One community particularly harmed by academic cheating is foreign students, particularly those from China and India.

Cheating amongst foreign students, particularly those from India and China, occurs at elevated frequencies [1]. But there is money to be made. Universities earn fat tuitions. And parades of scumbags take exams, write papers and falsify figures for a fee. The result is limited enforcement in the specific, i.e. against offenders and facilitators, in favor of a presumption of guilt in the general, i.e. against all foreign students from China and India.

I personally know honest individuals who had to overcome a presumption of cheating at school, at interviews and in the workplace. And it isn't just the cheaters who are complicit.

[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/foreign-students-seen-cheating-...

When visiting a university in China, I saw a prominently displayed list of students who were caught cheating in the most recent term. I haven't yet seen such lists in American universities.

My partner is finishing their masters in China currently (native Chinese). The levels of cheating that go on within her course alone are mind boggling:

1. Girls asking their would-be boyfriends to complete their essays and attend modules.

2. Purchasing completed essays from Taobao.

3. Copy pasting others work from Baidu with only name alterations.

4. Paying exam setters for exam questions.

Of course this is anecdotal but she has often tried to explain the culture of "Getting. good result is more important than how you got it". Cheating and succeeding shows you're resourceful. Getting caught is the only shame. The pressure and competition drives people to cheat because if you don't, you're left behind by everyone else who is.

I've observed all of these in the USA. I suspect this sort of thing transcends cultural and international borders.

Possibly amusing anecdote: I know a smart* technical colleague who wrote at least 2 PhD dissertations for former romantic partners. As in "best dissertation award" + famous people on committee + etc , etc. The former romantic partners went on to have distinguished careers in management.

* Depending on your point of view.

>I know a smart* technical colleague who wrote at least 2 PhD dissertations for former romantic partners

This is very hard to believe. From my experience this just couldn't work without near full time commitment by the ghost writer. The cheater would also have to be very familiar with the dissertation--to the point where they could have just written it themselves.

Pulling this off twice (or more since you said at least twice) is basically beyond belief (unless we're talking about a very disreputable university).

A PhD dissertation isn't something you can just turn in and you're done. And it's generally the result of years of work.

I find it plausible in a narrow sense of “write” that doesn't mean performing the substantive work, but merely assembling the formal written presentation of that work.

It depends but I don't really view that as full on cheating then. It'd be nice for them to actually write a bit of it (otherwise, they're going to have a tough time writing papers once they're out of grad school) but the actually bulk of work is the real thing.

Also, you can't cheat on a defense. If you can, then your Ph.D is worthless and the institution you got it from is near worthless.

Reread learc83's comment and it's really true. You can't just turn in your thesis. Moreover, you have to defend it, and your committee will tear into it even on the minutiae (happened during my defense) so it doesn't matter how well you know it if it isn't your work because if it isn't your work, you won't be able to defend it. The only conclusion I can see is they are crap profs/schools but that doesn't square with the "famous people on committee" bit.

Even in PhDs there are people who slip through the cracks.

I knew a PhD who in a postdoc would routinely plagerize work (lifted verbatim from other papers, passed off as own work). I would be shocked if they didn’t do this to some degree in their thesis too.

This was from a relatively good university in the UK.

Sure some people plagiarize, but plagiarizing an entire dissertation is a much different. What are you going to do when you have to defend?

Also it takes a good bit longer to get a PhD in the US compared to the UK. In the US most STEM PhDs take around 5 years to finish--that's a long time to fake it without anyone noticing.

Don’t know about the US system. But I can imagine it can happen, at least in the UK system which I’m farmiliar with.

External examiner who is in a related, but not same field for example. Or they’re just a buddies with the advisor and only give softball questions etc.

The defense in the UK is not seen as a big deal, I don’t know anyone who has failed.

I can't imagine someone who isn't very familiar with their dissertation successfully defending here.

Also to even get to that point were the advisor thinks you're ready to defend would require constant back and forth your advisor. Then committee is going to grill you. And finally the vast majority of dissertation defenses end with recommended changes. It really would require full time devotion on the part of the ghostwriter, and excellent acting on the part of the candidate. Not to mention familiarity with the thesis to the point that they could have just written it themselves.

I can see someone helping out a lot with writing it, but there is no way someone could just do your dissertation for you at a reputable US school in a STEM field outside of some very rare fluke. A person doing this 2 or more times with different SOs--someone is lying.

Many people in the US have a low opinion of UK and Continental PhD programs. Perhaps this is part of the reason?

I think you’re correct in your last point (and others, though I have no direct experience).

I guess I’m skeptical that any qualification is 100% effective at evaluating/training (but that possibly says more about my own biases).

I think your colleague may be lying. It’s next to impossible to be granted a PHD you didn’t write yourself after years of hard work.

It’s really hard to even have your work accepted by the review board if the empirical evidence and the methods aren’t solid.

A PHD is not a candidate or a bachelor, it’s where your work is reviewed by a board of experts in your field. Often some members of the board won’t necessarily want you to pass either, because it’s very likely they disagree with your thesis.

I mean, it’s a cute anecdote but there is virtually no chance it actually happened.

