The least able lost the most marks because they had gained the most from cheating. If you were able to get 90% without cheating the absolutely most you could lose is 10 percentage points, while if you are able to only get 10% then the most you could lose is 90 percentage points.
The most likely culprit, it emerged, was that the "collective" and "petty" forms of corruption, as witnessed by Dr Borcan herself, had a curious effect: they might be paid for chiefly by well-off students bribing invigilators, but everyone benefited. It gave the poorer students "a free ride" to higher marks.
It's poorly worded but they seem to hypothesise that poorer students were sort of piggy backing off of those who paid for the cheats. So they were cheating too.
Yep. I was in such an exam, and there was a voluntary collection of money to bribe the invigilators. I didn't pay in and was looked down because. I didn't cheat, but I could have if I wanted.
More interestingly, the teachers (which were the invigilators) rationalized this as "everybody is cheating, if you don't than the stupid kids from the country side would have bigger grades than you, so you should cheat too" (I was in an elite school).
The bribe was not huge (around $50 total sum per class per exam), so I don't think it wasn't the primary motivator for the teachers. Way more money was made by private untaxed tutoring.
Thank you for sharing that. It seems that the 'test score' was more important than actually educating the student. My assumption was that if the education was effective then the student would have no difficultly passing the test.
So I wonder a bit at what makes education ineffective. I coached at risk latino high school students briefly while attending college and for them it was pretty clear that they needed to work to help support the family so they had fewer hours to devote to study. I suggested to the program that paying these kids minimum wage to spend time with a tutor would pay for itself in reduced social services costs and police costs down the road but they were not interested in hearing about that.
well, it's not about passing the test. considering these exams are sorting mechanisms, you don't just have to pass; you have to do better than those that are trying to do the same university course you are
*edit:
and yeah, when it comes to the exam, you're no longer educating. literally the only important thing for both student and teacher at this point is the score
It was the really weird part about "AP" classes here in California. They teach you how to score well on the test for subject X but it is unclear that they impart any real understanding of subject X. And if you score well on the test for subject X you can skip taking it in college which sort of closes the loop on you ever learning the topic. Some teachers however take a better approach but certainly they aren't the common case.
The aim was to show that in the absence of academic cheating, a meritocracy would emerge. What the researcher realized was that the deck was stacked against poorer students and in favor of richer students...in essence, the cheating/rigging was happening before the kids walked into school...and the academic cheating was a response to level the playing field.
They aimed to help poor and disenfranchised groups get into their specialized public schools, by forcing a meritocracy, as disproportionately wealthy and white families were accepted because admittance was previously too discretionary and lots of excuses were made about why (hm sounds familiar).
After the meritocracy was established it became disproportionately asian by a huuuuuge margin (stuyvesant high school being ~75% asian with the city having a ~10% asian population) while poor and disenfranchised groups are still poor and disenfranchised. Just even more apparently now.
This is no comment about meritocracies, it is about illuminating how far off base a governing body will be at promoting a particular outcome.
Yes, that's basically it, although characterizing wealth as cheating is iffy. But I also suspect that their anti-cheating measures caught blatant stuff, like bribing and secreting answers, but missed stuff like bribing teachers and staff to get exams in advance.
Article seems not very well written. Even the initial "You might expect a less corrupt exam system to allow ability to shine through regardless of the economic status of the students" doesn't make sense on its face.
Why would I think exam cheating would influence structural problems, advantages and disadvantages, associated with SES levels? Getting rid of cheating doesn't get rid of private tutors, better equipped schools, less distracting home environments, etc.
There were monetary bribes being given to the test proctors. Usually when bribery takes place, it benefits the rich who have money to pay the bribes. Clamping down on bribery would in that case hurt the rich.
Respectfully, you're dancing around the issue. These results are only surprising if you have a strong a priori expectation that rich people cheat and poor people don't.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to imagine what such an expectation might betray.
What it would betray is the reality that not all wealth is earned equally. Yes, there are plenty of people that earn through effort and merit. But to look at one's environment (wether in a first, second, or third world country) and not see how much wealth is created through cheating is ludicrous. When someone walks into a bank with a gun and empties the registers, it's easy for us to see how that's criminal. But someone who empties a bank via Wall Street, etc. is just doing their job I suppose.
