¡¡¡¡Paper worship

¡¡¡¡Many of these people buy the phony diplomas to get a job or a promotion. While private employers often use education as a yardstick for job applicants, government agencies usually use it as a dividing line for certain promotions. "What would you do if you have worked all your life and possess all the qualifications for a higher position excerpt a degree that has suddenly become a prerequisite?" asked a promotion candidate who wanted to remain anonymous.

¡¡¡¡One way of going around the hurdle is to get a diploma from an overseas college that sets conditions on the financial rather than academic preparedness of a candidate. In other words, as long as you can afford the tuition, you won't be required to sit through hundreds of hours of classes and finish mounds of homework to get the degree. The Chinese call these "wild-chicken schools" because they are often not properly certified, staffed or equipped. Yet they may have grand-sounding names that impress the unsophisticated.

¡¡¡¡"It is not as easy to verify a foreign diploma," said Ye, the Guangzhou-based personnel officer. For example, a Harvard graduate in Shandong was suspected of producing a fake diploma to get a high-paying job, and was fired. But later it was found that his diploma was genuine. "If it had been a lesser-known school or an evening programme, it might be much more difficult to obtain this piece of information," Ye reasoned.

¡¡¡¡For diploma-seekers who occupy critical official positions, it is often easier to get a degree from a domestic school. An inside source told China Daily that some local officials enroll in master's or Ph.D. programmes of prestigious schools, often as part-time students. But they rarely show up for classes. Their homework and graduation thesis are mostly penned by others. When it comes to the grading, the panel of professors would be pressured from the school authority to "let it pass".

¡¡¡¡"I'm not inferring that the person does not have the knowledge for the degree. He is intelligent. The problem is, he simply does not have the time for a degree programme like this. He is at the peak of his career and he is doing a lot of good things for his constituencies. But to bestow him this degree would be against my principle," revealed the source, who is an eminent scholar.

¡¡¡¡In the above two cases, the diplomas are authentic, but either the school is not reputable or there is a "substitute" acquiesced by all the parties thus constituting a travesty of academic integrity.

¡¡¡¡Some schools have realized that a quick buck may carry a hefty price in terms of eroded reputation. Guanghua School of Management of Peking University has recently announced that, starting from 2003, it will no longer accept part-time Ph.D. students. "We have to ensure that our Ph.D. candidates have the necessary time for it," said a deputy dean.

¡¡¡¡The middle road

¡¡¡¡Between buying an outright fake and spending a lot of money and very little time on a genuine one that is fraudulent in essence, there is a vast gray area that yields a multitude of creative or risk-taking trickery.

¡¡¡¡Some students are quite serious about their school work, but when it comes to exam time they tend to lose their self-confidence and prefer to send someone else in their place. English-proficiency certification is a stumbling block that trips many career aspirants and sends them away in search of "substitute testers".

¡¡¡¡Plagiarism is another form of dishonesty that has percolated from the rank and file to the most elite class. Wang Mingming, a Peking University professor of anthropology, was found to have "borrowed" 100,000 words from a foreign textbook for his own work. A professor from China University of Mining and Technology deplored the current phenomenon of some of his colleagues churning out dozens of theses every year as "copy and paste" quickies.

¡¡¡¡Moving further away from shameless cheating is a form of shameless self-glorification. Some people have a tendency to call their own work "unprecedented", "breaking national records" or "reaching international level". Zou Chenglu, a prominent scientist, listed this as one of the major "sins" of academic duplicity, but others see it as an expression of ego-boosting.

¡¡¡¡So, what should be done about the varying degrees of deception in the education field? Some are arguing for tougher penalties such as taking the offenders to court. "A slap on the wrist is no deterrent," said Wen Zhichuan, a commentator. "They have broken the law and they should be punished accordingly."

¡¡¡¡Others point to the culture of diploma worship as the eventual culprit. If that is carried to the extreme, cheating is the natural corollary because people are measured by their diploma, nor their real talent, which may or may not correspond to their education, it is argued.

¡¡¡¡It is unrealistic to expect the campus to be a land of purity totally detached from the real world, some contend. Whatever dirty trick is practiced in the society at large will definitely be replicated, in one variation or another, in the world of education. There will never be a simple be-all and end-all defence, but a dynamic mechanism is needed to fight an ongoing war so that ethical behaviour will ultimately prevail. Enditem

¡¡¡¡(China Daily)