Diversity Is A Strength: Cheating and Discrimination Against Americans

Source: "Everything we know about the
Boeing 737 Max 8 crisis" -- Quartz

    I've sometimes wondered if the alleged higher I.Q. scores attributed to the Chinese or other Asian countries are actually due to higher intelligence, or if there is some other factor at work, such as some advantage offered by the test being offered in a language comprised of ideograms. On paper at least, the higher I.Q. appears true as we see Chinese and Indians increasingly dominating the high tech industries. But is it really true? Perhaps not.

    I recently came across this store at American Renaissance, "Squeezed to Zero: How the Woke and the Chinese are Destroying Academic Mathematics" by Thomas Anderson. In it the author describes some of the factors, including discrimination, which are keeping non-Asian Americans not only from getting good jobs in the tech industry, but also forcing them out of the running to get into the better academic programs. For instance, the author describes what he discovered as he prepared to get into a Ph.D. program:

It was during this time that I began to realize that Asians are not, in fact, smarter than or similar to white students. I can’t understate how rampant the cheating was. It was incredibly obvious, but the professors looked the other way. This is because international students are a cash cow for universities. Asian students study only to pass the test in the easiest, fastest way possible, not to learn any material. This was most apparent when we were sent to find real datasets and work through statistical analyses. Real data is messy — Google cannot help you. It requires an actual understanding of statistics, common sense, and creativity in order to understand what data might be telling you. The Asian students tried to parrot examples from our textbooks, which were developed with simple, contrived data, and their results were a laughable mess. They were unable to answer hard questions about the theoretical basis of their work, and couldn’t grasp any assumptions or limitations of their models. But they always aced the tests.

I also had experiences in university classes where Chinese and Vietnamese students would speak to each other in their native tongues during tests and the professor would do nothing. Although I'm not sure, I'm guessing that they were not discussing the weather.

    The author also relates this about the GRE exam:

Students all over the world take this exam, hoping to enter top-tier institutions in Europe and the United States, and the best schools usually admit the people with the top scaled scores. The year I took the test, the people at the top got perfect scores — a nearly impossible achievement — and almost every one was Chinese. Is that because they were brilliant? A simple online search yields hundreds of results of Chinese cheating rings for entrance exams, including the one for mathematics. I cannot prove it, but I believe cheating cost me admission into several universities. When Chinese and Indian students cheat their way to a perfect score, this puts those of us who took the exam honestly out of the running. Shut out of the elite programs, I looked for and found a smaller one in Texas.

After obtaining his Ph.D. and going to work in the corporate world:

The office was almost all Indian and Chinese. I was a stranger in my own workplace, in my own country. Asian managers openly discriminate when hiring; they prefer their racial kinsmen. This means they can be hired with fake credentials, though their later job performance gives that away. If you want to know why software seems to be getting worse every year, look at the number of H1-B workers and the level of outsourcing.

And even in the corporate world, the Chinese employees, he reported, where trying to steal ideas from other people. Amazing. Read the whole thing.

    It has real world consequences. You may remember how Boeing experienced multiple crashes involving its 737 Max aircraft which was associated with a software issue in the plane's flight control software. It was eventually discovered that Boeing has outsourced the programming to an Indian firm that was wholly inadequate for the job. For instance, in a report from TOC, "Software used in 737 Max crashes linked to Indian software companies," it related:

    Through an investigative journalism work, Bloomberg published an article today (‘Boeing’s 737 Max Software Outsourced to $9-an-Hour Engineers‘, 29 Jun) establishing that the Boeing’s 737 Max software had been outsourced to Indian software engineers working for only US$9 an hour in India, compared with US$35 to $40 for those in the U.S. on H1B visa or more for a full-time US software engineer.

    Bloomberg also found that Boeing’s subcontractors and suppliers were also outsourcing software work to India, in order to keep the cost down and to maximize profits.

    Longtime Boeing engineers whom Bloomberg spoke to, revealed that the problematic Max software which was plagued by issues, was developed at a time Boeing was laying off experienced engineers and pressing suppliers to cut costs. Hence, there was a push to outsource work to lower-paid contractors. This led to the reliance on temporary workers making as little as US$9 an hour to develop and test software, often from countries lacking a deep background in aerospace – notably India.

