They didn't just trade free speech for cash. They traded their academic integrity.
Talk to anyone who teaches at ANU/Monash/Melbourne and they'll tell you the same thing: most international Chinese students should fail by every metric there is, but there is tremendous pressure from the faculty to 'find marks' to get those students to scrape through and look the other way at their plagiarism and cheating.
It's like there are two sets of standards now. One for Chinese students, and one for everyone else.
I TAed a compulsory "Introduction to Engineering" class at USyd. The class itself was dead easy, the equivalent of the fizzbuzz interview question.
The single assessment was "review an engineering article" where I caught 7 students (all international) plagiarizing. Not just borrowing a sentence or two, but lifting entire paragraphs and gluing them together with broken English. In one case a student had gone as far as submitting Stephen Hawking's "Space and Time Warps", verbatim.
I raised all of these to the professor. Despite all students signing the "I know what plagiarism is, I won't do it and understand there I will be kicked out if I do" - the professor knocked back all of my claims and all students passed.
It was a huge disappointment to realize that this is how the "education system" works.
Can confirm. I used to teach Computer Science at Adelaide University. One of the factors in my decision to leave academia was the appalling extent to which academic standards were being lowered to cater for international students (mostly from China) who should not have even been accepted but brought in lots of cash.
I taught a Masters level Enterprise Architecture unit at Swinburne University for a single semester and concluded that the system is designed to pass students. Specifically, my advice to employers and recruiters is to discount science and technology degrees by at least a single grade i.e. high distinction is really a distinction, distinction is really a credit, credit is really just a pass, and a pass is actually a fail.
A decade earlier I had graduated from a Masters and had such a great experience as a mature age student that I vowed I’d try my hand at teaching if the opportunity arose. When the opportunity came, I was excited, thinking I’d experience the same kind of mature, engaged and discursive sessions that I had as a student. Far from it. A handful of my students turned up consistently and at least made an effort. The rubric for the assessments were designed to make it almost impossible to fail. Out of my cohort (27 students), I would be comfortable hiring 2. There was one kid (that passed, barely) who I wouldn’t hire as a cleaner because he wouldn’t know which end of the broom to point at the ground unless someone told him.
It was incredibly disheartening and I can’t see myself ever doing that again.
This isn’t a new problem, people were saying the same thing 20 years ago. And it isn’t accurate or fair to say it is a problem only with students of one single nationality, it’s not. It’s really the conflict of interest inherent in fee-paying international students - if you fail too many of them, they will leave and not come back and you lose out on future revenue from them - worsened by the fact that lowering English language entry requirements improves enrolment and revenue but then the students struggle academically because they can’t understand the course and struggle with writing essays/assignments/exams in English.
> It's like there are two sets of standards now. One for Chinese students, and one for everyone else.
At least in the UK, University of St Andrews, which has the highest percentage of international students in the country, offers a Foundation Year[1] to the applicants from the third-world countries, which must be taken before the 4-year undergraduate degree.
It reduces the knowledge gap, improves the language skills, and brings additional income to the university without affecting the quality and experience of the degree programs.
Same issue in New Zealand. There's even a cottage industry of corrupt TEFL schools so you can meet the language requirements.
In a way I hope it gets worse, to damage beyond repair the integrity of a university education. I think it's a tragedy we extend everyones childhood by 3 years, and at the end of it half of all graduates can't even earn themselves an upper working class lifestyle.
What is the motivation behind the cheating and plagiarism? This would seem to imply that students do not care about learning the underlying skill. Why would a country encourage this?
FWICT, at the University of Queensland Engineering faculty this looking the other way for international students doesn't appear to happen. I can't speak for other faculties.
I was stunned by the shear audacity of one recent attempt to cheat. It was a group project involving designing and building a hardware / software thingy. The idea was to pull in students from multiple Engineering disciplines I think. This particular group had both Australian students and overseas.
Like all such groups some did some work, others didn't and in this particular case there wasn't enough of the former so things weren't going well. On the due date they had to drop off the the project at a project room, which was locked up until evaluation day. One of the international students decided to break in and continue work. This involved breaking glass windows, jimmying doors, and turning the lights on. Naturally enough security noticed and put a quick end to it - but not before the submitted project was in pieces.
That made evaluating the project in the normal manner near impossible, so they put together a panel designed to feel like the Spanish inquisition and quizzed each student on their contribution for a hour or two. They passed one and failed the others - including the international students.
