US colleges expelled thousands of Chinese students last year for bad grades and cheating

Roughly 8,000 Chinese students were expelled from US colleges and universities last year, predominantly for bad grades and cheating, according to a new report from WholeRen Education.

"Chinese students used to be considered top-notch but over the past five years their image has changed completely - wealthy kids who cheat," Chen Hang, chief development officer at WholeRen, told The Wall Street Journal's China Real Time blog.

WholeRen representatives pointed out to The Journal that "huge numbers" of Chinese students study at American schools each year, so a few thousand expulsions is not a terrible failure rate. According to recent surveys, around a third of America's nearly 1 million international college students are from China.

However, WholeRen's numbers do not paint these students in a flattering light. According to the education company, 80.55% of Chinese students' dismissals "resulted from academic dishonesty or low academic performances," while just over 50% of the students had a GPA lower than a 2.0 - typically, a C.

The WholeRen report is in Chinese, but The Wall Street Journal pulled out some interesting details about the expulsions.

"More than half of the Chinese students expelled were from top 100 US universities, the survey found. Cheating at exams, plagiarism and finding other students to write papers for them were frequently cited as the specific causes of expulsion," The Journal reports.