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In this century, the number of Chinese students in American colleges has skyrocketed. From the Wall Street Journal:
Heavy Recruitment of Chinese Students Sows Discord on U.S. Campuses
Colleges need international students in part for the tuition revenue, but language and cultural barriers make assimilation a struggle
By Douglas Belkin and Miriam Jordan
… Rebecca Karl, a professor of Chinese history at New York University, puts it more starkly: She says Chinese students can pose a “burden” on her lectures, which she needs to modify for their benefit.
Many Chinese students “are woefully underprepared,” she says. “They have very little idea what it means to be analytical about a text. They find it very difficult to fulfill basic requirements of analytical thinking or writing.”
The unhappiness appears to be mutual. Lingyun Zhang, 25 years old, came from Beijing to study business at Oregon State University. She landed in an accounting class with 11 other Chinese students and four Americans.
“I didn’t expect to go abroad and take classes with so many Chinese people,” she said during a recent lecture on the U.S. regulatory environment.
And from The Atlantic:
How Sophisticated Test Scams From China Are Making Their Way Into the U.S.
Chinese students hire imposter “gunmen” to take the SAT, the GRE and other tests.
PEG TYRE MAR 21, 2016
… No one is sure exactly how many SAT, GRE and English-proficiency exam takers are using imposters in the U.S., but law-enforcement officials believe they could be more active than test administrators and security experts once thought possible. “Hiring test-taking proxies has been a widespread practice in China for a long time,” says Terry Crawford, who runs a video interviewing service called Initialview, which helps colleges, including Stanford, Duke, Georgia Tech, NYU, and Columbia, vet overseas applicants. “With so many Chinese students wanting to study in the U.S., it’s natural that these fraudulent practices are spreading here, where security is comparatively low.”
Although the Chinese have done much to improve the quality of test cheating in America, they didn’t invent using an imposter. From the Harvard Crimson in 2013:
… the future Senator Kennedy was asked to leave campus for cheating on a Spanish exam. Kennedy had paid the roommate of a fellow football player to take a Spanish exam under his name. Minutes after the exam ended, Kennedy received a call from the College informing him he would be suspended immediately. After spending two years in the military, Ted returned to the school and graduated in 1956—six years after he took up residence in Wigglesworth in the fall of 1950.
Of course, Ted looked much like his older brother Jack, who was Harvard’s new senator from Massachusetts, so it really wasn’t much of a plan. Lots of people from Fujian Province can come up with a better scam than Teddy could.
Toronto mayor Rob Ford passed away, which got extremely little mainstream coverage because his death occurred the same day as the Brussels terrorist attack.
Hey guys, there's nowhere to hide...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpwpplWNto
I low trust societies like japan photo ids must be placed on the desk so proctors can compare the picture to the face of the student sitting there.
China is the exact opposite
1/ How can we be sure that Ted didn’t get a substitute to serve in the military too (which was legal BTW during the Civil War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrollment_Act )?
2/ So:
a) There’s lots of test cheating in Asia and among Asians in the US
and
b) We can be absolutely certain that Asians have high IQ’s because look how well they do on IQ and PISA tests. There’s no other explanation.
with the top of the pole also being reserved for that chosen crowd.
OT- Here’s a funny story. Twitter users teach a Microsoft AI to be racist.
Now 4chan is busy tracking the mistresses of Ted Cruz after a newspaper published an article with their faces blurred.
Of course the left will complain that they are not human but that can be easily finessed I think by claiming that they have reached take-off IQ levels.
This would be supported by pictures of disconsolate "dreamer" robots feeling alienated and unwanted.
It would be important to have a picture of at least one tiny robot washed up on a beach somewhere which would be the fault of the heartless USA for not giving it citizenship.
I’m sure most of the serious, high IQ Asians students rarely cheat, but test and essay cheating is pretty common among low to mid-level East Asian students and is often excused and covered up by western universities (that’s what Asians have told me anyway). These lower tier students, like their western counterparts, aren’t particularly interested in academic study, and probably aren’t that conscientious, but are under a lot of family pressure to do well. In contrast, mid-level western university students aren’t under so much parental pressure to perform, so they have less incentive to cheat. Higher Asian neurotism levels also probably play a part, since more neurotic students are less willing to get in conflict situations with their parents over bad grades.
My belief stems from their grades in small, 20-30 student, literature discussion courses. Despite being nearly unable to hold conversation in English and being seemingly incapable of understanding spoken English, these students would excel on the papers. While it's possible they could have strong written skills but horrible speaking skills, it seems highly unlikely for them to receive top grades while many western students scored Bs and Cs.
Of course, the UC is also in on the scam with an ever increasing number of foreign students as well.
Once 4chan figured out how to mess with Tay’s algorithm they made it sound like /pol/
Now 4chan is busy tracking the mistresses of Ted Cruz after a newspaper published an article with their faces blurred.
Can someone bring me up to speed on the slang. What's pol and what's pos?
Interestingly, you can get leftist professors and faculty to pay attention to the issues of Chinese (and other international) students, particularly the writing faculty–people who work in and run the ‘writing centers’ on campuses. All professors have a different procedure when they receive largely unintelligible papers from Chinese students. International students are often sent to the writing centers which are designed to deal with students that have slightly remedial writing skills.
Many professors will just give a slightly bad grade to papers that look like they’ve been put through google translate if the student has a Chinese surname. From the Chinese students I’ve talked to, this is not a great problem, as their goal in attending an American university, even a regional public university like mine, is to attain social cache back home.
The other issue that I think could gain some traction is the use of Chinese students to inflate colleges’ diversity statistics. You can appeal to leftist professors by referencing the language they use about the merits of diversity in the classroom–it’s good to have people from different backgrounds sharing their life experiences, they say. They don’t accomplish their own goals when all the diversity slots are wealthy Chinese who don’t speak in class.
I have a wholly unqualified friend who is an "English teacher" and freelance journalist who has mooched around southeast Asia for at least two decades.
When he got bored teaching he converted himself into an academic rewrite man operating by word-of-mouth. He is diligent, quick and very smart so he gets a lot of work putatively tidying up post-grad theses and the like.
In many cases he effectively rewrites the rubbish he is given to the point where he claims to have "earned" dozens of masters degrees and quite a number of doctorates in subjects like Business, Marketing, International Relations etc.. Many of these students are studying at ostensibly good universities, albeit not international name colleges, and come from good families (to be able to afford his rates for a start).
This does not apply to top universities in Singapore etc. and the East Asia situation is a bit different, but still it gives me pause wherever I hear someone banging on about Asian education. I also think of things like this whenever someone says the West is lucky to get all these uber smart graduates.
Actually, Japan is culturally unique and quite different in its ethos from other countries in East Asia. Levels of trust are sky-high and dishonesty and corner-cutting is rare and alien to the average Japanese person.
The rest of East Asia and India, however, are a different story. Stories of cheating in SATs and GREs are not just commonplace, the SATs were cancelled in China, Taiwan and South Korea last year on one occasion.
I have met a Chinese “admissions consultant” based in San Francisco who boasted to me that his standard fee is $600,000. He tours the Chinese cities and provinces, meets wealthy families and guarantees “your-money-back” admissions to the top 20 US schools for their precious, mostly non-English speaking, offspring. Everything is taken care of, from tests to applications essays and a verification trail for accomplishment in high-school. He said his success rate is about 95%. Parents I’ve met in India confirm similar services and brokers exist.
For the newly rich in Asia, a placement fee of $600,000 is nothing, and family honor of a kid in a prestigious US school is everything.
I cannot believe that the US college admissions will not be corrupted, if it hasn’t been already.
The least corrupt, the most honest, and the most civic-minded country in Asia is without a doubt Singapore. Japan is actually mildly corrupt (about the level of the U.S., Hong Kong, and Ireland). Taiwan and South Korea are somewhat more corrupt than Japan (along Poland, Spain, Czech Republic), but are improving rapidly. China is still a HIGHLY corrupt country (the 2015 Corruption Perception Index rates it next to Benin and Columbia). You can reasonably expect the levels of any type of cheating across these countries to be consistent with the perceived levels of corruption.
As for Asian-Americans, they are likely to cheat at about the same rates as the general population (white, if you will) of similar demographic backgrounds (perhaps little higher due to higher academic pressures, but lower due to lower propensity for rule-breaking/higher conformism - they probably even out). The exceptions would be recent arrivals who still retain values of their homelands. On top of that, the recent Chinese immigrants tend not to assimilate well in cultural and civic aspects (along with Indians and Mexicans/Central Americans per the Manhattan Institute studies), and their cheating rate is probably fairly high.
I actually taught at the college level years ago, and can give you a profile of the cheaters if you really care to know. Every year I caught a few.
Thumbprint.
ID on desk at all times.
Only certain makes and models of calculators permitted, and they must be turned over to the proctors before the test to wipe out their memories.
No water bottles with labels. Crib sheets have been found on the inside of labels.
Assigned seats, with Orientals as widely separated as possible.
Bathroom monitors, to avoid note passing in the john.
I can't recall what else, but it takes about 45 minutes to jump through all the security hoops.
Or just consider a typical mainland Chinese student applying to some good but not great US school. Everyone understands that his application packet is a bunch of lies (though, of course, it could not be proven to be such without significant cost and effort). Everyone also understands that he will be paying full tuition. If the admissions office just applies its usual rules "fairly," he gets in. Is this corrupt?
A few years ago there was a minor scandal when a young Hindu woman named Kaavya Viswanathan was admitted to Harvard using one of these sleazy admission services (IvyWise, in this case). It turned out that the published novel Kaavya had supposedly authored as a teen was largely copied from someone else's previous best-selling novel. Then it was revealed that Kaavya didn't even plagiarize herself. It had been plagiarized for her by a ghostwriting service that IvyWise had hired to concoct a publishable novel for young Kaavya. IvyWise also created a bogus charitable organization that Kaavya could pretend that she had founded all on her own. After her deception was exposed, Harvard feigned concern for a while before deciding to let her stay. She graduated, went to law school, and now practices law in New York City.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXj5XE3XKk8
I admit I liked the guy, when I did finally first hear about him which was only a couple years ago for a short time, but was Rob Ford really a world figure? I’m sure there’re some interesting parallels to be drawn about him staking out political territory in a classic high-low “very diverse” vibrantopolis (–that’s according to Torontoans’ self-description anyway), yet he also had a kind of undesirable James Traficant aspect, and not just aesthetically.
I have long intuited that Chinese intellectual superiority and the avg 110 attributed to them is a myth. There is a long standing tradition in the East of education by rote memorization and by gaming aptitude exams. This may result in high scores on entrance exams and IQ tests but that doesn’t necessarily correlate with true intelligence or especially that indefinable quality that is true genius.
Genius of the sort we all understand is unique to Europe and its outliers, in other words to the white race.
If we disappear, so does genius, and with it the sort of civilisation which only it can inspire.
Has anyone ever sold an H1B slot to a proxy?
Way off topic, but if the photo of Chelsea Clinton up on Drudge’s front page right now (and all day) doesn’t REALLY resemble Webster Hubbell I’ll be damned.
I'm not a big fan of such rumors and theories, but Chelsea looks nothing, nothing, nothing like her dad. In fact, I've never seen a picture of her in which I saw any resemblance to Bill.
Web is still alive, so getting his DNA might be feasible. I am surprised that (apparently) no one has tried this. I should be scolded for my prurient interest, but it would be a fun scandal to see erupt between now and November.
The resemblance is also surprising given that Steve has reported previously that Chelsea Clinton has had numerous plastic surgeries. I guess the saying, "you can't polish a road apple" is apt here despite the advances of modern medicine.
>>From the Chinese students I’ve talked to, this is not a great problem, as their goal in attending an American university, even a regional public university like mine, is to attain social cache back home.
Back home? They have no intention of going back home and they are not going to go back home.
China is modernizing rapidly, and the migration spigot is going to slow down to a trickle at some point, as it has with more advanced East Asian countries. For a while, however, the Chinese will continue to inundate for a number of reasons, including the prospect of political instability.
That’s the usual line from somebody who doesn’t know much about East Asia, but would like to pretend as if he does. Or someone who thinks the Japanese are an honorary white race different from other “Orientals.”
The least corrupt, the most honest, and the most civic-minded country in Asia is without a doubt Singapore. Japan is actually mildly corrupt (about the level of the U.S., Hong Kong, and Ireland). Taiwan and South Korea are somewhat more corrupt than Japan (along Poland, Spain, Czech Republic), but are improving rapidly. China is still a HIGHLY corrupt country (the 2015 Corruption Perception Index rates it next to Benin and Columbia). You can reasonably expect the levels of any type of cheating across these countries to be consistent with the perceived levels of corruption.
As for Asian-Americans, they are likely to cheat at about the same rates as the general population (white, if you will) of similar demographic backgrounds (perhaps little higher due to higher academic pressures, but lower due to lower propensity for rule-breaking/higher conformism – they probably even out). The exceptions would be recent arrivals who still retain values of their homelands. On top of that, the recent Chinese immigrants tend not to assimilate well in cultural and civic aspects (along with Indians and Mexicans/Central Americans per the Manhattan Institute studies), and their cheating rate is probably fairly high.
I actually taught at the college level years ago, and can give you a profile of the cheaters if you really care to know. Every year I caught a few.
HOWEVER, Japanese personally operate more on an honor system. There is relatively low levels of assault and theft in Japanese cities, you don't have to bribe an official to get a driving license, etc. and bribery of government officials by citizens to just get on with daily life is unheard of; however the corruption of MITI/METI involved deeply in corporate affairs is another thing.
Breaking news: “Lyin’ Ted Cruz” about to become this election’s John Edwards?
Instead, right now on the CNN front page you have highlighted story, "Trump's history of controversy with women." And there are a LOT of "Trump is a bully" stories for his "attack" on Heidi "Goldman" Cruz.
I hope the Cruz story gets coverage, but I'm not counting on it.
Back home? They have no intention of going back home and they are not going to go back home.
The great bulk of Chinese students do go back home. They do better at home (now with the added prestige of American educational credentials) than they would here.
China is modernizing rapidly, and the migration spigot is going to slow down to a trickle at some point, as it has with more advanced East Asian countries. For a while, however, the Chinese will continue to inundate for a number of reasons, including the prospect of political instability.
Americans are lucky so many chinese, and Saudi students are willing to pay inflated prices for degrees from mediocre US universities (Oregon state!?). Its easy money to fleece the foreigners.
One day, the Chinese will have their own universities, and the Saudis will be out of oil. And american colleges will have to pay their own way again.
(American universities have a reputation, not wholly undeserved, of being places where you can outright buy a degree regardless of talent.)
Foreigners revere Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, etc., but beyond that they're nowhere near as knowledgeable about the rankings of US schools as Americans are (which shouldn't be surprising).
Americans understand that someone who attended Tulane sits higher on the totem pole than someone who attended Louisiana State University, but relatively few Chinese people do. As such, attending State U if you're Chinese will accord you about as much respect as if you graduated from a "Little Ivy."
