Shanghai Street View: Cheating Challenge
Following the recent completion of this year’s national college entrance exam, or gaokao, and the coming end of the academic year, I thought I’d take a look this week at the concept of cheating and its place in the academic worlds of both China and the US. I was drawn to the subject after reading about the extraordinary measures that test centers took in Shanghai to prevent high-tech cheating during this year’s recent gaokao.
As a university teacher myself, I also have strong views and experience with the matter, though nothing surprises me much these days after 4 nearly years teaching both undergraduates and graduate students.
The newspaper headlines were filled with the usual gaokao stories in the days before and after this year’s exam, detailing the years of preparation many students had taken, as well as practical matters like how they planned to get to centers for a test that has huge influence on their future development. But what caught my eye this year were the elaborate security measures being used to prevent cheating.
I wasn’t surprised to read that all electronic devices, including cellphones, were banned from test centers. Requiring all students to pass through metal detectors to enforce the ban seemed a bit more extreme, since it implied a lack of trust and assumed a level of immaturity among the students who will become the future leaders of China.
But what surprised me most was the use of wireless jamming devices and video surveillance systems at all of Shanghai’s 80-plus test centers. Those kinds of extraordinary measures might seem excessive to most westerners, though they look more understandable to people who are more familiar with the huge pressure on Chinese students to perform well on the gaokao.
Reports after the first of the test’s 2 days said that no one was caught cheating in Shanghai, and no major scandals were reported elsewhere in any of the publications I read. All of that brings us back to the bigger subject of cheating, and why Chinese education officials felt the need to take such severe steps to prevent dishonesty among students taking the gaokao.
China has a long history of test taking in its imperial civil service exams, which date back about 1,500 years to the Tang Dynasty when such tests became a common requirement for government officials. Several years ago I made a trip to Jiading in suburban Shanghai to visit a Confucian temple that was also a small museum on the history of the imperial civil service exams, known locally as keju.
Many of the museum’s exhibitions impressed me, but one of the most unforgettable was several items of clothing worn by cheating test takers. The inner folds of the clothes were inscribed with thousands of tiny printed characters, which were copies of classical texts that might appear on the examination. Such cheating seems quite clumsy and low-tech by modern standards, but it certainly shows that the phenomenon has a long and creative history in China.
Fast forward to the present, where cheating is something I always have to look out for in my classes, even though the vast majority of students are quite honest. After 1 or 2 bad experiences in my early teaching years, I now simply give a general warning at the start of each semester to put students on notice of my intolerance for cheaters.
Even so, there are usually one or two cases of cheating on tests each semester, which are never pleasant to deal with. Such cheating obviously isn’t exclusive to China, and was also relatively common though limited when I was a high school student in the US. But the phenomenon is nearly non-existent in US universities, most of which have zero-tolerance policies that can see students suspended or even expelled for even small violations.
Within the broader cheating realm, plagiarism seems to be one place where China and the west differ quite sharply. Nearly all western academics I know have encountered the issue in China at some point. Some of my American friends who studied in Nanjing in the 1980s told me they were even surprised when some of their Chinese teachers actually encouraged them to plagiarize.
Cheating on tests is considered bad in US universities, but plagiarism is far worse and almost inevitably results in expulsion from a university with no chance to return. Perhaps that’s why the issue is nearly non-existent in the US. By comparison, many Chinese students will admit they or their friends have copied other people’s work at one time or another in their academic careers.
I suspect that such copying may have been a form of flattery at some point in the past, as it enhanced the reputation and influence of the original writer in an era when academic circles were much smaller and people wanted to have their thoughts widely circulated. But in a day and age when innovation, creativity and intellectual property protection are critical factors to economic prosperity, cheating certainly seems like an increasingly anachronistic concept, and one that is finally receiving more attention in deserves from the thousands of teachers and test administrators across China.
