For our kids’ sake, check the slide

By WONG CHUN WAI

Our students score As in English at PMR or SPM levels but when it comes to college entrance examinations for UK and US, many of them fare badly.

THERE was a time when being a top public scorer meant getting 5As in the Lower Certificate of Examination (LCE) in Form Three and failing was not an option – it means dropping out of school at 15 years old or entering a private school to re-sit the examination.

Private schools were not elitist, unlike now, as they were perceived to be a place for failures, second-raters or students with disciplinary problems.

The LCE also required a candidate to pass Bahasa Malaysia and English as they were compulsory subjects. A distinction then really meant a distinction.

Then, there was the Malaysian Certificate of Examination (MCE) where a top student was equivalent to someone who scored 9As or 10As.

These were the students who eventually got scholarships to study in Harvard, Cam­bridge or Oxford, and their achievements would be published in the newspapers.

Before this, there were the Queen’s Scholars who were sent by the British to be educated in the United Kingdom.

We could recognise the best of the best. It was much simpler then trying to gauge the scholastic achievements of our students.

Now, we read of students in the UPSR for Year Six getting 7As while at the PMR level for Form Three students, they can get up to 9As. In the SPM, there are even those with 16As or more.

Continue reading “Yes, I are.”…

Half of Cambridge students admit cheating

Joanna Sugden

They go to one of the world’s most prestigious universities and pride themselves on their superior intellect but almost half of Cambridge students admit they are not immune from the temptation to cheat and submit essays they find on Google, a survey suggests.

The results of an anonymous online poll of more than 1,000 students conducted by the student newspaper Varsity found that 49 per cent of undergraduates pass other people’s work off as their own at some point during their university career.

Only 5 per cent said they had actually been caught plagiarising.

Academics in universities across the country have been accused by their peers of turning a blind eye to the practice to ensure their institutions climb national and international rankings.

One student told Varsity: “Sometimes, when I am really fed up, I Google the essay title, copy and throw everything on to a blank word document and jiggle the order a bit. They usually end up being the best essays.”

Law students were most prone to plagiarism with 62 per cent of those questioned admitting to breaking university rules.

Wikipedia, the open source encyclopedia, was the most popular source for undergraduate research with 82 per cent saying they used that instead of consulting books in the university’s copyright library which has the right to a copy of every book published in the UK.

Robert Foley, a professor in biological anthropology at King’s College Cambridge, said: “It is a depressing set of statistics.”

A university spokesman told Varsity that it regarded plagiarism as a “serious and potentially disciplinary offence which can lead to failure to obtain, or withdrawal of a degree”. He said the university was planning to introduce detection software to crack down on the problem.

Source : Times Online

All hail to the internet. We are in the age of copy pasta where plagiarism is the mother of modern age inventions. I now acknowledge the supremacy of Chinese Space Programme, lol.