On paper, Liu Cai was a model student. After moving to the United States from Beijing, he majored in biology at UCLA and volunteered at the Boys & Girls Club. A former teacher, Jose Echeverria, remembers him as âan excellent studentâ and a âgreat personâ who was âeasy to get along with.â Cai graduated in 2017 and landed a job at a health care technology company in Santa Monica. He appeared to be doing everything right.
So it came as a surprise when, on a Tuesday morning in March, federal authorities arrested him on suspicion of facilitating an international cheating ring. 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. Caiâs ringers would show up to testing sites with fake Chinese passports bearing their own photos but with the names of the clients. Where Cai slippedâand where investigators caught up to himâwas 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 âOperation TOEFL Recall.â) While the UCLA case is less shockingâbribes in thousands of dollars instead of millions; Chinese high schoolers instead of Full House cast membersâit represents an equally notable underbelly of American college admissions. If Varsity Blues is about the American ruling class perpetuating its privilege, the UCLA scandal reveals the extreme pressures and perverse incentives facing international students, many of them far less privileged and desperate to not screw up their shot.
Itâs 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.
Few suggest that Chinese students, who make up a third of all international students in the U.S., cheat at higher rates than students from other foreign countries. âPeople are understandably reluctant to make many assertions here,â said Gary Pavela, who runs the Academic Integrity Seminar, an instructional program for students caught cheating. âItâs become very sensitive and somewhat politicized.â In March a professor at the University of Maryland resigned after students accused him of discrimination for allegedly saying that all Chinese students cheat.
Itâs safe to say, though, that Chinese students bear the brunt of scrutiny. In 2016 Reuters reported that the University of Iowa was investigating at least 30 studentsâmost, if not all, believed to be Chineseâover allegations of cheating. In 2015 federal prosecutors in Pennsylvania indicted 15 Chinese nationals for a standardized test-taking scheme similar to the UCLA case. ACT Inc. and the College Board, which owns the SAT, frequently delays or cancels scores in Asia when test materials leak.
As supply follows demand, an entire industry has sprouted to help Chinese college applicants and students cheat. A Google search yields countless websites offering substitute test-taking services for the SAT, ACT, GRE, and TOEFL. A site called Cherry Blossom promises a âsafe,â âhonestâ experience for clients and contains numerous screen grabs of chats between the proprietor, who goes by âDemonHunter,â and satisfied customers. I messaged DemonHunter, offering my services as a test taker. âYou may need to go to Saudi Arabia for your first mission,â he wrote back. I asked how much it paid, but he never responded. He could smell a fake a mile away.
Indeed, scams in this industry are rampant. It can be hard to find a trustworthy cheater. While researching this story I paid a Chengdu-based website called HotEssay to write an article for me about the problem of international students cheating in the United States (it charged about 11 cents a word). The result, while not quite publication worthy, contained no plagiarism, as least as far as I could detect. A+!
âThey think itâs a gray area, but in the U.S. itâs a no-no area.â
Many consulting companies work to exploit flaws in the standardized testing system. The College Board often reuses SATs, administering them first in the U.S. and then in other countries months or years later. Test prep companies in Asia can therefore compile information about past exams to create a study bookletâor, if theyâre pros, to re-create entire tests. For exams offered on the same day around the world, some students will even exploit the time difference, taking the test in one time zone and then relaying details to students in a later time zone (a strategy dramatized in the 2017 Thai film Bad Genius).
But domestic students have access to these schemes, too. Why do international students exploit them more? Experts I spoke with cited family pressure, as many young Chinese students are only children and the first in their families to study abroad; opportunity, as cheating companies actively hawk their services in Mandarin to incoming students; and a general lack of preparedness for the rigors of an education in a non-native language. âThe biggest factor is not their international status but going to school in a language that theyâre not proficient in,â says David Rettinger, president of the International Center for Academic Integrity. (In 2017 the Chinese state-run Global Times ran a trend story about foreign students, including Americans, cheating at Chinese universities.)
Cultural differences play a role, too, particularly when it comes to perceived gray areas. Chinese students might think itâs acceptable to collaborate on homework or to find the answers to a test online in advance, says Andrew Chen of WholeRen, a firm that helps Chinese students apply to schools and jobs in the U.S. âThey think itâs a gray area, but in the U.S. itâs a no-no area.â
Cheating can self-perpetuate if unchecked. Chen tells the story of a student who faked his TOEFL score to get into Purdue University. Once there, he paid someone to attend classes for him. His (employeeâs) grades were good enough that he got into Columbia University for grad school, but then, struggling, he hired someone to take his classes there, too. Hoping to land a job at Goldman Sachs, he sought Chenâs help. âI think his English was at a high school level,â Chen says. All told, the beleaguered Chinese student spent nearly $1.2âmillion on not going to school.
Fixing cheating requires a comprehensive approach. Pavela compares it to airport security. Safety relies on a combination of ID checks, no-fly lists, metal detectors, and X-rays, and see-something-say-something vigilance. You donât just tell people not to bring a bomb on a plane. Standardized test companies implement ever-stronger security measures, including, in the case of the Educational Testing Service, which administers the GRE and TOEFL, facial and voice recognition software (still a far cry from the fingerprinting and radio-signal-detecting drones used at some testing sites for Chinaâs hypercompetitive college entrance exam). They also maintain a ârogueâs galleryâ of suspected cheaters and cross-reference new test-taker data against that, says Ray Nicosia, ETS director of testing security.
But reducing academic dishonesty might ultimately require, of all things, education. âItâs good old-fashioned teaching,â says Pavela, who runs the anti-cheating seminar. Getting through to students means helping them understand their goals and how cutting corners runs counter to achieving them. In his program, Pavela has students write a âgratitude statement.â âYou donât have to hire someone to do that,â he says. He also screens Shattered Glass, a 2003 film about fabulist journalist Stephen Glass in which, Pavela says, âhe started to deceive himself.â From there itâs a matter of getting to know students on an individual basis. âWhat youâre teaching has got to be engaging,â Pavela says. âItâs got to seem relevant to them in some way. If you can do that, youâll dramatically reduce academic dishonesty.â
Which sounds great, if schools have the resources for such personal attention. But in the meantime thereâs a huge, unthinking profit-driven apparatus steering students toward shortcuts. After getting my paper back from HotEssay, I asked âLisa,â a customer service rep, if the company worried that students use its services to cheat. âI donât know what they use it for,â she replied. When I pressed her, she offered an analogy: âThe vegetable seller doesnât ask you whether youâre going home to boil your food or fry it. Just worry about your own food.â
Note: This postâs subheadline was updated to remove an incorrect reference to the agency responsible for Operation TOEFL.Â
RELATED: How USC Became the Most Scandal-Plagued Campus in America
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weirdowiththebeardo on May 2nd, 2019 at 13:38 UTC »
I want to give a shoutout to whomever came up with "Operation TOEFL Recall". You a real one.
Ice_Man11 on May 2nd, 2019 at 13:30 UTC »
Anyone who has gone to a large American university is not shocked by this at all.
makencarts on May 2nd, 2019 at 12:34 UTC »
20 years ago, at Cal Poly, there were always several people in each class that couldn't speak a complete sentence in English.
I give my utmost respect to those who weren't cheating, but I'll guarantee you others were and it really did seem systematic.
Edit: Auto-correct failed me again!!!