Out of curiosity, do you have a PHD?

Management huh? Sounds like they were training to take credit for others work all along.

The level of patent / trademark infringement disagrees a bit with your statement.

That's the exact same thing that happened to the cycling sport.

You'll notice that 2 items in your list are about having money. If you come from a well off background, then you care about getting your degree, but not about actually acquiring skills/knowledge. Once you graduate you'll get a fictitious job for your parents' company, or something like that.

I'm not sure if any data is available/accessible on the topic, but I'd be willing to wage that the young Chinese person who is the first of their family to attend university cares much more about understanding the material so they can then get a high paying job than those who can afford to buy essays from Taobao.

I guess this might explains where there are so many cheaters in online games that are Chinese. Results are prioritized about integrity and self-respect I suppose.

That’s because American universities don’t put your name on a list when you cheat. They expel you.

Actually, not usually for first offenses (from my experience as college instructor)

But usually only for first offenses (which in my experience still automatically fail that class).

Could you explain? Policies and experiences will differ

I mean that there is usually very limited tolerance for repeat cheating, in the small amount of experience I have. You might not get expelled at first offense (unless you are leading a cheating ring of some sort, something that happened at my high school) or it involves publishing research, but a second or third generally does result in expulsion.

This is assuming that the school actually reached an incriminating verdict, ignoring possible incompetence and/or apathy towards catching and "convicting" cheaters.

They expel you or they sweep it under the rug and do nothing at all.

That would likely be a major FERPA violation.

In the US what happens if someone on that list kills themselves? Lawsuit from hell probably, at the very least.

You'd have a very hard time making that lawsuit go anywhere, I think.

It isn't just students that are cheating, it goes all the way up to the top of academia. I know a professor that reviews for a major journal who says he can't even keep up with the submissions from Chinese researchers because most of the time the entire paper is plagerised, the submission is canned without a second glance. Fucking sucks for the legitimate Chinese students and researchers but I guess when, "if you can cheat, then cheat." becomes one of the most well known idioms in your culture, you can't be too surprised. Just have to try extra hard to break the mold, I guess.

I think you are probably talking about wealthy students who gets into Ivy league through $2M+ donations. Vast majority of foreign students are too finance constrained even to survive with basic needs, let alone go shopping for paid cheating.

> Vast majority of foreign students are too finance constrained even to survive with basic needs, let alone go shopping for paid cheating.

Where did you get this idea? Foreign students are overwhelmingly paying the foreign student tuition (much higher than domestic tuition) without receiving any financial aid.

Exactly. Foreign students also have to prove they can support themselves (on top of paying full price for tuition) before they're even allowed in. The majority of them are pretty well off.

> I think you are probably talking about wealthy students who gets into Ivy league through $2M+ donations

The BBC article to which this thread is attached talks of a company advertising "essay[s]...starting at just $18.00 per page" [1]. Furthermore, the documented frequencies of foreign students cheating is too large to explain with solely income discrepancy.

[1] https://edubirdie.com

> You want people to learn when the stakes are low.

I totally agree with this. However, I'm not sure that students in middle/high school realize that the stakes are, in fact, low. The teachers and programs emphasize exactly the opposite.

"Oh this is going on your permanent record", whatever that is. "If you screw this up there's no way you'll be ready for university-level classes." On and on, and what a load of bull it was.

I think that they think the stakes are in fact higher than they are is the point.

This is a good point. I had thought that my high school grades were extremely high stakes, even though they weren't. Of course, now I know how silly I was. If the stakes weren't so high, I wonder if I would have been more tempted to cheat to get more free time. I think not, but no way to know for sure because can't run that experiment anymore.

On the other hand, in countries with huge populations like China and India, it seems that cheating is rampant because the stakes are so high? Can't recall what happens in India, but in China, the university you're allowed to choose is limited based on your final gaokao (high school examination) score. That in turn also determines what you're allowed to study, and that in turn determines what kind of jobs you can get when you graduate.

Pressure exists because it all comes down to a single score. But on the other hand, because of the scale of the population, I imagine it becomes an issue of efficiency. If it didn't come down to a single score, can't imagine the monstrosity that would be the admissions process for all the top universities. For example, I hear about Canadian universities that now say they don't prioritize GPA; they'll consider extra-curricular activities and so on too. Good luck with that if your admission applications explode a hundredfold.

So like someone else commented in this thread, the many become suspected instead. One department at my alma mater decided that GRE scores were not reflective of quality of students coming from China for masters degrees. So they threw GRE out the window and decided to only look at students that came from top ten universities in China when it came to Chinese student applications.

As with most things, the issue is multi-faceted and complicated.

I've heard about plenty of people who won large payouts in the lottery, it doesn't mean I'd go to them for financial advice. Places that rely on a single test or data point create perverse incentives to inflate the data point. I was a fairly intelligent student throughout most of my school career, but I flunked more than one class in college because of bad teachers who were incapable of teaching the subject matter(There was a single student who passed with a C in that class every other student failed, I passed easily with a different teacher) or real life issues taking priority (working a full time job distracts from grades). I agree with your statement that the issue is complicated, but perhaps some things shouldn't be simplified.

