Focus on three questions about the "paying for lessons" chaos
The fatal temptation to spend money to buy high-scoring lessons?
Editor's note
During this period of time, "paying for lessons" suddenly became a hot word on the Internet. The small ads in the circle of friends of "cheap and efficient" and "X yuan a door" made many college students taste the "sweetness" of "passing by without learning", and even more so. More and more college students are questioning online courses.
Recently, the Ministry of Education and Science of China Youth Daily received a letter from college students. The letter talked about the chaos witnessed by college students, and the contradiction between "brushing" and "not-brushing"... For this reason, education The Ministry of Science sent reporters to interview relevant university students, university teachers, and relevant experts in an attempt to unravel the chaos behind the "pay-for-book course".
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Today, the number of MOOCs and the scale of applications in my country ranks first in the world.
Online courses have become a common part of college students' learning tasks, and some courses are even required to be completed online.
However, more and more "pay-to-book courses" industry chain has also emerged.
The "manual brush lessons", "5 yuan per course" and "pass without learning" spread in the circle of friends and QQ groups...let many online courses become formalities.
In such a region lacking supervision, various games are being played on campus: some college students have gone astray in order to get high scores easily with the least time cost and the most trouble-free method, and some college students are waiting and watching. Seeing my classmates pass the course test with a few dollars, I feel uneasy and shaken.
On the other hand, some university teachers have not been able to ease their teaching tasks due to online classes. Instead, they have begun a battle of wits and courage between "swiping lessons" and "anti-swiping lessons".
"Paying for lessons" has become an open secret
Nowadays, almost every college student will encounter content that needs to be completed online in the course of study.
Some of these content are online oral exercises, some are MOOC courses for teachers, and some are online answers... In the context of increasingly diversified "online tasks", "paying lessons" has become an open secret among some college students.
At the end of 2020, Wu Yan, Director of the Higher Education Department of the Ministry of Education, revealed at a press conference that the number of online MOOCs on relevant platforms in China has increased to 32,000, with 490 million learners and 1.4 MOOC credits for students. 100 million person-times.
During the epidemic, MOOCs helped colleges and universities cope with the normality of home learning, and they are also becoming an important engine for the reform of higher education.
However, the general trend of online and offline teaching integration has been smelled by some criminals as the "business opportunity" in the middle.
Recently, some media reported that the Public Security Bureau of Chaoyang City, Liaoning Province, arrested 57 suspects from 5 tutorial platforms for illegally controlling computer systems.
According to the police report, data from the lesson-removing platform showed that from 2019 to 2020 alone, more than 7.9 million students purchased lesson-revising services nationwide, and the number of lessons was more than 79 million.
In addition, preliminary statistics on the number of off-line agents at all levels on the 5 lesson brushing platforms has exceeded 100,000, and most of them are college students.
Liu Xiu is a junior in physics majoring in a university in Beijing. She saw an advertisement in WeChat group about paying for lessons, so she paid 5 yuan per course for a few online courses.
"I mainly study some basic public courses, which have little to do with my major. I hope to fill up the credits of general elective courses in the freshman year, so as to reduce the burden of studying professional courses in the future."
Liu Xiu said frankly that at the beginning, I still used the computer to play online lessons. Many online lessons will have answers when they reach 1/3, 1/2, and 2/3, and they must be answered before they can continue to play, but in many cases , I forgot to answer the question while doing other things, and the online class cannot go on.
"These online courses are mainly for credits. In fact, I don't want to learn them. Moreover, there are a lot of freshman homework, so I can only study them at lunch or late self-study. If you deliberately go to online courses, you will find it very troublesome."
"We used MOOC for elective courses. At that time, I logged into my account when I was paying for elective courses, and I could clearly see that the class progress bar was moving forward. A course was finished in about 2-3 days." Liu Xiu Say.
The China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily reporters found that most of the platforms that provide refreshing services exist on several mainstream social platforms. Students can choose the platform according to their needs by providing the platform account, password, and school name to the staff. course.
The content of brushing courses includes videos, courseware, homework, exams, etc. The brushing methods are also divided into "second brushing", "slow brushing", video plus homework, exams only, etc., of which slow brushing has the highest price.
The platform for refreshing courses covers many current mainstream online education platforms.
Generally, online courses are paid according to the number of courses, and the price is lower, at 4-6 yuan per course.
In addition, some platforms even use college students as "agents" to expand the black chain, and publish paid lesson advertisements through various social media such as Moments of Friends, QQ Groups, and QQ Zones among students, and "agent" students earn agency fees. And commission.
A reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily saw that a certain class brushing platform divides "agents" into ordinary agents and top-level agents. You can withdraw cash over 10 yuan."
