If you're not cheating, you're not trying

China Daily ran a story yesterday about desperate students in China caught cheating on the College English Test conducted at schools across China. The article noted that in one test hall alone, 100 "cheating tools" were discovered. At another location, school officials were arrested for allowing four local students to hire proxies to take their tests for them. In other locations, school officials have been implicated with leaking test answers.

A few weeks ago, Chinese students across the country experienced the gruelling stress of China's college entrance exams. There are far more students than admissions slots, and this test is the only official determiner of who gets to go to the good schools. Unsurprisingly, cheating is rampant on this particular test, despite the fact that anyone caught with an illegal copy of the entrance exam can get up to 7 years in prison - a Chinese prison, we hasten to remind you - as a result of using this particular method.

Five years ago, AsianWeek (news magazine in San Francisco) ran an article documenting a cheating scandal in which a Chinese school was proven to be selling copies of U.S. college and graduate school entrance examinations at the school's bookstore. The article noted that this school had been found guilty of this practice twice before (in 1996 and 1997), suggesting that the practice is fairly ingrained. The People's Daily (government-sponsored Chinese newspaper) ran an editorial response, arguing (in poor English, ironically) that it is discriminatory for American testing services to make it harder for Chinese students to cheat on their tests.

As further testament to the culture of cheating here in China, we offer our readers some blogs (Metanoiac, Mask of China, Sinosplice) - written by Americans who came to China to teach English and were shocked by the brazenness of Chinese students in cheating. Oh, I also found an Australian writer for an international e-zine (Hackwriters) who posted on the subject.

Many Chinese are quite willing to talk about the pervasiveness of the cheating culture in China. Some are bothered by the possibility that their physician couldn't pass a legitimate medical exam, or that the engineers who are building the new subway system in Beijing (which has already suffered two collapses during construction) likely took a few shortcuts in college and may still be taking shortcuts on the job. Despite the heavy cost of this behavior, it is a difficult trend to correct. Perhaps the most shocking realization is that, if the stories Chinese people tell are true, many of these people put more effort into cheating than they'd have to expend if they simply decided to study for the test.