> Chinese-raised students at my local (prestigious, private) university can't speak basic English. The school then has to choose to either fail the student or ignore their cheating.

The financial pressure to ignore their cheating makes sense to me, but it's not clear to me how that's related to language skills.

Sorry, there was an implied premise that I probably should have included.

These US schools are teaching classes only in English, so the students' inability to speak, write, and (in some cases) read English means that they can't do the work.

I've observed them brazenly cheating during tests by looking at other students' papers, but I think it's more common to hire English speakers who know Chinese to do the work for them. They fail some tests, sure, but they end up with C's overall and a diploma to take home.

I actually had a classmate in college who ended up founding a successful business that exclusive connects American speakers of Chinese with wealthy students from China to write their essays and do their homework.

Because examinations they're passing and all the classes they're not attending are conducted entirely in English only. What I've observed happening in some places is that some specific schools are predominantly populated by rich international students from China and they pay someone else to attend classes and take their exams, or otherwise behave in cheating behavior to get the grade, but they themselves are not attending class or learning anything useful.

It's a scam on both sides and it devalues the degrees.

Has this been documented anywhere, by the way? You'd think that there would be more reporting around this topic.

My brother in law is a CS professor at a US state university. Failing foreign students is highly discouraged even ones caught cheating. He has learned to not do it anymore.

Former TA here. I saw this happen several times with foreign students and domestic students. Maybe I could shed a little light on why this is this the case in most universities (mine was a public one in a large state for what it's worth).

Failing someone on the grounds of cheating at the university where I attended was a huge time investment. If the student contested their failing grade, the professor/lecturer who was the accuser had to go with evidence and present it before an internal panel. The student would obviously be allowed to defend themselves.

The outcome of the panel would rarely be in the favor of the accuser and against the student. The student would have to have been accused multiple times before the panel would take the complaint seriously. The punishment would end up being something like turning the failing grade into just one grade above failing.

When you consider how much a lecture gets paid, and how little importance teaching is given for researchers, you begin to understand why lecturers/professors just hand out Ds and move on with their lives.

The amount of times I caught people with MOSS[1] was too damn high. Never had anything come out of it so I stopped going the extra mile past sending the results to the person teaching the course.

[1] https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/

My daughter has been TAing for undergrad intro-to-programming courses at her university (she is ugrad too). Her heart was broken more than once when she discovered how blatantly people she otherwise liked a lot would cheat.

Initially it posed quite a dilemma for her since she had the power to give zeros for cheating, we determined the best course of action is to forward the evidence to the professor and forget about it.

I have read articles about it, but it's very hard to Google for it. It would be hard to research, too, because the schools are complicit. They want these students to get their rubber-stamp diplomas for $250k+ and then leave the US. There would need to be some huge third-party investigation with subpoena powers over the schools to uncover all the fraud. So for now, it's anecdata that seems to ring true for anyone I talk to who gets near universities.

reported by who?

Disgruntled parents/children, perhaps?

> The school then has to choose to either fail the student or ignore their cheating. With a $250k incentive to choose the former, that's what they choose.

Isn't the former exactly what they should be choosing?

I meant that they choose the latter.

As for what they "should" be choosing, I think the article hits on it: they should be running leaner operations that can survive without what is essentially a large scale diploma fraud operation, in which both the schools and foreign students are complicit.

I guess they meant "latter"

Yes, thank you for the correction!

Not if they're a University; yes if they're a short-termist capitalist enterprise.