Y
yunlin
发信人: dreamfly (痴人说梦), 信区: GoAbroad
标 题: ETS控告新东方 （转载）
发信站: 日月光华站 (Mon Feb 5 22:51:39 2001), WWW-POST@10.9.0.142
发信人: fondness(hope for Berkeley), 信区: AdvancedEdu
标 题: ETS控告新东方
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Mon Feb 5 22:00:08 2001)
From the issue dated January 5, 2001
Chinese Applicants to U.S. Universities Often Resort to
Shortcuts or Dishonesty
By DANIEL WALFISH
Every time Mr. Alexander rewrites an application for a
Chinese student seeking admission to an American university,
he gets 1,000 yuan, or $120.
As an American graduate student at an Ivy League university,
trying to survive on grant money here while doing research on
his dissertation, he finds that money hard to turn down --
even though he knows that what he is doing is wrong. In the
past semester, Mr. Alexander, who doesn't want his real name
published, has rewritten 50 applications, netting $6,000.
Mr. Alexander says many Chinese applicants to American
graduate schools do not give him clear research interests, so
he makes up topics for them. For about a third of his clients,
he says, "I add a lot of stuff because they just don't have
any idea about anything."
Mr. Alexander and about 20 other writers are paid by the New
Oriental School, a private Chinese institution, which in turn
charges students $500 to $1,000 -- a substantial sum in China
-- to have their personal statements, resumes, and letters of
recommendation doctored. New Oriental School administrators
say they only provide polish, but other employees and students
say the name of the game is rewriting.
Indeed, with its no holds-barred approach to getting students
placed abroad, the New Oriental School, which is most famous
here for its test-preparation courses, seems to epitomize a
countrywide pattern of practices that clash with Western
educational values.
Study in the United States has long been seen in China as the
ticket to a bright future. Its popularity increased in the
1990's, in part because more students could afford it. In the
year ending September 30, the U.S. Embassy issued more than
24,000 visas to Chinese students and scholars.
As the popularity of study abroad has increased in China, so
has the use of shortcuts. They range from the dishonest, like
ghostwritten essays, to the downright criminal, like forging
degrees and transcripts or using stand-ins to take
standardized tests. At least one Chinese company even
advertises that it will help students gain admission to
American colleges in return for a cut of the students'
financial aid.
While only a minority of Chinese students are involved in
kickbacks, forgery, or the use of stand-ins, even students who
try to play by the rules are likely to have taken graduate
test-preparation courses at the New Oriental School.
About 55,000 Chinese now study in the United States, and they
are generally viewed as being hard-working, high-achieving
students. "In general," says Richard G. Sleight, associate
dean of Yale University's graduate school, "the Chinese
students are excellent."
In China, high-school students focus for years on a single
national examination that determines which students get into
which universities. Many Chinese students bring the same
single-mindedness to graduate-school admissions tests.
Admissions officers in the United States are on their guard
against dishonest shortcuts. Jennifer Caplan, dean of graduate
admissions at Columbia University, says that Columbia is
especially cautious when evaluating international applicants
but acknowledges that it has more problems with students from
mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan than elsewhere.
Sometimes Chinese people even show up at Columbia with fake
letters of admission and try to register. "Every year it
happens with two or three people," marvels Ms. Caplan.
One taboo technique is to use a "qiangshou," or "gunner" --
someone who takes a test in place of someone else. Every day,
several messages appear on the New Oriental School's
electronic bulletin board with titles like "searching for a
male TOEFL gunner," referring to the Test of English as a
Foreign Language.
One recent message from a person identified only as "bs2002"
inquired about a "female GMAT expert" and offered payment of
$1,200 for a score above 750 -- well above the average at the
top American business schools. That elicited a response from
someone outraged at the "loss of face" that such a scheme
could cause for China: "If you're not even willing to put in
the effort to prepare for the GMAT [Graduate Management
Admission Test], it's hard to imagine how you'll be able to
survive the two years of business school."
Ghostwritten applications are a more common phenomenon. Three
of the biggest companies in the ghostwriting business,
including the New Oriental School, rewrote about 1,000
applications this admissions season. The employees of one
company that calls itself the China Educational Service Center
say it provides ghostwriting services, although an
administrator there says its main business is just to give
advice on study abroad. "I honestly want to help students," he
says.
Chinese students usually do need help with their personal
statements. Unless instructed otherwise, they typically write
detailed autobiographies that may begin with their parents,
include mottoes about the value of hard work, and emphasize
personal qualities, awards, and class rank. They don't realize
that many graduate schools also want to hear about their
interests, relevant experience, and goals.
