Surge of Chinese Applicants Tests U.S. Colleges

[IIOY]

Wider admissions from overseas leave schools vulnerable to fraud, experts say

As U.S. universities search farther afield for international students, they are boosting not just their cash flow and their campus diversity, but also the likelihood of admissions fraud, experts say.



On Thursday, a U.S. attorney in Pittsburgh announced indictments against 15 Chinese nationals on charges that they cheated on college-entrance exams by hiring impostors to take the tests for them. Several of the students ended up at schools across the U.S.



“This is a group of Chinese, but I believe the problem of protecting the integrity of [college admission tests] is bigger than that,” U.S. Attorney David Hickton said.



In recent years, fraud on college-entrance exams has also been uncovered in students from South Korea, as well as from several states in the U.S. More students from a greater number of countries are seeking admissions to American campuses, bringing recruiters into more rural areas where academic standards and test-taking security can be less stringent, said Michael Reilly, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.



“What we hear from schools is that when students arrive at college campuses from China, you see once they begin their studies an incongruity between their performance and what their portfolio suggested they should be able to do,” Mr. Reilly said.



In the 2013-14 academic year, the number of international students studying at U.S. colleges and universities rose 8% from a year earlier to nearly 900,000, according to the Institute of International Education. Leading that surge were 274,439 Chinese students, an increase of nearly 17% from the year before.



While earlier students from China were largely the cream of the crop, more of these recent arrivals are struggling with academics, Mr. Reilly said.



China’s colleges rely almost exclusively on results from the national college entrance exam, known as the gaokao, in their admission decisions. As a result of that singular focus on test scores at domestic institutions, Chinese students put extra emphasis on their exam performances when applying to U.S. schools, said Marc Zawel, co-founder and chief executive of AcceptU, a Boston-based admission-consulting firm that works extensively with international students.



“They see the gaokao as essentially deciding where they’re going to go, and they see the SAT or ACT doing the same,” he said. Mr. Zawel said some U.S. schools struggle to validate high-school transcripts from overseas students, and so rely on standardized scores with the assumption that they are more authentic or reflective of a student’s abilities.



Schools have begun to shift their international admissions strategies in an acknowledgment that the tests can be gamed. Mr. Zawel said some of his clients now must participate in interviews with schools to prove their mastery of the English language, even if they scored well on the Educational Testing Service-administered Test of English as a Foreign Language, or Toefl. A high score could indicate comprehensive test preparation rather than actual fluency.



Mr. Zawel said most applicants want to follow the rules, though his team sometimes loses prospective clients after explaining that they won’t write essays or forge recommendation letters on applicants’ behalf—both of which he said are common services among Chinese admission consultants.



“China is the wild west of admission counseling,” he said. “Many agencies advise students in ways that cross a line.”



A Pittsburgh based company that works with Chinese students studying in the U.S. said academic dishonesty is a problem in part because standards around academic integrity are less stringent in China.



Andrew Hang Chen, the chief development officer at WholeRen Education, said his company has worked with 1,657 students who were kicked out of school over the past three years. Of those, nearly a quarter were asked to leave for academic dishonesty, he said.



Mr. Chen said issues around cheating have gotten worse as the quality of Chinese students has declined. “The image of Chinese students has dropped in the last few years,” Mr. Chen said. “The students who are coming over now are not always so well prepared.”



The indictments in Pittsburgh included charges against a student now studying at Northeastern University, according to a school spokeswoman who said the Boston school first learned of the federal investigation in August. The spokeswoman said the university will refer the student to its office of student conduct “for further action,” but Northeastern is barred by federal law from commenting further on disciplinary matters regarding specific students.



Mr. Hickton, the U.S. Attorney, declined to say what prompted the investigation, which led to charges that Chinese applicants were giving impostors fake Chinese passports and paying them as much as $6,000 to take their entrance exams for them.



Improvements in technology like cellphones, ear pieces and cameras embedded in eyeglasses have made it easier for test-takers to share questions and answers when portions of exams are reused world-wide. ETS withheld and ultimately canceled some scores for SAT exams administered in Asia at least four times in recent months, amid allegations of cheating. In at least some of those instances, test-takers in certain locations were reported to have shared questions with test-prep counselors in China and South Korea, who then passed the answers to their clients for upcoming exams.



Test administrators beefed up security across the U.S. in 2012, after the discovery of a cheating ring involving dozens of Long Island high-school students in fall 2011. Those students were accused of paying others up to $3,600 to stand in for them during exams. The ETS now requires students to show photographic proof of their identification when signing up for the tests and then again when sitting for the exams, and must confirm their gender and birth date.



Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of the Center for Fair and Open Testing, which advocates against the use of standardized testing in college admissions, said he expects to see these problems continue.



