A vibrant East Asian industry is
corrupting the American higher education system by gaming entrance exams,
concocting college applications and completing coursework on behalf of students
The advertisements were
tailored for Chinese college students far from home, struggling with the
English language and an unfamiliar culture.
Coaching services peppered
the students with emails and chat messages in Chinese, offering to help foreign
students at American colleges do much of the work necessary for a university
degree.
The companies would author
essays for clients. Handle their homework. Even take their exams. All for about
US$1,000 a course.
For dozens of Chinese
nationals at the University of Iowa in the United States, the offers proved
irresistible.
“Test-taking services.
Paper-writing. Take Online Courses for you,” says the social-messaging profile
of one Chinese coaching outfit used by Iowa students, UI International Student
Services.
A pitch emailed from another
business ended with this reassuring claim: “Your friends are all using us.”
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 that they hired Chinese-run outfits to take exams for them.
A May 8 letter sent by the
university to a fourth Chinese student, who allegedly had imposters take his
midterms for him, says the school will recommend expulsion.
“We are unable to be sure
that you will not cheat in the future, since your past actions call your future
behaviour into question,” it reads.
Foreigners in the United
States on student visas face possible deportation under US immigration law if
expelled from school.
GAMING THE AMERICAN SYSTEM
The Iowa cheating rings are
the latest evidence of how a vibrant East Asian industry is corrupting the US
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 US colleges to profit from foreign
students willing to pay full tuition.
Some companies are
leveraging weaknesses in the SAT, a standardised college entrance exam, to help
clients gain an unfair advantage on the test by feeding them questions in
advance.
In addition, there are
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 them 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.
“The reality is for
international students, particularly in Asia, there’s a worry about whether the
application is authentic, whether the essay is authentic, whether the person
who shows up at your door is the same person who applied,” said Joyce E. Smith,
chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counselling
in Arlington, Virginia.
The cheating services extend
far beyond Iowa.
At the University of
Washington, the University of Alabama and Penn State University, for example,
students received Chinese-language advertisements by email this semester from
unnamed firms.
The pitch: Students could
raise their grade point averages and graduate early if they hired the outfits
to take classes and do assignments for them. The ads offered a money-back
guarantee. Students who did not get As would get refunds.
AN EASIER WAY AHEAD
The market for such services
has major potential.
About 761,000 degree-seeking
foreign students now study in the US, according to the Institute of
International Education. A third come from China.
Department of Commerce
statistics show that Chinese students spent almost $10 billion on tuition and
other goods and services in America in 2014.
[Rong] was in the middle of the pack in terms of his
grades. Apparently that was not good enough for his family
Steven Griffin
Of course, not all Chinese
students are dishonest, and American students aren’t immune to the lure of
cheating either. Still, the temptation to break the rules is great in China
because the stakes are extraordinarily high.
Most seats at universities
in China are awarded through a competitive national entrance exam known as the
gaokao, a test that requires years of round-the-clock preparation.
A growing number of Chinese
parents are reluctant to put their children through that gauntlet. US
universities offer an easier way to get ahead, with a quality education and
better job prospects.
To help those students
succeed, a multifaceted industry is taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the
US higher education system.
For colleges, vetting the
applicants who use these services can be daunting. The case of Xuan “Claren”
Rong shows why.
A native of Shenzhen, a city
of about 11 million people near Hong Kong, Rong spent part of high school in
America. He entered the MacDuffie School, a boarding and day school in Granby,
Massachusetts, as a ninth-grader in September 2011.
“He seemed to be a diligent,
hardworking kid,” said Steven Griffin, MacDuffie’s head of school. Trouble was,
“he was in the middle of the pack in terms of his grades,” Griffin recalled.
“Apparently that was not
good enough for his family.”
Rong’s transcript at
MacDuffie, which the school verified as authentic, shows his overall grade
point average (GPA) as of April 2014 was 2.8 out of 4 – about a B – though it
was marred with Ds in Latin and Physics.
Rong was supposed to
graduate in 2015 but dropped out after his junior year.
In March 2014, he became a
client of Cunshande, a company that helps Chinese students get accepted to top
US colleges.
Cunshande, also known as
Transcend Education, is located on the 25th floor of an office tower in the
financial district of Shenzhen.
A HANDSOME FEE
Its founders – Kevin Li and
Michael Du – both attended one of America’s top public schools, the University
of California, Los Angeles.
Li said they began advising
Chinese students on applying to American colleges while at UCLA. Du would not
comment other than to say in an email that he is “no longer involved with the
operations at Transcend”.
Li and Du opened Transcend
in Shenzhen about five years ago. Li said Transcend has about 40 clients a year
and charges between US$12,000 and US$18,000 for its services, which he
described as mentoring and counseling students.
A receipt shows that Claren
Rong’s parents paid about $13,700 to Transcend. With the company’s help, Rong
applied to at least 15 U.S. colleges, emails reviewed by Reuters indicate. He
was accepted in 2015 by the University of California, Davis.
