Another Lecturer, Reader's Comment, Fee-paying uni students bully academics for

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Another Lecturer, Reader's Comment, Fee-paying uni students bully academics for good marks, Tracey Spicer, The Punch, 9 March 2010: http://www.thepunch.com.au/articles/fee-paying-uni-students-bully-academics-for-good-marks/ Historical link preserved from the original page.

Linking the permanent residency visa to postgraduate study seems to have led to many foreign students enrolling in Australian universities as an immigration scheme. Historical link preserved from the original page.

I am a former teacher of overseas students for 6 years in undergrad and postgrad IT studies at a private college that taught degrees from an Australian university. Historical link preserved from the original page.

During that time, I saw the courses from the university dumbed down to the point where some units simply became English tests, with students having to write a 1000 word essay or give a powerpoint presentation on their background, hobbies and interests, which I would think any Australian student could have managed in around half an hour of work and without any effort whatsoever.

These essays and power-point presentations certainly had no real academic merit, yet the students still struggled, and so the standard continued to be lowered until students were passing. The students were allowed to take textbooks and notes into exams and every effort was made to help them pass. This happened across the board in numerous subjects I taught and I even saw undergrad and postgrad students in the same class, being taught the same material, usually only with a small variation in the assignments they were given, if any at all.

Many students struggled with English and were obviously incapable of reading the instructions to assignments or the question in exams, for instance leaving out large sections of assignments, or misreading the question. In one year almost an entire unit answered an exam question regarding audio, as if we had asked about still images and jpegs. Which is akin to asking what colour is the sky and being told that the grass is green.

Attempting to read what they had written was similar to reading that of perhaps a dyslexic, where words were incorrectly substituted into text copied from the web to avoid accusations of plagiarism, often with the incorrect or opposite meaning of what should have been written. Yet this was not considered plagiarism by the university. Sometimes students would not even attempt to use a whole word and would use ‘textspeak’, such as ‘R’ instead of are, or ‘U’ instead of you.

I found that around 90 per cent of the thousands of students I taught had the peculiar trait of being unable to punctuate a sentence, with no capital at the start of sentence and placing the full stop at the start of the next sentence after two spaces, rather than at the end. This, I believe, was the result of many attending the same English school, despite the fact that the spell-checker would constantly attempt to correct them.

Then the students were incapable of completing work on time or regularly, often handing in assignments days late, or sitting in class each week, completing the previous weeks work instead of what was allocated for that lesson. When I tried repeatedly to explain the importance of deadlines, the students had no understanding of class work or being given assignments to finish during the semester. In India (where 95 percent of the students were from) they were taught in classes numbering in the thousands. Indian assessments were made using 200 prepared questions and answers, given to the students at the start of the semester and asked in a multiple-choice exam at the end, as it was impossible for the single lecturer to mark thousands of papers any other way.

Yet I was told by senior staff to ignore plagiarism and constantly reminded that we were offering a service to the students which they had paid for and expected to get good results for the fees they had paid. I even had senior staff alter my marks or ignore plagiarism complaints, then turn around and blame me if it was later picked up in reviews of the student’s work. All of this was because the college relied on the student fees to survive, as the did university, which only 10 years previously had catered purely for students from rural Australia, but which had now 70 percent foreign students enrolled in their courses, even opening a campus in Qatar.

However, perhaps the most damning revelation would come when you asked the students why they were here.

If you ask them who is here for an education, maybe one or two would put their hand up. Yet if you asked who is here for a degree and points for permanent residency, the entire class would unashamedly answer yes.

Linking the permanent residency visa to postgraduate study seems to have led to the foreign students enrolling in our universities and colleges as a back-door immigration scheme. They seemed to have no real interest in pursuing an education. The universities and colleges were complicit in allowing this to occur and advertised or modified their courses to ensure they met the immigration requirement, including offering combined bachelors and masters degrees in 3 years of study at one point, all the while dumbing down their courses to accommodate the foreign students and help to ensure they passed.