Peking University students who work for the China Educational
Service Center say it just asks clients to provide
introductory materials about themselves in Chinese. "Then they
find other people, such as me, to write a draft based on the
Chinese materials," says a student who didn't want her name
used.
The woman is an intelligent, lively, poised student who
studies hard. She refuses to show samples of her work for the
center. "That would not be professional," she says.
She adds that when people with strong academic abilities are
rejected for their poor English, it's a waste of their talent.
In fact, many Chinese students feel that the American
graduate-admissions process is biased against them because of
their language skills.
Couldn't her work mislead universities that are trying to
evaluate candidates' own thoughts? "Quite possibly," she says.
"I hadn't thought about that." Has it occurred to her that her
work might be unethical, maybe just plain wrong? "Wrong," she
muses. "I haven't thought about this question."
Not everyone in China thinks that way. Using someone else's
essay is "really unfair," says a woman from Tianjin applying
to statistics Ph.D. programs in the United States. "I want to
write something that represents myself," she says.
How do admissions officers spot bogus applications? Lisa K.
Urban, admissions director for the University of Wisconsin at
Madison's business school, says, "If you can call and talk to
them and their ability to communicate in person is nothing
like their statement, you can assume that their statement was
written by someone else."
Admissions officers believe that they catch the fakers -- most
of the time. "I would imagine there were times when
individuals may have slipped through the cracks," admits Brad
Pearson, director of admissions at Washington University's
John M. Olin School of Business. "I don't know how much more
we can police this."
The cheaters, say admissions officers, are harming themselves
in the end. "At some point, you're going to get caught," says
Ms. Urban. "If you arrive and your English skills aren't what
they need to be, you're out of here immediately."
The New Oriental School is the most successful company helping
Chinese students enroll at American universities. The school
has its headquarters in a small, white-tiled building in
Beijing's university district. Roughly 70 percent of
mainland-Chinese students who attend American universities are
graduates of New Oriental's test-preparation classes.
The school has developed an innovative system, using
inspirational lectures, sample test questions, the
memorization of test vocabulary, and lots of drill to help
Chinese students pass standardized tests.
The company's founder is Michael Yu, a gangly 38-year-old who
radiates cheer and has a gift for inspiration. He used to
teach English at Peking University.
Mr. Yu opened the New Oriental School in 1992. Within a few
years, most of Beijing's ambitious students were flocking to
it. Students now come from all over China to attend the
school's classes, many of which have hundreds of students
enrolled. Mr. Yu says that New Oriental's test-preparation
courses had 70,000 students last year.
New Oriental doesn't care too much about its teachers'
English-speaking ability. "The most important quality is not
substance," says Bao Fanyi, one of the school's assistant
directors, "but communication: the ability to teach, the
ability to entertain, and the ability to inspire." And of
course, teachers have to know the tests. "That is why we don't
have native speakers as instructors," Mr. Bao says. "We can
hardly find a native speaker who can score as high as these
instructors."
Applying for study abroad is a hard road for Chinese students,
and New Oriental classes are supposed to make it easier.
Instructors, who are usually no more than a few years out of
college, rev up students with speeches and tell stories of
their own struggles to adapt to life overseas.
By most accounts, the formula works. Zhiyun Yu, a Chinese
student now at Columbia University says, "New Oriental
provides you with a very competitive atmosphere. You gain
incentive and confidence."
Others are dubious about New Oriental's contribution to
students' test scores. The most significant thing New Oriental
does, says Tina Zhang, a student at Peking University, is
distribute sample tests.
For years New Oriental, like other Chinese test-preparation
schools, has been pirating and selling Educational Testing
Service publications -- thus compromising their integrity and
costing the testing service money by violating its copyrights.
The testing service is now trying to clamp down.
Mr. Yu routinely brags to students that the Educational
Testing Service has no problem with him, but in November, the
American organization got Beijing-government authorities to
seize unauthorized test materials from the school. Similar
government raids hit New Oriental in 1996 and 1997, and each
time, says Thomas Ewing, a testing-service spokesman, the
company said it would not pirate materials anymore.
Materials confiscated in 1996 and 1997 included non-public
tests that could only have been stolen from examination rooms
or memorized and written down later. Mr. Bao, the assistant
director, denies that the school steals materials from
examination centers. New Oriental teachers sometimes tell
students that before 1996, the school did improperly obtain
tests.
Mr. Bao says the testing service should sell New Oriental the
rights to its public materials, so that the school's
photocopying will be legal. "If worse comes to worst, and we
cannot use their material," he says, the only result will be
that students will get sample tests from other sources.