The least corrupt, the most honest, and the most civic-minded country in Asia is without a doubt Singapore. Japan is actually mildly corrupt (about the level of the U.S., Hong Kong, and Ireland). Taiwan and South Korea are somewhat more corrupt than Japan (along Poland, Spain, Czech Republic), but are improving rapidly. China is still a HIGHLY corrupt country (the 2015 Corruption Perception Index rates it next to Benin and Columbia). You can reasonably expect the levels of any type of cheating across these countries to be consistent with the perceived levels of corruption.
As for Asian-Americans, they are likely to cheat at about the same rates as the general population (white, if you will) of similar demographic backgrounds (perhaps little higher due to higher academic pressures, but lower due to lower propensity for rule-breaking/higher conformism - they probably even out). The exceptions would be recent arrivals who still retain values of their homelands. On top of that, the recent Chinese immigrants tend not to assimilate well in cultural and civic aspects (along with Indians and Mexicans/Central Americans per the Manhattan Institute studies), and their cheating rate is probably fairly high.
I actually taught at the college level years ago, and can give you a profile of the cheaters if you really care to know. Every year I caught a few.
I am actually very interested to hear of your experiences as a college instructor with instances of cheating by students from Asian cultures and your views of their value systems as transplanted into US academia.
I’d also be happy to share my experience living and working in Japan for two years, and in Singapore, Hong Kong and India for several years more, all since 1994.
I am not, however, interested in trading unprovoked put-downs and ad-hominems.
And, yes, I downed a lot of beers at Fatman Satay hanging out with the locals.You will be disappointed. The biggest cheaters were not Asians. Not even close. They were invariably athletes... and usually with some connivance of the administration. Mostly blacks with some whites.
Outside of athletes, the usual cheaters I caught were frequently from an upscale background with good connections to the university. They had high pressure, high expectation parents who were successful and who got them out of trouble at the drop of a hat. Most of these students seemed to feel that they deserved good grades, but weren't all that hardworking. They were pretty smart kids, but also somewhat lazy and unmotivated. But golly they wanted their A's, no matter what.
The very rich kids didn't cheat. They just partied a lot and dated very attractive coeds, and just had a good time looking beautiful in expensive cars and clothes. They were okay with passing and couldn't be bothered to study for A's or even B's. They didn't care enough to cheat, so long as they graduated.
The vast majority of Asian-American students I had kept their heads down and studied hard. They were mostly children of immigrants and didn't seem to want to blow their chances. Risk-aversion would be the word that captures the ethos. I didn't have a whole lot of foreign ones (I taught history), but you can read my earlier comment regarding them.The whole "the Japanese are unique and are unlike other Asians" bit is more than a little overplayed and hackneyed and deserving of the put-down.
Here’s this story about Saudis and Kuwaitis at us schools as well: http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/22/us/a-middle-eastern-tension-point-pocatello-idaho.html?_r=0&referer=https://www.google.com/
If I was some sort of Nazi I’d say that a great university is a rare thing, a national treasure and to be used to give its own people an advantage, instead of helping the rest of the world to compete with them.
“The great bulk of Chinese students do go back home.”
No they don’t. China is a polluted corrupt shithole – why would they go back?
When Glorious Leader Donald becomes President he’ll stop this student visa racket.
I am highly critical and suspicious of China for a variety of reasons (including the fact that it is a competitor/challenger nation to my beloved United States - I see it as a greater threat to the U.S. than ISIS to put mildly), but it's ignorant and stupid to call China "a polluted corrupt shithole." Yes, it is polluted. That's a function of its rapid development (highly rural countries with no industry are less polluted, obviously). Yes, it is corrupt. But if you have ever been to Shanghai today compared to, say, 25 years ago, you would realize the breathtaking growth and advances the Chinese have made. You wouldn't call it a "shithole." The material quality of life for the upper middle class Chinese is quite good now, and the middle class has become massively large and fairly well-to-do by global standards.
I've been to real shitholes. Areas that literally smell like shit. You have no idea what you are talking about.I don't care whether it's the American Hugo Chavez or President Oily or what have you. I want immigration restriction. And I want American universities to reduce the number of foreign students and refocus on educating the actually meritorious American kids. The current "racket" as such exists because that is a money-maker for American universities.
Not nearly as convincing as the one with Prince Harry.
One day, the Chinese will have their own universities, and the Saudis will be out of oil. And american colleges will have to pay their own way again.
And the good ones will go back to educating good American students from ordinary backgrounds (read “blue collar white families in ‘flyover’ country”) who are being ignored today.
Why can’t they just fingerprint everyone doing a test? It will be the inevitable outcome of mass immigration and multiculturalism anyway.
Now 4chan is busy tracking the mistresses of Ted Cruz after a newspaper published an article with their faces blurred.
they made it sound like /pol/
Can someone bring me up to speed on the slang. What’s pol and what’s pos?
'pos' is, I think, short for mainstream thinking...I always though it was some kind of reference to HIV-positivity, like 'you've been infected by the poz'...but I could be way off on that one.
While you're at it, get Anatoly to explain [[[square brackets]]] and the BASED meme.
pos = piece of shit
poz = HIV positive, usually with an implication that 1) "I'm alright with that," 2) "I'm sexually active anyway," and 3) "I'm alright with *that*" By implication, it refers also to the cultural marxist ideology which caused AIDS and to those people who hold that cultural marxist ideology. It's quite clever, actually, since cultural marxism is the AIDS of society. The latter, metaphorical, definition is the more common one by far in radical right discourse. This one, I believe, originates at mpcdot.com. Here is a thread where they discuss its meaning.
I grew up partly in East Asia, before coming to the U.S. After becoming an American and after I left academia, I was also stationed or otherwise traveled extensively throughout Asia, not just East Asia.
And, yes, I downed a lot of beers at Fatman Satay hanging out with the locals.
You will be disappointed. The biggest cheaters were not Asians. Not even close. They were invariably athletes… and usually with some connivance of the administration. Mostly blacks with some whites.
Outside of athletes, the usual cheaters I caught were frequently from an upscale background with good connections to the university. They had high pressure, high expectation parents who were successful and who got them out of trouble at the drop of a hat. Most of these students seemed to feel that they deserved good grades, but weren’t all that hardworking. They were pretty smart kids, but also somewhat lazy and unmotivated. But golly they wanted their A’s, no matter what.
The very rich kids didn’t cheat. They just partied a lot and dated very attractive coeds, and just had a good time looking beautiful in expensive cars and clothes. They were okay with passing and couldn’t be bothered to study for A’s or even B’s. They didn’t care enough to cheat, so long as they graduated.
The vast majority of Asian-American students I had kept their heads down and studied hard. They were mostly children of immigrants and didn’t seem to want to blow their chances. Risk-aversion would be the word that captures the ethos. I didn’t have a whole lot of foreign ones (I taught history), but you can read my earlier comment regarding them.
The whole “the Japanese are unique and are unlike other Asians” bit is more than a little overplayed and hackneyed and deserving of the put-down.
And we most certainly would never have cheated: that would have been both letting the side down and, perhaps worse, showing everone who mattered that we were no better than those nouveaux riches dogs the Kennedys.
I thought this was going to be a post about Chinese students throwing their exams into rivers and leaving them there.
No they don't. China is a polluted corrupt shithole - why would they go back?
When Glorious Leader Donald becomes President he'll stop this student visa racket.
Because foreign students who can afford full American tuitions come from upper middle class to upper class families, and have much better opportunities than they would as low status immigrants in the U.S.
I am highly critical and suspicious of China for a variety of reasons (including the fact that it is a competitor/challenger nation to my beloved United States – I see it as a greater threat to the U.S. than ISIS to put mildly), but it’s ignorant and stupid to call China “a polluted corrupt shithole.” Yes, it is polluted. That’s a function of its rapid development (highly rural countries with no industry are less polluted, obviously). Yes, it is corrupt. But if you have ever been to Shanghai today compared to, say, 25 years ago, you would realize the breathtaking growth and advances the Chinese have made. You wouldn’t call it a “shithole.” The material quality of life for the upper middle class Chinese is quite good now, and the middle class has become massively large and fairly well-to-do by global standards.
I’ve been to real shitholes. Areas that literally smell like shit. You have no idea what you are talking about.
I don’t care whether it’s the American Hugo Chavez or President Oily or what have you. I want immigration restriction. And I want American universities to reduce the number of foreign students and refocus on educating the actually meritorious American kids. The current “racket” as such exists because that is a money-maker for American universities.
Shanghai does smell like shit.
Agreed. Institutes of education should be considered part of a country’s national assets, helping it to keep ahead of its foreign competitors in science and technology. Instead, they’ve become international diploma bazaars, where native students get ever deeper in debt to obtain increasingly useless degrees.
Education Realist has commented on the Chinese propensity to cheat on exams and otherwise in class. I noticed that the University of Iowa has a large Chinese student component that is starting to become a problem; the Chinese don’t want to study any Iowa history (to be fair, the epic struggle to move the capital from Iowa City to Des Moines isn’t all that electrifying, even to an Iowan) and see no need to adopt Iowa patterns of behavior since the Chinese student body there is so large. My experience teaching Chinese students in France is that a few of them are superb, but that they tend to memorize Power Point slides and then write them as exam answers when they see “trigger words” in the exam questions. They hope to pick up enough points to pass.
Tampa Tribune, 03/23/16 – Audit: USF broke law with hefty payouts to former athletic director, coach
http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/college/audit-usf-broke-law-with-hefty-payouts-to-former-athletic-director-coach/2270526
…State law allows USF [University of South Florida] to categorize students from Latin American or Caribbean countries as residents if they receive state or federal scholarships; however, USF was doing this even when the students were receiving other, non-qualifying scholarships.
For example, 272 of 338 students examined by the auditor were receiving scholarships of up to $17,736 from USF, but had not received any federal or state scholarships. USF collected $2.9 million less in student fees than it should have.
The university contended that because its funding draws from state or federal sources, it was correct to call these foreign students Florida residents.
I suspect Hubbell probably is her biological father, but via in vitro fertilization. If one is infertile, why not pick someone you know and like- the ultimate vetting process–to be the sperm donor?
I had the same thought, immediately upon seeing it.
I’m not a big fan of such rumors and theories, but Chelsea looks nothing, nothing, nothing like her dad. In fact, I’ve never seen a picture of her in which I saw any resemblance to Bill.
One day, the Chinese will have their own universities, and the Saudis will be out of oil. And american colleges will have to pay their own way again.
They do have universities. If China works like the rest of Asia and Eastern Europe, then I’m pretty sure that the rich Chinese kids attend American universities only because they’re too dumb to attend a real native one.
(American universities have a reputation, not wholly undeserved, of being places where you can outright buy a degree regardless of talent.)
As for the students, the joke in China is the top third of college grads go to US universities for grad school, the second third get jobs in the government, and the bottom third go to Chinese universities for grad school.
@darkecologist: They don’t accomplish their own goals when all the diversity slots are wealthy Chinese who don’t speak in class.
@danielh: Back home? They have no intention of going back home and they are not going to go back home.
Back in the late ’90s, my MBA class in the traditional 2-year program at the University of Florida was 10% mainland FOB Chinese students + 5% Taiwanese; all early 20s, right out of undergrad w/o work experience. This was the known ratio for every MBA class. They all seemed competent in “statistics” but were abysmal in everything else, including English competency. Never spoke in class and circulated and communicated (in Chinese) only with the other Chinese students. I did sense some tension between the Chinese and Taiwanese students. The American students dreaded working with any of them on a group project. A few other American students and I wondered how they could comprehend the lectures and readings and suspected that they got some “special” tutorials and “assistance” from the administration. All of them desperately wanted to find jobs and stay in the US, preferably in Florida, and willing to accept any wage; driving down salary offers for the rest of us.
I did, however, get involved in a short fling w/ one of the Taiwanese female students – quite attractive and exotic, and half-way decent English skills. She was an “adventuress” seeking fun and experiences during her stay in America, and ended up marrying a German Deutsche Bank exec.
Americans have an exaggerated idea of how attractive America is. Yes, it beats the hell out of Somalia, but compared to Shanghai, New York is a sleepy little village with a 3rd world level airport and subway system. In Shanghai you take a 250 mph MAGLEV train to the airport.
I am highly critical and suspicious of China for a variety of reasons (including the fact that it is a competitor/challenger nation to my beloved United States - I see it as a greater threat to the U.S. than ISIS to put mildly), but it's ignorant and stupid to call China "a polluted corrupt shithole." Yes, it is polluted. That's a function of its rapid development (highly rural countries with no industry are less polluted, obviously). Yes, it is corrupt. But if you have ever been to Shanghai today compared to, say, 25 years ago, you would realize the breathtaking growth and advances the Chinese have made. You wouldn't call it a "shithole." The material quality of life for the upper middle class Chinese is quite good now, and the middle class has become massively large and fairly well-to-do by global standards.
I've been to real shitholes. Areas that literally smell like shit. You have no idea what you are talking about.I don't care whether it's the American Hugo Chavez or President Oily or what have you. I want immigration restriction. And I want American universities to reduce the number of foreign students and refocus on educating the actually meritorious American kids. The current "racket" as such exists because that is a money-maker for American universities.
Thank you for agreeing China is “corrupt” and “polluted”. The students don’t go home because it’s a corrupt polluted shithole. Sad.
In California at least, Chinese cheating is well known and test proctors have elaborate procedures to minimize it.
Thumbprint.
ID on desk at all times.
Only certain makes and models of calculators permitted, and they must be turned over to the proctors before the test to wipe out their memories.
No water bottles with labels. Crib sheets have been found on the inside of labels.
Assigned seats, with Orientals as widely separated as possible.
Bathroom monitors, to avoid note passing in the john.
I can’t recall what else, but it takes about 45 minutes to jump through all the security hoops.
Thus another example of diversity ramping up the regulatory/surveillance state.
Now that you mention it, Webster Hubbell is kind of a homelier version of Bill Clinton, so the idea that Bill and Hill would pick their friend Web for in vitro fertilization isn’t implausible if Bill was sterile.
If it's just the man who has a problem and the woman is fine, but they don't want her to do the Think Tank with two letterheads with him, then you use artificial insemination. Basically the turkey baster. Or the Erdogan Stinger as it should be known.
Kind of like improvisatory comedians when they’re out drinking with other improv comedians.
Compare a photo of Frank Marshall Davis with one of Barack Obama Jr. Then compare Barack Obama Jur. to Barack Obama Sr. See what you think.
(1) East Asian IQ is tilted against verbal. In PISA, Chinese performance is much higher than America’s on math and science, but a bit lower on verbal.
(2) The banal fact that English is a foreign language will incur another effective drop of 10-15 points even though English is now generally taught to a respectable level in Chinese schools.
(3) It is entirely logical that there will be a lot of cheating on admissions essays on the part of Chinese applicants bearing in mind the above plus the fact that in Chinese society a US higher education is a highly sought after prestige good to such an extent that even Xi Jinping’s daughter reportedly went to Harvard.
I’ll bag an eighth ounce of coke and do a line or ten in his honor.
At the end of the day, whether allowing cheaters or developing bullshit degree programs (The “Studies” of Women, Blacks and Sexuality of all sorts requiring no science, math or history) for morons, the Universities and colleges and their partners the banks, keep that money rolling in.