In March 2015, more than a
hundred U.S. colleges began receiving emails from an anonymous former Transcend
employee. The emails included details about 40 Chinese applicants, including
Rong.
“I am writing this email to
inform you that the student Xuan Rong under the influence of Cunshande, a
company which ghostwrites applications for Chinese students applying to
American universities, committed application fraud,” the tipster wrote to some
of the schools.
Rong, the tipster alleged,
claimed in his college applications that he attended a Chinese high school in
downtown Shenzhen, where he maintained an A average in his sophomore and junior
years.
In fact, the tipster said,
Rong was attending MacDuffie in Massachusetts.
The tipster attached two
transcripts for Rong – his real one from MacDuffie, the other from the school
in Shenzhen. Both transcripts list grades for his sophomore and junior years,
even though Rong did not take classes at the Shenzhen school those years.
Admissions offices often
lack the staff to pursue such red flags.
At UC Davis, where Rong was
admitted, 68,519 people applied to attend the school this fall. One of every
five were international students. The school has just seven admissions officers
on staff to vet those 13,560 international applicants.
Even so, an admissions
officer at UC Davis, Mitsuko Leonard, did email the former Transcend employee,
promising that “any real evidence you are able to provide will be considered”.
FAKE TRANSCRIPT
The tipster responded five
days later, on March 30, 2015, offering information about 21 students in 217 attached
documents. Leonard forwarded the material to the UC president’s office.
“Yikes this is from the
anonymous source in China. Please review,” she wrote.
Most of the attachments were
different versions of college essays that, the tipster claimed, had been
doctored by Transcend employees. They included nine versions of an essay by
Rong.
The evolving drafts display
dramatic improvement in grammar and writing. The email also included a “Special
Note” about where Rong attended high school.
The tipster alleged that
Rong’s parents had obtained “a fake Chinese high school transcript” from a
local Chinese high school to “hide his poor” average at MacDuffie. The
attachments included his legitimate transcript from the Massachusetts school.
UC Davis did not contact the
school at that time, and it admitted Rong.
The university said that we didn’t provide the right
information
Rong’s father
Griffin, MacDuffie’s school
head, said a UC Davis representative called months later, in late September,
asking about Rong.
A UC Davis spokesman
initially said the university could not comment on specific students. He later
said Rong would be leaving the university after the fall semester in December
2015.
Rong declined to comment.
His father, Yuanxin Rong, confirmed in an interview in Shenzhen last November
that UC Davis had expelled his son.
“The university said that we
didn’t provide the right information” in his application, he said.
Rong’s father also confirmed
that his son submitted a bogus Chinese high school transcript. He said
Transcend had advised his family to obtain a transcript from the Chinese high
school because of his son’s low GPA at MacDuffie.
Ketty Kang, director of the
international department at Cuiyuan High School in Shenzhen, confirmed that the
school issued a transcript for Rong showing he spent his sophomore and junior
years there.
“I should have added more
information to say he wasn’t actually at the school for several years,” she
said.
Li, the co-founder of
Transcend, initially said he had no knowledge of the Chinese transcript for
Rong. But the metadata – computer information – of the transcript, which was a
Microsoft Word file, showed that it had last been saved by Li.
Shown a copy of the document
and the metadata, Li conceded that Transcend had the fake transcript on file
and that he had seen it before. But he said Transcend played no part in
obtaining the document.
‘ANYONE WOULD DO THAT’
Li said the company does not
ghostwrite applications. He also said Transcend does not help students create
teacher recommendations for themselves.
But drafts of more than 200
recommendation letters written for more than 50 Transcend students suggest
otherwise.
The metadata on those
documents indicates that they, too, had been stored on Transcend’s computers.
Letters of recommendation are customarily confidential, and teachers rarely let
anyone change them.
We just wanted to get in a better school. It’s normal.
Anyone would do that.
Rong’s father
The letters disclosed by the
tipster bear signs of having been scripted or altered by students or Transcend
employees.
Two of the recommendations
are for Rong. Both claim he attended Cuiyuan High. One referred to his
“outstanding academic performance”. In another, a teacher claimed he had taught
Rong math in 11th grade and that he was “a great student”.
In a purported teacher’s
recommendation for another student, Li commented in the margins, “This part
needs to be expanded”.
He added that two other
paragraphs could be “combined into one and shortened so we have enough space
for this expanded paragraph”.
Shown a copy of that letter,
Li said Transcend never changes recommendations. Transcend’s input on that
particular letter, he said, was “definitely authorised by the school teacher.”
The teacher says otherwise.
Phillip Stout, then a
teacher at Shenzhen Middle School, said he did write a letter for the student,
whose name is being withheld. But Stout said he never gave a copy of the letter
to the student or authorised anyone to change it.
He also said he had never
heard of Li or his company. How Transcend obtained the letter is a mystery to Stout.
“If somebody else is editing
it, it’s not something I ever wanted,” he said. “It’s upsetting to hear.”
Rong’s father said the
family would now try to find another US school for his son. He expressed no
remorse about obtaining the fake Chinese transcript.
