Category: Tsinghua University

Tsinghua Curiosities: First Day of Class

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

I am teaching a seminar-like class called something like New Topics in Psychology. Most of the students are freshmen because this is the first year the psychology department has accepted undergraduates. Some unusual things happened on the first day of class:

  • A graduate student volunteered to be a teaching assistant. (She was the second person to do so. A grad student in automation had volunteered a week earlier.)
  • A freshman had her picture taken with me.
  • I mentioned Caltech, where I was a freshman. Someone asked if Randy Pausch was a Caltech professor. (He was at Carnegie-Mellon.)
  • The students did brief introductions. Many students appeared to think that one student’s Chinese name was humorous. This was briefly explained to me but I still have trouble believing it. Maybe I misunderstood.
  • There was uncertainty about the length of the class. It lasted only the first two-thirds of a longer period. (The basic unit is 45 minutes class plus 5 minutes break.)
  • The students were seated in the usual rectangular way. Moving from front row to back row, the students’ English appeared to get worse.
  • The (first) teaching assistant advised them to not say “My English is not good” but to say “My English is on the way”.

The Ethical Stupidity of Med School Professors: Plagiarism Very Very Bad, Ghostwriting Okay

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Do medical school professors live in a different ethical world than the rest of us? Apparently. A friend of mine just entered grad school at Tsinghua. She was required to attend four different lectures about how academic dishonesty is wrong. (The last one, she said, was good; the speaker told a lot of stories.) China has a huge plagiarism problem, sure, but at least they say that plagiarism is wrong.

Whereas medical school professors haven’t managed to grasp that ghostwriting is plagiarism (taking someone’s words and ideas as yours without acknowledgment). And it happens all the time. NYU med school Professor Lila Nachtigall, as I’ve noted, considered the deed so minor she forgot that she’d done it. Apparently using a different word confuses them. A recent article in Nature reveals the befuddlement of the entire medical establishment about this. We’re not sure what to do about it, journal editors say. As Tony Soprano’s mom would say: Poor you.

What’s so nauseating about this is that ghostwriting is certainly worse than the garden-variety plagiarism that American undergraduates and the odd Harvard professor engage in. (And at least they are embarrassed, unlike Nachtigall, when caught.) Garden-variety plagiarism is merely self-serving; you save time, get a higher grade. Whereas drug-company ghostwriting makes drugs appear better than they are. Which harms millions of sick people.

Although American universities publicly condemn plagiarism and other types of cheating, in practice they allow them. (Believe me, I know. When I tried to stop cheating in my Intro Psych class at Berkeley, the chairman of my department told me, “We’re not in that business.”) And the student cheaters — having been told by university blind-eye-turning that cheating is okay — grow up to be med school professors who do horrible things routinely. That’s my theory.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Spectacle Practice

Seth Roberts2 Comments

Late last night, on my way home, I came across a huge crowd of Tsinghua students next to the campus stadium. More than a thousand. There was no event at the stadium. All of them were dressed in a casual uniform, in varying colors. “What’s this about?” I asked one of them. “It’s a secret,” she said. Another one told me they were practicing for the upcoming National Day (October 1), which is China’s Fourth of July. This particular National Day will be the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the current system so there will be an especially big celebration. The uniforms said “60″ on the shirt. There were going to be at least 9 practices. This particular night was the first night they would practice in Tiananmen Square, where the event would take place. Every one of them had a square with different colors on the two sides; like a giant LED display they would make different displays. “It lasts all night,” the student told me. “It ends at 6 am. We don’t sleep.”

And, indeed, at 5:30 am the next morning, a police-escorted convoy of 45 buses, each with about 60 students, came through the campus gate near my apartment. An article about the Tiananmen practice says it involves about 200,000 people. That’s a lot of buses.

Tsinghua Dumplings

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Jennifer Lee, author of The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, has a nice post about dumplings, including this:

I once made 888 dumplings for a party, my personal record. . . . You might have crudites, warm cheese, stale hummus, left over at the end of the party. You will never have leftover dumplings — unless you burned them.

