College admissions cheating by American celebrities is more fun, Steve Sailer notes, but cheating by Chinese nationals is a much bigger problem, Los Angeles Magazine reports:
According to prosecutors, Cai, along with four current and former UCLA students and another student at Cal State Fullerton, helped at least 40 Chinese nationals obtain student visas by fraudulently taking the TOEFL, an English proficiency exam, on their behalf. Cai’s ringers would show up to testing sites with fake Chinese passports bearing their own photos but with the names of the clients. Where Cai slipped — and where investigators caught up to him — was charging 39 test registration payments to his credit card.
Any other day the UCLA bust might have made national headlines, but the news got swamped by a bigger, sexier college cheating scandal: Operation Varsity Blues. (The UCLA investigation was dubbed “Operation TOEFL Recall.”) While the UCLA case is less shocking — bribes in thousands of dollars instead of millions; Chinese high schoolers instead of Full House cast members — it represents an equally notable underbelly of American college admissions.
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It’s hard to find data on cheating that is broken down by country of origin, but a survey of 14 public universities by The Wall Street Journal found that in the 2014-15 school year, those universities reported cheating among international students at a rate five times higher than among domestic students. In 2018 a professor at UC Santa Barbara told the Los Angeles Times that Chinese students comprise 6 percent of the student body but account for a third of plagiarism cases. A 2016 study conducted by United Kingdom newspaper The Times says that students from outside the European Union were four times more likely to cheat than U.K. and European Union students.
Meh. They’re cheating to get into an American university, where they’ll get BS credentials that don’t mean anything, remain maleducated idiots, and then go back to be party luminaries in China. I’m not feeling the scandal, here–Although, I am embarrassed to acknowledge that the American educational system ain’t what it used to be.
Maybe we ought to export American academics to China, and let them have the full benefit of leftoid academic prowess…?
Though, if we were realistic and the Chinese were halfway cognizant, that would be recognized as an act of war.