Cheating in China on (American) college admissions

Inside Higher Ed has the story: In China, No Choice But to Cheat?

July 9, 2015 By

Elizabeth Redden

"EUGENE, Ore. -- Is the admission process broken for Chinese applicants to American colleges?

Variations of that question came up again and again during sessions on Wednesday at the Overseas Association for College Admission Counseling [OACAC] conference. Persistent concerns about standardized test fraud, doctored transcripts and fake admission letters -- and the role of agents in helping to "pollute" the application process (as one session description put it) -- are causing some to worry that Chinese students might think cheating is their only choice.

"We need to make it [the application process] safe for honest applicants," said Terry Crawford, the chief executive officer and co-founder of InitialView, a video interviewing company based in Beijing.

"There's a perception in China that the system is rigged, that if you pay enough money you're going to get the results that you want," Crawford said. He cited a recent China Newsweek article laying out the process and prices for cheating on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) as just one example of the type of story that feeds into this perception (the reporter received test answers during the exam via a small, wireless-enabled watch)."

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Interestingly, Initial View, the company that Terry Crawford and Gloria Chyou founded in China, was initially founded to address the problem of fraud in English language tests, by offering applicants the opportunity to make a video of an unscripted interview that they conduct, to be sent to colleges, who can then confirm the fluency of the speaker, and later verify that the student who enrolls is the one who took the interview.