    Two Indian software companies were found by Bloomberg to be linked to the Max software development – HCL and Cyient (formerly known as Infotech). The coders from HCL were typically designing to specifications set by Boeing, said a former Boeing software engineer. Still, “it was controversial because it was far less efficient than Boeing engineers just writing the code,” he said. Frequently, “it took many rounds going back and forth because the code was not done correctly,” he recalled.

I also found some articles describing wide-spread academic cheating in their native countries as well as here in the U.S.    

• "Bihar cheating scandal: What parents in India will do for good grades"--CNN (March 20, 2015). 

    The quest to be educated in India has literally scaled new heights.

    Images of parents and family members clambering up school buildings and clinging on window ledges to pass cheat sheets to their children have left authorities in despair.

    The incident took place on Wednesday in the state of Bihar, where students were writing their year-end grade 10 examinations.

    Examples of cheating incidents are not hard to find in India. But, even compared to previous events, this seems to be unprecedented in its blatancy.

• "Hundreds arrested following Indian exam cheating scandal"--The Independent (March 22, 2015).

    Authorities in the state of Bihar posted police at all schools where exams were being held over the weekend. At least 300 people were arrested and up to 700 students in total have been expelled for cheating.

    Police resorted to firing warning shots in the air outside an examination centre in the Vaishali District on Saturday to prevent large numbers of people helping students copy answers posted through the windows by friends and parents, The Tribune reports.

    The state government also took seven policemen into custody for dereliction of duty after they were accused of accepting bribes and ignoring people clambering up the side of buildings.

    Images and footage of parents and friends of students scaling up to four storeys of an exam centre to deliver answers to students inside emerged last week.

• "How Sophisticated Test Scams From China Are Making Their Way Into the U.S.: Chinese students hire imposter 'gunmen' to take the SAT, the GRE and other tests" by Peg Tyre, The Atlantic (March 21, 2016). Key bit:

No one is sure exactly how many SAT, GRE and English-proficiency exam takers are using imposters in the U.S., but law-enforcement officials believe they could be more active than test administrators and security experts once thought possible. “Hiring test-taking proxies has been a widespread practice in China for a long time,” says Terry Crawford, who runs a video interviewing service called Initialview, which helps colleges, including Stanford, Duke, Georgia Tech, NYU, and Columbia, vet overseas applicants. “With so many Chinese students wanting to study in the U.S., it’s natural that these fraudulent practices are spreading here, where security is comparatively low.”

• "How an industry helps Chinese students cheat their way into and through U.S. colleges"--Reuters (May 25, 2016).

    Today, the University of Iowa, one of the largest state universities in the American Midwest, says it is investigating at least 30 students suspected of cheating. Three sources familiar with the inquiry say the number under investigation may be two or three times higher.

    University spokespeople declined to name the students or comment on their nationality, citing academic privacy laws.

    But those familiar with the investigation said that most, perhaps all, of the cheating suspects are Chinese nationals. They stand accused of cheating in online versions of at least three courses, including law and economics. Three of the Chinese suspects admitted to Reuters that they hired Chinese-run outfits to take exams for them.

* * *

    The Iowa cheating rings are the latest evidence of how a vibrant East Asian industry is corrupting the U.S. higher education system by gaming entrance exams, concocting college applications and completing college coursework on behalf of students. These nimble operators not only help students cheat their way into universities. They also help them cheat their way through.

    The companies are prospering by exploiting two intersecting interests: the growing demand by Chinese nationals to study overseas, and the desire by U.S. colleges to profit from foreign students willing to pay full tuition.

    As Reuters reported in March, some companies are leveraging weaknesses in the SAT, a standardized college entrance exam, to help clients gain an unfair advantage on the test by feeding them questions in advance.

    In addition, Reuters has identified companies in China that help students contrive their entire college application – embellishing or ghostwriting application essays, doctoring letters of recommendation from high school teachers, and even advising kids to obtain fake high school transcripts. Other providers continue the illicit assistance after admission, such as those that performed coursework for hire in Iowa City.

• "India tried to stop cheating in school — so half a million students just skipped exams"--Washington Post (Feb. 9, 2018). 