I went to UQ myself many years ago, back when it was only Australians who attended, and we also got up to some shenanigans. No country breeds only angels. My student cohort did things that were equally bad. The major one was discovering a security flaw in the PDP 10's operating system (TOPS-10), and using it to crash the system repeatedly so we could get the a little more time on the assignments. It didn't go down so well as that same PDP 10 was used to run the Uni's administration, and so it took out things like payroll. They had no idea who did it and no way of finding out, but needed to put an end to it very quickly. I thought they handled it very well. They put the usual suspects in a room, said no one would be punished, but they really needed to know how it was being done. They didn't have much choice I guess, as everyone in the room knew how it was done but no one was going to admit to doing it.
I can't really say which of these two crimes caused the most damage - the one by the Australians or the international student. But I suspect in the eyes of the Uni the international one suffered from a far bigger flaw than damage or inconvenience - it was just plain stupid in a way I had never seen in my day.
Are the Chinese sending their less astute students there? Most Indian and Chinese students I worked with in engineering college were studious and sharp, which I couldn't say so much for a lot of my American compatriots until the first couple of years of weed out classes made sure only dedicated students made it through.
Similar stuff is going on in NZ. A university in Auckland recently halted a pro-Democracy protest organised by HK students after a university official was summoned to the Chinese embassy. There were of course no issues when mainland students organised a pro-Beijing rally.
Local. TAed (USA nomenclature) 6 instances of 4 courses at top 5 AU Comp. Sci. university. Can confirm professorss of 3 courses wanted to fail at leats 1 student (one wanted to fail half a summer school class: approximately 75 students) and not a single student was ever failed because politics. Very few if any candidates for failure were local students.
Have many contacts, some with Ph.Ds, some who are lecturers in charge of courses now who at least reluctantly admit to this pattern.
Universities have indirect policies that penalise LiCs for failing students. Classic example: every failing students requires a report to management. Why did they fail? What is your proposal to prevent this type of failure from happening in the future?
When the reason is: how the hell did they get through the prerequisite course (presumably because of the same political pressure) you are met with: they met the prerequsites; you are applying unreasonable expetations on your students.
The entire reputation of the univiersity is for sale. How long can it last? If recent history is any guide, a long time. Let's find out.
While at university here in Australia I was given the opportunity to spend a few weeks in China sponsored by Huawei.
I was naive back then. It was just one massive brain washing exercise where we were taken on a propaganda tour and taught how stupid the Australian government was to not contract Huawei to build the NBN.
I’m a uni student in aus right now and I’m not a fan of Chinese propaganda but I wouldn’t mind a free trip to China. Do you have any links/tips on how I could get myself on one of these trips? I’m at UNSW btw.
When I went back to school
I found out about a thing called CourseHero. How? A classmate lab partner submitted the report we submitted for our work. He submitted it verbatim with his name, my name, a third person in our group and even the instructor's name.
The only reason I knew of it was a fellow classmate got a new phone and for kicks looked up his name and found the report at CourseHero.
By the looks of that website I'd say cheating is rampant. Being drawn into something you're not aware of then nearly expelled is maddening.
[+] [-] missosoup|6 years ago|reply
Talk to anyone who teaches at ANU/Monash/Melbourne and they'll tell you the same thing: most international Chinese students should fail by every metric there is, but there is tremendous pressure from the faculty to 'find marks' to get those students to scrape through and look the other way at their plagiarism and cheating.
It's like there are two sets of standards now. One for Chinese students, and one for everyone else.
[+] [-] lwakefield|6 years ago|reply
The single assessment was "review an engineering article" where I caught 7 students (all international) plagiarizing. Not just borrowing a sentence or two, but lifting entire paragraphs and gluing them together with broken English. In one case a student had gone as far as submitting Stephen Hawking's "Space and Time Warps", verbatim.
I raised all of these to the professor. Despite all students signing the "I know what plagiarism is, I won't do it and understand there I will be kicked out if I do" - the professor knocked back all of my claims and all students passed.
It was a huge disappointment to realize that this is how the "education system" works.