Your solution would cure a lot of ills besides just this; in fact it has long been known to be the formula for improving schools in lots of measurable ways. In other words you are describing "good education." They should be doing it already whether cheating is an issue or not. But they've already rejected it, at least in many public schools, because they're too resource-constrained.

...or believe they are.

...or are made to believe they are.

...or are given so much pointless BS to do that even though they're not, they are.

I had a fellow masters student in tears during a group project once because she had already failed our first assessment. Apparently in her 4 year undergraduate degree in Nepal she had never once had to cite sources. All work was from proscribed textbooks only. Imagine her shock when starting a masters in Australia and having to do Harvard referencing for everything.

When are the stakes low vs. high when it comes to academic plagiarism? I would think that the stakes are always quite low, at least until you get to post-graduate academic work where plagiarism can have legal or serious ethical (e.g. medical research) problems.

You seem to be claiming that at some point the stakes become "truly" high, and thus we ought to artificially punish plagiarism so that people learn that there are consequences.

I'm claiming that encouraging plagiarism artificially punishes the "I can do the work but I freeze up in a high-pressure/high-stakes do-or-die situation like an interview" crowd - because it means that that's the only tool I can trust to weed out the people who've just coasted on bullshit their whole lives.

The high-ness of the stakes at the college level seems to depend on if you have scholarships or similar - I've seen those be pulled, but haven't seen people I've known personally be actually expelled. So if you're fully dependent on them, it's bad, otherwise, it's no big deal. After college it depends on the type of job - some bigco or government orgs seem perfectly happy to carry a bunch of dead weight around.

Pre-college is mostly a super-low-stakes area for kids these days, but complicated by something 'tcfunk points out in a sibling comment, where authority figures lie about that - claiming everything is dire - but the kids also know their teachers/administrators are full of shit. My friends and I were very good at finding out which rules we could break with impunity - having too many rules, if anything, watered down the seriousness of the important ones.

So where you see problems are e.g. kids who could get away with anything suddenly running afoul of drug laws, or losing their scholarship over rules that didn't have teeth in high school, etc. Of course, the better off you are, the more easily you can weather that stuff - but to me, the root is that we're very opaque with our kids about what you'll get into real trouble over or not, and it changes in a very lumpy manner.

I don't know, I don't really see a parallel between a writing assignment and a high-pressure situation like an interview. The latter is essentially impossible to cheat on with anything resembling plagiarism.

What the parent means is that when cheating isn't accorded a serious enough response, the signaling value of a degree is watered down, so parent must rely more heavily on the interview, which is unfair to those who perform poorly in interview enviornments but are otherwise good at their job.

A recent TIFU (Today I Fucked Up) on Reddit, depending if you believe it - I'm inclined not to, described such a situation:

https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/8g33nv/tifu_by_plagia...

They were allegedly expelled for plagiarising a 500 word essay.

> She sent me to the dean with the recommendation that I be expelled. Now the dean told me I can't graduate. I spent 4 years working on an engineering degree. I have over $100,000 in loans, and I can't be hired without my degree. My life literally vanished in the matter of 20 minutes.

The irony is they could have literally scrawled anything on the paper and flunked, but passed the year.

Whether or not this story is true, universities certainly have grounds to expel you immediately if you're caught cheating. And if you've spent $100k on a degree that you need because of professional accreditation... those are quite high stakes.

Agreed. But nothing special about it. People's lives are ruined for stupid mistakes all the time. Some of those mistakes cost a hell of a lot more too. I'm talking of course about encounters with the criminal justice system

I had a classmate like this. My high school has a graduation requirement where each senior delivers a speech to the student body on a topic of their choice. At the time of his speech, it was spring and my classmate had been accepted to Princeton on a tennis scholarship--all he had to do was sit back and coast into the Ivy League. Despite this, he plagiarized his speech. The administration found out and notified Princeton, which rescinded his acceptance. (He ended up attending the local state university.)

Aren't those the artificial high stakes we're talking about? I'm asking what inherently high-stakes situation that is preparing you for.

For a real world situation? Just look at the Google vs Uber trial. IP theft and corporate espionage is incredibly high stakes. You can presumably make a lot of money selling secrets, but if you're rumbled, that's your career over.

Well, how about getting blackballed professionally?

After all, surely the main upside of acing university is to get into a high-stakes position.

At the University of Arizona, there was a strict expulsion and forfiture of earned credits policy for plagarism amongst undergrads. I'd say having wasted $20k is pretty high stakes, though I suppose not as high as jail time.

But that's the artificial stakes we're talking about, right? The school chose to make and enforce that rule. What inherently high-stakes situation is that preparing them for?

You can’t cheat without rules; all rules are socially constructed. Does that make them artificial as opposed to inherent?

Or have I missed your point?

> The first solution that occurs to me seems to be smaller class sizes and differently structured assignments with more of a "tell me about why you wrote this" type interactive stuff. The same way you'd do when looking at someone's github, to see how deep their understanding of the code there goes.

What you are really saying is money. You need more money to do your solution.