Chinese honesty

Last week, one of my Oil 2 students told me he met a Chinese friend of mine taking a test earlier that day. He said the guy knew the other foreigners as well and it sounded like we were quite good friends. The options of people this could have been were pretty slim, so I figured out who it was very quickly, and was immediately confused as to why this person was taking a test.

My student took it to advance in his job. My friend is technically unemployed, but sometimes does work for his parent's business. He has a masters degree from the UK, is not currently looking for a job and lives at home. I could not for the life of me figure out how the test would benefit him. I expressed as much to my student, and he said they were kind of cheating. He and my friend were put into a secret room to take the test and left alone with their answer sheets. Someone returned later to collect the answers.

This still didn't explain to me why my friend would need to take this test to cheat on anyway. And my student is quite smart so I didn't see him needing to cheat from my friend either. When I asked my friend, he didn't want to tell me or explain at all and said that he wasn't proud of it (so naturally I had to out him on my blog, sorry!).

Apparently, someone with some kind of government connections had paid him to take the test for them. Everyone that takes this test has a picture attached to their registration form. Whomever paid my friend to take the test knew someone that could usher my friend into a private office to take it instead of in the large room with the list/photo check in.

If he was so ashamed, I wasn't sure why he did it to begin with, but I only pushed for so many details.

Today, I returned to school after a break to have the receptionist immediately tell me to talk to a Chinese girl standing at the counter. She didn't tell me what to talk about and seemed quite frantic, but I had a class to prepare for. I asked the girl a few questions and gathered that she was a junior in high school and tomorrow had an interview with a private language school that she wished to attend. I told her and the receptionist that I had to go but they would have to rearrange my afternoon a bit if they wanted to me to spend time preparing her for the interview.

The situation seemed a little weird, the girl wanting to practice the day before an interview and telling me no to "practice" but yes to "prepare" (I assumed practice was just a new word). Turns out they wanted me to get the girl's life story down this afternoon so I could just pretend to be her and do the interview myself tomorrow. I have no clue if it was her idea or my school's.

By the time I figured this out, the girl was gone, but I told school admin it was a terrible idea and I wouldn't do it. They found a Chinese teacher to do it instead.