Campus Reform runs an article describing cheating by students from China during both the admissions process and after they arrive, in the classroom. This doesn’t surprise me, I found students from Asia more likely to cheat.
Getting someone else to take the TOEFL (test of English as a foreign language) exam is common. Many of my foreign students could read English reasonably well but were unable to understand spoken English at the level of a college lecture.
You may ask how I knew this. I tested knowledge of the assigned reading via multiple choice questions on which they did more or less okay. The tests also included a couple of short answer essays from my lectures, many of these they left blank whereas my domestic students normally aced them. My guess: their conversational English classes back home were taught by locals whose spoken English was badly mispronounced.
If I spoke to Asian students they smiled a lot and said “Yes” a lot. I never mistook that “Yes” for agreement or understanding. I understood it to mean “I’m listening and wish to seem polite to an authority figure.”
My students from India were another matter, their English was mostly quite good even if their accent sometimes put the emphasis on the wrong syllable. They too were prone to cheating, sometimes quite blatantly. I once had three women from India who sat together in class turn in identical homework papers. It didn’t work and their grades suffered.
On the other hand, one of the best MBA students I ever taught was Pakistani and another very good one was from India. Fine honorable men, both of them. Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.