    It’s only the fourth day of annual examinations in India’s largest state of Uttar Pradesh and already the government says 661,643 students — around 10 percent of the total number enrolled — have failed to show up.

    A government official said it’s because this year they've upped their anti-cheating efforts, and clamped down on the state’s notorious education mafia by installing CCTV cameras and deploying a police task force to catch the cheaters.

    India’s hugely competitive examination system coupled with poor teaching standards in schools has seen the growth of a massive cheating industry in recent decades. Students need top marks — sometimes over 99 percent — to get into the country’s highly oversubscribed universities and so examiners are bribed, answer sheets leaked and exam rooms infiltrated.

• "A Chinese Cheating Ring at UCLA Reveals an Industry Devoted to Helping International Students Scam Grades" by Christopher Beam, LA Magazine (April 26, 2019).

    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 “an excellent student” and a “great person” who was “easy to get along with.” 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. 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. 

Also:

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. 

Another issue that crops up is discrimination, sometimes described as a form of nepotism. Of course, it has always been acknowledged that to make it to the top of the corporate ladder or advance beyond a certain point in any organization, it mattered more who you knew than what you knew. But it seems to be an open secret that Indian managers in IT (or any other company, for that matter) will outright discriminate against anyone that is not Indian. (See also here). For instance, in a Vice article about how Indian managers have imported India's caste discrimination system into nominally American companies, it related the following (underline added):

    Maya is a Dalit, a group previously called “untouchables” in India’s caste system, which has structured Hindu society for centuries. Under the caste system, people are ranked at birth, and that impacts every aspect of their lives, including where they work, who they marry, and access to education.

    But she soon learned that caste discrimination didn't respect borders, and for 18 years she has faced discrimination at the hands of higher-caste Brahmin Indians who have established powerful cliques within many of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies. She has hidden her identity and even used fake names to get work.

"Powerful cliques" within the companies. Chew on that. And as Breibart reports, it is driving Americans out of IT jobs:

    Census data shows that one-in-seven software developers in Hudson County, New Jersey, were born in the United States, down from a six-in-seven share in 1980.

    This wholescale replacement of American software experts by foreigners — mostly by Indian visa workers — is repeated in many counties across the United States, according to 2017 federal census data analyzed by R. Davis, a software developer in Silicon Valley.

    The trend is spreading into other sectors, including accounting, health care, and design because U.S. investors and Indian firms are cooperating to transfer many professional-grade jobs to India and the payroll savings to Wall Street.

    In 2017, American-born programmers were just one-in-four software employees in Santa Clara, California, down from four-in-five in 1980.

    Just one-in-three software developers in Richmond County, NY, were born in the United States. One-third of the workers in Forsyth County, GA; McLean County, IL; and in San Bernardino County, CA, in 2017 were American-born.

    Americans comprise only four-in-ten programmers in Bergen County, TN; in Loudoun County, VA; in Broward County, FL; and in Denton County, TX.

    American-born software experts are only half the workforce in Snohomish County, WA; in Cleveland County, OK; in Douglas County, NE; in Montgomery County, MD; in Suffolk County, MA; and in Benton County, AR, the home of Walmart.

    “It should be concerning that some very key areas, like Silicon Valley and New York City, have the largest swings in the demographics,” Davis told Breitbart News. He continued:

     I think that these areas have reached the point that there is a real risk that tech workers from certain countries (mostly India) are being favored in the hiring process.

    One item that I haven’t really heard covered is the fact that the majority of recruiters now seem to be India-born … I have had 4 on-site interviews since being laid off and interviews with 18 people during those interviews. A full 13 of them appeared to have been born in India and only one seemed to be likely U.S. born.

    That may have been partially bad luck and much of the problem that I had getting hired may have been from ageism, being in my early 60s. Still, it seems to point out a risk of one nationality getting too high a representation in the hiring process.

Moreover, the huge inflow of foreign visa workers — and expanding loss of young American graduates — is gradually filling middle-management and leadership teams with foreign-born executives.

    There is a growing volume of anecdotal reports and courtroom evidence that Indian managers at U.S. companies and subcontractors prefer to hire Indians, usually by covertly discriminating against better-qualified American applicants.

 Read the whole thing.