As you may have noticed from my last post, this semester’s academic activities are winding down and will come to a close in a matter of just a few weeks. Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working long hours to design my students’ final examination and provide teacher’s comments on their final writing projects, despite the fact that it is technically a holiday break. This semester, I am teaching sophomore-level Writing for English Majors; for their end-of-the-semester assignment, I have required my students to write a three-page essay on one of four topics concerning global climate change and environmental protection.
In class, we viewed The 11th Hour, a documentary on the environmental crisis narrated by none other than Leonardo DiCaprio. Knowing that my students adore him, I chose this film in part because I knew they would pay attention to it, even if only to see DiCaprio’s handsome features. Last week, I collected the first page of their written assignment. Not only did some of the students write in size 20 font despite my instructions to use size 12, but many of them hand-wrote their homework (again, despite my instructions that it should be typed) using minuscule, cartoon-ridden notebook paper.
Now, the issues mentioned above are minor ones that can be easily resolved. However, one of the major roadblocks I have encountered since teaching in China is plagiarism. It’s no news that China is rife with copied material – one of the stipulations of the country’s ascension to WTO membership was that it was supposed to take further measures to ensure the protection of intellectual property rights. Nevertheless, it’s easy to find knock-offs of almost every famous designer product under the sun in China; students indiscriminately copy textbooks, and people of almost every age download music and movies from the Internet for free.
China's Biggest Educational Roadblock: Plagiarism
Considering this reality, it should come as very little surprise that I have caught multiple students of mine copying material from the Internet and attempting to pass off another author’s writing as their own. Earlier in the semester, a student of mine stormed out of the classroom crying after I wrote on her homework that she would receive a grade of zero on that particular assignment as a result of plagiarism. Though I have told my students again and again that I believe this kind of behavior to be unacceptable, some of them continue to do it.
Usually, all I have to do is go to Baidu and type in a few words from a student’s passage to find the exact source that the work came from. Unfortunately, I don’t think that most students in China realize just how serious an offense plagiarism really is – despite the fact that my students all know that it’s morally wrong, here the punishment meted out for copying another’s work is quite weak. On top of this, all of my students were taught in high school to learn through rote memorization, and most of them have not fully engaged in imaginative thought to the same degree American students have. Therefore, brainstorming an argument in favor of environmental protection or food safety standards of their own volition can seem like quite a daunting task, at least for my students.
As a foreign teacher, I can only hope that the Chinese government’s strategy towards the protection of intellectual property changes sometime soon; perhaps if the country’s leaders show that they adequately respect the creative work of others, China’s students will learn to do so too.
Hi Lauren,
Your comment about “rote memorization” seems to make a lot of sense, and it’s something I hadn’t openly considered before in relation to the Chinese.
Apart from having a Chinese wife I also work for a company that imports most its product from China, and I have noticed (subconsciously) that the staff in the Chinese office never seem to “think outside the box”.
They will do something in the way they were first shown and it is very difficult to get them to change their working practices, even when the changes may be very small and the benefits should be very easy to see.
No matter how many times one tries to explain something and show them by example that a slight change to procedure would be of more benefit, and more accurate, the response is always… “Yes, ok, I did that for you… see ? ” … but they have still done things the same old way !
Thank you for pointing out that it is probably because of the the way they are taught things in school, it’s a very good extra string to my bow knowing what might be causing their inability to adapt to change as fast as I would hope.
Very useful.
As far as the plagiarism is concerned I concur. In my experience the Chinese seem to have no compunction about copying something verbatim and are always surprised when I point out that we, in the West, consider it to be unacceptable.