US Colleges expel 8,000 Chinese students

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

LINK

This article states that American colleges have about a half million Chinese students attending and that while most do well, 8,000 have been expelled for cheating or low grades.

"Universities in the U.S. have expelled thousands of Chinese students in the past three years, according to WholeRen Education, which provides academic services to Chinese students.

A 54-page report released this week says that schools in the United States have expelled 1,657 Chinese since the 2012-2013 school year, mainly for “academic dishonesty or low academic performances,” but a company representative now says the number might be as high as 8,000 students. “A lot of students tend to keep silent or go back to their country,” says Andrew Chen, chief development officer at WholeRen."

Basically the students come to the US not academically prepared for the rigors of college here plus many have gotten used to cheating or bribing their way thru school back in China and have trouble being on there own here. Alot of this is due to more wealth in China and those parents having children less prepared for college.

thing is those students come to the US and pay full tuition so US colleges really work hard to recruit them. One college administrator says 1 Chinese student subsidizes 2 American students.

I found this interesting because back when I was in school the few students from China were often the smartest in class. Now things seem to be changing.

Does anyone else work at a college and have some insight into this?

2

May I expand the OP’s question?
Like the OP, I am surprised ----but not only about Chinese students.
I’m surprised that universtities expell anybody in large numbers.

When I was in college 30 years ago, the threat of expulsion was theoretically possible, but in reality it was unheard of. Is it more common today?

3

That article is interesting to me because my college was just GIVING degrees to Chinese students. They couldn’t speak any English, much less write and present in it, had no idea what was going on, never went to meetings, and walked out with a Master’s degree.

Maybe my little school was desperate to have an international presence so they were more lax on these things, but my knee-jerk reaction is “wow, the balls of those schools!”

4

Well, 8,000 out of 500,000 is only 1.6%, so I’d have to see the comparable numbers for US, European, etc. students being ‘kicked out’. Based on low academic performance, I suspect US students rates are comparable if not higher…and of course, the number of college students who ‘drop out’ on the 4-year path are even higher.

Still, the point of coming to America for a degree if not prepared for the cultural and education differences is well taken. That over 95% are (apparently) doing well is testament to China’s obsession to modernize and overcome centuries of poor high-level education in as short a time as possible.

IMHO as always. YMMV.

5

At my undergrad, there was definitely a requirement to maintain a certain level of academic performance. At the college level, you had to basically pass most of your classes. If not, you automatically had a Very Serious Meeting with a dean, and were put on academic probation. At that point, if you kept failing most classes for another semester or two you just wouldn’t be allowed to enroll again at some point.

Specific major programs often had more stringent requirements. Some would count a D as failing in classes required for the major.

My current PhD program counts a B- or lower as failing - one C is enough to trigger academic probation, and a second can get you kicked out.

6

Again, this is because they pay full tuition and then some.

7

I may be nit-picking, but to me there’s a difference between expulsion and “not being allowed to enroll again.”
When I was a student at a large State Universtiy, there were often kids who dropped out,(usually transfers from a community college who decided that a ‘real’ university was too much for them.) So they tried a semester or two, and simply didn’t come back.

I don’t call that being “expelled”,
To me, being expelled means you are being punished.And that’s what surprised me : 8000 “expellees”. But I think I misunderstood the OP.

8

There’s a difference between deciding a school was too much for you and the university telling you that it’s too much for you too. The former isn’t an expulsion, the latter is.

9

Well, were 8000 expelled or 1657? Or were 1657 expelled and 6400 not allowed to re-enroll?

The article is kind of weak on the number, despite the number being the main draw of their headline.

10

How else will a school “expel” someone for poor academic performance? They’re not going to, say, tell someone to leave right after they fail midterms in several classes. The administration won’t know what’s going on until grades are submitted at the end of the semester, at which point it’s easiest to say “don’t come back”.

The only circumstances, AFAIK, that the school will tell someone to leave immediately mid-semester involve the more serious cheating or plagiarism cases, or something criminal.

11

To me, that’s not expulsion. It’s just a question of fulfilling the requirements.

Every school always requires that students maintain a minimum grade average. (imagine a person who gets all “F”'s. Obviously, he won’t be back next semester. He won’t even attempt to register for classes, and he doesn’t need to be told why. You always have to complete certain standards before you continue, (ex:. You can’t register for Biology 201 before you take Biology 101)

Now that’s what I call expulsion!

12

I can buy the article; back when I was in grad school (MBA) more than a decade ago, we had a large contingent of Chinese international students, and they were, without exception, the least competent group in our MBA class.

They often would get flustered with the idea that there was no ONE right answer for many of the projects/test questions/assignments, and they seemed to have real problems with thinking for themselves- apparently their educational system had been much more oriented toward memorization/regurgitation than ours is.

They also had (to us) strange collective notions of what was, and was not cheating. They were notorious for collectively working on assignments in classes like accounting, finance or operations research. When one person figured it out,someone else would vet the answer, and then they’d ALL turn in that answer as individuals.

