> The person is retrieving their information from another's head. They're using a social storage mechanism. This works fine in the classroom, it works OK in the workplace. It works well in most situations. The only place it breaks down is during testing.

Many tests verify a skill rather than knowledge. If you're cheating then you're masking your lack of skill by using another person's skill as a crutch. If you're later given the relevant qualifications and end up in a situation where other people expect to be able to rely on you having the said skill then you're likely to fail these people. Bad.

In today's world, remembering specific pieces of information locally is less of a concern, I agree, but for basics it still applies: you may be able to learn it from colleagues or internet when you need it, but there is still a limit on your "input bandwidth".

You may be right, but huge problems arise with the open-everything-testing solution with regards to access to resources, especially with standardized testing. SATs (and standardized tests in general) are meant to be a blind test that objectively evaluates the abilities of any individual student anywhere the same way; if we allow external resources, this will undoubtedly be a huge disadvantage for students in lower income areas who don't have easy access to the Internet or a sufficient number of reference books and materials for all the students. Providing internet access at testing sites would help somewhat, but if you have grown up in an environment where the internet was not as ubiquitous as some of us are used to, you may not have the Google-fu or knowledge of Internet research methodology necessary to compete with those in wealthier areas. This is an issue that will hopefully be diminished over time, especially in developed nations, but it will be a very long time before Internet access is sufficiently widespread in what are now developing nations to prevent a huge barrier to entry for students in these places.

Maybe students who are disadvantaged on their internet access could test on other subjects, such as math or physics. It seems unfair to penalize the other people who have access to information and can use it.

As a child I was not allowed to use calculators in math - for the reason that "what if your computer breaks?" - well, it never broke. It was a stupid rule, especially after 4th grade.

Computer access will always be available, so why ban it during testing?

"what if your computer breaks?" is a poor reason. The real reason is to get an estimate of results in your head so you can cross-check the computer for mistakes. How much ice cream to feed my city of 30,000? If the computer says 7.336E9 kg, that's a problem.

That would be OK if the rules were the same for all teams. In any situation, classroom or not, if you're breaking the rules you are cheating. This doesn't mean that "network learning" is wrong, just that doing this without common approval of all participants is not socially acceptable.

Proctors rarely get a common agreement. They make the rules, then you're forced to either accept them or completely forego the examination - the equivalent of failure, it negates the time you've spent training.

To me, it's a form of duress.

I was once in an exam hall and middle-aged female primary school teachers were in the next row writing a trivial (non-degree) exam on primary school mathematics education or something [^]. They were brazenly passing notes to each other even though the exam was open-book. Cheaters gonna cheat.

[^] With teachers like that, it isn't surprising that South Africa is so poorly ranked at maths.

Yes, the point of testing is to know whether the person being tested actually knows anything. Your example is of someone who does not.

No - what's happening here is we're disagreeing on the meaning of the verb "to know".

Why is it even bizarre? Chinese people cheat for the same reasons anyone would cheat. Being chinese and born in America, I actually found it really surprising the first time I met software engineers who refuse to download even one copy of pirated software.

Culturally we just feel significantly less guilty about it. Doesn't mean we aren't aware that it's wrong. Chinese people are fully aware of what's right and wrong and we choose to deliberately cheat. Whether that's a cultural tendency or genetic one is another story.

> Chinese people are fully aware of what's right and wrong and we choose to deliberately cheat. Whether that's cultural tendency or genetic one is another story.

What?! Genetic?! There is very little, if any evidence to support the idea that genetics has anything to do with the Chinese propensity to cheat...

There's no evidence at all. Even when attempting to do research on this, the political backlash could destroy any scientist's career. No official evidence will ever be collected because of this.

I only speak from personal experience. I know many chinese people both born here and born abroad. I am also chinese and born in the united states. I am telling you, honestly, from a purely anecdotal standpoint: I think there's a chance it's genetic.