Zhang Jia's classmate, who is a senior in a college in the west, is the "agent" responsible for pushing paid-for-teaching advertisements.
Under the influence of her classmates, Zhang Jia also started to pay for lessons.
Zhang Jia said that the fee for brushing courses is generally 3 to 5 yuan per course, and the payment is in the form of WeChat red envelopes. Different courses usually add different WeChat friends and provide the other party with "university name + account number as student ID + password. +course name".
"The rest are all inclusive. The scores for paying for the lessons can reach more than 80 points." Zhang Jia said.
Not only that, some technology-related majors even started a "small business" by themselves: helping their classmates learn lessons.
What Wang Yu studied is computer science, and now he has been "operating" paid courses for almost a year.
"I seldom send advertising messages, mainly through word of mouth among my classmates. I have done a good job in the quality, timeliness and service attitude of the class. Therefore, there are many "repeat customers" who can do so in an average of one year. 500-700 orders." As for how much money he made, Wang Yu said that the monthly living expenses are enough.
"It's not as good as paying for a class to get a higher score"
Brush or not?
Many college students have been caught in a dilemma between time and score in this environment.
After various trade-offs, some college students went astray.
A reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily found that the cost is low and the results are high. This is the feature that almost all college students interviewed have summed up the paid lessons.
Chi Hehe, a junior in a college in Wuhan, Hubei, followed a WeChat public account for learning English classes under the introduction of his senior.
"One semester's English class only costs 18 yuan. The main reason is the large amount of service. I feel that the whole school knows a lot of people, but everyone does not put it on the surface. The platform can even provide urgent services, such as when the end of the semester is approaching. 5 yuan to complete the task within 24 hours, plus 10 yuan to complete the task within 12 hours, and so on." Chi Hehe said.
In addition to saving trouble, Chi Hehe said that due to the problem of the online course system, this platform directly opened the gap between the grades of those who paid for the lessons and those of their own online courses.
"Spoken English scores are scored by computers, not by teachers. We have tested it together, and it is difficult to get a perfect score no matter how well you say it. However, you can get full scores for oral English using this tutorial website."
Fu Liang, a senior from a university in Hainan, has insisted on completing the content of the online course from the beginning, but he found that it took a lot of time to answer the questions by himself, but the scores were always not as high as those of his classmates.
Gradually, Fu Liang also started paying for lessons.
"For example, the error rate of the questions I answered may be relatively high, but after paying for the lessons, I can score more than 90 points." Fu Liang said that he learned the news through the QQ group. There are more than 400 people in this group, and most of them are Students who need to refresh the class.
The administrator will send advertisements for paid refresher courses.
After adding friends with them, the other party will send the payment code and scan the code to pay.
Generally, it is 8 yuan for a course, and 5 yuan for the number of courses of 3 or more.
"So I signed up with my classmates and brushed 4 courses. We provided the other party with the account and password of the online course platform. They did it, and the score was close to full marks." Fu Liang said.
Liu Xiu also said that the scores obtained by using paid brushing courses are very high, close to full marks.
"This is very important to me, because our school also includes the scores of online courses in the comprehensive grade point. Some students have the need to go abroad. They will pay for many elective courses to improve their grade points."
Liu Xiu also knows that the behavior of paying for school lessons is wrong, but Liu Xiu believes that the lack of strict school management has also contributed to the trend of school lessons.
"Our school doesn't care much about the elective courses in MOOCs, and credits are also given according to the progress of completion." In her view, "MOOCs should be used as a supplement to extracurricular knowledge, as extracurricular reference materials, and should not be used as credits. One way".
However, paying for lessons is not always so "reliable."
Zhao Yu, who studied at a university in Northeast China, still remembers that he had been given a record of bad lesson review by the online course platform when he was undergraduate. Fortunately, the school did not give any punishment.
After graduate school, despite the teacher's repeated orders and five applications for not allowing the class to be used, most of the students in the class chose to use the class once they found out that the school would give a demerit penalty.
In the beginning, Zhao Yu, like most of his classmates, handed over his account and password to the person in charge of brushing the class.
"It took a total of more than a dozen yuan, which is much cheaper than the flow rate of the course." However, after a while, Zhao Yu found that the error rate of his online courses was particularly high. When he was preparing for his own answer at the end of the semester, he found that the test time was already long. Was automatically consumed by the refreshing software.
"When the refreshing software starts to refresh the lesson, it will automatically refresh the lesson and automatically search for the questions, so when the final exam questions come out the first time, the software will be'answered' in advance, and the remaining answering time will be automatically consumed," Zhao Yu said In the end, he almost failed the exam and got only 63 points. Many of the students in the class scored between eight and ninety points.
Zhao Yu told reporters from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily that many students in the online course group formed by the teacher and the teacher reported that they could not take the final exam.