“Higher education” is the greatest scam ever. They take in minnows that have no place, that are NOT “college material” in the old sense and sell them, at full price, a worthless “Bachelor’s of Science” that taught them no useful and especially, marketable, science at all. I’m sure, paraphrasing Lewis Black, the greediest fuckers in history look at the hucksters of higher education and say, “THAT is really fucking greedy. And I wish I’d thought of it”. EDS and the rest had nothing on the crooked, criminal enterprise of Higher Education. It’s a beautiful, wonderful scam..
So we are surprised at the abject lack of integrity of “Higher Learning” as an instrument? It is crooked top to bottom, 80% of its collective “business” is selling for high cost a piece of paper that has no value to the indebted, now-indentured recipient that “earned” that piece of paper (“it looks GREAT on the wall of Mom’s basement bedroom!”). And we huff and puff in righteous indignation at this? They have to get their out-of-state tuition somewhere, they’ve already grown to outsize proportions and milked out the native minnows. In their greed, they must have MORE suckers, they’ll get them somehow, from somewhere, by all means fair and foul. And so they cheat by allowing cheating. That’s really fucking greedy!
When do we wise up to them?
A college degree helps you get a job, because it makes you look better than people without one. So what's the left-wing solution? Send everyone to college! (Remember, minorities are less likely to go to college, so it must be racism.) Of course, then you just have lots of hapless sons and daughters of teachers and construction workers cluttering the entry-level job market with worthless degrees--but now, they're thousands of dollars in debt.
But, of course, the universities clean up, because they get their money.
A similar scam is the large number of PhD programs that will never lead to tenure-track positions but provide lots of cheap labor for professors.
I think this post leads to the wider HBD issue of why East Asians tend to do a lot better than whites academically.
I put it down to three main factors:
Introversion – Asians are more introverted and studies show introverts do better academically
Slightly higher IQ (especially in regard to mathematics)
Neuroticism – Asians are more concerned with pleasing parents and fret more about whether or not they will pass their degrees and be able to compete in the job market.
Contrary to popular belief, I don’t think it’s due to superior levels of personal conscientiousness. When the social pressure is off, East Asians are just as likely to slack off as whites are.
And, yes, I downed a lot of beers at Fatman Satay hanging out with the locals.You will be disappointed. The biggest cheaters were not Asians. Not even close. They were invariably athletes... and usually with some connivance of the administration. Mostly blacks with some whites.
Outside of athletes, the usual cheaters I caught were frequently from an upscale background with good connections to the university. They had high pressure, high expectation parents who were successful and who got them out of trouble at the drop of a hat. Most of these students seemed to feel that they deserved good grades, but weren't all that hardworking. They were pretty smart kids, but also somewhat lazy and unmotivated. But golly they wanted their A's, no matter what.
The very rich kids didn't cheat. They just partied a lot and dated very attractive coeds, and just had a good time looking beautiful in expensive cars and clothes. They were okay with passing and couldn't be bothered to study for A's or even B's. They didn't care enough to cheat, so long as they graduated.
The vast majority of Asian-American students I had kept their heads down and studied hard. They were mostly children of immigrants and didn't seem to want to blow their chances. Risk-aversion would be the word that captures the ethos. I didn't have a whole lot of foreign ones (I taught history), but you can read my earlier comment regarding them.The whole "the Japanese are unique and are unlike other Asians" bit is more than a little overplayed and hackneyed and deserving of the put-down.
Thank you for those details on the sociology of students in academia and their propensity (or otherwise) to cut corners. It makes sense that, to some extent, the motivation to cheat to get high grades is a function of wealth and social incentives, such as parental pressure, more than ethnicity. The bit about student athletes, too is consistent with what one knows, anecdotally.
I also know where you are coming from regarding the “holiness” meme of Japanese culture prevalent in some quarters in the West, especially in America. It is indeed often trotted out for precisely the reason you state-that Japan is somehow quasi-Western in its ethos. That, of course is rubbish. But what I was picking up on was the equally frequent casual tendency to lump in Japan with China and Korea, when it is, in fact, as distinct as Turkey is from Austria.
My observation is that Japan was a noticeably less corrupt place to work in (as I think you allude to in one of your other posts) than many other countries in East Asia. While the exam system is Japan is as high-pressure as in China and cheating may indeed be a concern for their educators, it did strike me as to how little of an issue honesty at a simple, civic level was in Tokyo. A large scale cheating scandal would be a surprise.
Tokyo is famous for its lost and found facility, where you have a reasonable expectation of finding a lost umbrella or a wallet-which makes it a bit different from Singapore and Hong Kong in that micro-level, granular detail regarding interpersonal honesty.
Equally, the newspapers in Asia have never, to my knowledge, reported cheating scandals from Japan. They do, however, report them from China, Taiwan and South Korea. Not to mention India. I mentioned the cancelling of SATs last year, which happened for the June test date.
Singapore, though, after 50 years of strong top-down rule, feels similar to Japan-honest in its day to day texture of life and transactions. But I (or the locals) could never imagine that a lost wallet would be invariably be returned to lost and found.
Also, I think it is important to note that the growing industry in Asia surrounding admissions to college in the US is a phenomenon only for a few hundred thousand Asians, solely among the well-to-do who can shell out the $75k+ that it takes. For these people, a lot of social cachet and face seems to be at stake. Nonetheless, that displaces a few hundred thousand American citizens of lesser means, which is a fundamental problem of fairness in education that needs to be fixed.
It is beyond shortsighted for America to fail to fix the spiraling cost of college education and instead have its colleges resort to a strategy of excluding US citizen applicants in favor of full-fare paying foreigners.
But I dare say if you cut off the flow of foreign funds by the simple expedient of limiting student visas, college costs will start to come back in line.
I’m no expert, but after all, I don’t see that real dollar academic salaries have greatly increased, or that student-professor ratios have changed in close to a century in American universities. And the method of instruction is still one teacher speaking to a room of students.
Therefore, simple math leads one to suspect that education can still be delivered at more or less the same cost that it used to be.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/03/why_the_japanese_arent_looting.html
"Anthropologists speak of Japan as a "shame culture," as opposed to a "guilt culture," meaning that people are constrained to behave themselves properly by an aversion to being judged negatively by those around them, rather than internalizing a moral imperative. Broadly speaking, that is true today. But it is also true that most contemporary Japanese have internalized a deep respect for private property, that is manifested in a ritual of modern life for children, one which we might do well to emulate. When a child finds a small item belonging to another person, even a one yen coin, a parent takes the child to the local koban and reports lost property. As chronicled by T.R. Reid in his wonderful book about living in Tokyo, Confucius Lives Next Door, the police do not resent this as a waste of time but rather see it as part of moral education, solemnly filling out the appropriate forms, thanking the child and telling him or her if the owner does not appear to claim the item, it will revert to the finder after a certain period of time. "
Reminds of having to TA a class in graduate school for a subject that was not my specialization. The Chinese student who was supposed to teach the class had been admitted into the graduate program in that specialization. Yet he was not appointed as a TA for that class because he was unintelligible. Further he was on a fellowship like the rest of us in the program. In other words, the university was not making any money from having him as a student. Why was he admitted? From what I could tell, he was not an exceptional student either.
American high schools are super-anal about their college prep curricula, as if a student who was allowed to take linear algebra instead of calculus would never have a chance at getting into a good college, but the colleges will happily admit Chinese students based on a fuzzy transcript faxed from Chingchong High School and an SAT score from a Li Gao who may or may not be the actual applicant.
Can someone bring me up to speed on the slang. What's pol and what's pos?
/pol/ is short for ‘politically incorrect’, the alt-right troll board that loves to do stuff like this–I believe they changed Pepsi’s slogan to ‘Hitler did nothing wrong’.
‘pos’ is, I think, short for mainstream thinking…I always though it was some kind of reference to HIV-positivity, like ‘you’ve been infected by the poz’…but I could be way off on that one.
While you’re at it, get Anatoly to explain [[[square brackets]]] and the BASED meme.
It’s a little more complicated, but I agree: it’s, IMHO, one of the nastiest swindles ever pulled on the middle class in the name of ‘equality of opportunity’.
A college degree helps you get a job, because it makes you look better than people without one. So what’s the left-wing solution? Send everyone to college! (Remember, minorities are less likely to go to college, so it must be racism.) Of course, then you just have lots of hapless sons and daughters of teachers and construction workers cluttering the entry-level job market with worthless degrees–but now, they’re thousands of dollars in debt.
But, of course, the universities clean up, because they get their money.
A similar scam is the large number of PhD programs that will never lead to tenure-track positions but provide lots of cheap labor for professors.
Do foreigners coming to the US to attend college count as exports to that country in terms of import/export trade balance government statistics? Same question with regard to tourism and then items tourists purchase here and bring back home.
I took a course on GPS technology in grad school. During the first lecture, the professor notified the students that only US citizens would be allowed to take the class, as teaching foreigners how GPS works would be an illegal export of restricted technology.
The least corrupt, the most honest, and the most civic-minded country in Asia is without a doubt Singapore. Japan is actually mildly corrupt (about the level of the U.S., Hong Kong, and Ireland). Taiwan and South Korea are somewhat more corrupt than Japan (along Poland, Spain, Czech Republic), but are improving rapidly. China is still a HIGHLY corrupt country (the 2015 Corruption Perception Index rates it next to Benin and Columbia). You can reasonably expect the levels of any type of cheating across these countries to be consistent with the perceived levels of corruption.
As for Asian-Americans, they are likely to cheat at about the same rates as the general population (white, if you will) of similar demographic backgrounds (perhaps little higher due to higher academic pressures, but lower due to lower propensity for rule-breaking/higher conformism - they probably even out). The exceptions would be recent arrivals who still retain values of their homelands. On top of that, the recent Chinese immigrants tend not to assimilate well in cultural and civic aspects (along with Indians and Mexicans/Central Americans per the Manhattan Institute studies), and their cheating rate is probably fairly high.
I actually taught at the college level years ago, and can give you a profile of the cheaters if you really care to know. Every year I caught a few.
I’m curious what the evidence for this is. I find it hard to believe. I could believe it of third generation Chinese-Americans, but there are so few of them that it’s hard to know.
I am highly critical and suspicious of China for a variety of reasons (including the fact that it is a competitor/challenger nation to my beloved United States - I see it as a greater threat to the U.S. than ISIS to put mildly), but it's ignorant and stupid to call China "a polluted corrupt shithole." Yes, it is polluted. That's a function of its rapid development (highly rural countries with no industry are less polluted, obviously). Yes, it is corrupt. But if you have ever been to Shanghai today compared to, say, 25 years ago, you would realize the breathtaking growth and advances the Chinese have made. You wouldn't call it a "shithole." The material quality of life for the upper middle class Chinese is quite good now, and the middle class has become massively large and fairly well-to-do by global standards.
I've been to real shitholes. Areas that literally smell like shit. You have no idea what you are talking about.I don't care whether it's the American Hugo Chavez or President Oily or what have you. I want immigration restriction. And I want American universities to reduce the number of foreign students and refocus on educating the actually meritorious American kids. The current "racket" as such exists because that is a money-maker for American universities.
I think Twinkie feels we have disrespected his extended famiry here…
Shanghai does smell like shit.
And half of my extended family is white, mostly of English, German, and Swedish descent.
So can you stop your juvenile snark now.You haven't been to India, have you Or for that matter, the New York City of my youth.
I don’t understand what you mean by corrupt. You can buy your way into Harvard. Make a big enough contribution, and they let your kid in (assuming he’s at least sort of bright). The price tag is much higher than 600K, though. Many millions. Being famous and/or powerful is also a way in. But this has always been true, so I’m struggling to understand how it can be “corrupted.” You mean, like, all the slots in the incoming class are allocated this way? An increasing proportion over time?
Or just consider a typical mainland Chinese student applying to some good but not great US school. Everyone understands that his application packet is a bunch of lies (though, of course, it could not be proven to be such without significant cost and effort). Everyone also understands that he will be paying full tuition. If the admissions office just applies its usual rules “fairly,” he gets in. Is this corrupt?
Thumbprint.
ID on desk at all times.
Only certain makes and models of calculators permitted, and they must be turned over to the proctors before the test to wipe out their memories.
No water bottles with labels. Crib sheets have been found on the inside of labels.
Assigned seats, with Orientals as widely separated as possible.
Bathroom monitors, to avoid note passing in the john.
I can't recall what else, but it takes about 45 minutes to jump through all the security hoops.
45 minutes to jump through all the security hoops.
Thus another example of diversity ramping up the regulatory/surveillance state.
Can someone bring me up to speed on the slang. What's pol and what's pos?
pol refers to 4chan.org/pol and 8ch.net/pol, the latter being more nazi than the former. As you would expect, pol has also come to refer to the people, ideas, and trolling activity common on those boards.
pos = piece of shit
poz = HIV positive, usually with an implication that 1) “I’m alright with that,” 2) “I’m sexually active anyway,” and 3) “I’m alright with *that*” By implication, it refers also to the cultural marxist ideology which caused AIDS and to those people who hold that cultural marxist ideology. It’s quite clever, actually, since cultural marxism is the AIDS of society. The latter, metaphorical, definition is the more common one by far in radical right discourse. This one, I believe, originates at mpcdot.com. Here is a thread where they discuss its meaning.
I am highly critical and suspicious of China for a variety of reasons (including the fact that it is a competitor/challenger nation to my beloved United States - I see it as a greater threat to the U.S. than ISIS to put mildly), but it's ignorant and stupid to call China "a polluted corrupt shithole." Yes, it is polluted. That's a function of its rapid development (highly rural countries with no industry are less polluted, obviously). Yes, it is corrupt. But if you have ever been to Shanghai today compared to, say, 25 years ago, you would realize the breathtaking growth and advances the Chinese have made. You wouldn't call it a "shithole." The material quality of life for the upper middle class Chinese is quite good now, and the middle class has become massively large and fairly well-to-do by global standards.
I've been to real shitholes. Areas that literally smell like shit. You have no idea what you are talking about.I don't care whether it's the American Hugo Chavez or President Oily or what have you. I want immigration restriction. And I want American universities to reduce the number of foreign students and refocus on educating the actually meritorious American kids. The current "racket" as such exists because that is a money-maker for American universities.
Ironically, most Chinese cities do smell slightly of shit. It has something to do with how the sewer system is constructed.
One notable exception - when I visited Chongqing's Porcelain Village (Ci Qi Kou?). The place was marvelous looking. I can't tell if it was the real deal or a sort of faux medieval Disneyland, but I loved it. However, there was one non-descript stretch of road on the busiest street, with a lot of food vendors, hawkers and the like, which utterly reeked of shit. Not the bad kind, the worst kind. It hit me like a brick, while I was eating some sort of meat on a stick. Just 8 meters ahead, the smell instantly stopped. I thought that maybe I got a Smiling Buddha from one of the tourists around, so I continued my visit. Came back through the same spot to meet up with my group, it happened again. I was on the verge of visibly retching along with every other straight eye in that spot, while the Chinese either didn't notice, or were saving face by pretending not to. There was something there that wasn't anywhere else. Haunted?
Or lack of one.
