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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

I lived in China for 8 months while I worked on a project in Shenzen. Unfortunately, cheating is endemic in Chinese culture. They have many idioms about cheating and the one I heard the most from Chinese speakers is "neng pian jiu pian" which translates roughly to "if you can cheat and get away with it, then cheat". I've seen business deals fall apart and contracts being withdrawn because Chinese factories would scam people out of some quick money instead of collecting a large sum at the end of the project.

Whatever changes they plan to enact to stop this cheating will take several generations to eradicate.

South China Morning Post has an article on academic cheating:

http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1974986/...

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I was pretty surprised when I moved to Prague to learn that students both Czechs but especially students from the former USSR (the *stans and Russia) expected to be able to work together on exams. Having gone to school in the US and been graded on a curve I just couldn't understand these people actively wispering and showing echother answers letting others read over their shoulders. There were groups of people who would have one person study and sit in the row bellow them in the auditorium and then there would be three rows of students above all copying in a game of telephone from one to the other. I remember a very serious incident in college in the US when our history professor found two answers to be similarly worded. The two students were kicked out of the class with a warning that if they were caught copying from eachother again they would be kicked out of school. In Prague, the professors obviously knew about the copying and didn't say a word. Indeed, some of them helped us cheet by showing the answers during the test. They only wanted to be able to document our results to prove to the acreditation comitee that we had studied, and they cared not for our actual qualifications at the end of the degree.

I wonder if a lot of it has to do with the collectivist nature of the society --- both the former USSR and China are notably communist, and the general expectation is that you help others.

I know that in China, there's plenty of "under the table" IP "sharing" happening amongst tech companies too.

https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=4297

I’m Russian living in Asia now and I agree with this hypothesis.

Soviet education and propaganda both nurtured collaboration over competition. “Individualsist” was definitely a bad label to have in my Soviet childhood. Egoism was and still is considered one of the worst qualities of all.

I feel that pre-Soviet fables and other lore had similar moral message.

Togetherness and group benefit are definitely valued higher than individual profit, needs of the many outweigh needs of the few and so on.

...which is ironic because the kleptocrats at the top of Russia's economy and politics are all egomanaiacal selfish individualists.

Its no coincidence - in a prisoners dilemma when everyboddy cooperates its easy to get to the top by defecting

I can't speak for Russia and "*stans", but this is patently untrue for the Czech Republic (where I come from).

Obviously it may depend on the particular institution -- with new, for-profit, private universities (milking rich foreigners who've come to Prague for the beer and fun) having much worse reputation than the public venerable ones like the Charles University (est. 1348). Saying students are "expected" to plagiarise is simply insulting.

I went to Peďak at Charles University. What I wrote was absolutely true of my experience.

There is a saying that cheating may teach you more than memorizing everything.

Sometimes the tests are given not by the teacher himself but by the state/school or some other third party and the teacher has a feeling of “In it together” with the students by helping them out a bit. They understand that its not the most important subject in the lives of the students and rotte memorization will not help them that much anyway.

There’s also a saying that cheating encourages teamwork. I’ve had a biolagy teacher (In a programming-oriented school) actually assign us into teams for the exams where we were encouraged to specialize and devide our learning so we could better “solve” the exam. She knew that people were not there for her subject anyway, and wanted us to learn actual practical skills - and in so doing had made such a strong connection with all of her students that we actually learned much more about biolagy from her than my peers from other schools.

And sometimes teachers just dont care - they are graded by their students’ academic sucesses somewhat. They will not be given promotions if students all have top grades, but will be “talked to” if they perform poorly. Such a feedback mechanism practically begs teacher sponsered cheating.

But yeah having a degree is way overvalued for historical reasons. Though companies have started to “wisen up” a bit not really accepting college degrees at face value as they previously did.

Though not extreme similar situation exists in India. I think it is due to the forcing of western education standard on other countries who were not given time to naturally progress into formal education. It resulted in a situation where the economic prospects of who got a degree(not necessarily real knowledge) was much higher(20x) than those who don't. This resulted in majority of the students studying just for the degree not out of interest of the subject. And this trickled down into next generation as they become teachers as well and solidified into a copy and pass culture, not gain real knowledge. However there is a small percentage of students who still want to learn but they are often at a disadvantageous position as even as a community nobody values original work anymore. It's unfortunate but it generates large number of 'skilled labourers' (even if it's low quality) which helps improve human capital.

That is one reason you see very less innovation from here. Not because of actual lack of skills but original work is not much valued as much as if you can make money even if by copying existing work..

It will definitely change when the economic disparity neutrkises to some extend and people value original work more

"solidified into a copy and pass culture, not gain real knowledge"

Was the depiction of this phenomenon in the movie 'Three Idiots' (where the professor demanded students regurgitate dictionary definitions) accurate?

Copy and pass is not an accurate description.

It's more like chew and pour. Cram and pass. Photocopy.

