Interview: Grace Before Meals post-rocking Shanghai
A big THANKS to all our Independence Day Party sponsors
Around Shanghai: No more airplane temperature checks, but we're getting a Wall St. Bull and Linkin Park!
Shanghaiist was never a good cheater -- we raised the hand that had the history of the American Civil War scribbled on it to hail the teacher over. Chinese students, on the other hand, are much more adept and much more high-tech about it. However, remember that these things do backfire.
A student in Wuhan, capital of China's central province of Hubei, used earphones so small that they slipped into his aural canal and perforated his eardrum, the China Daily newspaper said.Another student's earphones required an operation for their removal, the paper said, while an electronic device connected to headphones and strapped to a third student's body exploded, leaving a bleeding hole in his abdomen.
Supervisors at an exam hall in Wuhan, capital of central Hubei province, found over 100 "cheating tools" including earphones hidden in vests, wallets and waistbands, the paper said.
Bleeding abdomens? Sounds like Wuhan, Iraq.
The monitoring of test sites has gone high-tech: There are video cameras mounted in every classroom as well as devices that interfere with mobile phone signals. They know when your phone picks up a signal.
For a list of various methods of cheating, check out this report (in Chinese). Ｕnfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your sense of justice) the cheaters are now being cheated. The glasses that you see in the picture, which supposedly contain a camera and are doubled sided (meaning perhaps you can see something from the inside?) are for sale on the internet, and are probably fake. Our personal favorite is a pen like the one you see in The Da Vinci Code -- the light emitted from the pen illuminates the cheat sheet that you've written in invisible ink somewhere else. At least it won't perforate your eardrum or blow up in your face. The title of this article says it all: it uses a literal translation of the English phrase "armed to the teeth" -- 武装到牙齿.
Of course, the university entrance examination is really just the tip of the iceberg: Pay enough and you can get the damn degree, as well. Here's just one example from Liaoning province (in Chinese).
Photo from Xinhua.
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sheesh, for all the time it takes to come up with these crazy ideas you'd think they'd just as well study for the damn test. afterall, it's all rote memorization here anyway, right? :p
well, it is a lot of memorization but on the other hand, most standardized tests are--there are virtually no areas of human creativity tested in any standardized test that i've ever taken. Obviously certain subjects need more memorization than others--you need to memorize English vocab, trigonometric identities, etc. In fact that is really part of the problem--they test so many things that it really strains people. In america, the SAT was just two sections, it required little substantive knowledge, and while certain amounts of cultural knowledge were perhaps implicit in the verbal sections, it really boiled down to your comprehension, and not really your literateness or ability to harness the power of language, i.e., write. i think the educational system is less monolithic and absurd than it used to be; mor people are doing vocational training, for example. But still it's a pressure cooker. don't know what else to say about it.