I was in Urumqi on a motorcycle tour and walking the back streets. Suddenly a little boy ran out of a shop, pulled his pants down, squatted on the curb, and dumped one in the gutter. He pulled his pants up and ran back into the shop.
http://www.agroecology.org/Case%20Studies/nightsoil.html
http://www.agroecology.org/Case%20Studies/nightsoil.html
With such a densely settled country, it was probably a necessity to maintain soil fertility. Of course there are also some negative consequences; smells, hepatitis etc.
Personally, I think selling degrees to foreigners is a great way for our poor country to make some money.
But on a couple conditions.
1. Tuition for grandparents-born-here-Americans (“citizens”) is free for real subjects and minimal for others like philosophy, history, etc.
2. The foreigners are in their own tracks, or ideally their own separate universities (at least, their own division of an existing one) so they do not crowd out Americans or make it harder for them to register for needed classes.
3. The foreigners are required to leave the country immediately upon graduation, or the university must pay a fine equivalent to all tuition and fees received.
@danielh: Back home? They have no intention of going back home and they are not going to go back home.
Back in the late '90s, my MBA class in the traditional 2-year program at the University of Florida was 10% mainland FOB Chinese students + 5% Taiwanese; all early 20s, right out of undergrad w/o work experience. This was the known ratio for every MBA class. They all seemed competent in "statistics" but were abysmal in everything else, including English competency. Never spoke in class and circulated and communicated (in Chinese) only with the other Chinese students. I did sense some tension between the Chinese and Taiwanese students. The American students dreaded working with any of them on a group project. A few other American students and I wondered how they could comprehend the lectures and readings and suspected that they got some "special" tutorials and "assistance" from the administration. All of them desperately wanted to find jobs and stay in the US, preferably in Florida, and willing to accept any wage; driving down salary offers for the rest of us.I did, however, get involved in a short fling w/ one of the Taiwanese female students - quite attractive and exotic, and half-way decent English skills. She was an "adventuress" seeking fun and experiences during her stay in America, and ended up marrying a German Deutsche Bank exec.
That was 20 years ago. Look at how much the per capita GDP has risen since then in China (and Taiwan) and you’ll understand why they go back home today.
Americans have an exaggerated idea of how attractive America is. Yes, it beats the hell out of Somalia, but compared to Shanghai, New York is a sleepy little village with a 3rd world level airport and subway system. In Shanghai you take a 250 mph MAGLEV train to the airport.
I WISH China were more attractive to the Chinese.
I live in NJ in neighboring town to a very large Asian population. The schools in that district are considered stellar and Asians trample each other to find real estate there. The schools on paper have very high test scores but the locals that I know in the dwindling white population are very unhappy and there is more than meets the eye. Folks report rampant cheating in the High School among the Chinese students, significant jockeying by the parents to obtain prior test answers, they actively promote it in the family. The whites have consistent arguments with the school board as athletics are cut in favor of more money for G&T programs, mind you these whites are not dummies but are looking for the right balance for their kids. Also, so much homework is given that many of the white parents leave the district on that issue alone as the Chinese kids have zero social life. High levels of stress, depression and bullying exist as these asian strivers are driven to the edge. The most interesting aspect is that there is reverse racism now against the white minority, white kids unable to compete academically or willing to cheat are ridiculed openly. What I find interesting is that college acceptance from this High School is only 85% which is below my district which is 95% and my district has few Asians. My only guess is these kids are burning out, moving to China? Puzzling.
I really dislike the term "reverse racism" as all the implications are that virtually only white people are racist and that anti-white racism is the exception. Which of course is ludicrous. Fortunately the term is hardly ever seen here.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-23325612
“A Chinese translator in Birmingham has been jailed for helping 200 learner drivers cheat on theory exams. Peter Hui was approved by the Driving Standards Agency (DSA) to translate multiple choice questions in Mandarin for foreign applicants but was also providing answers for a fee.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3459469/James-Bond-style-spy-gear-used-to-cheat-immigration-test.html
“Two men have been jailed after using hi-tech hidden cameras, transmitters and surveillance gadgets to tell candidates sitting the exams the right answers. The Life in the UK test is the last step towards earning citizenship and those who pass are then entitled to apply for a British passport. But there are fears unsuitable candidates may have earned the right to settle here thanks to a highly sophisticated scam to cheat the questions. Participants, who did not understand English, went in to a test centre in Wimbledon library, south west London, armed with a hidden shirt buttonhole camera, microphone and earpiece. In a scam akin to a scene in a James Bond movie, two fraudsters sat outside in BMW car packed with hi-tech equipment and a laptop and directed them to tick the right answers via the secret link. “
RIP Epic Crack Mayor
Based upon my experience with Chinese students at a high end university, I believe a good number of them are cheaters. Certainly it is not the majority, but there is absolutely a strong undercurrent of them.
My belief stems from their grades in small, 20-30 student, literature discussion courses. Despite being nearly unable to hold conversation in English and being seemingly incapable of understanding spoken English, these students would excel on the papers. While it’s possible they could have strong written skills but horrible speaking skills, it seems highly unlikely for them to receive top grades while many western students scored Bs and Cs.
But my experience with Asian American students at Berkeley in the 80's was that they were very bright and hard working. Chinese, Indian, Korean, all of them were studying and discussing the lectures all the time. If anybody was cheating, I never saw even a smidgen of it. Some of them really helped me get through some tough classes.
“Tokyo is famous for its lost and found facility, where you have a reasonable expectation of finding a lost umbrella or a wallet-which makes it a bit different from Singapore and Hong Kong in that micro-level, granular detail regarding interpersonal honesty. “
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/03/why_the_japanese_arent_looting.html
“Anthropologists speak of Japan as a “shame culture,” as opposed to a “guilt culture,” meaning that people are constrained to behave themselves properly by an aversion to being judged negatively by those around them, rather than internalizing a moral imperative. Broadly speaking, that is true today. But it is also true that most contemporary Japanese have internalized a deep respect for private property, that is manifested in a ritual of modern life for children, one which we might do well to emulate. When a child finds a small item belonging to another person, even a one yen coin, a parent takes the child to the local koban and reports lost property. As chronicled by T.R. Reid in his wonderful book about living in Tokyo, Confucius Lives Next Door, the police do not resent this as a waste of time but rather see it as part of moral education, solemnly filling out the appropriate forms, thanking the child and telling him or her if the owner does not appear to claim the item, it will revert to the finder after a certain period of time. “
They didn't find it at that stop, but eventually the phone was returned at the train's terminal location. JR called me and kept the phone for me with a lost & found ID number in an envelope inside a locked locker.
Contrast... my mother recently tried to go cross-country on Greyhound, but the black female bus driver left her stranded in the middle of nowhere. She had to be picked up by police, and her belongings may have been (if not stolen by the bus driver) left unsecured in a big room in Chicago which she could travel to herself and rifle through. She discovered this by making multiple calls to national and local Greyhound offices, most of which were never answered or returned.
OT but something the fellas here might appreciate:
A Huffington Post piece says that being black in America is kind of like being in the North Korean gulag.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/la-sha/on-the-revocation-of-whit_b_9531122.html
Actual title: “North Korea Proves Your White Male Privilege Is Not Universal”
As far as I can tell this is a real HuffPo piece and not a parody of a HuffPo piece.
(2) The banal fact that English is a foreign language will incur another effective drop of 10-15 points even though English is now generally taught to a respectable level in Chinese schools.
(3) It is entirely logical that there will be a lot of cheating on admissions essays on the part of Chinese applicants bearing in mind the above plus the fact that in Chinese society a US higher education is a highly sought after prestige good to such an extent that even Xi Jinping's daughter reportedly went to Harvard.
Did Xi really?
Isn’t in vitro fertilization used when the woman is less fertile as well?
If it’s just the man who has a problem and the woman is fine, but they don’t want her to do the Think Tank with two letterheads with him, then you use artificial insemination. Basically the turkey baster. Or the Erdogan Stinger as it should be known.
I haven’t had that experience, but I have a broad and shallow experience of Chinese cities – a lot of them, but being feted in central locations with limited personal mobility.
One notable exception – when I visited Chongqing’s Porcelain Village (Ci Qi Kou?). The place was marvelous looking. I can’t tell if it was the real deal or a sort of faux medieval Disneyland, but I loved it. However, there was one non-descript stretch of road on the busiest street, with a lot of food vendors, hawkers and the like, which utterly reeked of shit. Not the bad kind, the worst kind. It hit me like a brick, while I was eating some sort of meat on a stick. Just 8 meters ahead, the smell instantly stopped. I thought that maybe I got a Smiling Buddha from one of the tourists around, so I continued my visit. Came back through the same spot to meet up with my group, it happened again. I was on the verge of visibly retching along with every other straight eye in that spot, while the Chinese either didn’t notice, or were saving face by pretending not to. There was something there that wasn’t anywhere else. Haunted?
There may have been an open toilet or vent near the spot you walked through and no other proper venting in the area so all the gasses were getting out in that one spot.
I get most of what I know about Japan from anime, but that’s my impression — that Japan is very high-trust, almost the opposite of China in that regard.
Shouldn’t be hard to pull off
Recently USC passed UCLA on the average SAT scores of it’s incoming freshman. I don’t think this had ever happened before. While affirmative action certainly had a role, the bigger role was all the high SAT scores of the foreign students. SC probably knew there was a lot of cheating but it is sort of beneficial. SC gets to charge a high tuition and claim they have a very smart class of incoming students which helps it’s rankings. Why would anybody want to expose cheating?
Of course, the UC is also in on the scam with an ever increasing number of foreign students as well.
@danielh: Back home? They have no intention of going back home and they are not going to go back home.
Back in the late '90s, my MBA class in the traditional 2-year program at the University of Florida was 10% mainland FOB Chinese students + 5% Taiwanese; all early 20s, right out of undergrad w/o work experience. This was the known ratio for every MBA class. They all seemed competent in "statistics" but were abysmal in everything else, including English competency. Never spoke in class and circulated and communicated (in Chinese) only with the other Chinese students. I did sense some tension between the Chinese and Taiwanese students. The American students dreaded working with any of them on a group project. A few other American students and I wondered how they could comprehend the lectures and readings and suspected that they got some "special" tutorials and "assistance" from the administration. All of them desperately wanted to find jobs and stay in the US, preferably in Florida, and willing to accept any wage; driving down salary offers for the rest of us.I did, however, get involved in a short fling w/ one of the Taiwanese female students - quite attractive and exotic, and half-way decent English skills. She was an "adventuress" seeking fun and experiences during her stay in America, and ended up marrying a German Deutsche Bank exec.
As a german citizen and former Douche Bank client, I think that bank will be taken care of in the next financial meltdown. They certainly have it coming.
I was the only American-born grad student in my second-rate engineering department so guess who had to blow every summer TA’ing while the other students were allowed to spend their summers producing unintelligible research that the profs had to completely rewrite?
American high schools are super-anal about their college prep curricula, as if a student who was allowed to take linear algebra instead of calculus would never have a chance at getting into a good college, but the colleges will happily admit Chinese students based on a fuzzy transcript faxed from Chingchong High School and an SAT score from a Li Gao who may or may not be the actual applicant.
OT: but you can’t make this shit up http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/in-a-divided-nation-muslims-say-they%E2%80%99re-more-belgian-than-ever/ar-BBqTvqQ?li=BBnb7Kz&OCID=DELLDHP
how the sewer system is constructed
Or lack of one.
I was in Urumqi on a motorcycle tour and walking the back streets. Suddenly a little boy ran out of a shop, pulled his pants down, squatted on the curb, and dumped one in the gutter. He pulled his pants up and ran back into the shop.
The least corrupt, the most honest, and the most civic-minded country in Asia is without a doubt Singapore. Japan is actually mildly corrupt (about the level of the U.S., Hong Kong, and Ireland). Taiwan and South Korea are somewhat more corrupt than Japan (along Poland, Spain, Czech Republic), but are improving rapidly. China is still a HIGHLY corrupt country (the 2015 Corruption Perception Index rates it next to Benin and Columbia). You can reasonably expect the levels of any type of cheating across these countries to be consistent with the perceived levels of corruption.
As for Asian-Americans, they are likely to cheat at about the same rates as the general population (white, if you will) of similar demographic backgrounds (perhaps little higher due to higher academic pressures, but lower due to lower propensity for rule-breaking/higher conformism - they probably even out). The exceptions would be recent arrivals who still retain values of their homelands. On top of that, the recent Chinese immigrants tend not to assimilate well in cultural and civic aspects (along with Indians and Mexicans/Central Americans per the Manhattan Institute studies), and their cheating rate is probably fairly high.
I actually taught at the college level years ago, and can give you a profile of the cheaters if you really care to know. Every year I caught a few.
I worked at a Japanese company for three years and Piltdown Man’s observations seem basically correct. One can always find exceptions but we’re talking about broad generalizations here.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/03/why_the_japanese_arent_looting.html
"Anthropologists speak of Japan as a "shame culture," as opposed to a "guilt culture," meaning that people are constrained to behave themselves properly by an aversion to being judged negatively by those around them, rather than internalizing a moral imperative. Broadly speaking, that is true today. But it is also true that most contemporary Japanese have internalized a deep respect for private property, that is manifested in a ritual of modern life for children, one which we might do well to emulate. When a child finds a small item belonging to another person, even a one yen coin, a parent takes the child to the local koban and reports lost property. As chronicled by T.R. Reid in his wonderful book about living in Tokyo, Confucius Lives Next Door, the police do not resent this as a waste of time but rather see it as part of moral education, solemnly filling out the appropriate forms, thanking the child and telling him or her if the owner does not appear to claim the item, it will revert to the finder after a certain period of time. "
In case of “shame culture” you would expect not returning found items if nobody saw you picking them up while in case of “guilt culture” you would have a duty to return regardless whether somebody saw you or not. As we know when comparing Japan vs. Judeo-Christian countries it is not so. This “shame” vs. “guilt” cultures dichotomy was invented by Judeo-Christian (with the emphasis on the Judeo part) anthropologists just to put down the Japanese culture. It is BS.
Living in Japan is a challenge to foreigners, who are inclined to bring that attitude with them from home. Just one reason to restrict immigration here...
Are you trying to engage in some sort of discourse with The Twink? Let me tell you how it works on this man’s internet; The Twink is like the Pope, he pronounces, you listen. Anecdotes don’t trump facts … except when it’s an anecdote from The Twink, then the debate is over. Dismissed.
One notable exception - when I visited Chongqing's Porcelain Village (Ci Qi Kou?). The place was marvelous looking. I can't tell if it was the real deal or a sort of faux medieval Disneyland, but I loved it. However, there was one non-descript stretch of road on the busiest street, with a lot of food vendors, hawkers and the like, which utterly reeked of shit. Not the bad kind, the worst kind. It hit me like a brick, while I was eating some sort of meat on a stick. Just 8 meters ahead, the smell instantly stopped. I thought that maybe I got a Smiling Buddha from one of the tourists around, so I continued my visit. Came back through the same spot to meet up with my group, it happened again. I was on the verge of visibly retching along with every other straight eye in that spot, while the Chinese either didn't notice, or were saving face by pretending not to. There was something there that wasn't anywhere else. Haunted?
Put it this way, even attempting to construct water based flush toilet sewerage systems – with all the attendant filtration plants, being mindful of natural rivers flows and hydrology, in a nation of 1200 million people, is an awesome undertaking in itself.
