> these projects devolved into internet searches, copy-pasting online articles and pictures and calling it a day.
In every education system I've ever participated in, that's how the majority of students deals with homework. I saw it in Germany from primary school to university. I saw it at a Chinese university. I saw PhD students get called out for copying from each other, with the TA writing "at least don't be so obvious about it" in the course chat. (Then he deleted the message for plausible deniability, of course.)
I'm convinced that it's like this everywhere in the world. Creative problem solving is hard, and most students are constantly struggling to keep up. If they have no motivation to learn, there is not much that educators can do to make them learn. That wouldn't be such a problem if there weren't the motivation to be able to claim that they learned about something, when in fact they didn't.
There are measures that can prevent cheating (today I got a warning that jammers would be in use around Chinese high schools to prevent cheating during the national exams), but you can't always enforce that students are actually studying instead of just pretending to. In the end the responsibility lies with the student to make an honest attempt before they resort to copying.
I agree that such an education system doesn't create a large pool of talented problem solvers, but no country has a system that achieves that. The system is for everyone else, those who wouldn't even pretend to learn if they weren't forced to do so.
In every education system I've ever participated in, that's how the majority of students deals with homework. I saw it in Germany from primary school to university. I saw it at a Chinese university. I saw PhD students get called out for copying from each other, with the TA writing "at least don't be so obvious about it" in the course chat. (Then he deleted the message for plausible deniability, of course.)
I'm convinced that it's like this everywhere in the world. Creative problem solving is hard, and most students are constantly struggling to keep up. If they have no motivation to learn, there is not much that educators can do to make them learn. That wouldn't be such a problem if there weren't the motivation to be able to claim that they learned about something, when in fact they didn't.
There are measures that can prevent cheating (today I got a warning that jammers would be in use around Chinese high schools to prevent cheating during the national exams), but you can't always enforce that students are actually studying instead of just pretending to. In the end the responsibility lies with the student to make an honest attempt before they resort to copying.
I agree that such an education system doesn't create a large pool of talented problem solvers, but no country has a system that achieves that. The system is for everyone else, those who wouldn't even pretend to learn if they weren't forced to do so.