"I think the teacher actually knows that these students who have problems are all because they use up the exam time by refreshing the software. Later, the teacher posted the answer records of these students one by one, and these students lied that they had forgotten to answer them. question."
University teachers: fighting against "anti-scrubbing classes"
Allowing students to complete online courses seems to ease the teaching task of university teachers, but in fact, many university teachers have to start "anti-scratch class" response actions.
Li Wei, who studied at a university in Beijing, said that in a public elective course of "Appreciation of Chinese Classical Literature" he took, the teacher left everyone with an assignment and made it clear that this assignment was prepared for the anti-brush course.
"That is to copy texts by hand." Li Wei said that the teacher adopted a different grading method: copying texts accounted for 40%, and final papers accounted for 60%.
Based on the knowledge taught in the classroom, the teacher selects ancient famous articles such as "Bitter Cold Travel", "Suofeng Poem", "Li Sao", and popular science essays on ancient Chinese knowledge, presented in the form of traditional characters, and students are required to submit them as copies after they have finished copying. Usual grades.
"After deleting the punctuation, copy the text on 400-character squared paper on each page, just like copying a copybook. Many characters are particularly difficult to write, such as the traditional "Melancholy" of the two characters "Melancholy", with nearly 50 strokes." Li Wei said that this special "copybook" has a total of 8888 characters, because it usually took about a week to copy all of the traditional characters because it was rarely used in traditional Chinese characters.
Nowadays, many colleges and universities have begun to take action by cooperating with online course platforms to strictly investigate students who have brushed courses.
In 2019, Chengdu University received feedback from Wisdom Tree and Chaoxingerya online course platform companies that some students had bad learning records such as using third-party software to on-hook and refresh lessons. The school requires that there are many bad learning records, which exceed 50% of the total class hours. In March 2021, the Academic Affairs Office of Suzhou Industrial Vocational and Technical College issued a notice stating that Chaoxing Company provided the school with 416 people for bad behavior in the learning of public elective courses, involving 416 person-times. Students with bad behaviors shall be notified by the whole hospital, and the corresponding course learning progress shall be cleared.
In response to the problem of students brushing the class, Ling Huanzhang, director of the Applied Mathematics Research Center of Harbin Engineering University, said in an interview with a reporter from China Youth Daily and China Youth Daily. During the semester online class teaching, check the back-end playback data from time to time, and find that there is relatively concentrated refreshing data, and promptly remind students of their inquiries.
"Sometimes in the background, it is found that the playback data of individual students is concentrated in a short period of time. In this case, it is most likely that the students are brushing lessons." Ling Huanzhang said.
As far as individual students are concerned, this kind of misunderstanding of learning not only wastes their studies, but also seriously encourages opportunistic thinking.
In addition, the behavior of brushing courses also seriously affects the credibility of online teaching and has a huge impact on the quality of higher education.
Ling Huanzhang believes that the behavior of brushing lessons directly affects education fairness.
"In recent years, colleges and universities have been managing in various ways. In addition to often reminding students in the classroom, they also actively cooperate with third-party online courses, adopting methods such as pop-up questions during video playback to check student playback status, but the effect Still not satisfactory."
Since the outbreak of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, online course platforms have become an important part of college teaching, but at the same time Ling Huanzhang reminded that arranging excessive online courses is a double-edged sword for students.
"Currently, colleges and universities have a trend of rushing to learn online courses, which directly leads to the overburden of students' academic work." Ling Huanzhang believes that the construction of online courses in colleges and universities has developed rapidly in recent years. , Music Some courses suitable for offline learning also have a tendency to become online.
"I have seen some students use two mobile phones to scan online classes at the same time in class, which loses the meaning of learning." In Ling Huanzhang's view, to solve the problem of students "paying for lessons", in addition to continuous improvement in the judiciary Laws and regulations, intensifying the crackdown, also need to start from the third-party platform and schools in an all-round way, and address both the symptoms and the root causes.
"At the level of third-party platforms, technical support should be strengthened to make up for technical loopholes. In addition, colleges and universities should streamline high-quality courses when setting up courses, adjust the assessment mechanism for students' learning achievements, and cannot simply quantify with back-end broadcast data," Ling Huanzhang said, At the school level, it is necessary to shift from “data” only to assessing the mastery of students’ knowledge and content, not to use third-party data to evaluate students’ learning effectiveness, and to appropriately “reduce the burden” for students in the online course setting to attract students to online courses. In the next classroom education, this also requires college teachers to improve the quality of courses to a certain extent.
(At the request of interviewees, all students in the text are pseudonyms)
China Youth Daily·China Youth Daily reporter Ye Yuting, trainee reporter Han Rong, trainee Sun Shaoqing, and Tang Renzhang Source: China Youth Daily