FTinPRC
- 2017-02-21
I too was a 论文指导 thesis advisor for two years at a Chinese University.
Requiring English majors in Chinese universities to write a graduate thesis in English is insane, but the regulation is still in effect.
For the record: Chinese majors at Harvard University are not required to write a graduate thesis in Chinese. If they do choose a thesis, it is written in English.
At one University, I offered the Dean of the department a wager: choose ANY Chinese professor of English at the school and place her in a hotel room for a week with internet access to write a 5000 word 'thesis' in English. If she hasn't plagiarized 30% of the paper and didn't have 50 grammatical errors, I would pay for the hotel and give the teacher and the Dean 50K Rmb each. She laughed, knowing full well that not one of her staff wrote English well enough to write an actual paper. The entire staff, however, certainly did enjoy abusing the students about their lack of ability during the 'thesis defense', which when spoken in Chinese is pronounced similarly to the word for shit 大便/答辯, a mispronunciation I insisted on using.
Of 400 student during that two year period, not one actually wrote a thesis. Most purchased them or copied them from the internet. The best students actually did what I call a 'hot pot' thesis, choosing paragraphs from various online sources and simmering them together with every conjunction know to man.
heretosay
- 2017-02-21
Okay, yes, I will accept that you didn't understand that copying and pasting in this context without citation is by definition plagiarism. Don't make a big deal out of it - I've seen worse. No reason to get daffier.
When teaching at a university in China, I was once asked to grade graduate thesis (lets not argue about the plural of thesis) written by students I was not familiar with. I also had to sit on the panel as they orally proved their thesis. They were all guilty to a certain degree, but I had to take into consideration a cultural aspect that I had learned before leaving for China. In short, the Chinese were not bound by the same restrictions as we are when it comes to quotations. For them to quote someone without citation was perfectly natural because they were taught that it honored the person they were quoting and that was enough.
Okay, I could go on about that but, pardon the digression, one of the above students actually copied and pasted nearly the entirety of his thesis. Of course I couldn't pass him. At his oral presentation, I asked him to explain himself. His reasoning didn't get him passed (we made arrangements that gave him the opportunity to pass later), however, what he said was damned interesting. Well, I thought so at the time anyway. His reasoning was that since he could make money on line, monitoring certain games and such, that time spent studying English was simply a waste of his valuable time and writing a damn thesis in English about something he had no interest in was even more of a waste of time. This despite it being pointed out to him that his parents were spending a great deal of money to educate him. Clearly, they didn't recognize his talents and were victims of the notion that every child must learn English or, in this case, get a degree in English. Actually, he almost had me laughing, but really I couldn't help but admire his forthrightness and independent thinking. That was in 2009.
So anyway, just sayin.' And what's so interesting about apple pies anyway? Now, if you were to discuss apple cultivars, you might pique my interest. Sure glad all those colonials had the good sense to bring a large variety of apple tree cuttings from Europe.