DADWAGON

Look, I’m not saying that the Chinese students who got insanely good scores on the recent international standardized tests were cheating. Oh no. Certainly not. Don’t you see those quotation marks up there around the word “cheat”? I’m definitely the last person to suggest that the many news reports and anecdotes I’ve heard about Chinese students cheating in general would apply in this case. After all, a guy who had absolutely nothing to do with administering the tests told the New York Times “he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable”:

“The technical side of this was well regulated, the sampling was O.K., and there was no evidence of cheating,” he said.

Did the Chinese students cheat? You didn’t hear me say that. All I’m saying is that their success proves that U.S. students aren’t cheating well enough. Yet another way we’re falling behind as a superpower.