>'Three Idiots' Where silencer says, "I don't care what it means. I'll memorize it." Describes Nigerian, Ghanaian and Indian school system.

This is what results when lecturers also crammed and passed without understanding. Since they don't know what's important, they favor trivial parts of their subjects.

For instance on an Excel course, the lecturer asked us to draw the exercises in drawing books after every class.

When most exam questions are patterned after "Who wants to be a millionaire?" The only way to get good grades is to cram.

But these issues are Child's play compared to the real issue: In public schools what you know doesn't matter. If you've not "sorted" the lecturer, it's an automatic E, F, or D.

When a lecturer tells you on your first day that A is for alpha and omega. B is for the lecturer. And C is for bright students...

I've not made anything up.

Basically, the bribery in developing or underdeveloped countries is simply a reflection of what goes on in schools.

Chinese culture is very competitive, and if there is a score and a 'winner' I find that people will work very hard to achieve the highest possible score. I think it is inevitable that some of those competitors will use a creative interpretation of the rules to "win" and there are so many people competing it will lead to large numbers of people cheating even if the per capita numbers are similar for other groups.

There was a very funny movie (it was a comedy of course) called "Kung Fu Mahjong II" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Fu_Mahjong_2) in which a central theme was that everyone was cheating at the game and they all knew it. So at that point it isn't really "cheating" if the cheating is part of the game.

What is interesting is that science itself is not amenable to cheating, only the reporting of it is. And to the extent that reporting is a good proxy for the science, cheating there works. But failure to produce the actual science is like having someone else take your driving test, it puts your own life (and those driving around you) in danger.

I don't know "Chinese culture is very competitive" compared to others. It may be the long tail you are seeing from the large population.

As I mentioned earlier, China is very relation based and Chinese themselves know that. To counter that performance evaluation tends to be very quantified. You could say there is a number fetish. College admission used to be based on one score. Introducing flexibility causes a lot of anxiety about "hou men" (backdoor or favoritism). GDP growth needs to be above 6.5%. I just read a policeman commenting that they have numerical targets for the number of arrests they make.

Anyway because of the emphasis on relationship there is actually a heavy price to pay if you are thought of a cheater in private social networks. It is another story though dealing with strangers/abstract public interests/intrusive governments so there is a degree of split personality there.

My son is graduating from a US high school this year. He is an academic star. On his brag sheet he lists what he is most proud of himself as doing all his work honestly. Not all those academic achievements that he worked hard for. It goes to show what he thinks of academic honesty here. It does not make him like his classmates less though. It does not make me think cheating endemic to the US either. There is always grayness. I am proud of his integrity but I wouldn't automatically think a lot less of a kid because he cuts some corners once in a while.

With your 8 months experience you are making quite broad claims. Let's take the example used in the NYT report: doctors buying reviews to get their papers published. It has a clear root that is actually mentioned in the article: "Many of those authors were clinical doctors, who in China face intense pressure to publish." See also "Young Chinese doctors and the pressure of publication" http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-67... So this is really a management induced problem (just compare the number of doctors China produces and the number of available SCI journals to publish in). I don't see why it has to take generations to address.

China is to a very large degree a relation based society. How to temper favoritism in academic evaluations is a real issue. It seems many organizations in China have outsourced this function to SCI publications. While quantification is a lesser evil their trust in SCI seems misplaced. There are for profit publishers out there who are happy to accommodate this demand for publications and these publishers are not necessarily Chinese.

BTW "neng pian jiu pian" is a derogatory term for cheaters not something people take pride in.

More thoughts on doctors buying papers:

Giving heavy weight to publishing is actually a good thing in the Chinese context. I hope they can fix the process instead of throwing out the baby with the bath water.

In China medical education for most doctors is a post-secondary one instead of post-graduate. For a doctor to be able to write a proper paper, it shows at least a few qualities many others do not possess including abilities to read and write in English, keep up-to-date with medical research in one's specialty, and do some quantitative analysis etc. This is regardless of the originality or importance of the findings. Yes it is a low bar but it is still better than alternatives.

The hospitals have a need to outsource evaluations to outside experts. SCI journals are the wrong targets to outsource to and the hospitals individually do not have resources to come up with alternatives. However regulators and funding agencies can. They should black list journals that are known to publish trash for profit. They should work with publishers to come up with alternative formats that de-emphasize impact factors but instead focus on the rigor of reporting: to publish your research does not need to be original as long as it is adding independent and verifiable data points to our knowledge base; you do need to be up-to-date on your methodology and rigorous in documenting the quality of your data, however. Indeed to ease the English writing difficulty, they can provide standardized templates that could actually ease the collection of machine readable data. This way while each publication may be low value, in aggregate they can provide real value. They could treat this as a "continuing medical education" issue.

Of course this does not prevent real geniuses from publishing ground-breaking research in reputable journals. They need to be realistic in that most people are simply not qualified or lucky enough to come up with ground breaking research in their career, esp. when their main job is clinical rather than research.

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