Cheatin' on Uncle Mao

Clever methods for cheating on the national college entrance exams in China:

China’s students have apparently developed skills for building cheating devices to use during an SAT-like exam that look like they have been pulled straight from a James Bond movie.

Some of the uncovered equipment included miniature cameras installed into both a pen and a set of glasses, as well as wireless earphones resembling small earplugs. In one instance, a grey tank top was wired with a plug capable of connecting to a mobile phone that could be used to send out information. There was also a camera installed in the shirt.

“Imagine in the US if all universities began to admit students simply on how they ranked on the SAT,” [said Yong Zhao, the presidential chair at the University of Oregon's College of Education] “When you have one criteria to select students you are always going to run into these problems because the stakes are so high.”

Yeah, just imagine! How novel would that be, admitting people to higher education institutions based on their intelligence and studiousness. What a concept!

Zhao expressed concern that countries like the US, for example, may be taking cues from China by placing more emphasis on high stakes standardized testing. He says outsiders see the Chinese education system as one of meritocracy — but, he says, it only values meritocracy in testing, and not in other areas. "Test scores are a very poor measure of a person's future, they're a very poor measure of a country's future," he said.

I've railed against standardized testing here before. I stick by that in the sense of using standardized tests as a measure of fiscal allowance for public schools, because it's just a giant shell game. There is an important distinction here that Mr Liberal College in Oregon is obfuscating. A standardized admittance test -- i.e., SAT/ACT -- is a fair way to evaluate students' preparedness for college. It is only when taken to the ludicrous extreme of applying it to middle-schoolers who have barely figured out how to speak coherently that the concept of standardized testing fails miserably.

While one can certainly go too far in the direction of standardized college entrance examinations, and a case could be made that China has done so, it's equally true that one can go too far in the other direction. For that, we don't have to look far. In the United States, race, sex and financial background are factors weighed at least as heavily in college entrance quotas as test scores. It's been that way for several decades now and the early results don't look good at all.

Given a choice between an engineering candidate who has great test scores in math and one with middling test scores in math, all other things being assumed equal, who is the better selection for the school and ultimately for society? The answer is obvious. It should be equally obvious that selecting the student with middling test scores in math as the better engineering candidate because she's black and from a poor family is idiocy of the highest order. But many, many people in this country disagree with me on that... which is precisely why we're being rapidly overtaken on the world stage by countries like China.

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