Suffice to say that a ‘proper’ sewage treatment plant – of the type that doesn’t poison every living thing in the river for miles downstream, is always the biggest single electricity consumer in any municipality.
How do they use some much power? What do they do - boil the sewage?
When I arrived at a large Japanese university thirty years ago, I carelessly lost my wallet containing the equivalent of $2000 in a busy quadrangle. I went to the lost and found a few hours later and my wallet was returned with cash intact. I wouldn’t expect to be so lucky on a US campus.
What are implying, Steve? That all Chinese look alike? Thaaaat’s raaaaaacissssst!
Well for b we can also look at their societies, how fast they are able to industrialize like South Korea and stuff like that which indirectly informs us
Americans have an exaggerated idea of how attractive America is. Yes, it beats the hell out of Somalia, but compared to Shanghai, New York is a sleepy little village with a 3rd world level airport and subway system. In Shanghai you take a 250 mph MAGLEV train to the airport.
That hasn’t stopped half a million Chinese from coming here, more every day. And that half-million is the official number. The real number I’d guess is twice that.
I WISH China were more attractive to the Chinese.
This seems to be getting no pickup in the “respectable” media. They want Trump out, so they will bury the Cruz story. Should Cruz win the nomination, this story will be everywhere.
Instead, right now on the CNN front page you have highlighted story, “Trump’s history of controversy with women.” And there are a LOT of “Trump is a bully” stories for his “attack” on Heidi “Goldman” Cruz.
I hope the Cruz story gets coverage, but I’m not counting on it.
Even Rush is running with this. A couple of months ago I thought Rush was pro-Trump. The last week I am convinced he is for Cruz. He was promoting Cruz's idea of increasing the policing of muslim neighborhoods as a way to prevent terrorism as though that was a bright idea. After Brussels he made Cruz look like the guy with the right idea. But apparently not bringing muslims into your nation in the first place, Trump's idea, did not cross Rush's mind.
I am getting a little antsy that Trump won't get his 1237 delegates. Now Drudge is reporting that Cruz is going to get more delegates from LA even though he lost the state by 3 points.
I think if the parental pressure to do well or very well this tests whatever how had been culturally internalized among westerners, so a lot of ”western” students also cheat this tests as happen in South Korea, Taiwan and China, i don’t know if will be in the same % …
Japanese students seems have also higher parental pressure (a ingraited cultural mark) to do well in the school but japanese society is a economically stabilized society where the competition among people, seems, tend to be lower. I mean, most part of japanese people have good living standard with a good social structures and with relative lower ambition in their lifes, specially to immigrate for other nations, namely USA.
Japaneses look markedly more introverted than koreans and chineses. People who cheat in the tests may are more likely to be more extroverted.
Chinese population (enourmous) also give us this impression, maybe they cheat less than what we are thinking.
Westerners internalize that racism whatever what it is, is the ultimate sin,
Easterners internalize that have a diploma whatever how is the ultimate priority for the families who has worked hard to improve their living standard.
This began happening nearly half a century ago. One euphemism for the corruption is “affirmative action”. And, BTW, it appears to have a particularly adverse affect on the admission rates of Chinese-American students to the USA’s better colleges and universities.
Many professors will just give a slightly bad grade to papers that look like they've been put through google translate if the student has a Chinese surname. From the Chinese students I've talked to, this is not a great problem, as their goal in attending an American university, even a regional public university like mine, is to attain social cache back home.
The other issue that I think could gain some traction is the use of Chinese students to inflate colleges' diversity statistics. You can appeal to leftist professors by referencing the language they use about the merits of diversity in the classroom--it's good to have people from different backgrounds sharing their life experiences, they say. They don't accomplish their own goals when all the diversity slots are wealthy Chinese who don't speak in class.
I wish you flunked them, so I wouldn’t have to deal with their “English” at work.
Someone must have hired a Ted Cruz look alike to boost Ted’s chances with the Mormons:
http://www.nationalenquirer.com/celebrity/ted-cruz-sex-scandal-mistresses-cheating-claims/
Too true. The foreign students who attend on graduate visas, are there largely to be present in the United States in the hope of getting a job. They are allowed to work for one year after graduation, and then after that have to find sponsorship. It’s a lottery ticket for most of them.
So Steve, are you going to comment on the emerging Ted Cruz sex scandal and how the MSM is covering it up because he’s the only thing standing between Trump and the GOP nomination?
One notable exception - when I visited Chongqing's Porcelain Village (Ci Qi Kou?). The place was marvelous looking. I can't tell if it was the real deal or a sort of faux medieval Disneyland, but I loved it. However, there was one non-descript stretch of road on the busiest street, with a lot of food vendors, hawkers and the like, which utterly reeked of shit. Not the bad kind, the worst kind. It hit me like a brick, while I was eating some sort of meat on a stick. Just 8 meters ahead, the smell instantly stopped. I thought that maybe I got a Smiling Buddha from one of the tourists around, so I continued my visit. Came back through the same spot to meet up with my group, it happened again. I was on the verge of visibly retching along with every other straight eye in that spot, while the Chinese either didn't notice, or were saving face by pretending not to. There was something there that wasn't anywhere else. Haunted?
Sounds like there was a sewer that was venting in that area. Methane gas builds up in sewers and can explode if the sewer is not vented. Every house has standpipes that lead from the drains to the roof to in order to vent those gasses where they won’t hit your nose, and toilets are designed to have standing water in the bowl to block gasses. I had an idiot plumber who re-plumbed my kitchen and bypassed the vent pipe that served the area in the process, so that the sink always smelled bad.
There may have been an open toilet or vent near the spot you walked through and no other proper venting in the area so all the gasses were getting out in that one spot.
The pipes are so tall and massive that it still boggles the mind that the Victorians were able to erect them.
OT:
What? A professional org. of doctors taking a non-pc stand? What WILL the media and schools DO with this? Ignore or go ape-shyt?
http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/25/american-college-of-pediatricians-warns-youth-transgenderism-is-child-abuse/
Americans have an exaggerated idea of how attractive America is. Yes, it beats the hell out of Somalia, but compared to Shanghai, New York is a sleepy little village with a 3rd world level airport and subway system. In Shanghai you take a 250 mph MAGLEV train to the airport.
Meh. Shanghai is basically GENERIC CHINESE CITY with bigger buildings and a nice skyline.
You could….but no one uses it.
(American universities have a reputation, not wholly undeserved, of being places where you can outright buy a degree regardless of talent.)
It’s not true that ‘native’ Chinese universities have any cache at all in China vis-a-vis US ones. Quite the opposite, even the best universities in China (Beijing, Fudan, Xinua) have thoroughly second rate facilities that would make the average US university (and even some high schools) ashamed. Go to Beida sometime and see the labs and classrooms.
As for the students, the joke in China is the top third of college grads go to US universities for grad school, the second third get jobs in the government, and the bottom third go to Chinese universities for grad school.
Instead, right now on the CNN front page you have highlighted story, "Trump's history of controversy with women." And there are a LOT of "Trump is a bully" stories for his "attack" on Heidi "Goldman" Cruz.
I hope the Cruz story gets coverage, but I'm not counting on it.
The big story this week was Brussels and it should be helping Trump given his stance on suspending immigration from the muslim world. Instead they are focusing on Trump’s supposed attack which was just tweeting out a photo of his wife and one of Cruz’s. Sure it wasn’t a flattering photo, but none in the MSM ever use good photos of Trump. Even so it is a non-issue compared to Brussels and the looming importation of refugees from Syria.
Even Rush is running with this. A couple of months ago I thought Rush was pro-Trump. The last week I am convinced he is for Cruz. He was promoting Cruz’s idea of increasing the policing of muslim neighborhoods as a way to prevent terrorism as though that was a bright idea. After Brussels he made Cruz look like the guy with the right idea. But apparently not bringing muslims into your nation in the first place, Trump’s idea, did not cross Rush’s mind.
I am getting a little antsy that Trump won’t get his 1237 delegates. Now Drudge is reporting that Cruz is going to get more delegates from LA even though he lost the state by 3 points.
The WhiteMan’s Marion Berry is dead, that’s a shame.
Hey guys, there’s nowhere to hide…
"I'm not going to lump everybody up in one group..."
Just after he complains about White people being a certain way. Classic.
This ties into the current topic because Truth looks forward to the day when Whites have become a vanishingly small segment of the USA partly due to immigration from foreign students; then he can enjoy the vibrancy of red houses and neighbors who don't speak English.
Anonymous said, “Suffice to say that a ‘proper’ sewage treatment plant – of the type that doesn’t poison every living thing in the river for miles downstream, is always the biggest single electricity consumer in any municipality”.
How do they use some much power? What do they do – boil the sewage?
Sewage plants in their operational requirements need to pump back and forth enormous volumes of water repeatedly.
Any thoughts on Charles Murray’s appearance on PBS regaring Trumpism and his conversion to on immigration? I am glad to see him converted. The State of White America was a great work but completely overlooked the I word.
There may have been an open toilet or vent near the spot you walked through and no other proper venting in the area so all the gasses were getting out in that one spot.
The streets of London are resplendent with very, very, tall – 40′ or so, cast iron green painted Victorian era vent pipes placed at strategic intervals.
The pipes are so tall and massive that it still boggles the mind that the Victorians were able to erect them.
As top student in my class, I was constantly being accused of cheating or receiving special favor by teachers. Well, I did even help out my high school teachers and college professors in graduate schools on some tough subjects.
More people accusing me of cheating, more I feel great about myself.
Strange.
Americans have an exaggerated idea of how attractive America is. Yes, it beats the hell out of Somalia, but compared to Shanghai, New York is a sleepy little village with a 3rd world level airport and subway system. In Shanghai you take a 250 mph MAGLEV train to the airport.
Bill Ayers is smiling in Hyde Park.
Same thing happened to me in a Helsinki Burger King outlet (Carroll’s) full of teenagers. Less money, but out in the open, not in a wallet. Sitting on the condiment counter. Nobody touched it.
gotta keep up the whitey-is-lower-than-asians-on-the-totem-pole-meme, heh?
with the top of the pole also being reserved for that chosen crowd.
I prefer Japan to the rest of Asia combined, but even there one finds a vanishingly small amount of world class genius.
Genius of the sort we all understand is unique to Europe and its outliers, in other words to the white race.
If we disappear, so does genius, and with it the sort of civilisation which only it can inspire.
Did you see any vegetable plots in town? China has a long history of using human excrement as fertilizer:
http://www.agroecology.org/Case%20Studies/nightsoil.html
I'm sure it's only a matter of time until they fix this. The Chinese are great at building infrastructure and do it at a fraction of the cost of what similar projects cost in the West, not just because of lower labor costs but because they do this stuff efficiently. In China they build subway systems for $30 million/mile and something like 30 cities have systems under construction (China has tons of cities with over 1 million people that you never heard of). Meanwhile in NY they have been building a single line (the 2nd Avenue Subway) for something like 40 years and billions of $ with no end in sight. The Chinese built a 1,000 mile high speed line between Shanghai and Beijing in a couple of years (most of the tracks are elevated). Several hundred thousand construction workers worked on it simultaneously. They set up stacks of trailers right next to the tracks so the workers lived on site. In California they are building a high speed train to nowhere in the Central Valley and it will reach SF and LA (if ever) long after we are all dead.
And, yes, I downed a lot of beers at Fatman Satay hanging out with the locals.You will be disappointed. The biggest cheaters were not Asians. Not even close. They were invariably athletes... and usually with some connivance of the administration. Mostly blacks with some whites.
Outside of athletes, the usual cheaters I caught were frequently from an upscale background with good connections to the university. They had high pressure, high expectation parents who were successful and who got them out of trouble at the drop of a hat. Most of these students seemed to feel that they deserved good grades, but weren't all that hardworking. They were pretty smart kids, but also somewhat lazy and unmotivated. But golly they wanted their A's, no matter what.
The very rich kids didn't cheat. They just partied a lot and dated very attractive coeds, and just had a good time looking beautiful in expensive cars and clothes. They were okay with passing and couldn't be bothered to study for A's or even B's. They didn't care enough to cheat, so long as they graduated.
The vast majority of Asian-American students I had kept their heads down and studied hard. They were mostly children of immigrants and didn't seem to want to blow their chances. Risk-aversion would be the word that captures the ethos. I didn't have a whole lot of foreign ones (I taught history), but you can read my earlier comment regarding them.The whole "the Japanese are unique and are unlike other Asians" bit is more than a little overplayed and hackneyed and deserving of the put-down.
When I was at Berkeley back in the late 1960s, there were, believe it or not, a lot of us sons and daughters of the very well off who acted in precisely the way you describe. The term “the gentleman’s C” was still believed in and acted upon with enthusiasm.
And we most certainly would never have cheated: that would have been both letting the side down and, perhaps worse, showing everone who mattered that we were no better than those nouveaux riches dogs the Kennedys.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/leading-article-the-gentlemans-third-under-threat-1482283.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-lament-for-the-third-class-degree-1110167.html
Shanghai does smell like shit.
I am not ethnically Chinese, and have no love for the Chinese. Far more important than my ethnicity or personal feeling is the fact that Chinese immigrants in the U.S. have low levels of cultural and civic assimilation. For that reason alone, I am opposed to any large-scale immigration from China. It also doesn’t help matters that China is a repressive, still nominally communist nation that is a competitor and challenger nation to my country, the United States.
And half of my extended family is white, mostly of English, German, and Swedish descent.
So can you stop your juvenile snark now.
You haven’t been to India, have you Or for that matter, the New York City of my youth.
Did you see any vegetable plots in town? China has a long history of using human excrement as fertilizer:
http://www.agroecology.org/Case%20Studies/nightsoil.html
With such a densely settled country, it was probably a necessity to maintain soil fertility. Of course there are also some negative consequences; smells, hepatitis etc.
And half of my extended family is white, mostly of English, German, and Swedish descent.
So can you stop your juvenile snark now.You haven't been to India, have you Or for that matter, the New York City of my youth.
Thanks, Twinkie, for your always interesting comments. I’ve learned a lot from you here.
I appreciate your moderate attitude too, ever a welcome counterbalance.
You are relatively new here, welcome.
I really dislike the term “reverse racism” as all the implications are that virtually only white people are racist and that anti-white racism is the exception. Which of course is ludicrous. Fortunately the term is hardly ever seen here.
Hey Steve, you should write a bit on Tay Tweets, a recent Microsoft AI program that was designed to learn how to tweet, and then have conversations of its own with other twitter accounts.
This resulted in the AI program becoming ferociously racist in less than a day, and causing a massive sh*tstorm.
A Huffington Post piece says that being black in America is kind of like being in the North Korean gulag.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/la-sha/on-the-revocation-of-whit_b_9531122.html
Actual title: "North Korea Proves Your White Male Privilege Is Not Universal"
As far as I can tell this is a real HuffPo piece and not a parody of a HuffPo piece.
It’s great to see a black person take a stand in favor of law and order.
I was shocked to hear about Teddy serving in the military. This is a resume point never mentioned in all the runs for office etc. as far as I know. I wonder if anyone really checked into his service record in detail. Not much point after the scoundrel died a while ago, but it would be interesting.