Mr. Bao may be right. Piracy of books, software, and music is
so common in China that outside New Oriental's classrooms, old
women hawk bootleg copies of the CD-ROM's that the school
sells its students. New Oriental's book about students' essays
and letters of recommendation is also a victim. "That book was
on somebody's Web site," marvels Mr. Bao.
When Chinese students boast about high scores on
graduate-school admissions tests, they often cite, with equal
parts pride and shame, people who can score very high -- 2200
or more out of a possible 2400 -- on the Graduate Record
Examination without necessarily being able to speak a proper
English sentence.
Some Chinese students get scores on the verbal section of the
exam that are wildly out of proportion to their command of
English, as measured by anything other than a multiple-choice
test.
How do they do it? Students say that if they spend enough time
practicing on past exams and memorizing Mr. Yu's book of
Graduate Record Examination vocabulary, they eventually can
ace the tests.
Mr. Yu seems to have created a Chinese-style solution for
beating the Graduate Record Examination that students in
American test-preparation programs like Kaplan and the
Princeton Review would probably be unwilling to use.
The testing service acknowledges that brute force can raise
scores, and says that is one reason why it is developing a new
generation of tests. "We're aware that students will go to
extreme lengths to prepare and that when they do, they have an
advantage," says Mr. Ewing.
Some Chinese students aren't thrilled with the stratospheric
test scores that New Oriental has appeared to create. The fact
that every Chinese student has become an exam-taking machine
makes New Oriental's kind of help of little use, complains Mr.
Yu, the student at Columbia.
A Graduate Record Examination score of 2000 was once
considered high and would really help a student's application,
he says. Now a score of 2200 is "just so-so" for a Chinese
student even though the average score worldwide is about 1600.
New Oriental's next goal is recognition and respect. Legend,
China's largest computer company, has invested $6-million in a
much-trumpeted joint venture with the school to offer online
courses. The school also wants to be able to grant real
degrees.
In the end, New Oriental seems like a strange gateway to the
West. On the one hand, it preaches the value of study abroad;
on the other, it sends people to the United States who may not
be able to communicate once they arrive. But that's an
irrelevant subtlety for some Chinese students obsessed with a
dream of study abroad.
--
--
What if someone you never met,
Someone you never saw,
Someone you never knew,
Was the only someone for you?
--
标 题: ETS控告新东方 （转载）
发信站: 日月光华站 (Mon Feb 5 22:51:39 2001), WWW-POST@10.9.0.142
发信人: fondness(hope for Berkeley), 信区: AdvancedEdu
标 题: ETS控告新东方
发信站: BBS 水木清华站 (Mon Feb 5 22:00:08 2001)
From the issue dated January 5, 2001
Chinese Applicants to U.S. Universities Often Resort to
Shortcuts or Dishonesty
By DANIEL WALFISH
Every time Mr. Alexander rewrites an application for a
Chinese student seeking admission to an American university,
he gets 1,000 yuan, or $120.
As an American graduate student at an Ivy League university,
trying to survive on grant money here while doing research on
his dissertation, he finds that money hard to turn down --
even though he knows that what he is doing is wrong. In the
past semester, Mr. Alexander, who doesn't want his real name
published, has rewritten 50 applications, netting $6,000.
Mr. Alexander says many Chinese applicants to American
graduate schools do not give him clear research interests, so
he makes up topics for them. For about a third of his clients,
he says, "I add a lot of stuff because they just don't have
any idea about anything."
Mr. Alexander and about 20 other writers are paid by the New
Oriental School, a private Chinese institution, which in turn
charges students $500 to $1,000 -- a substantial sum in China
-- to have their personal statements, resumes, and letters of
recommendation doctored. New Oriental School administrators
say they only provide polish, but other employees and students
say the name of the game is rewriting.
Indeed, with its no holds-barred approach to getting students
placed abroad, the New Oriental School, which is most famous
here for its test-preparation courses, seems to epitomize a
countrywide pattern of practices that clash with Western
educational values.
Study in the United States has long been seen in China as the
ticket to a bright future. Its popularity increased in the
1990's, in part because more students could afford it. In the
year ending September 30, the U.S. Embassy issued more than
24,000 visas to Chinese students and scholars.
As the popularity of study abroad has increased in China, so
has the use of shortcuts. They range from the dishonest, like
ghostwritten essays, to the downright criminal, like forging
degrees and transcripts or using stand-ins to take
standardized tests. At least one Chinese company even
advertises that it will help students gain admission to
American colleges in return for a cut of the students'
financial aid.