The article stops short of an explanation, because the explanation for the gap may actually be very simple. However, it is more fashionable to talk about inequality gaps without actually looking at the causes.
Poorer students are more likely to be lazy and not want to study, due to their upbringing and because their parents are also less educated and have more distrust in the skills that are taught in schools. Richer students' parents are more likely to be well-educated and thus to impose on their children that they need to study harder and take education more seriously.
This is not news or any revelation. Of course, some of the richest kids may also be lazier, but the big difference would be between the poor and the middle-class kids.
Alternate/additional explanation for the findings: cheating continued after the campaign, but wealthier students were less afraid of the consequences than poor students.
Alternate alternate explanation: wealthier students also stopped cheating, but corruption became even more rampant in the grading stage. A lot of papers were "marked" so that they could be recognized by the graders and given a more favorable grading.
I know people which were a constant 5 at math through high school but which got 9.85 in the exam (1-10 grades at the time).
Teachers preferred corruption to happen in the exam room, since it was the students cheating, than in the grading stage where they were liable.
It never ceases to amaze me how much our life is determined by something we have zero control over - the family we are born into. "Life isn't fair" couldn't be more true here I guess.
This isn't to say that social status/family has to determine someone's future - I'm a firm believer that hard work and choices can turn that around. Although on a purely statistical basis, it seems that this is rarely the case.
Social status doesn't make you get bad grades on exams. Being stupid does. You can expect kids with poorer parents to do worse on exams in any place where smart people are better at making money.
Just to be clear - I'm comparing two billionaires who started off as millionaires, and suggesting that Gates is of above average intelligence whereas Trump is not.
But it doesn't last long. After 3 generations, maybe less, there's little statistical difference between those descended from wealth and those not (all else equal!) The super wealthy may leave billion dollar empires to their children, sure. But if we are talking about the upper middle class, a moderate inheritance from your parents isn't going to make or break your life's outcome.
A moderate inheritance plus support during your education may well make or break your life's outcome vs someone born to a poor family.
'Inheritance' doesn't have to mean just what was passed down at death - it must also include all the additional resources available during development to have any meaning.
But it doesn't! That's the point. Otherwise the lottery winners kids would be better off since they could go to better schools and afford college. In general there's little evidence that education makes any difference at all.
Seriously, your lottery winners example is meaningless.
But if you are saying that education makes little difference to lifetime earnings, you're going to have to back that up with a reference because it's an extraordinary claim.
Lottery winners are overwhelmingly white trash. Who would reasonably expect such people, with no experience of money, to invest their windfall reasonably?
The result isn't necessarily surprising, but it does show a point. Not all lottery winners blow the money immediately and foolishly. You would expect there to be at least some statistical effect. But it doesn't seem to matter. And it's probably the best randomized experiment we can do to compare the effects of wealth and not wealth, all other variables equal. Wealth doesn't' seem to matter as much as people think it does.
It goes back in time too. Winners of 1832 Georgia land lottery were given free land of significant value by the government to settle and farm. After a few decades, they weren't any better off than the nonwinners.
The average American has more wealth than pretty much everyone on Earth. You can't seriously think that it's because Americans are all genetically smarter than everyone else?
Variation within a group can be explained by different factors than variation between groups. That is, it could be completely true that Americans with higher IQs are more likely to become wealthy. But as a group America's success is due to other factors than IQ.
I don't think anybody would seriously dispute that relationship. Rather, I think people are disputing the directionality.
You seem to be suggesting some sort of natural selection process, whereas it's also legitimate to posit that status contributes to higher IQ (or g, if you prefer) in the form of:
- fewer chemical contaminants in utero and in early life (i.e. living in a less chemically polluted environment)
- access to better nutrition
- access to better medical care
- less stress in utero and in early life
- less exposure to disease
- less exposure to psycho-physiological toxicity (e.g.: poor sleep quality due to a noisy environment)
The list goes on.
tl;dr: you're assuming causation from correlation.
Who lost the most marks when cheating was stopped? Those of lower socio-economic status. Because those of such status generally engage in higher rates of criminal behavior [1], why is this presumed to be surprising?