“Offense always beats defense when it comes to hacking,” Mr. Schaeffer said. “The human imagination is incredible, especially when there’s money at stake.”


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[ChillyMcFreeze]

This is totally unsurprising to me. It's a real shame for the Chinese students who truly are the best and brightest. When a student takes the gaokao, they don't just get a score back, they get a list of colleges they are now eligible for. The pressure is enormous compared to American kids' SAT scores. There are no other admission factors in China besides gaokao score from what I understand.

[compassrose]

We've had this problem with grad students-- they get great TOEFL scores but then can't speak English well enough to teach here (which is what they are paid to do).

[katfco]

We found that problem a lot in China. We had to be very specific about what we considered cheating, and at exam time, we still had to deal with crib sheets, ringers and other creative methods--including one incident when someone had written a timeline of British history on the desk ahead of time.

We also found that, if a student failed the test for a class, they could pay to take it again and if they failed it again, they could pay a fee to get a passing grade.

[IIOY]

May 30, 2015 9:07:13 GMT -5 compassrose said:

We've had this problem with grad students-- they get great TOEFL scores but then can't speak English well enough to teach here (which is what they are paid to do).

This was a huge issue at my university. Everyone hated the econ and math TAs in particular because it was impossible to communicate with them, and many of us skipped office hours because they were useless. Needless to say, this engendered a great deal of resentment.

[compassrose]

May 30, 2015 9:26:47 GMT -5 IIOY said:

May 30, 2015 9:07:13 GMT -5 compassrose said:

We've had this problem with grad students-- they get great TOEFL scores but then can't speak English well enough to teach here (which is what they are paid to do).

This was a huge issue at my university. Everyone hated the econ and math TAs in particular because it was impossible to communicate with them, and many of us skipped office hours because they were useless. Needless to say, this engendered a great deal of resentment.

Yep, my grad students are pretty unhappy-- the non-English speakers are supposed to grade while they take classes on teaching in English, but a few of them even have trouble with that.

[Velar Fricative]

May 30, 2015 9:26:47 GMT -5 IIOY said:

May 30, 2015 9:07:13 GMT -5 compassrose said:

We've had this problem with grad students-- they get great TOEFL scores but then can't speak English well enough to teach here (which is what they are paid to do).

This was a huge issue at my university. Everyone hated the econ and math TAs in particular because it was impossible to communicate with them, and many of us skipped office hours because they were useless. Needless to say, this engendered a great deal of resentment.

I hate to say this but this is why I quit being a math major. I still love math and the math department was full of brilliant instructors (most from outside the US) but the language issues made things really difficult for a lot of us. I just couldn't get past this and switched after freshman year. Then tried econ but same issue. I couldn't stomach paying this tuition when communication was a huge problem. I can't teach myself advanced math!

So now that I type this, perhaps it wasn't an accident after all that I discovered linguistics...

[sugarglider]

May 30, 2015 14:23:56 GMT -5 Velar Fricative said:

May 30, 2015 9:26:47 GMT -5 IIOY said:

This was a huge issue at my university. Everyone hated the econ and math TAs in particular because it was impossible to communicate with them, and many of us skipped office hours because they were useless. Needless to say, this engendered a great deal of resentment.

I hate to say this but this is why I quit being a math major. I still love math and the math department was full of brilliant instructors (most from outside the US) but the language issues made things really difficult for a lot of us. I just couldn't get past this and switched after freshman year. Then tried econ but same issue. I couldn't stomach paying this tuition when communication was a huge problem. I can't teach myself advanced math!

So now that I type this, perhaps it wasn't an accident after all that I discovered linguistics...

Really? I took Calc II, Calc III, and Linear Algebra with all full professors (no TAs) who were all born and bred Americans. What a difference a couple years make!

[greeneggs]

May 30, 2015 9:26:47 GMT -5 IIOY said:

May 30, 2015 9:07:13 GMT -5 compassrose said:

We've had this problem with grad students-- they get great TOEFL scores but then can't speak English well enough to teach here (which is what they are paid to do).

This was a huge issue at my university. Everyone hated the econ and math TAs in particular because it was impossible to communicate with them, and many of us skipped office hours because they were useless. Needless to say, this engendered a great deal of resentment.

The TA who taught my Algebra class was at least kind enough to warn us that the semester would be a shit show by saying on the first day "Half will drop, those of you left, half will fail.  It's OK, in America there is no shame in failing, but in Japan, great shame".  He was impossible to understand and it got to the point where the university math tutoring lab had to set aside special tutors just for his classes.  I'm convinced the only reason we passed the class is that he added at least a 30 point curve because if everyone had gotten the grades we earned turned I'm sure there would have been trouble for him.