Edit: Just to keep things from getting out of hand, and more balanced I want to state this fact: Statistically, it is far more likely for a serial killer to be a white caucasian male then it is for a serial killer to be of any other race. Do I think this is a cultural thing? No. I'm leaning towards genetics. But that's a purely anecdotal opinion as there's no evidence pointing in either direction.

> Even when attempting to do research on this, the political backlash could destroy any scientist's career. No official evidence will ever be collected because of this.

This is really offtopic, but I think you're wrong. There are two ways to do such research - the proper one and the racist one.

The proper one is to link specific genes to specific behavior. This presumes that you screen individuals in the study for those genes. Then you are not being racist, because existence of those genes is rarely 100% coinciding with culture or skin color. Research like that is quite common, if there is a reason to think there is indeed a link (for example there is a genetic study of above average intelligence in Ashkenazy Jews, they were extremely homogenous group and yet they don't all share the genes that has been shown to have the link).

The racist way is to match skin color or culture to behavior. This is scientifically useless, because you don't show any actual genetic link, and it only serves for stirring racial hate (you could pick any indirect attribute from many, like eye color or facial hair, so why pick skin color?). Such studies are rightfully being rejected by real scientists.

Why would those things be genetic? If there were a "serial killer gene" or a "cheater gene", those traits should manifest themselves in all kinds of obvious differences in behavior - which we do not see. It's hard to imagine a protein causing such complex differences in behavior while affecting nothing else.

You don't have to go to the absurd "cheater gene" degree. Note this is not at all scientific, but rather trying to point out how easy some small genetic things might push society and culture in particular directions.

Suppose instead that a few traits like: - Social Intelligence - Impulse Control - Desire for Retribution

have normal distribution with slightly different peaks in different populations.

A population with high social intelligence and low desire for revenge might tolerate more cheating(since people only cheat when they can get away with it) than one with low impulse control and high desire for revenge, where cheating might spark a shootout.

You probably don't have to move those distributions much to start seeing pretty large changes in things like mass shooting demographics, or who cheats.

What's the other explanation then? Culture? Why don't we see higher rates of serial killers in other races born in the United States?

It's very possible for many differences in behavior between races to be genetic in origin, in fact it's the more logical hypothesis versus the alternative which states genetics doesn't influence behavioral differences between races.

Think about it. If genetics influences physical traits from height, skin color, facial features, and even athleticism, what black magic in this world makes it so that genetics doesn't even touch behavior or intelligence?

>It's hard to imagine a protein causing such complex differences in behavior while affecting nothing else.

It's impossible to logically deduce a conclusion from the bottom up. We simply currently don't have enough knowledge to know how proteins scaffold the entire human neural network. With highly limited knowledge, we can only look at the problem from the top down. That being: genetics is known to influence physical traits, therefore it is logical to conclude that it also influences mental traits.

> If genetics influences physical traits from height, skin color, facial features, and even athleticism, what black magic in this world makes it so that genetics doesn't even touch behavior or intelligence?

Because we have no evidence that such is the case on a culturally grouping level.

There is no genetic concept of "Chinese". It literally doesn't exist.

You're making this about the possibility of genetics impacting behavior, when the real issue is you thinking cultural boundaries exist in genetics. They don't.

There's no concept of humanity on the atomic level. It literally doesn't exist. One configuration or mishmash of atoms we call rocks are no different then the mishmash we call humans. Try, without using any high level concepts or groupings, to define what configuration of atoms signifies a rock and what configuration signifies a human.

If you go low enough on any topic the boundaries between categories become vague and the definitions become extremely complex. It's very hard to define what a human is in terms of atoms. The same goes for race, it's very hard to define, at the genetic level what is chinese, and what is not, but the category and boundary exists at all levels, and we can't ignore it.