On Topic. A friend of mine once worked for the Education Testing Service interviewing foreign candidates for teaching positions here. The idea was to assess their English proficiency via Skype. He would regale me with imitations of the garbled, completely unintelligible gibberish they spoke, all the while having held themselves out as proficient in English.
The interesting thing to me is that they were never penalized for putting their own determination to advance above simple academic honesty. We simply expect Chinese and Indians to cheat wherever possible while taking it on ourselves to catch them out in individual cases. Madness.
It should be noticed that the cheating non-English speaking potential grad student assistants were being chosen for positions at selective universities. So, you pay extra for sending you child to an institution that depends on cheating foreigners, who cannot communicate effectively.
(2) The banal fact that English is a foreign language will incur another effective drop of 10-15 points even though English is now generally taught to a respectable level in Chinese schools.
(3) It is entirely logical that there will be a lot of cheating on admissions essays on the part of Chinese applicants bearing in mind the above plus the fact that in Chinese society a US higher education is a highly sought after prestige good to such an extent that even Xi Jinping's daughter reportedly went to Harvard.
PISA’s verbal section is called reading. In 2012 Shanghai, not China, was number one in reading, math, and science. Six of the top seven “countries” in reading were Asian. The exception was Finland.
Twenty-five years ago there was a verbal/reading gap between Asian Americans and white but that is closed now, including Filipinos. Filipino Americans don’t have high math scores like east Asians but they score the same as whites on both math and reading.
The 2015 PISA will report China as country for the first time. It should come out in December 2016. The scores will be lower than Shanghai but still high because Chinese students have to take a senior high school entrance exam call the zhongkao. In rural areas as many as 25 percent of students never attend senior high due to low zhongkao exam scores or the inability to pay school fees. These low functioning students won’t be tested by PISA.
http://akarlin.com/2012/08/analysis-of-chinas-pisa-2009-results/
Hey guys, there's nowhere to hide...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpwpplWNto
It seems all homeowners associations are evil. Nice tie-in to the chinese student issue Truth. Oh wait, you didn’t do that at all.
My perennial mantra floated across my mind as I was watching: Luckily none of this has anything whatsoever to do with me.
I have mostly failed in my attempts at this, but you're a good boy.
I unintentionally deeply insulted a Chinese student in a Russian history class by asking him what I thought was a softball analytical question about a short reading. He was a perfectly intelligent lad and smart enough to be at an American university, and, if the question was not a sort of verbal arithmetic, with a straightforward and inarguable final solution, he was at sea and upset about it.
It is no exagerration to say that Chinese schooling at all levels is rote memorization and cheating, with critical thinking actively discouraged, and with very creative cheating, so long as it does not humiliate the professor, quietly rewarded. This situation is the same found in Late Soviet Russian education.
I have tried to tell Chinese people (other than the one I angered), what you consider to be intelligence and scholarship, we consider to be meaningless, safe make-work and pedantism, and what we consider to be intelligence, you consider to be childish unwillingness to prepare. I have had good results with individuals unconnected with the government who have come to this conclusion already in studying hard science with exposure to the English-speaking world (which rapidly disabuses the most faithful totalitarian of certain illusions), but I do not think that I have converted anybody who did not already think this.
I quite liked the video, though, especially the portly vulgarian in shorts who accused the Cubans of lowering the local tone. Either him or the uptight lady brandishing a 25-year-old list of rules, none of which were applicable to the matter in question. Or possibly the argument conducted in two different languages between people who had no idea what their opponents were saying, except that, on principle, they disagreed with it.
My perennial mantra floated across my mind as I was watching: Luckily none of this has anything whatsoever to do with me.
The least corrupt, the most honest, and the most civic-minded country in Asia is without a doubt Singapore. Japan is actually mildly corrupt (about the level of the U.S., Hong Kong, and Ireland). Taiwan and South Korea are somewhat more corrupt than Japan (along Poland, Spain, Czech Republic), but are improving rapidly. China is still a HIGHLY corrupt country (the 2015 Corruption Perception Index rates it next to Benin and Columbia). You can reasonably expect the levels of any type of cheating across these countries to be consistent with the perceived levels of corruption.
As for Asian-Americans, they are likely to cheat at about the same rates as the general population (white, if you will) of similar demographic backgrounds (perhaps little higher due to higher academic pressures, but lower due to lower propensity for rule-breaking/higher conformism - they probably even out). The exceptions would be recent arrivals who still retain values of their homelands. On top of that, the recent Chinese immigrants tend not to assimilate well in cultural and civic aspects (along with Indians and Mexicans/Central Americans per the Manhattan Institute studies), and their cheating rate is probably fairly high.
I actually taught at the college level years ago, and can give you a profile of the cheaters if you really care to know. Every year I caught a few.
It depends upon what sort of behavior you are talking about in Japan. As recent corporate scandals show, Japanese executives are under heavy pressure to cheat in showing earnings as higher ups linger for decades; the Olympus, Toshiba, and other earnings scandals are much worse than in places like the US where execs move around a lot and take a hit to their personal worth if they are caught cheating. No high paying next job for them. While there is no “next job” at another company for Japanese execs for the most part.
HOWEVER, Japanese personally operate more on an honor system. There is relatively low levels of assault and theft in Japanese cities, you don’t have to bribe an official to get a driving license, etc. and bribery of government officials by citizens to just get on with daily life is unheard of; however the corruption of MITI/METI involved deeply in corporate affairs is another thing.
My belief stems from their grades in small, 20-30 student, literature discussion courses. Despite being nearly unable to hold conversation in English and being seemingly incapable of understanding spoken English, these students would excel on the papers. While it's possible they could have strong written skills but horrible speaking skills, it seems highly unlikely for them to receive top grades while many western students scored Bs and Cs.
this confuses me. My brother was a college professor in the 90’s and he said all his Asian students cheated. We didn’t get into the breakdown of which Asian countries they came from or whether they were Americans or not. I can only guess that the cheating would be more rampant among the immigrants rather than the native born.
But my experience with Asian American students at Berkeley in the 80’s was that they were very bright and hard working. Chinese, Indian, Korean, all of them were studying and discussing the lectures all the time. If anybody was cheating, I never saw even a smidgen of it. Some of them really helped me get through some tough classes.
The number of seats at elite colleges has not increased with the population growth of the US. There are five or six times as many Asian Americans as were in the 80s. Most elite private schools have racial quotas that require Asians to compete only with Asians for admission, making them increasingly desperate and having to produce better resumes. In addition more international students are taking seats.
In states that have banned affirmative action, ALL state flagships use tricks to admit more blacks and Hispanics. Texas admits the top 10 percent from every high school. UCB admits the valedictorian and salutatorian from every high school that doesn't normally send students to UCB. Last year Michigan didn't admit anyone from their waitlist because usually only whites and Asians come off the waitlist and Michigan didn't want to water down the percentage of blacks on campus.
Asians in the 80s didn't have to cheat because they easily got into top colleges and graduate/professional schools which led to desired job placements.
I encountered many of these kids when I was at university. Some of them could barely speak English and couldn’t write a coherent essay to save their lives. Three of them were caught plagiarizing their term papers and expelled. The rest muddled through, no doubt continuing to use the same shady tactics that got them admitted.
A few years ago there was a minor scandal when a young Hindu woman named Kaavya Viswanathan was admitted to Harvard using one of these sleazy admission services (IvyWise, in this case). It turned out that the published novel Kaavya had supposedly authored as a teen was largely copied from someone else’s previous best-selling novel. Then it was revealed that Kaavya didn’t even plagiarize herself. It had been plagiarized for her by a ghostwriting service that IvyWise had hired to concoct a publishable novel for young Kaavya. IvyWise also created a bogus charitable organization that Kaavya could pretend that she had founded all on her own. After her deception was exposed, Harvard feigned concern for a while before deciding to let her stay. She graduated, went to law school, and now practices law in New York City.
I believe Eldo Kim was let back into Harvard. He is the guy who threatened to blow up the school because he didn't feel prepared for his final exam. He reminds me of a latter day Robert Oppenheimer, another man of second chances.
Eldo immigrated from South Korea at age 8, I think. I always felt he a foot in the East and another in the West. But after hearing about the foreign-born Duke student who didn't know that the noose he hung on campus might be upsetting to black people, I think that Eldo may still have both feet in the East.
More people accusing me of cheating, more I feel great about myself.
Strange.
When I was accused of hacking during online video games against human opponents, I felt honored instead of offended. When you have the skill only hackers can match, then………..
ute – maybe I clipped too much of that piece. It doesn’t matter if it’s a shame culture or a guilt culture, or if the very concepts are Western inventions. What is salient is that Japanese kids are taught from an early age to respect others property even when it’s lying in the street.
And we most certainly would never have cheated: that would have been both letting the side down and, perhaps worse, showing everone who mattered that we were no better than those nouveaux riches dogs the Kennedys.
The “gentleman’s third” i.e. the lowest UK undergraduate degree is mourned in these two Independent pieces
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/leading-article-the-gentlemans-third-under-threat-1482283.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/a-lament-for-the-third-class-degree-1110167.html
“Japanese kids are taught from an early age to respect others property” – Exactly!
I agree. I always read his posts closely and have learned a lot from Twinkie.
My belief stems from their grades in small, 20-30 student, literature discussion courses. Despite being nearly unable to hold conversation in English and being seemingly incapable of understanding spoken English, these students would excel on the papers. While it's possible they could have strong written skills but horrible speaking skills, it seems highly unlikely for them to receive top grades while many western students scored Bs and Cs.
Foreigners who can write English easily often sound surprisingly awkward when they speak it. Listen to Slavoj Žižek speaking.
I mean, in absolute terms chineses cheat more but and in the relative terms**
Westerners internalize that racism whatever what it is, is the ultimate sin,
Easterners internalize that have a diploma whatever how is the ultimate priority for the families who has worked hard to improve their living standard.
And Obama is raising that (OPT) program to three years.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2011/03/why_the_japanese_arent_looting.html
"Anthropologists speak of Japan as a "shame culture," as opposed to a "guilt culture," meaning that people are constrained to behave themselves properly by an aversion to being judged negatively by those around them, rather than internalizing a moral imperative. Broadly speaking, that is true today. But it is also true that most contemporary Japanese have internalized a deep respect for private property, that is manifested in a ritual of modern life for children, one which we might do well to emulate. When a child finds a small item belonging to another person, even a one yen coin, a parent takes the child to the local koban and reports lost property. As chronicled by T.R. Reid in his wonderful book about living in Tokyo, Confucius Lives Next Door, the police do not resent this as a waste of time but rather see it as part of moral education, solemnly filling out the appropriate forms, thanking the child and telling him or her if the owner does not appear to claim the item, it will revert to the finder after a certain period of time. "
Recently, I left my smartphone on the seat when I got off the train. I realized as it pulled away, so I immediately went and reported it. The JR (Japan Rail) staff contacted the staff at the next station, and they searched when the train stopped.
They didn’t find it at that stop, but eventually the phone was returned at the train’s terminal location. JR called me and kept the phone for me with a lost & found ID number in an envelope inside a locked locker.
Contrast… my mother recently tried to go cross-country on Greyhound, but the black female bus driver left her stranded in the middle of nowhere. She had to be picked up by police, and her belongings may have been (if not stolen by the bus driver) left unsecured in a big room in Chicago which she could travel to herself and rifle through. She discovered this by making multiple calls to national and local Greyhound offices, most of which were never answered or returned.
One day, the Chinese will have their own universities, and the Saudis will be out of oil. And american colleges will have to pay their own way again.
One reason to put your kid in an expensive mediocre American University is a loud mouth kid can get into a lot of political trouble in China. So it is actually safer for a Chinese to park their kid in the US for their 20s until they learn to STFU. If your lucky you kid’s only political crimes will be complaining about cultural appropriation and white privilege.
Well, one of problems from high IQ people is to lie or cheat. I bet it is a problem most people wish they had. lol.
http://www.limitlessmindset.com/limitless-lifestyle/494-20-notorious-problems-smart-people.html
One notable exception - when I visited Chongqing's Porcelain Village (Ci Qi Kou?). The place was marvelous looking. I can't tell if it was the real deal or a sort of faux medieval Disneyland, but I loved it. However, there was one non-descript stretch of road on the busiest street, with a lot of food vendors, hawkers and the like, which utterly reeked of shit. Not the bad kind, the worst kind. It hit me like a brick, while I was eating some sort of meat on a stick. Just 8 meters ahead, the smell instantly stopped. I thought that maybe I got a Smiling Buddha from one of the tourists around, so I continued my visit. Came back through the same spot to meet up with my group, it happened again. I was on the verge of visibly retching along with every other straight eye in that spot, while the Chinese either didn't notice, or were saving face by pretending not to. There was something there that wasn't anywhere else. Haunted?
That’s mostly the smell of stinky Tofu..
A college degree helps you get a job, because it makes you look better than people without one. So what's the left-wing solution? Send everyone to college! (Remember, minorities are less likely to go to college, so it must be racism.) Of course, then you just have lots of hapless sons and daughters of teachers and construction workers cluttering the entry-level job market with worthless degrees--but now, they're thousands of dollars in debt.
But, of course, the universities clean up, because they get their money.
A similar scam is the large number of PhD programs that will never lead to tenure-track positions but provide lots of cheap labor for professors.
Well, if degrees are currency, the greater number of them diluted and reduced the value of the rest. Of course, STEM is not impressed with the Dope-Degrees, it is still a meritocracy. Except for the women, who do nothing in the field but must be handed some credit for the work, mostly for chasing coffee. The men work 80 hours and do the work, the women work 30 for the same money and come in at 10am and go home at 4. At the end, they hang her name on it because we must have women in STEM! Women aren’t interested in the work, they want the check and easy hours.
Liberal arts? “Studies” degree programs? Greatest scam EVER. And, the most useless degrees in education. They should call them “Childhood Extension Programs”.
I think different motivations apply in different circumstances, but in the case of lost property, there are mutiple things going on… empathy with regard to property, desire to see the “system” work correctly, service culture, and the Japanese comception of responsibility, which I haven’t quite figured out yet. After living here a while, I’ve learned that a lot of what goes on in Japanese institutions revolves around assignment of blame, but I don’t understand well enough to predict. In the case of lost and found, I think some responsibility for the item is transferred to others when the item is reported missing. Unless you’re running up against rules, no one will ever say, “that’s not my problem.”
Living in Japan is a challenge to foreigners, who are inclined to bring that attitude with them from home. Just one reason to restrict immigration here…
On other hand, japanese’s’ like to cheat pregnant whales…
they called it ”tradition”
don’t appropriate it ok**
One day, the Chinese will have their own universities, and the Saudis will be out of oil. And american colleges will have to pay their own way again.
“Americans are lucky so many chinese, and Saudi students are willing to pay inflated prices for degrees from mediocre US universities (Oregon state!?).”
Foreigners revere Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, etc., but beyond that they’re nowhere near as knowledgeable about the rankings of US schools as Americans are (which shouldn’t be surprising).
Americans understand that someone who attended Tulane sits higher on the totem pole than someone who attended Louisiana State University, but relatively few Chinese people do. As such, attending State U if you’re Chinese will accord you about as much respect as if you graduated from a “Little Ivy.”
