Tuesday, November 08, 2011

NY Times: These Chinese Students are Too Good To Be True

For a few thousand, they'll find a college for you, help you fill out the app, if you english is bad, they'll write an essay and fake recomendation letters, and if you're grades are bad, they'll put in a fake transscript too. That's not even covering the other article about the Chinese test prep house that turns out students with perfect SAT scores that need a TRANSLATOR to speak with the reporter.

Excerpts;

Colleges, eager to bolster their diversity and expand their international appeal, have rushed to recruit in China, where fierce competition for seats at Chinese universities and an aggressive admissions-agent industry feed a frenzy to land spots on American campuses. College officials and consultants say they are seeing widespread fabrication on applications, whether that means a personal essay written by an agent or an English proficiency score that doesn’t jibe with a student’s speaking ability. American colleges, new to the Chinese market, struggle to distinguish between good applicants and those who are too good to be true.
Once in the classroom, students with limited English labor to keep up with discussions. And though they’re excelling, struggling and failing at the same rate as their American counterparts, some professors say they have had to alter how they teach.
Colleges have been slow to adjust to the challenges they’ve encountered, but are beginning to try new strategies, both to better acclimate students and to deal with the application problems. The onus is on them, says Jiang Xueqin, deputy principal of Peking University High School, one of Beijing’s top schools, and director of its international division. “Are American universities unhappy? Because Chinese students and parents aren’t.”
“Nothing will change,” Mr. Jiang says, “unless American colleges make it clear to students and parents that it has to.”

more: 
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/the-china-conundrum.html?_r=1&ref=admissions

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