article does focus more on those students. I think if you add India in the mix, that would overwhelm statistically all the other countries (South America, Africa, Europe etc).

> I take some offense at the generalization of all foreign students as cheating.

Where did you read that? Can you show the quote where it says "all foreign students are cheating". I couldn't find it directly, or implied.

> when there are wide varieties between the subgroups.

They are wide variaties. But surely you don't believe their is a proportional representation from all the countries (if there are 100 students, they'll be 10 from Norway, 10 from India, 10 from Bolivia 10, etc). You are from Norway, I was from Europe as well. On average most students would probably be from China and India though.

I believe you miss the point. Stating that foreign students cheap more, implies that simply being foreign is what increases your chance of cheating. When in fact it would have been more accurate to say 3rd world students cheat more. Of course that wouldn't have been politically correct so it gets watered down.

The reason this matters is that e.g. in Japan, foreigners are described as the source of all sorts of problems, because yes statistically speaking if you throw everybody who is a foreigner into one group and run statistics on them they are significantly overrepresented on a number of bad things.

That means you would struggle with getting things like an apartment because simply being foreign labels you.

I guess in a screwed up way some people might thing this is a more democratic form of racism.

But I don't think it is a step forward when we "democratize" prejudices by creating artificial groups of people and discriminating based on that.

Would it somehow be more fear if we in Europe regarded the US as dangerous as Mexico because we artificially picked the whole of north America including Mexico to make generalizations about everybody living there?

It is a correlation based heuristic. Quantifying and splitting countries into 1st, 2nd, 3rd world would be a bit too much. Where to make the cut-offs? As a cohort, and looking simply at correlation being a foreign student in US seems to be correlated with cheating. And I speak this as a former foreign student as well.

> Stating that foreign students cheap more, implies that simply being foreign is what increases your chance of cheating.

Not quite. The article does go into more details showing that a large number of foreign students are Chinese. So it is not as simple as being from another country. Being a foreign student in US doesn't imply being a random sample from all of the world's countries. India and China account for the majority of students and the article does focus on China quite a bit.

> When in fact it would have been more accurate to say 3rd world students cheat more

Ok thinking about it some more. Isn't that more problematic. Is China a 3rd world country? What does 3rd world even mean anymore? Wouldn't that be deeply insulting to them?

> That means you would struggle with getting things like an apartment because simply being foreign labels you.

I would struggle, agreed. But that is their country and if a simple heuristic works for them, well it works for them. Perhaps expanding energy and inquiring what country tenants are coming from or white/blacklisting nationalities, religions, countries and managing rules based on that is just too troublesome so they look at a general correlation.

> I guess in a screwed up way some people might thing this is a more democratic form of racism

It is not quite the same. Unless it is really about another persons' skin color. But it is not, it is about cheating, crime, and so on. It so happens that is also correlated with certain nationalities, cultures or skin colors. Haven't been to Japan. Maybe they are really that racist, but I wouldn't be surprised if landlords just don't want to get ripped off, and managing profits and risk is what they worry about.

> Would it somehow be more fear if we in Europe regarded the US as dangerous as Mexico because we artificially picked the whole of north America including Mexico to make generalizations about everybody living there?

Fair to who? Maybe it would be fair to you if say you were flooded by lots of people from North America who committed crimes, picked pockets, stole, started fights in the street, threw trash all over. It might not be fair some people from US who don't behave that way typically, but the world doesn't operate on fairness.

If you Google 'Foreign Students Seen Cheating More Than Domestic Ones' and click on the wsj link that appears on the results, you'll be able to see the entire article.

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