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July 4, 2015

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Students cash in as demand for proxy soars

CAN’T attend all the classes in universities so that you can spend that extra time with your boy or girlfriend or doing other social business?

Well, it is becoming easier to get someone to fill in for you. Just pay an “agent,” and he will arrange someone to deal with the roll call in the class.

Hiring people to attend lectures is slowly becoming a business of sorts in some of the colleges in China, and Internet is the platform to make it happen.

“People won’t get exposed,” says a “proxy” whose screen name is Qimi. “Usually students ask us to go to classrooms that have nearly a hundred students. The lecturers don’t even know most of them.”

Countless chat groups with shady titles like “lecture cover-up” can be found on QQ, a popular online platform for chatting. The groups are mainly in north China like Heilongjiang, Liaoning, Jilin, Shanxi and Shandong provinces.

They are even brave enough to name the college on the forum title.

Most of the proxies are junior college students. They have fewer lectures and more free time. It does not hurt to make some extra pocket money by sitting in classrooms for a couple of hours.

The proxies charge more or less the same. It is usually 20 yuan (US$3.22) for a class of one and a half hours and 25 yuan if they are expected to take notes.

There are even package deals. If a student wants proxies for a whole month or even a year, that can be arranged and discounts are available.

The payment is done online and the two parties never actually meet. A student can avail of the service just by telling their gender and the time and place for the lectures.

“During proxies, we don’t have to pay a lot of attention in the class unless asked to, and we are free to do our own stuff,” says Qimi. “So it doesn’t actually waste time while you can earn some money. It is killing two birds with one stone.”

One anonymous proxy says some students are not keen on attending boring lectures such as political science or ideology class.

Others are pursuing double degrees and can’t attend all the lectures, while there are also a few students who come from rich families and all they are interested in is a degree or diploma rather than learning any real thing.

“This is the reality of colleges now,” says Qimi. “Most students are adults and the business is done by mutual consent.”

Although the booming trend has yet to catch on in Shanghai, scattered cases and online ads can be seen off and on in the city, too.

Online postings for proxies to attend lectures have been around in Shanghai since 2011.

Some students from the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics say they would pay for anyone willing to go for lectures on the weekend.

Ray Pei, a student from Shanghai Business School, claims he’s never heard of such “business” in his college.

“There might be someone asking his or her friend to cover for them during a lecture for attendance’s sake. But I have never heard of students paying people to show up in classrooms,” he says.

Some of the parents are understandably worried that some of the substitutes could be one of their own, but they can do little unless they hack into their children’s online account.

“If I find out that my child uses my money to do such shameful thing, he’ll have a hard time,” says Pei’s mother. “I’m surprised that universities don’t do anything to stop it.”

Of late, however, there have been several cases of proxies showing up at exams, including something as important as gaokao or national college entrance examination, or driving license tests, English level exams and many others. It is even common to hire proxies to do the homework, or write essays and even thesis.

A very recent incident happened in Shanghai when 14 people were detained in May for appearing for other students in the college examination for vocational school students.

Police said all the suspects were college students.

Gu Yanzhi, a researcher with the Changjiang Education Research Institute, says that the surging cases of proxies reflect the urgent need for reforms in the country’s education sector.

Giving an example of college lectures, Gu says a lack of assessment system is one of the main reasons that both students and teachers don’t pay enough attention to lectures.

“In elementary and high schools, the scores of students are the most direct evaluation of education quality, but in colleges, no one knows or even cares how much and how well a student learns,” says Gu.

He adds most colleges in China put more emphasis on research than teaching. Colleges give strict evaluation on research and thesis publication for professors and other teachers. But for lectures, the only requirement is that the teachers should appear on time in the classrooms.

“No one pays any attention to how to teach students, or if the students find the lectures interesting at all,” Gu says. “Under such circumstances, students prefer to do other things.”

The issue of education reforms was debated nationwide last year, when Fang Yanhua, an English teacher at Tsinghua University, was sacked for failing to submit thesis that would have entitled her to promotion.

It led to more than 50 students, including graduates, to write to the university, demanding that it reinstate her.

They said Fang was one of the best teachers they had in college, who spent a great amount of time outside classrooms reviewing and proofreading their homework, which no other teachers did.

“Education should be the hallmark of all the universities,” says Gu. “We should reform the present teaching standard in colleges. It is a shame that even after a semester, teachers and students still don’t know each other.”




 

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