Chinese IQ Is Real, But So Is Their Thousand-Year Tradition Of Exam Cheating
05/06/2021
Earlier: China’s Long "Traditions Of Scholarship" Backed By JUST AS LONG Traditions Of Cheating
Scholar of Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism Bryan W. Van Norden tweets this:
Tools for cheating on the Chinese imperial civil service examinations--from the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911): cheat book, cheat vest, and cheat socks. pic.twitter.com/MfOyoo97Xi
— Bryan W. Van Norden (@BryanVanNorden) May 5, 2021
Chinese people have higher average IQs than white Americans, and muchhigher IQs than black Americans. Some people have hypothesized that this partly a result of the Darwinian effect of thousands of years of making people with good test scores into (literal) Mandarins [官], who thus had a better chance to pass on their genes. See How Social Darwinism Made Modern China, by Ron Unz, .American Conservative, March 11, 2013.
Some time ago, I said that while China has a tradition of scholarship, going back thousands of years, since they more or less invented standardized testing for Civil Service in 220 AD, they also, as a result, have a very long tradition of cheating at standardized tests, which we've covered in previous posts:
- Tiger Parents Riot In China: "No Fairness If You Do Not Let Us Cheat."
- Chinese Cheating
- Chinese Cheating And The SAT Scandal: The Global Tong War Over Test Scores
- Shanghai’s PISA Test Scores Aren’t Meaningless, But May Involve Some Cheating
- GRE Cheating and Immigration
These two posts by Steve Sailer allude to the fact that for Chinese students, it’s very easy to find another Chinese student who looks like you to take the test, because one Chinese student looks much like another — even to a Chinese examination proctor:
- Chinese Students in American Colleges Passing Tests Ted Kennedy-style — By Hiring Imposters To Take The Tests
- White People So Racist They Don’t Notice Chinese Scamming Them on SAT
And of course, one of the stakes in modern "high stakes" tests is the right to immigrate to the United States, as seen by Steve Sailer’s blog post Chinese Cheating Ring: "An Industry Devoted to Helping International Students Scam Grades," and this 2012 story from the NYT:
Sneaking Into Class From China
By Mark McDonald, NYT Rendezvous Blog, February 5, 2012
HONG KONG — The letters are arriving now from American universities — the dreaded thin envelopes that suggest an application has been denied, and the fat ones that indicate acceptance.
Anxious students and parents are nervously opening their mailboxes at Baltimore row houses, Battle Creek split-levels and Bakersfield farmhouses. And there are similar anxieties in Beijing, Shanghai and elsewhere in China, as more Chinese students than ever are applying to American schools.
In many cases, according to anecdotal evidence and hard-data surveys, the successful Chinese applicants will have cheated their way into college. [More]
And into America, where despite the fact that they're technically "non-immigrants," they're unlikely to go home.
What does this mean for America? It means an immigration moratorium should not make many exceptions for "high IQ" immigrants, who after all, just displace a better class of American.