Chinese Applicants to U.S. Universities Often Resort to Shortcuts or Dishonesty

Students can buy essays, stand-ins for exams, and improper access to standardized tests

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.