“We just wanted to get in a
better school,” he said. “It’s normal. Anyone would do that.”
‘THEY TEMPTED US’
The situation at the
University of Iowa illustrates how Chinese cheating-service providers can cause
trouble long after admission.
At Iowa, four or five
so-called transcript evaluators review international applications from
potential freshmen, according to a school spokesman. For the fall 2016 term,
nearly 5,000 international students applied, leaving each of the admissions
officers to scrutinise on average about a thousand applications.
In 2015, 4,540 international
students were enrolled at Iowa. Of those, 2,797 were from China. That’s 9
percent of the school’s student body. Most or all of the students accused of
cheating are Chinese nationals.
An email sent on April 25 to
faculty members of Iowa’s business school explained how the suspects were
caught.
The students, wrote Kenneth
G. Brown, associate dean at the university’s Tippie College of Business, had
taken online examinations monitored by a proctoring services company, ProctorU.
The contractor discovered
that students taking online classes had other people take their exams for them,
he wrote.
ProctorU is able to monitor
students through the cameras mounted in the computers used to take the test. In
checking the faces of the exam-takers against the identification photos of the
legitimate students, ProctorU came to believe that imposters had stepped in for
the students. It then alerted the university.
We’re students, too, making a little hard-earned money. I
hope you can have mercy on us in your writing. Don’t wipe us out. Thanks a
million.
UI International
“Some of these students
conducted this type of cheating in more than one class,” Brown wrote. He said
that some of the ringers cheated for more than one student. Brown declined to
comment. ProctorU confirmed the outlines of how it detected the cheating.
It is not clear if the
university has identified any of the ringers, known as “gunmen” in China. But
the three Chinese students interviewed for this article mentioned several
services they had used. The students spoke on the condition that they not be
named.
One, a third-year transfer
student from a Chinese university, said UI International Student Services took
a midterm exam for her in March.
In a series of
Chinese-language messages via the WeChat app, UI International confirmed that
it provided “substitute” course-taking services to students at the University
of Iowa.
But contradicting the
student, UI International denied taking exams for students and said none of its
clients had been accused of academic fraud.
UI International said it
also provides services at a handful of other American colleges, which it
declined to name. Its students-for-hire are all undergraduates, UI
International said, but not all are Chinese.
“We’re students, too, making
a little hard-earned money,” UI International said in the WeChat exchange. “I
hope you can have mercy on us in your writing. Don’t wipe us out. Thanks a
million.”
Another student caught in
the cheating crackdown, a sophomore, said she hired a company that goes by the
names Fanyi Translation and Fanyi Creation Translation.
Fanyi’s website,
fanyishop.com, became inaccessible on May 23. It had carried the motto
“diligently creating value”.
Its specialities include
writing papers for students. “We have native English speakers from the UK and
the US who can guarantee the quality of the writing,” the site said.
Fanyi charged 5 cents per
word for “polishing” an existing piece of writing and 21 cents a word for “gold
medal expert service” – editors writing bespoke pieces for the student.
Fanyi also said it would
create documents for students going abroad, including personal statements and
recommendation letters.
‘BOLT OUT OF THE BLUE’
Fanyi accepted payment in US
and Canadian dollars, British pounds and Chinese renminbi, by Visa, MasterCard
and UnionPay, its website said. The operators of the company could not be
contacted.
The transfer student who
said she used UI International is a 21-year-old junior. She has been at Iowa
for two semesters. She paid $1,200 to UI International to take the midterm exam
for her in the Introduction to Law course, she said.
“At the start, I wasn’t
looking for someone to take my exams for me,” she said.
My family is very strict with me and has very high
expectations for my grades ... My mother’s health is not good, too, and I
didn’t want to disappoint her, which led me to make a wrong decision.
A 21-year-old transfer student
“But when I did my homework,
I discovered the grades I got for my homework were always very poor. Then I
began to worry.
“My family is very strict
with me and has very high expectations for my grades.”
Her mother teaches at a
university back home in China, she said.
“My mother’s health is not
good, too, and I didn’t want to disappoint her, which led me to make a wrong
decision,” she said.
The sophomore student who
hired Fanyi Translation said she paid the service US$1,400 to take the midterm
exam for her in the same law course.
“[The service] sweet talked
and tricked us. They told us they can get As for us – that they can guarantee
Bs and strive for As,” she said.
Fanyi delivered on one
promise, though: the girl received a B on her midterm. But because she was
caught cheating, she failed the course.
“We really regret it now,”
she said.
A third student, also a
sophomore, said he paid US$2,400 via PayPal to someone a friend recommended
through WeChat. The service would take two online economics classes for him.
The sophomore did not even know the ringer’s name.
A mediocre student, he
thought the service would help his grades. He said he recognised that what he
did is wrong.
When the university told him
he had been caught, he said: “It was a bolt out of the blue. I was really
scared.”
Now, the student is looking
to put the incident behind him. He says he hopes to stay on in the US – and
transfer to another school.
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