This reminds me how much I liked the dumplings a the Tsinghua student cafeterias. I think they were served at every meal but I associate them with breakfast, maybe because there was less choice at breakfast. Fresh and homemade and chewy and well-spiced and incredibly cheap (like all the cafeteria food). Maybe 6 for 25 cents. There was an optional vinegar-like sauce (speaking of fermented foods). There were two types (pork & ??) but I didn’t understand the Chinese names.

I tried to avoid them. They were too easy and familiar. But it takes a certain amount of stamina to eat strange food so if I was tired, I’d have dumplings.

Why One Student Loves Tsinghua University

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

After reading my post about Reed College’s horrible treatment of Chris Langan, a friend of mine who is a student at Tsinghua University wrote this:

I feel so lucky that we have lots of brilliant scholars who are at the same time good teachers. Many of them do care about undergraduates and give good advice. I don’t know which education system for undergrads [Tsinghua’s or Reed’s] is best, for colleges that do poorly in educating undergrads [like Reed] may produce students who are more independent. But being educated here, I have to say I love Tsinghua and its teachers a lot.

Why does she love Tsinghua? I asked.

I think it is very tolerant. I made many mistakes while I was growing up, but just like my parents, my school didn’t forced me to do anything to correct my mistakes. It gave me freedom to choose, to live my own life. I’m glad it didn’t interrupt my life and gave me the chance to see my mistakes and to correct them by myself. And when I did want to correct them, it allowed me to. I realize that there won’t be many chances to make mistakes and to correct them by myself after I leave school so I value the time in the school. So I guess the best thing about Tsinghua is its freedom and tolerance.

My friend started as a math major. Then she became an English major. Now she is taking economics classes because she wants to study economics in graduate school. That’s what she means by “mistakes”: choosing the wrong major.

Tsinghua versus Reed.

Life Imitates Art School (part 2)

Seth RobertsLeave a comment

Tsinghua University includes an art school added six or seven years ago. An art school elsewhere in Beijing moved to the Tsinghua campus; a big building was built for them. Two of my Chinese teachers are art students. I told them about the San Francisco art school where every department looks down on another department. This got a big laugh. The same thing happens in their school, they said. It is divided into fine arts and design. The fine arts students look down on the design students because the design students are working for money; the design students look down on the fine arts students because they aren’t practical.

The more curious interaction is between the art students and the rest of the school. Students in the rest of Tsinghua, which resembles MIT, often ask the art students their score on the national exam that high school students take to get into college. It is incredibly difficult to get into Tsinghua by that route; maybe 1 in 10,000 is successful. Art students have lower scores on this test but must also pass a test of artistic ability. One of my teachers, who is now a graduate student, said she’d been asked her exam scores at least 10 times. Here is one context. My teacher has just helped another student with his bike.

Student who has just been helped: What’s your major?

My teacher: Art.

Student: What was your score on the national test?

And she is big and strong, she said, so potential questioners may have been afraid of being hit. Other art students are asked more often.

Marxism Studies at Tsinghua University

Seth Roberts1 Comment

All Tsinghua undergraduates are required to take four Marxism-related classes to graduate; next year the requirement will be reduced to three classes. A friend told me about her Marxist philosophy class, which she thought was pretty interesting:

  • There is no homework. No reading, no papers.
  • If there will be a final, it hasn’t been mentioned.
  • The teacher doesn’t take attendance. Now and then he calls on students to answer questions and if the student isn’t present, this is noted.

My friend, who is a member of the Communist Party, couldn’t suppress a smile when she told me about the lack of homework.

Making a Living in China

Seth Roberts5 Comments

Several buildings are being built on the Tsinghua campus. At least one woman makes a living as a prostitute among the construction workers. She is known as Qikuaiban, which means seven and half yuan (about $1). The name came about when she offered her services to a worker, he said, “All I have is seven and a half yuan,” and she accepted that payment.

Happiness in China: Who wants to be a construction worker?

Who Steals Bikes?

Seth Roberts5 Comments

At Tsinghua University, students are said to spend more on bike locks than on bikes. A friend of mine, a senior, is on her fourth bike. I met a faculty member who went to get her bike just as it was being stolen. She saw how it was done: The thief had a large number of keys. She shouted at the thief to stop, a crowd gathered, and he gave the bike back. Later she encountered him while buying pork: He was the butcher.