While only a minority of Chinese students are involved in
kickbacks, forgery, or the use of stand-ins, even students who
try to play by the rules are likely to have taken graduate
test-preparation courses at the New Oriental School.
About 55,000 Chinese now study in the United States, and they
are generally viewed as being hard-working, high-achieving
students. "In general," says Richard G. Sleight, associate
dean of Yale University's graduate school, "the Chinese
students are excellent."
In China, high-school students focus for years on a single
national examination that determines which students get into
which universities. Many Chinese students bring the same
single-mindedness to graduate-school admissions tests.
Admissions officers in the United States are on their guard
against dishonest shortcuts. Jennifer Caplan, dean of graduate
admissions at Columbia University, says that Columbia is
especially cautious when evaluating international applicants
but acknowledges that it has more problems with students from
mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan than elsewhere.
Sometimes Chinese people even show up at Columbia with fake
letters of admission and try to register. "Every year it
happens with two or three people," marvels Ms. Caplan.
One taboo technique is to use a "qiangshou," or "gunner" --
someone who takes a test in place of someone else. Every day,
several messages appear on the New Oriental School's
electronic bulletin board with titles like "searching for a
male TOEFL gunner," referring to the Test of English as a
Foreign Language.
One recent message from a person identified only as "bs2002"
inquired about a "female GMAT expert" and offered payment of
$1,200 for a score above 750 -- well above the average at the
top American business schools. That elicited a response from
someone outraged at the "loss of face" that such a scheme
could cause for China: "If you're not even willing to put in
the effort to prepare for the GMAT [Graduate Management
Admission Test], it's hard to imagine how you'll be able to
survive the two years of business school."
Ghostwritten applications are a more common phenomenon. Three
of the biggest companies in the ghostwriting business,
including the New Oriental School, rewrote about 1,000
applications this admissions season. The employees of one
company that calls itself the China Educational Service Center
say it provides ghostwriting services, although an
administrator there says its main business is just to give
advice on study abroad. "I honestly want to help students," he
says.
Chinese students usually do need help with their personal
statements. Unless instructed otherwise, they typically write
detailed autobiographies that may begin with their parents,
include mottoes about the value of hard work, and emphasize
personal qualities, awards, and class rank. They don't realize
that many graduate schools also want to hear about their
interests, relevant experience, and goals.
Peking University students who work for the China Educational
Service Center say it just asks clients to provide
introductory materials about themselves in Chinese. "Then they
find other people, such as me, to write a draft based on the
Chinese materials," says a student who didn't want her name
used.
The woman is an intelligent, lively, poised student who
studies hard. She refuses to show samples of her work for the
center. "That would not be professional," she says.
She adds that when people with strong academic abilities are
rejected for their poor English, it's a waste of their talent.
In fact, many Chinese students feel that the American
graduate-admissions process is biased against them because of
their language skills.
Couldn't her work mislead universities that are trying to
evaluate candidates' own thoughts? "Quite possibly," she says.
"I hadn't thought about that." Has it occurred to her that her
work might be unethical, maybe just plain wrong? "Wrong," she
muses. "I haven't thought about this question."
Not everyone in China thinks that way. Using someone else's
essay is "really unfair," says a woman from Tianjin applying
to statistics Ph.D. programs in the United States. "I want to
write something that represents myself," she says.
How do admissions officers spot bogus applications? Lisa K.
Urban, admissions director for the University of Wisconsin at
Madison's business school, says, "If you can call and talk to
them and their ability to communicate in person is nothing
like their statement, you can assume that their statement was
written by someone else."
Admissions officers believe that they catch the fakers -- most
of the time. "I would imagine there were times when
individuals may have slipped through the cracks," admits Brad
Pearson, director of admissions at Washington University's
John M. Olin School of Business. "I don't know how much more
we can police this."
The cheaters, say admissions officers, are harming themselves
in the end. "At some point, you're going to get caught," says
Ms. Urban. "If you arrive and your English skills aren't what
they need to be, you're out of here immediately."
The New Oriental School is the most successful company helping
Chinese students enroll at American universities. The school
has its headquarters in a small, white-tiled building in
Beijing's university district. Roughly 70 percent of
mainland-Chinese students who attend American universities are
graduates of New Oriental's test-preparation classes.
The school has developed an innovative system, using
inspirational lectures, sample test questions, the
memorization of test vocabulary, and lots of drill to help
Chinese students pass standardized tests.
The company's founder is Michael Yu, a gangly 38-year-old who
radiates cheer and has a gift for inspiration. He used to
teach English at Peking University.
