Mimicry and TOEFL

I have some students preparing for the TOEFL exam, so I was wondering how best to help them out. Most schools that teach TOEFL preparation are actually teaching tricks on how to "guess correctly" - looking out for specific patterns, and using knowledge of the testing format that TOEFL employs to get a feel for the probable answer - rather than actually teaching English. On the one hand, this is probably very effective. People who learn these tricks will undoubtedly get higher scores than the students who try, through conversation or newspaper reading, to quickly improve their English ability. However, using these high test schools to get into schools or to get jobs will be misleading. It's almost like cheating.

Last night I ran into a guy at the grocery store (both of us doing our shopping after midnight) and we had a very long conversation about all kinds of things, during which he claimed that all Taiwanese people cheat on everything, all the time. They copy notes and tests from previous years, trying to reproduce the "right" answers - and who can blame them? They could stagger off into their own independent territory, trying to do it all on their own, and they will undoubtedly get lower grades. Since grades in Taiwan completely rule your entire future, with no exceptions, nobody can afford the risk of independence. Learn what works. Learn the right answer. Not the process.

But is this cheating? One of my student's other teachers gave him a list of grammatically correct sentences to use during essay writing. He was supposed to memorize the sentences and then copy them into his essay whenever possible. He asked if this was a good idea, and I said that it was: trying to express their own thoughts freely, they will translate from the Chinese and the grammar will be very difficult to sift through. The meaning will get lost, the paper will be obtuse and difficult to read. Learning the structure of many common English sentences, for transitions and things, will really help. Sure, the writing will be rough, fragmented, and disconnected. It may seem starchy or false. But at least there's a chance of getting the meaning across. Throwing the grammar around changes all of the meaning in English, and with many sentences together, meaning gets lost (I know, I've had to correct some papers).

Likewise, in my classes, I sometimes wonder if my classmates aren't "mimicking", or learning and reproducing the target language rather than fully understanding it. But then, what does it mean to "fully understand" something? If they know the right technical jargon and they employ it correctly, grammatically, in relevant discourse (sometimes I'm surprised how well they can do this - I usually reduce all concepts into very simple English) what separates them from native speakers?