I am working at university in Europe. We have a great number of exchange students (one semester, year, of multiple years). I have great difficulties to teach (or work with) students from Asia (mainly China and India, but not only). Some of them are similar to other exchange students (Europe and US). But it seems that most of them does not work in the way we expect. Few examples:

- they are doing their best to avoid classes and labs with various excuses, sometimes it seems that presence at classes and labs cause them some tremendous pain (even though they are free to play with their mobile phones).

- they have complains about too high difficulty of the courses. But they complain only by email. They never ask or complain during the lab.

- they never admit they do not understand the topic - even though other students do so, and/or I directly ask them if they understand

*Note: I could find much more problems, but I focused only on problems exclusive for Asian exchange students.*

I can simplify and summarize it:

- they are avoiding attending school

- they avoid work/learning

- they never ask anything

- they never talk directly to me in person

I commonly witness things like this:

- 90 minutes of lecture, followed by 90 minutes of time to consult and discuss the lecture or tasks they got. They leave the class immediately after lecture, and send me email in 5 minutes that they do not understand it (with no particular question/note). If I ask them to be more specific, then I have got no response. Later, when they submit solutions for their tasks, it is obvious they do not learn much.


My sample size ~100 of those students in two years. It is not a big sample at all (including my cognitive biases as well). However, it seems that the bad patterns in their behavior are not just my bad luck. Also my colleagues report similar/same experience with similar/same groups of students here.

**My questions:**

- do you experience the same problems, or do I have bad sample only?

- what should I do to improve my teaching impact on them?

- why their behaviour is so weird and "unstudent like" (from European point of view), is their previous education too different?

- how looks the education at their universities?

*Note: I know that "Asia" is extremely large place with lot of strongly different countries, so feel free to limit your answer on India and/or China.*