This ended up being a problem, when this was reported as academic dishonesty, and the school kind of softpedaled the whole thing, not wanting to eject every Chinese student from the full-time MBA program, despite these sorts of behaviors being 100% counter to the code of conduct and all standards of academic honesty.

13

That wasn’t my experience in undergrad, either when I was one, or when I TAd
The first bad semester was kind of ignored. The second got you a “shape-up” conference and plan(some majors or colleges like engineering would kick you out of their program). Only after three failed semesters did they kick someone out.

14

This is almost exactly what I came to post. I was in a same situation doing an MBA part-time from 1996-2000. All the work in the non quantitative courses was group work. If you had an international Chinese student in your group, you would hope there was some number crunching to be done so you could hand it to them. When there wasn’t, the text they handed in was most always some patchwork quilt of parts of textbooks pasted together, with no quotes or references. Try as we might, we could not ge them to see why this was not acceptable.

4 out of 5 times, their level of function in English was not adequate for a universtiy degree. We could not understand how they got in.

The students who grew up here from chinese parents were just the opposite, almost always the best students in the class, and usually with an engineering background.

The international chinese students were also badly handicapped by their lack of knowlege of North American culture as it affects idioms and language, and by the differences in social norms and body language nobody told them about. Most sports-based expressions were unknown to them, so things like “throwing a curveball”, “from out of left field”, “punting the issue” and “touching base” were incomprehensible to them, but they were too embarassed to ask for explanations. Just about all of them, except the smaller ladies, would stand way too close to you during conversations, well inside “bad breath” range. I often thought there should be a cultural acclimatization course for them, like the training we would receive before business trips to Japan.

15

Yes, I have been hearing there is a growing rift between Chinese-Americans and Chinese internationals moving here or students.

16

Oh? Didn’t know.

Any article you can point me to where I can learn more? What are the points of friction?

17

THe drop out rate doesn’t seem high at all. Is this news?

With that in mind, based on a couple years teaching in a lower-tier Chinese university, there are some very real differences between our education systems.

It’s hard to explain, and comes as a cop-out when I do, but plagiarism is honestly just seen completely differently in China. I’ve heard various explainations. Some think it comes from the Confucian exams, which tested a person’s ability to quote specific texts. One of my observations was that turning in an imperfect product was considered to be worse than turning in a less-than-original project. But what it comes down to is that in Chinese academic systems, plagiarism is often considered a potentially helpful tool, not the primal academic sin. It’s just a totally different way of looking at things. I think our approach is better, and that original thought is a useful thing to learn. But it’s going to be a tough message to get through to people who’ve been taught something different their entire lives.

In China, high school is considered the really hard part of one’s academic career, and the expectation for college is that it will be relatively lightweight. Chinese students who I knew that studied abroad were often shocked by the sheer amount of reading and writing involved in a US university. It’s not that they are unable to work hard, it’s just not what they understood college to be like.

Group work was always hard for my students. It used to make me crazy, until I thought back to my elementry school. Remember being grouped up in third grade, with the group electing a timekeeper, notetaker, and spokesperson? We do that over and over through our academic career, until that particular dynamic is drilled in to us and completing work in groups is second nature. Looking back, it’s kind of remarkable just how hard that specific dynamic was pushed. Of course it is going to be tough for people who learned something else.

I also worked with a lot of teachers in China who are eager to transform their education system. It’s a system with a long history that’s been through a lot of change in the last 50 years. There are definitely a lot of people out there who would like to get in to better synch with other parts of the world, but it will take a while for those changes to trickle down.

18

I have been teaching at a university in China for the past 6 years.
Cheating in China is very common, and I must retest all students until they pass the final
exam.
As long as tuition is paid, all students will graduate.
I have never heard of a student failing to graduate no matter how often they are caught cheating, or how low their scores.

This news story is amusing:

“We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.”

"Riot after Chinese teachers try to stop pupils cheating

What should have been a hushed scene of 800 Chinese students diligently sitting their university entrance exams erupted into siege warfare after invigilators tried to stop them from cheating.

The relatively small city of Zhongxiang in Hubei province has always performed suspiciously well in China’s notoriously tough “gaokao” exams, each year winning a disproportionate number of places at the country’s elite universities.
Last year, the city received a slap on the wrist from the province’s Education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject. Forty five examiners were “harshly criticised” for allowing cheats to prosper.
So this year, a new pilot scheme was introduced to strictly enforce the rules.
When students at the No. 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams earlier this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised not by their own teachers, but by 54 external invigilators randomly drafted in from different schools across the county.
The invigilators wasted no time in using metal detectors to relieve students of their mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers.

