Last week, journalist and mature age Masters student, Meshel Laurie, penned an alarming article in Fairfax explaining how domestic university students are effectively cross-subsidizing the marks of international students by carrying the load in group assignments:
It’s a neat trick: group assessment (with groups allocated by instructors) in courses overloaded with full-fee-paying, non-English speaking students means the English speakers bear the burden of catching the others up, translating the course content for them and helping them pass…
The workload is overwhelming enough without having to piggyback someone else through it too… The university assessment process is heavily weighted towards group activities…
In the wake of this article, Fairfax readers unloaded in Letters to the Editor, recounting how domestic students are being shafted by “diabolical” group assignments that have effectively turned them into unpaid tutors for international students struggling to comprehend English. In the process, university standards are being comprehensively destroyed.
Below are some key highlights:
As a mature-age student, I also returned to study and found the “group assessment” diabolical. Sometimes you got students who were equally committed to the project, but more often many were not. One student, apart from barely turning up to group meetings and expecting us to explain and do everything for her, plagiarised my work. (It was for a group presentation). When I confronted her about this, she said it was normal to copy in China…
At the end of the semester, I asked our tutor if he was going to pass her as she contributed barely anything. He said as she was a foreign, full-fee paying student, he was obligated to pass her…. I am all for student diversity, but a two-tier assessment (one for foreign students and one for locals) is, of course, not equitable nor ethical…
Russell McGilton, Coburg North…
During her degree, my daughter often found herself in the situation where the only hope she had of passing group assignments was by doing most of the work herself. In a group of five or six, there would usually be three or four Chinese with unacceptably poor English comprehension. They barely understood what they were being asked to do, much less have the capacity to help formulate responses. How shockingly unfair was that on my daughter and other locals who were dumped with this responsibility? How dare our universities dole out degrees to students who only pass because other students have effectively hauled them through by doing the work for them?…
The real demonstration of her university’s attitude was the day she walked into a lecture to find it being conducted in Chinese. She said she did not understand, whereby the lecturer apologised to the auditorium and said they would now have to conduct it in English.
Kay Buckeridge, Mosman, NSW
These criticisms come as a former Monash College English language teacher, Warwick Lowe, warned over the weekend that international students had been admitted to the university with barely functioning English-language proficiency:
International students with poor English skills are being admitted to Monash University using language tests “carefully crafted” to allow nearly all of them to pass, says a former English teacher at the university who was sacked after drawing attention to the problem…
[Lowe] said the university’s intensive English courses for international students did not give them enough language proficiency and left them struggling in university study. “This is not a grey area. It is an absurdity that they can enter with language which is wholly inadequate,” he said.
So here we have a deplorable situation where universities have restructured entry requirements to enable the recruitment of huge volumes of non-English speaking background (NESB) international students:
At the same time, university assessment has been restructured into group assignments to ensure that domestic students carry the load and effectively become unpaid tutors to help NESB international students pass.
The above farce highlights just how far Australia’s university system has strayed away from its initial purpose of educating Australians and raising the nation’s productive potential.
Instead, universities have turned into blood-sucking corporations that push through as many full-fee paying international students to maximise revenue, no matter the cost to standards.
If Australia’s universities wish to continue running a significant international student business, they should be required to run separate international student schools that provide for these students and their special needs. They most certainly should not restructure long standing entry, teaching and assessment requirements to cater for full fee-paying NESB students at domestic students’ expense.
