Cheating

While only Toffee was caught cheating during the exam for my pre-university classes, I found on grading the answer sheets that some of my worst students were getting relatively good scores. I mean, top scores.

A corporate tax law professor I once had used to offer his classes a terse piece of advice on tax avoidance strategy: "Bulls win; pigs lose." These students evidently never benefitted from this advice.

Everyone here would have been perfectly happy if I'd just quietly marked the papers, whiled away my remaining days in Beijing, and taken off to Canada forever. But that simply is not my way.

For various reasons, only 33 of my pre-university students had ended up writing the final exam. (Such academic pretensions have become increasingly superfluous here.) Seven of the 33 had questionable scores. Three days after the exam, just before the students were about to write an exam for another course, I spoke to Wu and told him I wanted the seven to rewrite it. He agreed, and we went off together to the exam room where the students were waiting to write that morning's exam. I announced that due to "discrepancies," the seven would have to stay behind after that exam to rewrite mine. Then I left, intending to return when the other exam ended.

It was so simple. I'd verified all seven were present; Wu (together with the course instructor) was in the exam room monitoring; I'd told Wu he could come and get me in my room if the other exam finished early.

Wu knocked at my door a short time before the scheduled end of the other exam. The students, he said, had refused to rewrite the exam and had left the exam room.

Refused? Refused?!

Jim didn't seem to be quite on board here. As we talked, he wasn't arguing exactly -- but he was proffering the students' viewpoints, as if they mattered. For one thing, he was reporting their claim that they hadn't cheated.

After a time, reluctantly, Jim conceded that Mr. Li had had a hand in this. Li had issued a decision, apparently, that the exam rewrite was unnecessary.

So off we went to have a meeting. Geez, how could I have overlooked this step?

Mr. Li motioned to Jim and me to have a seat. I kicked off with: "Tell Mr. Li that students cannot respect a school where the bad students get better grades than the good students." Hopefully he'd catch the allusion to his declaration in one of our long-ago meetings to the effect that I'd lost the students' respect.

There were some Chinese expostulations between Li and Jim, but there really seemed to be no counter-argument that made any sense. After ten minutes, Li gruffly relented, and Jim went off to round up the seven students.

One Chinese person who's worked with Li opines that, for reasons relating to Chinese history (preceding Li's birth 60 years ago), Li is generally suspicious of Westerners and their ways. Or, you might say, racist to some degree (though he's always been friendly with me, and I've never felt any indication of personal animosity). If true, that would make him a less than brilliant choice to manage a campus for a Western-oriented school with Western teachers. But that only makes the theory more plausible.

A typical question on the exam was the following (pertaining to the Total Recall script):

"MCCLANE: (raspy) Use your head, you dumb bitch! He's acting out the secret agent role from his Ego Trip!

"DR. LULL: (superior) I'm afraid that's not possible.

"MCCLANE: (condescending) Why not?"

Dr. Lull answers this question by telling McClane that: A) Quaid did not choose the "secret agent" Ego Trip, he chose to be a movie star; B) she is not a "dumb bitch"; C) she believes it's too dangerous to work with a real secret agent like Quaid; D) they have not yet put the Ego Trip into Quaid's memory.

I'd altered the exam for the rewrite, mixing up sections and mixing up answers so that the above, for example, became:

Dr. Lull answers this question by telling McClane that: A) Quaid did not choose the "secret agent" Ego Trip, he chose to be a movie star; B) they have not yet put the Ego Trip into Quaid's memory; C) she believes it's too dangerous to work with a real secret agent like Quaid; D) she is not a "dumb bitch".

Four students rewrote the exam (the other three were apparently unintimidated by Jim). We seated them at the four corners of the room. If they could cheat under these conditions, they didn't need any more education.

As shown below, the scores plummeted:

No. of Correct Answers (out of 27)

         Initial Rewrite

Billy      24      10
Hamlet     23       8
Kane       17       9
Summer         REFUSED
Wang Hong  24       6
Yao Kai        REFUSED
Zhao Han       REFUSED

(Yes it's no joke, one of them is called Hamlet.)

I submitted my course grades -- my final duty -- to Meng and Wu. Toffee and the above seven, instead of a grade, got asterisks indicating cheating. What the school does with the grades is anyone's guess. I just hope I've adhered to all international regulations.

Today, snowfall in Beijing! The first, but for a few trivial flakes six weeks ago. A preview of what's in store for me in Toronto on Tuesday.