It seems to me that the basis of the author's misunderstanding that leads to their surprise is the narrative of wealthy people being more likely to be corrupt on a per capita basis, which clearly runs counter to the statistics which demonstrate those of less economic means committing more crimes per capita.
It also runs counter to the fact that those of greater means have greater scores due to greater means, and thus less likely to need to cheat to have good scores.
I don't follow your last point. Why can't both be true? That seems like a leap. The socioeconomic status can still be the predominant predictor of grades.
Did you read the article? Here's the relevant parts:
The most likely culprit, it emerged, was that the "collective" and "petty" forms of corruption, as witnessed by Dr Borcan herself, had a curious effect: they might be paid for chiefly by well-off students bribing invigilators, but everyone benefited. It gave the poorer students "a free ride" to higher marks.
It also meant that when cheating was removed, the academic advantages of wealthier students became even more apparent. Cheating it seemed had provided a kind of levelling effect.
The more correct explanation would seem to be that wealthier students have other advantages - probably along the lines of test preparation, lower stress if it's anything as in the States - which allowed them to retain high performance once cheating was reduced.
I'm not sure from where you're deriving these narratives and counter narratives from.
That doesn't contradict his claim in the least. I don't think he's opposed to the notion that disparities exist in terms of competitive advantage.
The point is rather that such a result only comes as a surprise if one has a strong a priori expectation that rich people cheat more than poor people. Otherwise one would predict exactly this effect.
Wealth correlates well with opportunity and choices; students coming from wealthier families can better afford to acquire other compensating controls -- like private tutoring, or simply eating the fail on the exam and relying on social capital and social networks to make up for it after the fact.
The poor can't afford such measures and lack the social connections, so they have no choice to play outside the confines of the system and expect results; they have to obtain the relevant differentiator -- in this case, grades -- leaving some desperate subset among them to resort to the most overt, blatant types of cheating to get ahead.
Also the children of the affluent have more time since they often don't have to work.
In fact I was explicitly told by my parents to study rather than work. Their reasoning was that the whole point of them grinding their butts off working was so I could have the best education money could buy (they grew up poor in post WW2 Japan and were dirt poor immigrants in grad school in the 70's).
Worked out for me, but there's no denying that I had an enormous edge over the vast majority of my peers.
Nary a consideration of the possibility that poverty and cheating were correlated. "Equality" is euphemism for "the world how I arbitrarily want it--facts be damned."
What I find most interesting about the article is the complete lack of concern if the anti-corruption efforts have had an effect on absolute performance. It is though what is important is the pass rate on the exams, not the learning the material tested.
This isn't surprising at all. IQ is highly correlated with genetics (especially for older teens and adults), and the correlation between IQ and income is similarly strong.
The idea of completely stopping cheating in systems like these harms meritocracy. I know this sounds outrageous.
The problem is systemic - in European post-socialist countries, education is based mostly on rote learning which becomes more and more pointless in a modern world. Example on the bottom.
Students cope with that by cheating, which allows them to concentrate their time on actually useful aspects. Most teachers, except the dullest ones, tolerate that. In other words, the whole system sort-of works only because of cheating! As it's so accepted rote learning is irritating, but mostly harmless.
There's a fine boundary where cheating stops being beneficial - crib notes are great, making someone else solve problems for you, or having pre-made answers is not. That actually should be punished.
Punishing all forms of cheating is going to be incredibly damaging, because it means the best scoring students are going to be those best at memorization.
Wouldn't it be better to remove rote learning instead? Obviously, but I'm afraid that's not realistic. Harshly punishing cheating now is going to achieve the opposite: today's top rote learners become tomorrow's professors and teachers. Not only did they get great scores, but they presumably feel good in a rote-learning system.
---
What do I mean by rote learning? Memorize these numbers [0] to the third decimal place. Not a joke - it's a real example, albeit exceptional in its absurdity.
BBC unfortunately still has plenty of elitist or colonial shade. Articles showing most news from other countries in poor light or fault finding is its forte. Other day I was rummaging through news of 1999 about Google/Larry/Sergei. Bbc has mentioned it's a breakthrough tech but much of article was dedicated in mentioning that google only indexes only 10% of web. And the tone was on negative side. Peter thiel's rightly says that most of Western Europe only reacts to its progress.
reply