Cheating student faces deportation to China from US

                    

An SAT promotional poster is seen at the Beijing Education Expo on Nov 2, 2013. PROVIDED FOR CHINA DAILY

San Francisco, July 30-A Chinese student named Biyuan Li was ordered deported for hisattempt to cheat his way into the graduate schools of top U.S. universities on Wednesday.

Li, now 25, studies accounting and finance at Northeastern University in Boston,Massachusetts. He was convicted by a federal judge on counts of conspiracy, making andusing forged passports, wire fraud and mail fraud, according to the Boston Globe.

Report also said that he was sentenced to five years probation and deported to Chinaimmediately for his part in a large college admissions testing scam. Li pleaded guilty to acount of conspiracy to commit mail fraud in July 2014.

His personal LinkedIn page shows that he was awarded honor student in May 2014 andearned International Student Scholarship in May 2010.

However, all his success was jeopardized in May 2015 when he was charged with paying animposter in China to take the GRE. Li sent his Chinese passport to a service in China sothat a fraudulent copy could be manufactured for the imposter's use. Further, Li attemptedto have the exam results sent on his behalf to many top American graduate programs atschools such as Penn, Johns Hopkins, Columbia, Northwestern, Brown and others, thedocuments revealed.

Li is one of 15 Chinese nationals charged in a federal indictment that describes aninternational scheme in test-taking cheat.

New York Times reported in May that some students allegedly paid impostors $6,000 totake the SAT and GRE.

Shao wei, former education consular at the San Francisco Consulate General said that"Some of the students studying abroad aim to gain good fame, to add highlight to theirresumes, or even to fulfill their parents' dreams." Minna Wang, chief content manager ofWholeRen Education, a US-based agency providing services to Chinese students said"They may take ways to reach that goal."

A White Paper on Dismissal Issues of Chinese Students in the United States 2015, releasedby WholeRen Education, reported that an estimated 3 percent of Chinese studentsstudying in the US , or about 8,000, were dismissed last year. And the report said that22.98% of the students was dispelled because of academic dishonesty.

Minna Wang told the report that "U.S. universities consider that the preliminaryrequirement of academic performance lies in honesty". She said that one Chinese studentwas dispelled just because he had pre-taken the exam during his preparation but didn't tellhis teacher. "If it happens in China, he will be OK. But here in the United States, it'sconsidered as dishonesty," explained she, "Because it's unjustified to other students."

According to the Institute of International Education, China sends more students to studyin the United States than does any other country; 31 percent of the international studentsin the United States during the 2013-14 academic year came from China. That year, 274,439 Chinese students studied in the United States, an increase of 16.5 percent over theprevious year.

As the number of Chinese students applying to US universities grows, schools should bemore vigilant to verify these papers, told Stanley Nel, USF vice president of internationalrelations.