[+] [-] peterkelly|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phs318u|6 years ago|reply
A decade earlier I had graduated from a Masters and had such a great experience as a mature age student that I vowed I’d try my hand at teaching if the opportunity arose. When the opportunity came, I was excited, thinking I’d experience the same kind of mature, engaged and discursive sessions that I had as a student. Far from it. A handful of my students turned up consistently and at least made an effort. The rubric for the assessments were designed to make it almost impossible to fail. Out of my cohort (27 students), I would be comfortable hiring 2. There was one kid (that passed, barely) who I wouldn’t hire as a cleaner because he wouldn’t know which end of the broom to point at the ground unless someone told him.
It was incredibly disheartening and I can’t see myself ever doing that again.
[+] [-] skissane|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krn|6 years ago|reply
At least in the UK, University of St Andrews, which has the highest percentage of international students in the country, offers a Foundation Year[1] to the applicants from the third-world countries, which must be taken before the 4-year undergraduate degree.
It reduces the knowledge gap, improves the language skills, and brings additional income to the university without affecting the quality and experience of the degree programs.
[1] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/subjects/study-options/foundati...
[+] [-] lacampbell|6 years ago|reply
In a way I hope it gets worse, to damage beyond repair the integrity of a university education. I think it's a tragedy we extend everyones childhood by 3 years, and at the end of it half of all graduates can't even earn themselves an upper working class lifestyle.
[+] [-] stri8ed|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rstuart4133|6 years ago|reply
I was stunned by the shear audacity of one recent attempt to cheat. It was a group project involving designing and building a hardware / software thingy. The idea was to pull in students from multiple Engineering disciplines I think. This particular group had both Australian students and overseas.
Like all such groups some did some work, others didn't and in this particular case there wasn't enough of the former so things weren't going well. On the due date they had to drop off the the project at a project room, which was locked up until evaluation day. One of the international students decided to break in and continue work. This involved breaking glass windows, jimmying doors, and turning the lights on. Naturally enough security noticed and put a quick end to it - but not before the submitted project was in pieces.
That made evaluating the project in the normal manner near impossible, so they put together a panel designed to feel like the Spanish inquisition and quizzed each student on their contribution for a hour or two. They passed one and failed the others - including the international students.
I went to UQ myself many years ago, back when it was only Australians who attended, and we also got up to some shenanigans. No country breeds only angels. My student cohort did things that were equally bad. The major one was discovering a security flaw in the PDP 10's operating system (TOPS-10), and using it to crash the system repeatedly so we could get the a little more time on the assignments. It didn't go down so well as that same PDP 10 was used to run the Uni's administration, and so it took out things like payroll. They had no idea who did it and no way of finding out, but needed to put an end to it very quickly. I thought they handled it very well. They put the usual suspects in a room, said no one would be punished, but they really needed to know how it was being done. They didn't have much choice I guess, as everyone in the room knew how it was done but no one was going to admit to doing it.
I can't really say which of these two crimes caused the most damage - the one by the Australians or the international student. But I suspect in the eyes of the Uni the international one suffered from a far bigger flaw than damage or inconvenience - it was just plain stupid in a way I had never seen in my day.
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tjpnz|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caf|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apta|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway4888|6 years ago|reply
Local. TAed (USA nomenclature) 6 instances of 4 courses at top 5 AU Comp. Sci. university. Can confirm professorss of 3 courses wanted to fail at leats 1 student (one wanted to fail half a summer school class: approximately 75 students) and not a single student was ever failed because politics. Very few if any candidates for failure were local students.
Have many contacts, some with Ph.Ds, some who are lecturers in charge of courses now who at least reluctantly admit to this pattern.
Universities have indirect policies that penalise LiCs for failing students. Classic example: every failing students requires a report to management. Why did they fail? What is your proposal to prevent this type of failure from happening in the future?
When the reason is: how the hell did they get through the prerequisite course (presumably because of the same political pressure) you are met with: they met the prerequsites; you are applying unreasonable expetations on your students.
The entire reputation of the univiersity is for sale. How long can it last? If recent history is any guide, a long time. Let's find out.
[+] [-] solidsnack9000|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] friendlybus|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jaimex2|6 years ago|reply
I was naive back then. It was just one massive brain washing exercise where we were taken on a propaganda tour and taught how stupid the Australian government was to not contract Huawei to build the NBN.
[+] [-] boredishBoi|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dghughes|6 years ago|reply
The only reason I knew of it was a fellow classmate got a new phone and for kicks looked up his name and found the report at CourseHero.
By the looks of that website I'd say cheating is rampant. Being drawn into something you're not aware of then nearly expelled is maddening.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]