But my experience with Asian American students at Berkeley in the 80's was that they were very bright and hard working. Chinese, Indian, Korean, all of them were studying and discussing the lectures all the time. If anybody was cheating, I never saw even a smidgen of it. Some of them really helped me get through some tough classes.
It is impossible to say what was going on in the 90s at your brother’s college without more details. However, the 80s were a kinder gentler time. I have an old college guide that I bought for 99 cents from the thrift store. UC Berkeley tuition and fees for the entire 1984-85 school year were $1400, minorities were 25.5 percent, and the acceptance rate was 68 percent. UCB was a safety school. The acceptance rate is now 16 percent.
The number of seats at elite colleges has not increased with the population growth of the US. There are five or six times as many Asian Americans as were in the 80s. Most elite private schools have racial quotas that require Asians to compete only with Asians for admission, making them increasingly desperate and having to produce better resumes. In addition more international students are taking seats.
In states that have banned affirmative action, ALL state flagships use tricks to admit more blacks and Hispanics. Texas admits the top 10 percent from every high school. UCB admits the valedictorian and salutatorian from every high school that doesn’t normally send students to UCB. Last year Michigan didn’t admit anyone from their waitlist because usually only whites and Asians come off the waitlist and Michigan didn’t want to water down the percentage of blacks on campus.
Asians in the 80s didn’t have to cheat because they easily got into top colleges and graduate/professional schools which led to desired job placements.
My last semester at UCB cost my parents $800 in tuition. Now it's $8, 185. The top SAT's scores now are nearly perfect. I'm assuming that the smart kids in the 80's, had they taken the test prep courses, would have been getting those scores back then. Or maybe the test got easier? Anyway I heard numbers in the the 1300's from other Cal students and was quite impressed back then. Once, a guy told us he got a 1510 and everybody's jaw dropped. Now, that will barely get you in (I suppose if you're Asian or White).
Is this all bad or good on balance?
I taught ESL in Taiwan and China for a few years and I can tell you that this is, sadly, true. You definitely come across the odd very bright one but for the most part they’re just good at memorizing things and finding creative ways to cheat and cut corners. Many a foreigner turns up in East Asia thinking they’re going to be surrounded by geniuses only to find that most adults are really only interested, depending on gender, in shopping, playing computer games and Hello Kitty.
It takes a mind that is entertained and motivated by ideas to have exceptional performance. It is also a high risk and not particularly high reward. For most, optimizing signaling and navigating complex systems works just fine.
A lack of focused motivation means I am here spending time posting here rather than something personally productive after all.
I wasn’t referring to Shanghai.
http://akarlin.com/2012/08/analysis-of-chinas-pisa-2009-results/
My belief stems from their grades in small, 20-30 student, literature discussion courses. Despite being nearly unable to hold conversation in English and being seemingly incapable of understanding spoken English, these students would excel on the papers. While it's possible they could have strong written skills but horrible speaking skills, it seems highly unlikely for them to receive top grades while many western students scored Bs and Cs.
They may have more of the old fashioned “grammar translation” method of language instruction, which emphasizes reading and writing over speaking. We used to have this as well when Latin and Greek were the basis of education and modern languages were studied similarly. Now we’ve gone completely in the opposite direction, dropping the Classics and grammar/translation in favor of endless “practical” applications like ordering in restaurants, etc.
A few years ago there was a minor scandal when a young Hindu woman named Kaavya Viswanathan was admitted to Harvard using one of these sleazy admission services (IvyWise, in this case). It turned out that the published novel Kaavya had supposedly authored as a teen was largely copied from someone else's previous best-selling novel. Then it was revealed that Kaavya didn't even plagiarize herself. It had been plagiarized for her by a ghostwriting service that IvyWise had hired to concoct a publishable novel for young Kaavya. IvyWise also created a bogus charitable organization that Kaavya could pretend that she had founded all on her own. After her deception was exposed, Harvard feigned concern for a while before deciding to let her stay. She graduated, went to law school, and now practices law in New York City.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXj5XE3XKk8
Thanks for the update. I forgot all about old girl. I didn’t know about the IvyWise angle. She graduate from Georgetown Law. Yeah.
I believe Eldo Kim was let back into Harvard. He is the guy who threatened to blow up the school because he didn’t feel prepared for his final exam. He reminds me of a latter day Robert Oppenheimer, another man of second chances.
Eldo immigrated from South Korea at age 8, I think. I always felt he a foot in the East and another in the West. But after hearing about the foreign-born Duke student who didn’t know that the noose he hung on campus might be upsetting to black people, I think that Eldo may still have both feet in the East.
You follow the rules all of the time Erik, I appreciate that, and so does Twinkie, he would have given you a solid “c” for effort.
I have mostly failed in my attempts at this, but you’re a good boy.
They didn't find it at that stop, but eventually the phone was returned at the train's terminal location. JR called me and kept the phone for me with a lost & found ID number in an envelope inside a locked locker.
Contrast... my mother recently tried to go cross-country on Greyhound, but the black female bus driver left her stranded in the middle of nowhere. She had to be picked up by police, and her belongings may have been (if not stolen by the bus driver) left unsecured in a big room in Chicago which she could travel to herself and rifle through. She discovered this by making multiple calls to national and local Greyhound offices, most of which were never answered or returned.
LOL! “Pssst, hurruh up…hurruh up…y’all get back up on the bus, I’mma close the doe and leeve befo dat crazuh-ass lady finish her chicken fried steak…”
Looking at my peers, I don’t think it is the lack of mental capability that is behind exam optimization intellect. It is relative lack of actual curiosity relative to IQ compared to white populations. I don’t know whether it is in absolute terms or IQ controlled demographics that this is true.
It takes a mind that is entertained and motivated by ideas to have exceptional performance. It is also a high risk and not particularly high reward. For most, optimizing signaling and navigating complex systems works just fine.
A lack of focused motivation means I am here spending time posting here rather than something personally productive after all.
How do they use some much power? What do they do - boil the sewage?
Pumping substantial volumes of water requires an enormous amount of energy, as obviously water is a rathet dense fluid, the mass is lne kilogram per litre as I recall. Think how heavy a filled bath tub is, and multiply that tens of thousands of times occurring every moment of the day.
Sewage plants in their operational requirements need to pump back and forth enormous volumes of water repeatedly.
Thanks for the answer. I learn a lot here.
My belief stems from their grades in small, 20-30 student, literature discussion courses. Despite being nearly unable to hold conversation in English and being seemingly incapable of understanding spoken English, these students would excel on the papers. While it's possible they could have strong written skills but horrible speaking skills, it seems highly unlikely for them to receive top grades while many western students scored Bs and Cs.
Someone else wrote the paper for them.
Would it be that hard to get a DNA test? Like from a water glass from one of her public appearances? I would be curious to learn whether she fiercely guards against such a risk, like having aides stay on top of anything that might have her DNA on it. Maybe some enterprising pre-school worker could help once her daughter starts attending whatever ritzy academy she sends her to.
Web is still alive, so getting his DNA might be feasible. I am surprised that (apparently) no one has tried this. I should be scolded for my prurient interest, but it would be a fun scandal to see erupt between now and November.
The resemblance is also surprising given that Steve has reported previously that Chelsea Clinton has had numerous plastic surgeries. I guess the saying, “you can’t polish a road apple” is apt here despite the advances of modern medicine.
Hey guys, there's nowhere to hide...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNpwpplWNto
From the embedded video:
“I’m not going to lump everybody up in one group…”
Just after he complains about White people being a certain way. Classic.
This ties into the current topic because Truth looks forward to the day when Whites have become a vanishingly small segment of the USA partly due to immigration from foreign students; then he can enjoy the vibrancy of red houses and neighbors who don’t speak English.
http://www.agroecology.org/Case%20Studies/nightsoil.html
No, I think Alfa158 was on the right track – their sewer systems are not vented properly so sewer gas leaks out and stinks up the street.
I’m sure it’s only a matter of time until they fix this. The Chinese are great at building infrastructure and do it at a fraction of the cost of what similar projects cost in the West, not just because of lower labor costs but because they do this stuff efficiently. In China they build subway systems for $30 million/mile and something like 30 cities have systems under construction (China has tons of cities with over 1 million people that you never heard of). Meanwhile in NY they have been building a single line (the 2nd Avenue Subway) for something like 40 years and billions of $ with no end in sight. The Chinese built a 1,000 mile high speed line between Shanghai and Beijing in a couple of years (most of the tracks are elevated). Several hundred thousand construction workers worked on it simultaneously. They set up stacks of trailers right next to the tracks so the workers lived on site. In California they are building a high speed train to nowhere in the Central Valley and it will reach SF and LA (if ever) long after we are all dead.
I WISH China were more attractive to the Chinese.
Right! Such a superior culture, yet they need the degree and approval from the white man’s college?
Teaching foreign students counts as an export in the sense of trade compliance (ITAR, etc.).
I took a course on GPS technology in grad school. During the first lecture, the professor notified the students that only US citizens would be allowed to take the class, as teaching foreigners how GPS works would be an illegal export of restricted technology.
The number of seats at elite colleges has not increased with the population growth of the US. There are five or six times as many Asian Americans as were in the 80s. Most elite private schools have racial quotas that require Asians to compete only with Asians for admission, making them increasingly desperate and having to produce better resumes. In addition more international students are taking seats.
In states that have banned affirmative action, ALL state flagships use tricks to admit more blacks and Hispanics. Texas admits the top 10 percent from every high school. UCB admits the valedictorian and salutatorian from every high school that doesn't normally send students to UCB. Last year Michigan didn't admit anyone from their waitlist because usually only whites and Asians come off the waitlist and Michigan didn't want to water down the percentage of blacks on campus.
Asians in the 80s didn't have to cheat because they easily got into top colleges and graduate/professional schools which led to desired job placements.
So the cheating started in the 90’s? Makes sense. That was the Clinton era after all.
My last semester at UCB cost my parents $800 in tuition. Now it’s $8, 185. The top SAT’s scores now are nearly perfect. I’m assuming that the smart kids in the 80’s, had they taken the test prep courses, would have been getting those scores back then. Or maybe the test got easier? Anyway I heard numbers in the the 1300’s from other Cal students and was quite impressed back then. Once, a guy told us he got a 1510 and everybody’s jaw dropped. Now, that will barely get you in (I suppose if you’re Asian or White).
Is this all bad or good on balance?
A recentered 1510 is equivalent to an old 1430 per the table at that link.
Jerry Brown is asking why "normal" people can't get into UCB anymore.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/23/gov-brown-says-normal-californians-cant-get-berkeley-problem-some-californians-blame
In the Spring of 2004 on a trip, by Greyhound, from Chicago to NYC, our driver got lost in Newark and asked the passengers for directions. Somehow he got to Newark Union Station which handled both buses and trains. I got off and took a train to Midtown Manhattan. On the return trip a few days later, in Indiana, not far from our destination in Chicago, another driver made his own unscheduled fast-food stop because he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, wait for the official one 40 miles further down the line.
It might have actually been a toilet break, but the driver may not have wanted to announce it to everyone. This happens. When you gotta go, you gotta go.
My last semester at UCB cost my parents $800 in tuition. Now it's $8, 185. The top SAT's scores now are nearly perfect. I'm assuming that the smart kids in the 80's, had they taken the test prep courses, would have been getting those scores back then. Or maybe the test got easier? Anyway I heard numbers in the the 1300's from other Cal students and was quite impressed back then. Once, a guy told us he got a 1510 and everybody's jaw dropped. Now, that will barely get you in (I suppose if you're Asian or White).
Is this all bad or good on balance?
The SAT got easier (say ~50-100 points for the combined total depending on score level) after the 1995 “recentering.” See links at http://research.collegeboard.org/programs/sat/data/equivalence
A recentered 1510 is equivalent to an old 1430 per the table at that link.
And, look at the stats for who gets admitted to Berkeley now. Californians are at about 66%. that stinks. It should be more like 86%.
Actually, it’s the exact opposite, at least in Korea, where I taught English for a few years after college. Most of the expats there tend to presume that the people are dumber than they are and kind of slow. They also tend to view them as morally unenlightened in terms of contemporary social liberalism, which is true.
I took a course on GPS technology in grad school. During the first lecture, the professor notified the students that only US citizens would be allowed to take the class, as teaching foreigners how GPS works would be an illegal export of restricted technology.
yeah, it is a good business for the US. ” In the 2011-12 academic year, Chinese international students spent about $40 billion dollars, including $5.7 billion in the U.S. alone.” http://www.yaleeconomicreview.org/archives/294
My last semester at UCB cost my parents $800 in tuition. Now it's $8, 185. The top SAT's scores now are nearly perfect. I'm assuming that the smart kids in the 80's, had they taken the test prep courses, would have been getting those scores back then. Or maybe the test got easier? Anyway I heard numbers in the the 1300's from other Cal students and was quite impressed back then. Once, a guy told us he got a 1510 and everybody's jaw dropped. Now, that will barely get you in (I suppose if you're Asian or White).
Is this all bad or good on balance?
The SAT got easier after it was recentered in 1995. According to Wikipedia, there were only 25 perfect scores in all of 1994. The first new SAT in April 1995 alone produced 137 perfect scores.
Jerry Brown is asking why “normal” people can’t get into UCB anymore.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/01/23/gov-brown-says-normal-californians-cant-get-berkeley-problem-some-californians-blame
A recentered 1510 is equivalent to an old 1430 per the table at that link.
wow, thanks for the link. That 1510 guy really was brainy!
And, look at the stats for who gets admitted to Berkeley now. Californians are at about 66%. that stinks. It should be more like 86%.
Someday, we will figure out how to build bridges out of fairy dust and kumbaya...
(American universities have a reputation, not wholly undeserved, of being places where you can outright buy a degree regardless of talent.)
A Thai businessman told me he had sent all his children to American Universities because “They cater for all levels of stupidity”. (He had little faith in his children’s intellectual fire power.)
Japan is probably the most honest, low- crime society in the world
China is the exact opposite
Here’s a plan. To outflank all the Latinos and other riffraff flooding into the United States how about making sure that all these new robots we keep hearing about are Trump supporters?
Of course the left will complain that they are not human but that can be easily finessed I think by claiming that they have reached take-off IQ levels.
This would be supported by pictures of disconsolate “dreamer” robots feeling alienated and unwanted.
It would be important to have a picture of at least one tiny robot washed up on a beach somewhere which would be the fault of the heartless USA for not giving it citizenship.
Many professors will just give a slightly bad grade to papers that look like they've been put through google translate if the student has a Chinese surname. From the Chinese students I've talked to, this is not a great problem, as their goal in attending an American university, even a regional public university like mine, is to attain social cache back home.
The other issue that I think could gain some traction is the use of Chinese students to inflate colleges' diversity statistics. You can appeal to leftist professors by referencing the language they use about the merits of diversity in the classroom--it's good to have people from different backgrounds sharing their life experiences, they say. They don't accomplish their own goals when all the diversity slots are wealthy Chinese who don't speak in class.
This is not directly relevant but it is a good anecdote:
I have a wholly unqualified friend who is an “English teacher” and freelance journalist who has mooched around southeast Asia for at least two decades.
