The BIG news in Japan these days, besides the 28 Japanese students whose bodies they haven’t yet found in Christchurch (without apparently mentioning all the other exchange students from other Asian countries who died there), is the discovery of cheating on Japanese University entrance exams.
The culprit, under the handle “Aicezuki” apparently went on Yahoo Questions during the exam, specifically the English language portion, and posted the exam question. Within a few minutes a helpful user responded with an answer, which may have been applied to the exam.
I personally wouldn’t have used that answer. The grammar was not the best as far as I could tell from brief screen captures shown on television. Was it good enough for Kyoto University’s entry exam? Perhaps, considering the levels of English aptitude which are normal in Japan.
Either way, this is a big deal. Most mornings, while I am trying to find some way to make it look like I am eating at least a respectable portion of the immense amount of food laid out for me, I have been treated to theorizing and discussion by some of the greatest minds on Japanese morning panel news show. Yesterday they had a reenactment of a testing environment to test different cheating methods in their quest to uncover the truth/ looking for a way to fill time until the weekend when they all have AV Idols booked to come on the program. About twenty students sat a test with an invigilator. The invigilator was assigned to look for cheating students. About ten of the students were rigged up with different devices for cheating. These included a pen camera, glasses camera, cell phone scanner camera thingies, earpieces, and normal smart phones with people typing on them. They tested them all out and most of them got caught, except one guy who just had an iphone in his sleeve or under his arm whenever the teacher came around.
I really hope whoever put together that segment felt like an idiot this morning when it was explained in a news conference at the Kyoto Police Headquarters (yes, it’s that serious) that it was some guy who had borrowed his mother’s cell phone and just typed fast. And, it proved to all us students who were watching while eating our melon pan before school that you don’t need to buy fancy hidden cameras to cheat. All you need is your normal cell phone.
After it was discovered to have happened at Kyoto University, the student admitted to police that he did the same for exams at three other prestigious universities. These included Keio which is one of the top two most prestigious private universities in the country.
Why is this earth shattering news? In the past, the university exams were the great equalizer of Japanese society. The exams are all multiple choice because it does not allow for any subjective grading. However, some universities have recently begun to introduce short essay sections.
The supposed equality of these has changed recently with more options for private schools and cram schools. As these options become available, families who can afford them take advantage of them more and more. Thus the exams become more difficult to adjust for those who spend hours in class after school or in schools which teach directly to these exams. This effectively shuts out many of those who go to the local public high school from the nation’s elite universities.
Where you go to university is probably the most important factor which decides your place in Japanese society. If you don’t go to university, you’ll probably work in a service job until you retire with no pension. If you go to Tokyo University’s Faculty of Law, you’ll get a job in the upper echelons of the national bureaucracy upon graduation. The entrance exams decide where you fall within this scale. Therefore, it is a big deal when somebody cheats.
And now they’ve caught somebody cheating. But something I wonder is how often it happens. This person was caught because somebody saw it the question on the internet, based on my very poor understanding of the Japanese on the news. But there is no way that this was the first time. In a society which offers no second chances, the stakes of this exam are too high to leave to private school, cram school, and chance alone. Japanese cell phone users have been able to access the internet for a long time, and prior to that they could have used other forms of cheating, such writing on your arm or on the inside of your eye patch.
This, in the end, only furthers my disgust with Japanese news media.
In other news, for someone who is interested in the American State Department and the Foreign Service, the last few weeks have been interesting. With the unrest in the Middle East things have been pretty rough for officers posted to places like Libya, Egypt, and Bahrain.
As the Foreign Service seems to have so many bloggers within its ranks, whenever a major event happens I instantly start searching the FSO blogosphere to try and find some firsthand accounts of the view from the embassy compound. Probably the most fascinating one that I have come across recently is that of a Junior Consular officer posted to Tripoli. He wrote a brief article about his hasty departure from the country, and the extreme emotional difficulty of undergoing his own evacuation while working to aid other foreign nationals in Libya. The link to the original is here, and another here, in case the original is removed.
An article about the families of the embassy officials who were evacuated can also be found here.
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