A special team of female invigilators was on hand to intimately search female examinees, according to the Southern Weekend newspaper.
Outside the school, meanwhile, a squad of officials patrolled the area to catch people transmitting answers to the examinees. At least two groups were caught trying to communicate with students from a hotel opposite the school gates.
For the students, and for their assembled parents waiting outside the school gates to pick them up afterwards, the new rules were an infringement too far.
As soon as the exams finished, a mob swarmed into the school in protest.
“I picked up my son at midday [from his exam]. He started crying. I asked him what was up and he said a teacher had frisked his body and taken his mobile phone from his underwear. I was furious and I asked him if he could identify the teacher. I said we should go back and find him,” one of the protesting fathers, named as Mr Yin, said to the police later.
By late afternoon, the invigilators were trapped in a set of school offices, as groups of students pelted the windows with rocks. Outside, an angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: “We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat.”
According to the protesters, cheating is endemic in China, so being forced to sit the exams without help put their children at a disadvantage.
Teachers trapped in the school took to the internet to call for help. “We are trapped in the exam hall,” wrote Kang Yanhong, one of the invigilators, on a Chinese messaging service. “Students are smashing things and trying to break in,” she said.
Another of the external invigilators, named Li Yong, was punched in the nose by an angry father. Mr Li had confiscated a mobile phone from his son and then refused a bribe to return the handset.
“I hoped my son would do well in the exams. This supervisor affected his performance, so I was angry,” the man, named Zhao, explained to the police later.
Hundreds of police eventually cordoned off the school and the local government conceded that “exam supervision had been too strict and some students did not take it well”.’

.

19

I teach in a public university, and in any given semester i’ll have at least one or two Chinese students in each of my classes.

You can talk all you want about cultural differences in education, or whatever, but in my experience the fundamental problem facing most of these students is that their English simply is not good enough to cope with university-level ideas and communication, especially in subjects that are language-intensive. Yes, every foreign student that we admit has to pass the TOEFL or some other similar test, but the level of English competence required for admission falls far short of the level necessary for actual competence in the classroom, in my opinion.

I teach history, and many of the documents that we read in class deal with fairly complex ideas, often expressed using difficult language. My English-language students find some of the documents difficult, and have to read them closely in order to understand what the authors are trying to say. This is intentional on my part; i’m trying to develop their skills of reading and analysis, and i like to challenge them with some difficult material. But if it’s hard for the English speakers, it must be a nightmare for students who have just scraped through a TOEFL test.

I blame the university, and the people in charge of admitting the international students. It’s incredibly unfair on the students themselves. They are told, “Hey, your English is good enough. Give us thousands of dollars and we’ll let you study at our fantastic American university!” But then they just dump these poor kids into classes that they’re not prepared for, and leave those of us in the faculty to deal with the problems.

I’ve had Chinese students in my office who could not even understand that i was explaining to them that their English was not good enough to pass my course. I would speak slowly, and enunciate clearly, and it would take them three or four times to understand what i was telling them. How is a student who has this much trouble with English going to be able to understand the debates between the Federalists and anti-Federalists over the adoption of the American Constitution, or Andrew Jackson’s bank veto message? How are they going to be able to explain the significance of the Compromise of 1850 in the growing debate over slavery and free soil? How can they understand the principles of William Graham Sumner’s social Darwinism? How can they follow a fifty-minute lecture that i deliver in front of the class when they can’t follow a bit of basic conversation in my office?

Some of these students—a lot of them, in fact—work their asses off all semester, doing the best they can to complete a difficult course in what is still, for them, a largely unfamiliar language. They read the book and the documents over and over, in some cases actually memorizing the important issues word for word so they can reproduce it on the in-class exams. A few have English that is good enough to actually do well. The majority of them scrape by with D’s and C’s. But some end up with failing grades. And some of them, either out of dishonesty or, i suspect, out of sheer desperation, resort to cheating.

For the ones that don’t cheat, people like me are left in a rather invidious position, especially when it comes to the borderline cases: i can fail them, but it seems pretty damn unfair to fail them for their poor English when they’ve been explicitly told by the university that their English is good enough for admission; or i can pass them, which seems unfair to the other students who are held to a higher standard.

I’m happy to have international students at the university. I came to the United States myself as a grad student, with the explicit purpose of studying in an American university. I believe that academic institutions benefit from bringing together people from all over the world. But it’s just not fair to take tens of thousands of dollars from foreign students who clearly aren’t ready to take a university degree in the English language.

I’ve complained about this to people in the international office on more than one occasion. They always nod politely, and express great concern, and talk about how they are doing everything possible to help the international students succeed, and how they are looking into increasing the language requirements. But every semester, they just keep admitting more of these underprepared students and banking their tuition checks.

20

Back in 1980 I worked in an office in a titanium factory, and there was a young Chinese metallurgist who also worked there. One day, on breaktime, one of the foreman mentioned how the Chinese in America are excelling in everything, and asked David why the Chinese are so smart. David’s simple answer: “only the smart ones are able to get out and come here”.