Copycat kids

As we near the end of the first term, students are handing in their plagiarized final assignments and reciting their memorized presentations. It's a fascinating, frustrating, and sometimes funny issue that we foreign instructors can talk about endlessly. The Chinese faculty doesn't find it problematic, or even interesting, and our department doesn't have any policies against plagiarism.

Independent thinking does not exist in this educational system. Rote memorization and regurgitation are the norm. Students are taught that there is only one correct answer to anything and everything. They are taught that that one correct answer cannot be found in their own imaginations; it's an answer that already exists and it's their job to memorize it. Everything in China, after all, leads to one party line, one standardized thought, one absolute authority. Critical thinking is risky business; so what we, as teachers, are left with are a lot of students with no opinions mindlessly repeating what they'd read or heard someplace else.

Since Tsinghua is arguably the best university in China-- known as a feeder school to Party leadership-- we have, in our classrooms, the nation's strongest test-taking, inside-the-box-thinking, rote-memorizing, and risk-adverse perfectionists.

Last year a Yale biology professor, who was a visiting teacher at Peking University (also known as "Beida," and Tsinghua's rival), was so personally insulted by his students' behavior that he wrote them a letter assailing widespread plagiarism in China. I can relate to his frustrations, but his letter doesn't really delve into why chronic plagiarism exists, which I think is something worth pondering. He also went on to attack the country's lack of protection for intellectual-property rights.

“Disturbingly, plagiarism fits into a larger pattern of behavior in China,” he wrote. “China ignores international intellectual-property rights. Beida sees nothing wrong in copying my textbook, for example, in complete violation of international copyright agreements, causing me to lose income, stealing from me quite directly. No one in China seems to care."

An interesting letter. You can read Professor Stern's entire letter here.