Chinese helped to game US colleges

Thousand dollars per course

IOWA CITY, Iowa, May 26, (RTRS): The advertisements were tailored for Chinese college students far from home, struggling with the English language and an unfamiliar culture.

Coaching services peppered the students with emails and chat messages in Chinese, offering to help foreign students at US colleges do much of the work necessary for a university degree. The companies would author essays for clients. Handle their homework. Even take their exams. All for about a $1,000 a course.

For dozens of Chinese nationals at the University of Iowa, the offers proved irresistible.

“Test-taking services. Paper-writing. Take Online Courses for you,” says the social-messaging profile of one Chinese coaching outfit used by Iowa students, UI International Student Services. A pitch emailed from another business ended with this reassuring claim: “Your friends are all using us.”

Today, the University of Iowa, one of the largest state universities in the American Midwest, says it is investigating at least 30 students suspected of cheating. Three sources familiar with the inquiry say the number under investigation may be two or three times higher.

University spokespeople declined to name the students or comment on their nationality, citing academic privacy laws.

But those familiar with the investigation said that most, perhaps all, of the cheating suspects are Chinese nationals. They stand accused of cheating in online versions of at least three courses, including law and economics. Three of the Chinese suspects admitted to Reuters that they hired Chinese-run outfits to take exams for them.

A May 8 letter sent by the university to a fourth Chinese student, who allegedly had imposters take his midterms for him, says the school will recommend expulsion. “We are unable to be sure that you will not cheat in the future, since your past actions call your future behavior into question,” it reads. Foreigners in the United States on student visas face possible deportation under US immigration law if expelled from school.

The Iowa cheating rings are the latest evidence of how a vibrant East Asian industry is corrupting the US higher education system by gaming entrance exams, concocting college applications and completing college coursework on behalf of students. These nimble operators not only help students cheat their way into universities. They also help them cheat their way through.

The companies are prospering by exploiting two intersecting interests: the growing demand by Chinese nationals to study overseas, and the desire by US colleges to profit from foreign students willing to pay full tuition.

As Reuters reported in March, some companies are leveraging weaknesses in the SAT, a standardized college entrance exam, to help clients gain an unfair advantage on the test by feeding them questions in advance.

Application

In addition, Reuters has identified companies in China that help students contrive their entire college application — embellishing or ghostwriting application essays, doctoring letters of recommendation from high school teachers, and even advising kids to obtain fake high school transcripts. Other providers continue the illicit assistance after admission, such as those that performed coursework for hire in Iowa City.

“The reality is for international students, particularly in Asia, there’s a worry about whether the application is authentic, whether the essay is authentic, whether the person who shows up at your door is the same person who applied,” said Joyce E. Smith, chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling in Arlington, Virginia.

The cheating services extend far beyond Iowa. At the University of Washington, the University of Alabama and Penn State University, for example, students received Chineselanguage advertisements by email this semester from unnamed firms. The pitch: Students could raise their grade point averages and graduate early if they hired the outfits to take classes and do assignments for them. The ads, reviewed by Reuters, offered a money-back guarantee. Students who didn’t get As would get refunds.

The market for such services has major potential. About 761,000 degree-seeking foreign students now study in the United States, according to the Institute of International Education. A third come from China. Department of Commerce statistics show that Chinese students spent almost $10 billion on tuition and other goods and services in America in 2014.

Of course, not all Chinese students are dishonest, and American students aren’t immune to the lure of cheating. Still, the temptation to break the rules is great in China because the stakes are extraordinarily high.

Most seats at universities in China are awarded through a competitive national entrance exam known as the gaokao, a test that requires years of round-the-clock preparation.

A growing number of Chinese parents are reluctant to put their children through that gauntlet. US universities offer an easier way to get ahead, with a quality education and better job prospects.

To help those students succeed, a multi-faceted industry is taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the US higher education system. For colleges, vetting the applicants who use these services can be daunting. The case of Xuan “Claren” Rong shows why.

A native of Shenzhen, a city of about 11 million people on the Chinese mainland near Hong Kong, Rong spent part of high school in America. He entered the MacDuffie School, a boarding and day school in Granby, Massachusetts, as a ninthgrader in September 2011.

“He seemed to be a diligent, hardworking kid,” said Steven Griffin, MacDuffie’s head of school. Trouble was, “he was in the middle of the pack in terms of his grades,” Griffin recalled. “Apparently that was not good enough for his family.”

Transcript

Reuters reviewed Rong’s transcript at MacDuffie, which the school verified as authentic. It shows his overall grade point average as of April 2014 was 2.8 out of 4 — about a B — though it was marred with Ds in Latin and Physics. Rong was supposed to graduate in 2015 but dropped out after his junior year.

In March 2014, he became a client of Cunshande, a company that helps Chinese students get accepted to top US colleges. Cunshande, also known as Transcend Education, is located on the 25th floor of an office tower in the financial district of Shenzhen.

Its founders — Kevin Li and Michael Du — both attended one of America’s top public schools, the University of California, Los Angeles. Li said they began advising Chinese students on applying to American colleges while at UCLA. Du wouldn’t comment other than to say in an email that he is “no longer involved with the operations at Transcend.”

Li and Du opened Transcend in Shenzhen about five years ago. Li said Transcend has about 40 clients a year and charges between $12,000 and $18,000 for its services, which he described as mentoring and counseling students.

A receipt shows that Claren Rong’s parents paid about $13,700 to Transcend. With the company’s help, Rong applied to at least 15 US colleges, emails reviewed by Reuters indicate. He was accepted in 2015 by the University of California, Davis.

In March 2015, more than a hundred US colleges began receiving emails from an anonymous former Transcend employee. The emails included details about 40 Chinese applicants, including Rong.

“I am writing this e-mail to inform you that the student Xuan Rong under the influence of Cunshande, a company which ghostwrites applications for Chinese students applying to American universities, committed application fraud,” the tipster wrote to some of the schools.

Rong, the tipster alleged, claimed in his college applications that he attended a Chinese high school in downtown Shenzhen, where he maintained an A average his sophomore and junior years. In fact, the tipster said, Rong was attending MacDuffie in Massachusetts.

The tipster attached two transcripts for Rong — his real one from MacDuffie, the other from the school in Shenzhen. Both transcripts list grades for his sophomore and junior years, even though Rong didn’t take classes at the Shenzhen school those years.

Admissions offices often lack the staff to pursue such red flags. At UC Davis, where Rong was admitted, 68,519 people applied to attend the school this fall. One of every five were international students. The school has just seven admissions officers on staff to vet those 13,560 international applicants.

Even so, an admissions officer at UC Davis, Mitsuko Leonard, did email the former Transcend employee, promising that “any real evidence you are able to provide will be considered.”

The tipster responded five days later, on March 30, 2015, offering information about 21 students in 217 attached documents. Leonard forwarded the material to the UC president’s office. “Yikes this is from the anonymous source in China. Please review,” she wrote.

Most of the attachments were different versions of college essays that,