What is the motivation behind the cheating and plagiarism? This would seem to imply that students do not care about learning the underlying skill. Why would a country encourage this?
I don't know if it's universal, but Australian culture (and maybe Chinese for all i know) has gone fully down the route that the purpose of universities and education is purely for certificates to present to employers.
Indeed, the notion that you would go to university to "learn", or god forbid, continue learning irrespective of employment and wage opportunities, or pay money for learning that didn't have an employment or wage outcome, would be seen as some kind of mixture of stupid/bad decision/literally non sensical.
University, and academic publications and structure, makes a lot more sense once you accept almost no one there is interested in knowledge.
University education in Australia is a major migration pathway. By studying at a University there, you are basically guaranteed permanent residency at the end.
That's why the USA and UK should oppose efforts to allow students to stay in the country after they graduate. International student graduates should have to go through the same migration process as anyone else.
Additionally, Governments should place a cap on the number of student visas they issue each year, require universities charge a minimum amount, and require the full three years be paid upfront. Universities will be more willing to fail poor students under these conditions; it will also prevent/reverse a race to the bottom.
> Cheating and plagiarism are perfectly a-ok in China[1].
[1] doesn't show this and it's not actually true. Cheating is common, but Chinese students know that it's forbidden and they'll be punished if they get caught, so they spend at least some effort changing what they copy before passing it off as their own work. Of course that stops working as soon as they leave the country and their language skills are suddenly not good enough to rewrite everything.
Ironically, when I was an exchange student in China, the non-Chinese students formed a tight-knit group sharing their work and getting passing grades for weak essays in bad Chinese copied from someone else.
Some things are more culturally universal than they appear at first glance.
How do you reconcile your viewpoint with all the evidence even in the comments here of Chinese students blatantly copying entire published works, after they sign disclaimers saying they understand the penalties for doing that?
I have signed dozens of those same disclaimers in China. During exams, everything but pencil and paper needs to be left in your bag in a corner of the examination room. I hear security during Gaokao is even stricter. If you do something stupid like submitting your program's benchmark results with nanosecond precision and they're identical to another student's, you're going to get caught and punished.
I had to take a mandatory course in academic writing despite having already taken a similar one in Germany, allowing me to compare the two. There was all the same content about quotations without proper attribution of the source being plagiarism and how to correctly format references and so on. (Quotations are why the threshold for duplicated content in your first link can't be 0, by the way.)
Do you think they'd do all that if it were considered socially acceptable to cheat? Teachers don't want their students to pass a course by cheating and they try to find and punish those who do. Students are obviously aware of that; they simply cheat anyway if they think they can get away with it.
Not getting away with it is what I think causes the perception that Chinese students cheat more than others. Writing assignments in their native language would allow them to discuss with their friends, take a look at their answers, then write it up in their own words. Not having the language skills to do that makes evading detection a lot harder. As I said, I have observed essentially the same dynamic with international students in China.
So based on my personal experience, I don't think Chinese students cheat more than those of other countries. Of course the only other education system I know from the inside is that of Germany, where several ministers (including the minister of education [1]) had to resign after plagiarism was found in their dissertations. Maybe in other countries students who are faced with the choice of probably failing a course because they can't do an assignment or possibly failing after getting caught cheating will take the honorable option. I doubt it, though.
