Chinese Students in American Colleges Passing Tests Ted Kennedy-style—By Hiring Imposters To Take The Tests
03/25/2016
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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.

[Comment at Unz.com]
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