I've heard of your argument before. They say that the delta in genetic differences between two people of different races is the same as the delta of two people, of the same race, therefore race doesn't exist. This argument is flawed. I believe the "genetic" definition of race is immensely more complex than simply the delta of genetic differences. Here's a more accurate definition: People of the same race have a higher probability of sharing certain genetic traits.

So let me redefine my argument in way you can understand. The people who we label as "chinese" who share similar physical/genetic traits, I believe will be more likely to also share a behavioral genetic trait that makes them more likely to cheat.

I'm sorry, you misunderstand -- the people we label as "Chinese" do not share similar physical/genetic traits.

Common misconception that they do, but there is very little genetic consistency across cultural boundaries, and when such a thing does exist, it's quite noteworthy.

> the people we label as "Chinese" do not share similar physical/genetic traits.

This statement is utterly and completely incorrect. It is a common myth in the social sciences.

Please read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_genetics#Population_ge...

first paragraph from above page: "The relationship between race and genetics is relevant to the controversy concerning race. In everyday life many societies classify populations into groups based on phenotypical traits and impressions of probable geographic ancestry and socio-economic status - these are the groups we tend to call "races". Because the patterns of variation of human genetic traits are clinal, with a gradual change in trait frequency between population clusters, it is possible to statistically correlate clusters of physical traits with individual geographic ancestry. The frequencies of alleles tend to form clusters where populations live closely together and interact over periods of time. This is due to endogamy within kin groups and lineages or national, cultural or linguistic boundaries. This causes genetic clusters to correlate statistically with population groups when a number of alleles are evaluated. Different clines align around the different centers, resulting in more complex variations than those observed comparing continental groups."

In short it's saying genetic traits can be statistically correlated with population groups (race) but variations of traits that are different within population groups can actually be more complex than those observed when compared with people outside of their race.

This is literally exactly my argument. Supported by wikipedia at the very least.

I do not accept the given definition of race from this page, as it presumes the term "race" is in any way scientific or rigorously defined when in actuality it is not.

What we "tend to call" race is not defined, despite this wiki page's attempt to do so.

This wiki page is the reflection of the general opinions of the scientific community. You can redefine any word to have any definition that fits your universe, but when communicating with other people, we must go with general consensus.

> This wiki page is the reflection of the general opinions of the scientific community.

It isn't. The concept of "race" is not rigorously defined.

A word not having a rigorous definition does not make the concept non-existent among scientists. "Life" is not rigorously defined.

Life is very rigorously defined, however it's not unequivocal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life#Definitions

A word not having a rigorous definition means it cannot be discussed scientifically. Hence the actual problem of studying the existence of life, e.g. is a virus alive?

please note. Unequivocal and rigorous are synonyms.

http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/unequivocal/4

>A word not having a rigorous definition means it cannot be discussed scientifically.

Life is discussed scientifically in many contexts yet it is not unequivocally or rigorously defined. In fact there's an entire field based on the study of life. It's called biology, aka the study of life. If a scientific field can stem from a word that does not have a rigorous or unequivocal definition, then it can be discussed scientifically.

@dimino

I'm getting pretty tired too. You choose not to accept the facts even when a scientific description proving my point is thrown in your face. Ideas need evidence for support, you have presented me with ideas, but no evidence.

The folks in the field are in agreement with me, (see the old wikipedia link I sent you). You got nothing, only empty claims.

I'm getting tired of this conversation, so I'll just leave you with the idea that words carry different definitions in different contexts. There is no scientific context by which "race" is currently known. You can choose to accept that, or you can continue to deny that, it doesn't really matter to any of the folks who work in this field.

> Chinese people are fully aware of what's right and wrong and we choose to deliberately cheat.

I personally got bit by this in my work. This is exactly why I'm never ever going to work with a Chinese again in my life time. I should also tell about this to people I care about.

It's the unfortunate truth, imo, that chinese people are more likely to cheat. This does not preclude other races from cheating though, and it does not mean ALL chinese people cheat.

Testing allows people to have an objective means of determining others' worth as external storage in specific situations.