An instructor at a university in Beijing describes how, as final exams were nearing this year, a Ph.D. student who had been noticeably absent from classes during the semester presented him with a roll of 100 yuan notes. In an empty classroom, the student tried to shove the bills, the equivalent of several hundred dollars, into the pockets of the teacher.
The bribe was refused.
“I told him, ‘If you come to take the exam, you will get a [passing] grade,’” said the instructor, adding that he had been encouraged by the administration not to fail any students. But the student persisted, trying to stick the money into the instructor’s notebook. The instructor finally had to push aside the student, who was trying to block the door, to flee the classroom.
The stubborn student later showed up at the instructor’s apartment with an envelope containing the money. The attempted bribery only ended after the instructor took the envelope and threw it into the hallway, slamming the door behind him.
If cheating weren’t so common at Chinese universities, such incidents would be more comical. Students and professors say that corruption -- in admissions, exams, and scholarship -- is rampant in a system that lacks the rule of law, where bureaucracy dominates, and where the cultivation of guanxi, or relationships, defines how business is done. The problem isn’t limited to universities: In surveys, citizens repeatedly rank corruption as one of the country’s top problems. Learning to be corrupt may be one of the lessons a student gets from a university education in a society where engaging in corruption is viewed as a survival skill, even as people denounce bribery and bash those who are more well-connected than themselves.
The issue of corrupt admissions was spotlighted in the media last year, when a list of students admitted to Shanghai Jiao Tong University surfaced on a university Web site, posted accidentally by an admissions-office clerk. The document listed the names of 82 students, their national college exam scores, and the names of the people who recommended each student for admission, many of them influential government officials. College admissions in China are supposed to be based on a student’s score on the national exam. But if the student is connected and has missed the cutoff mark by a few points, administrators routinely ignore that rule.
“Every school has a list like this,” says a dean at one of Shanghai’s biggest universities, who admits to regularly pulling strings to get her friends’ children into college. “It’s just unfortunate that their list ended up on the Internet.”
References for Sale
But plenty of other instances of corruption escape attention, possibly because, as students and professors say, such practices are seen as ordinary. Individuals and private test-preparation centers sell letters of recommendation and personal essays for admission into foreign universities for around $125 each. Signs are posted around campuses advertising the services of qiang shou, or hired guns, who offer to take exams, including the Graduate Record Examination and Test of English as a Foreign Language, for students for anywhere between $200 to $1,200, depending on the difficulty of the test and the score earned. But sometimes, as one student says, “you don’t want too high of a score, otherwise people might think you’re cheating.” Raymond Nicosia, director of test security for the Educational Testing Service, says a variety of measures are taken to prevent impersonations, including requiring photo identification, videotaping the testing room, and taking pictures of students at the test site. The students’ pictures are printed on reports of test scores.
One recent graduate says an administrator at one of Beijing’s smaller colleges offered her $250 to take a graduate admissions exam for the administrator’s friend. The administrator assured the student that there was no risk involved, saying that the proctor had also been bribed. When the student declined, he offered to throw in a cell phone and a jade trinket.
Degrees are highly coveted in China -- not just for prestige, but also because salaries are determined by the status of the university the employee attended and what degree was earned. To make money, universities have recently been starting master’s degree and Ph.D. programs for executives and government officials. Students in these programs maintain their full-time jobs and put little emphasis on studying, say professors and administrators. Some students rarely attend class and hire others to write their dissertation, says Yang Dongping, a professor at Beijing Institute of Technology’s Higher Education Research Institute who has studied university corruption for several years.
Still others bypass the academic system entirely and buy their degrees. On the streets of Haidian, the capital’s university district, touts sell fake diplomas with the forged seals of real universities for $25. Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong-based, pro-Beijing newspaper last month reported that so many officials have bought diplomas that the government has had to start widespread checks on academic backgrounds of government officials, who are required to hold at least a bachelor’s degree. Job applicants in China often have to show their actual diplomas when applying for employment.
The result of all of the cheating and fakery is that the value of degrees themselves has been lowered. A February report in a restricted-circulation government journal titled Banyuetan says that Xijiang University, in a southern province, has gotten such a bad reputation for selling degrees that some employers in the region won’t take graduates from the university. But for many jobs, the diploma “is just a piece of paper that’s needed in the bureaucracy,” says one government official, who is also studying for a Ph.D. in Beijing. Most employers “know it’s fake -- and won’t check on it,” he adds. Mr. Yang, at Beijing Institute of Technology, estimates that at least half a million government employees have phony degrees.
To combat corruption, universities have begun setting rules to cut down on cheating. One positive outcome of Peking University’s recent plagiarism scandal, which involved an anthropology professor who copied an American textbook, is that the university has come up with a detailed code of conduct for students and professors. Besides plagiarism and fabrication of material, the code covers exaggerating the academic and economic results of research.
Several Chinese Web sites have begun keeping watch on university corruption. Mr. Yang advocates harsher punishments for administrators and professors engaged in corruption. “In the Ming dynasty, they would cut off your head,” he says. “Now you get three years in jail.” While he believes beheadings may be going too far, longer jail sentences might be appropriate, he says.
Fake Diplomas
But many professors and administrators are cynical, and feel there is little impetus for reform. An administrator in Beijing likens trying to cure corruption in universities to picking a pimple on a patient with cancer. Having connections is not just a source of pride, but also a means of survival, and bribes are seen as necessary presents. “Favors are expected, and at what point does gift giving and treating people to a meal become corruption?” says Stanley Rosen, a political-science professor at the University of Southern California who specializes in China.
With the vast majority of cases going unreported, offenders are rarely punished. In the case of the Ph.D. student who tried so hard to bribe his professor, at least one administrator knew about it, but no disciplinary action was taken. Some universities don’t want to lose students, even cheating ones, because tuition in many Ph.D. programs is high and often paid for by large companies and the government. “What’s to be gained from reporting this?” the administrator asks. “You would have honest and bankrupt schools.”
http://chronicle.com Section: International Page: A33