Mr. Yu opened the New Oriental School in 1992. Within a few
years, most of Beijing's ambitious students were flocking to
it. Students now come from all over China to attend the
school's classes, many of which have hundreds of students
enrolled. Mr. Yu says that New Oriental's test-preparation
courses had 70,000 students last year.
New Oriental doesn't care too much about its teachers'
English-speaking ability. "The most important quality is not
substance," says Bao Fanyi, one of the school's assistant
directors, "but communication: the ability to teach, the
ability to entertain, and the ability to inspire." And of
course, teachers have to know the tests. "That is why we don't
have native speakers as instructors," Mr. Bao says. "We can
hardly find a native speaker who can score as high as these
instructors."
Applying for study abroad is a hard road for Chinese students,
and New Oriental classes are supposed to make it easier.
Instructors, who are usually no more than a few years out of
college, rev up students with speeches and tell stories of
their own struggles to adapt to life overseas.
By most accounts, the formula works. Zhiyun Yu, a Chinese
student now at Columbia University says, "New Oriental
provides you with a very competitive atmosphere. You gain
incentive and confidence."
Others are dubious about New Oriental's contribution to
students' test scores. The most significant thing New Oriental
does, says Tina Zhang, a student at Peking University, is
distribute sample tests.
For years New Oriental, like other Chinese test-preparation
schools, has been pirating and selling Educational Testing
Service publications -- thus compromising their integrity and
costing the testing service money by violating its copyrights.
The testing service is now trying to clamp down.
Mr. Yu routinely brags to students that the Educational
Testing Service has no problem with him, but in November, the
American organization got Beijing-government authorities to
seize unauthorized test materials from the school. Similar
government raids hit New Oriental in 1996 and 1997, and each
time, says Thomas Ewing, a testing-service spokesman, the
company said it would not pirate materials anymore.
Materials confiscated in 1996 and 1997 included non-public
tests that could only have been stolen from examination rooms
or memorized and written down later. Mr. Bao, the assistant
director, denies that the school steals materials from
examination centers. New Oriental teachers sometimes tell
students that before 1996, the school did improperly obtain
tests.
Mr. Bao says the testing service should sell New Oriental the
rights to its public materials, so that the school's
photocopying will be legal. "If worse comes to worst, and we
cannot use their material," he says, the only result will be
that students will get sample tests from other sources.
Mr. Bao may be right. Piracy of books, software, and music is
so common in China that outside New Oriental's classrooms, old
women hawk bootleg copies of the CD-ROM's that the school
sells its students. New Oriental's book about students' essays
and letters of recommendation is also a victim. "That book was
on somebody's Web site," marvels Mr. Bao.
When Chinese students boast about high scores on
graduate-school admissions tests, they often cite, with equal
parts pride and shame, people who can score very high -- 2200
or more out of a possible 2400 -- on the Graduate Record
Examination without necessarily being able to speak a proper
English sentence.
Some Chinese students get scores on the verbal section of the
exam that are wildly out of proportion to their command of
English, as measured by anything other than a multiple-choice
test.
How do they do it? Students say that if they spend enough time
practicing on past exams and memorizing Mr. Yu's book of
Graduate Record Examination vocabulary, they eventually can
ace the tests.
Mr. Yu seems to have created a Chinese-style solution for
beating the Graduate Record Examination that students in
American test-preparation programs like Kaplan and the
Princeton Review would probably be unwilling to use.
The testing service acknowledges that brute force can raise
scores, and says that is one reason why it is developing a new
generation of tests. "We're aware that students will go to
extreme lengths to prepare and that when they do, they have an
advantage," says Mr. Ewing.
Some Chinese students aren't thrilled with the stratospheric
test scores that New Oriental has appeared to create. The fact
that every Chinese student has become an exam-taking machine
makes New Oriental's kind of help of little use, complains Mr.
Yu, the student at Columbia.
A Graduate Record Examination score of 2000 was once
considered high and would really help a student's application,
he says. Now a score of 2200 is "just so-so" for a Chinese
student even though the average score worldwide is about 1600.
New Oriental's next goal is recognition and respect. Legend,
China's largest computer company, has invested $6-million in a
much-trumpeted joint venture with the school to offer online
courses. The school also wants to be able to grant real
degrees.
In the end, New Oriental seems like a strange gateway to the
West. On the one hand, it preaches the value of study abroad;
on the other, it sends people to the United States who may not
be able to communicate once they arrive. But that's an
irrelevant subtlety for some Chinese students obsessed with a
dream of study abroad.
--
--
What if someone you never met,
Someone you never saw,
Someone you never knew,
Was the only someone for you?
--