When he got bored teaching he converted himself into an academic rewrite man operating by word-of-mouth. He is diligent, quick and very smart so he gets a lot of work putatively tidying up post-grad theses and the like.
In many cases he effectively rewrites the rubbish he is given to the point where he claims to have “earned” dozens of masters degrees and quite a number of doctorates in subjects like Business, Marketing, International Relations etc.. Many of these students are studying at ostensibly good universities, albeit not international name colleges, and come from good families (to be able to afford his rates for a start).
This does not apply to top universities in Singapore etc. and the East Asia situation is a bit different, but still it gives me pause wherever I hear someone banging on about Asian education. I also think of things like this whenever someone says the West is lucky to get all these uber smart graduates.
And, look at the stats for who gets admitted to Berkeley now. Californians are at about 66%. that stinks. It should be more like 86%.
I was born and grew up in California. The beginning of the end for me was in 1993, when Berkeley and UCLA both rejected my >4.0 GPA, 1530 SAT, two varsity sport application. (At least my backup school in the Cal State system said yes.) They didn’t say why, of course, but nowadays they’re fairly forthright about not needing much white trash in the multicultural leadership caste of our glorious diverse future.
Someday, we will figure out how to build bridges out of fairy dust and kumbaya…
In 2013 the New York Times wrote about UC Berkeley's current "holistic" admission process. Even with the affirmative action ban, when a peon doing the initial round of selecting doesn't pick enough of the right type of applicants, they are asked to carefully rethink their decisions.
Today I would encourage someone with your stats to spend about $2000 on applications. Schools like Kentucky, Arizona, and Alabama have been known to offer full-rides merit scholarships. Last year a guy from Tennessee got in all the Ivies and Stanford but chose the full scholarship at Alabama.
Someday, we will figure out how to build bridges out of fairy dust and kumbaya...
Prop 209, banning affirmative action, didn’t pass until 1996. They took one look at your application and threw it in the garbage, thinking that you would get into all of the other schools that you applied to.
In 2013 the New York Times wrote about UC Berkeley’s current “holistic” admission process. Even with the affirmative action ban, when a peon doing the initial round of selecting doesn’t pick enough of the right type of applicants, they are asked to carefully rethink their decisions.
Today I would encourage someone with your stats to spend about $2000 on applications. Schools like Kentucky, Arizona, and Alabama have been known to offer full-rides merit scholarships. Last year a guy from Tennessee got in all the Ivies and Stanford but chose the full scholarship at Alabama.
Someday, we will figure out how to build bridges out of fairy dust and kumbaya...
I find that stunning. I would have expected that profile to get you admitted to almost any elite college (the pre-recentering 1530 is especially impressive, that’s 1 in 10,000 level per https://www.iqcomparisonsite.com/oldSATIQ.aspx , solidly above the ceiling of the current SAT).
For mid-tier state schools I would find Anonymous 104’s comment likely:
But I thought Berkeley was considered competitive with elite private colleges and did their admissions accordingly. I’d also think they would believe they had a decent chance of getting you as the flagship CA state university.
The US is 65 percent white and 1 percent Native American. Native American perform worse academically than whites. Yet, Columbia's class of 2019 was 38 percent white and 4 percent Native American. Columbia must have accepted 90-100 percent of the NA applicants and less than 10 percent of the white applicants.
Asian Americans are suing elite schools because even though they are 5 percent of the US population and 20-25 percent of some elite colleges, they feel that more of them should be getting in. It has already been shown that Asians need a much higher SAT scores that other races in order to admitted to an elite college, the same for the MCAT and medical school.
http://undergrad.admissions.columbia.edu/classprofile/2019
https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/sat/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-ethnicity-2014.pdf
Genius of the sort we all understand is unique to Europe and its outliers, in other words to the white race.
If we disappear, so does genius, and with it the sort of civilisation which only it can inspire.
Japan has been economically and culturally stagnant for about a quarter century. They’re still a rich nation, but hard for genius to emerge on an island of stagnation.
What kind of genius are you talking about that is unique to Europe? The genius for making the perfect loaf of bread?
2) The kind your pseudonymous handle so directly evokes.
As an English professor, it’s pretty easy to detect who is and is not lying about their experiences with East Asian college students.
Sewage plants in their operational requirements need to pump back and forth enormous volumes of water repeatedly.
I did not know about the back and forth pumping. I thought they filtered all the bad stuff out, let it sit for a few days, and then dumped it in the river.
Thanks for the answer. I learn a lot here.
1) I was hardly talking about the last 25 years; after all, there is precious little genius to be found in Europe during that short time span either.
2) The kind your pseudonymous handle so directly evokes.
That is true. You just don’t understand how elite colleges do their admissions. Elite colleges ideally want thirty-five percent of their domestic freshman class to be NAM even though Asians and whites are by far more likely to qualified. This means that every NAM with great stats is an automatic admit and NAMs with mediocre stats still have a decent shot. Meanwhile the Asian and white quota fills so quickly that superior applicants get tossed.
The US is 65 percent white and 1 percent Native American. Native American perform worse academically than whites. Yet, Columbia’s class of 2019 was 38 percent white and 4 percent Native American. Columbia must have accepted 90-100 percent of the NA applicants and less than 10 percent of the white applicants.
Asian Americans are suing elite schools because even though they are 5 percent of the US population and 20-25 percent of some elite colleges, they feel that more of them should be getting in. It has already been shown that Asians need a much higher SAT scores that other races in order to admitted to an elite college, the same for the MCAT and medical school.
http://undergrad.admissions.columbia.edu/classprofile/2019
https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/sat/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-ethnicity-2014.pdf
Also, if a college goes All-Oriental, it will lose cachet among Whites, including prospective faculty. Load up Harvard with Chinese and nobody else will want to go there.
2) The kind your pseudonymous handle so directly evokes.
But Japan was historically NE Asia’s hinterland. Asia’s genius lies on the continent. There was genius in Japan for a while in the modern period but that has pretty much faded over the past few decades as a result of the recession.
Where was German genius before the Renaissance when it lagged behind much of the world? Indeed, where was Western Europe’s genius for most of human civilization? Aside from a few Mediterranean city-states on the Italian peninsula, Greece and others, most of Europe languished in backwardness most of the time.
If you don't get that then you are incapable of commenting interestingly upon anything to do with this topic.
What is your experience?
The US is 65 percent white and 1 percent Native American. Native American perform worse academically than whites. Yet, Columbia's class of 2019 was 38 percent white and 4 percent Native American. Columbia must have accepted 90-100 percent of the NA applicants and less than 10 percent of the white applicants.
Asian Americans are suing elite schools because even though they are 5 percent of the US population and 20-25 percent of some elite colleges, they feel that more of them should be getting in. It has already been shown that Asians need a much higher SAT scores that other races in order to admitted to an elite college, the same for the MCAT and medical school.
http://undergrad.admissions.columbia.edu/classprofile/2019
https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/sat/sat-percentile-ranks-gender-ethnicity-2014.pdf
I would guess that colleges discount Oriental scores to compensate for their presumed cheating.
Also, if a college goes All-Oriental, it will lose cachet among Whites, including prospective faculty. Load up Harvard with Chinese and nobody else will want to go there.
I think the quandary college administrators face is that there just isn't any more room for Asians except at the expense of others. Blacks/Hispanics can't be winnowed. Christian whites are already underrepresented. White Jews, overrrepresented by perhaps 10X, can be reduced, but that would be intolerable.
Thank you. In saying so little that yet reveals so much I don’t need to say anything more.
BACH represents everything that makes Europe imperishable and unbeatable.
If you don’t get that then you are incapable of commenting interestingly upon anything to do with this topic.
Bach has a unique genius but others have their genius as well. There was music before Bach. And great music continued after Bach.
Visited my daughter this weekend in Bucks County, Pa and went to Princeton, NJ for lunch. After lunch, my wife and I sat on a bench and people watched from in front of a book store directly across from the gates to the campus. We estimated that 75% of all the student aged shoppers and strollers we saw were Asian, hardly any blacks. I have no way of knowing who was Chinese, but most looked Japanese to me.
If you don't get that then you are incapable of commenting interestingly upon anything to do with this topic.
Bach is terrific, but so are Vivaldi, Beethoven, Mozart, Bruch, Chopin, Scarlatti…
Bach has a unique genius but others have their genius as well. There was music before Bach. And great music continued after Bach.
You didn't see that coming, did you?
Also, if a college goes All-Oriental, it will lose cachet among Whites, including prospective faculty. Load up Harvard with Chinese and nobody else will want to go there.
There isn’t much connection between international students from abroad with subpar command of the English language that colleges are aggressively recruiting with domestic Asian American students.
They used to say the same thing about Jews and now they’ve magically disappeared into the “white” demographic making up perhaps half of it.
I think the quandary college administrators face is that there just isn’t any more room for Asians except at the expense of others. Blacks/Hispanics can’t be winnowed. Christian whites are already underrepresented. White Jews, overrrepresented by perhaps 10X, can be reduced, but that would be intolerable.
Not to mention Asian Americans who have spent the entirety of their lives in schools and communities with nearly all other Asian immigrants, and families that consume nearly exclusively Asian language media. None of this was possible with the Asian immigrants of a generation ago.
So Twinkie's and your assumption that Asian Americans do not have the same prediliction for cheating may depend on the numbers, and locations. If the Chinese language newspaper that your family get on the doorstep every morning includes a morally neutral section on the latest cheating techniques, and has advertisements for the scammers that facilitate it, and all your classmates and neighbors get the same newspaper, it may be time to re-evaluate some assumptions.
Bach has a unique genius but others have their genius as well. There was music before Bach. And great music continued after Bach.
Indeed, and all of it European.
You didn’t see that coming, did you?
You didn't see that coming, did you?
True, I didn’t really see it coming that you wouldn’t understand it’s just a metaphor.
I think the quandary college administrators face is that there just isn't any more room for Asians except at the expense of others. Blacks/Hispanics can't be winnowed. Christian whites are already underrepresented. White Jews, overrrepresented by perhaps 10X, can be reduced, but that would be intolerable.
” domestic Asian American students.” That social and legal construct includes many many immigrants, legal and illegal, citizen and non-citizen, and also includes ‘native born’ ‘citizens’ born in birth tourism hotels 15-20 years ago, who have never lived here.
Not to mention Asian Americans who have spent the entirety of their lives in schools and communities with nearly all other Asian immigrants, and families that consume nearly exclusively Asian language media. None of this was possible with the Asian immigrants of a generation ago.
So Twinkie’s and your assumption that Asian Americans do not have the same prediliction for cheating may depend on the numbers, and locations. If the Chinese language newspaper that your family get on the doorstep every morning includes a morally neutral section on the latest cheating techniques, and has advertisements for the scammers that facilitate it, and all your classmates and neighbors get the same newspaper, it may be time to re-evaluate some assumptions.
1. Asian Americans are tight and hardly venture outside their ghettos.
2. We have evidence of high level cheating among some international Chinese students aggressively courted by US universities, per the article.
3. You've seen/heard of sophisticated "scam" ads in ethnic papers.
4. Thus high level cheating is endemic and replete within the Asian American population. A strong percentage of Asian Americans likely take part in brazen "scams". And therefore, the broad brush with which you paint is not unfair. The borders between the Chinese abroad and Asian Americans near are too porous. Attempt at differentiation is moot.
5. Consequently, discounting GPAs and test scores among Asian American applicants makes sense.My reply:
1. No
2. Yes, per the article.
3. Maybe so. But "cheating" services have been around forever everywhere.
4. Only presumption on your part. We probably have no idea how many students use "essay writing" services. Or pay someone to sit in for them for tests.
5. No, collective punishment wouldn't be just. Even assuming everything is true the penalty hurts everyone alike, cheaters and non cheaters.
Thank you for the kind words.
Not to mention Asian Americans who have spent the entirety of their lives in schools and communities with nearly all other Asian immigrants, and families that consume nearly exclusively Asian language media. None of this was possible with the Asian immigrants of a generation ago.
So Twinkie's and your assumption that Asian Americans do not have the same prediliction for cheating may depend on the numbers, and locations. If the Chinese language newspaper that your family get on the doorstep every morning includes a morally neutral section on the latest cheating techniques, and has advertisements for the scammers that facilitate it, and all your classmates and neighbors get the same newspaper, it may be time to re-evaluate some assumptions.
Your argument seems to be:
1. Asian Americans are tight and hardly venture outside their ghettos.
2. We have evidence of high level cheating among some international Chinese students aggressively courted by US universities, per the article.
3. You’ve seen/heard of sophisticated “scam” ads in ethnic papers.
4. Thus high level cheating is endemic and replete within the Asian American population. A strong percentage of Asian Americans likely take part in brazen “scams”. And therefore, the broad brush with which you paint is not unfair. The borders between the Chinese abroad and Asian Americans near are too porous. Attempt at differentiation is moot.
5. Consequently, discounting GPAs and test scores among Asian American applicants makes sense.
My reply:
1. No
2. Yes, per the article.
3. Maybe so. But “cheating” services have been around forever everywhere.
4. Only presumption on your part. We probably have no idea how many students use “essay writing” services. Or pay someone to sit in for them for tests.
5. No, collective punishment wouldn’t be just. Even assuming everything is true the penalty hurts everyone alike, cheaters and non cheaters.
I really dislike the term "reverse racism" as all the implications are that virtually only white people are racist and that anti-white racism is the exception. Which of course is ludicrous. Fortunately the term is hardly ever seen here.
I understand your disapproval of the term. However, note that the most fervent backlash to the term ‘reverse racism’ is actually from black activists as they believe blacks can never be racist.
“Actually, Japan is culturally unique and quite different in its ethos from other countries in East Asia. Levels of trust are sky-high and dishonesty and corner-cutting is rare and alien to the average Japanese person.”
I used to believe this, but now I’m really not so sure. Not that I believe Japan is really “low-trust” or whatever, but that they’re so fundamentally different from the rest of east asia. I think you’re looking at more a circumstantial period of history than anything that seemingly sets Japan apart. There are major facets of Japanese history that not too long ago made them stand out as the perfect representation of the sort “low-trust” aspects of east asian society, the extreme conformity, commitment to honor etc. The samurai, their behavior and beliefs in WWII and more would at face value give you the impression they represent the worst of east asia in those regards.
China’s dysfunction arguably runs back centuries, but some of the biggest factors are from the past several decades. Taiwan does have problems with cheating, but it doesn’t seem to be quite on par with mainland China, given how it’s better than mainland China in almost every basic regard. South Korea’s cheating issues could be related to it’s crushing education system, which is also heavily behind it’s sky-high suicide rates.
I do think Japan is the best country in east asia (and one of the best in the world), but saying “dishonesty and corner-cutting is rare and alien to the average Japanese person.” is pure, grade-A japanophilia. In another post, you remark on the “holiness” of Japan that some quarters bestow and how it’s “quasi-western”, but also say lumping Japan in with China and Korea is like lumping comparing Austria to Turkey. China and Japan, maybe, but what really sets Japan and China apart is more recent than Turkey and Austria, what with… well, centuries to over a millenia of muslim rule and considerable population movements from different ethnic groups for probably that similar period of time.