Whistleblower warning on degrees

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Degrees are being awarded to overseas students who speak almost no English, claims a whistleblowing academic.
The academic, at a world-famous UK university, says postgraduate degrees are awarded to students lacking in the most basic language skills.
There are concerns that financial pressures to recruit overseas students for cash rather than quality could threaten the credibility of degrees.
But Universities UK says there are "rigorous" checks on standards.
The number of overseas students taking higher degree courses, such as masters and doctorates, has soared - rising more than eightfold since the mid-1990s.
More than 60% of higher degree students are now from outside the UK.
Overseas students have been seen as a lucrative source of revenue - with the Higher Education Policy Institute calculating payments to universities of almost £1.5bn per year in fees plus £2.2bn in living costs.
Language doubts
But the whistleblowing academic, who wants to remain anonymous, describes a postgraduate system in which lecturers are expected to teach courses to overseas students who have only the most limited English.
These students, who pay an average of about £19,000 per year, will in theory have passed English language proficiency tests, but there are questions about the reliability of such evidence.



"For example, last week I tried to speak to a student who could not understand a simple request; in the end, we had to resort to pen and paper," writes the academic, who works at a leading Russell Group university.
"Someone who needs to communicate using pictures is, to say the least, unlikely to have passed the language proficiency test by themselves."
Describing the frustration of fellow lecturers, this academic says that once students have arrived at the university, often to study for a one-year masters course, it becomes difficult for them to be failed or sent home.
While there is intense competition for undergraduate places at the university, the academic says that it is much easier for overseas students to find places on taught postgraduate courses.
It is also unusual for students to fail postgraduate courses - so much so that there are no national figures. The Higher Education Statistics Agency says that its record-keeping on degree levels "does not explicitly contain the concept of 'failing' a course".
The overall category for those who leave, drop out or fail, known as "left with no award" is 10.9%.
'Eroded'
There are concerns among senior figures in higher education about the consequences of the financial pressures on universities to recruit overseas students.

HIGHER DEGREES

1995: 8,689 UK students; 6,912 overseas students
2001: 27,985 UK students; 30,760 overseas students
2007: 34,600 UK students; 14,300 EU students; 44,225 non-EU overseas students

Source: HESA



Student walks out
Lecturer's warning
University staff comments

Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment Research at the University of Buckingham and an expert on higher education, warns of the need to protect the reputation of UK university degrees.
"In the long run, the perception of a degree will change," he said.
"If international employers find that when they're recruiting from a British university and finding that the student cannot speak English and has no sign of the necessary capabilities – then the reputation will be gradually eroded.
"Once that has happened it will be very difficult to reverse."
Prof Smithers says these problems are a reflection of the changing nature of universities. Are they academic institutions or businesses?
"In the past, the system only had to consider the question of maintaining standards – now that they are run like businesses it changes the way they think about recruiting students and awarding degrees.
"It's a very important issue - it's the juncture of trusting universities and their need to secure their income stream.
"Teaching home undergraduates isn't cost-effective, so they are increasingly looking to overseas students for income."
'Low standard'
But once students have been recruited - and they are not able to carry out the academic work - Prof Smithers says that this creates a dilemma for universities.




"It's a difficult situation, when you might have students who arrive as part of a contract with an overseas government, such as training civil servants, and you find that they are of a low standard.
"What sort of standards do you apply? Do you fail all of them?"
And Prof Smithers says it is difficult for academics to protest.
"The concern is often unspoken. Universities are more centrally driven, it's quite hard even for heads of department and deans of faculty to stand against that."
He highlights how attempts to help students with inadequate English can create other problems. If they have to use translators to produce essays, it makes it difficult to assess the quality of the original work.
The worry about one-year masters degrees can also come from the customers, says Bahram Bekhradnia of the Higher Education Policy Institute - who talks about "mutterings round the bar".
"The concern about international students and their language ability is actually two way.
"I have heard examples of foreign governments saying they are concerned that in a year students may spend so much time getting their English up to scratch that they don't learn much of the subject matter.
"The Chinese ministry for example has stopped supporting students on masters courses."
The British Council in Beijing confirms that the "ministry of education support (in the form of scholarships) is now focused on PhD students and not Masters".
Almost a third of complaints received by the Office of the Independent Adjudicator for Higher Education relate to taught postgraduate courses - and more than a third were from overseas students.
Feeder schools
A survey of plagiarism published this month found that postgraduate students were disproportionately likely to have been caught cheating.

It is doing no one any favours for this sort of 'Cash for Hons' situation to continue


The UCU lecturers' union is also concerned about another aspect of overseas recruitment - in which private English-language colleges become partners of universities, recruiting students overseas and then acting as feeders for university courses.
This is a form of "privatising" access to universities, says UCU spokesman Dan Ashley.
"We have a proud reputation, but mustn't tarnish it for the sake of making a quick buck," he said.
Glasgow Caledonian University is planning a partnership with the privately-run INTO group, which would see INTO recruiting overseas students and providing a foundation course, in partnership with the university, on the university campus.
Students who have completed this foundation course could then transfer to the second year of a Glasgow Caledonian degree course.
This partnership, with an intended capacity of up to 600 overseas students per year, is being opposed by a campaign group of staff, including law lecturer Nick McKerrell.
"It shows higher education is being sold off," says Dr McKerrell.
The university rejects this, saying it is a joint venture which will bring financial and cultural benefits, without compromising standards, which will "help to safeguard the university's future in an increasingly competitive environment".
A spokesman for INTO says its arrangements are "not privatisation but a joint venture with it and the university as equal partners".
Universities UK, the body representing higher education leaders, also rejects the idea that there has been any lowering of standards.
A spokesman says that "all academic programmes in the UK are subject to the UK's rigorous and independent quality assurance procedures".
"Talented students from around the world contribute immeasurably to the intellectual vitality of UK higher education and make a critical contribution to our international standing.
"UK degrees are recognised around the world as being high quality and lead to excellent employment opportunities."
A spokeswoman for the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills said it was up to individual institutions to monitor the quality of their courses and for the sector's representative body, Universities UK, to comment on the issue.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7358528.stm

melancholly

all sounds perfectly true to me............ student fees have gone up but funding has gone down....... plenty of places run expensive postgrad courses entirely aimed at foreign students to enable them to stay in the black and run the undergrad courses mainly for home students. (although i have had to mark undergrad work in one particular place which was so badly written it made no sense - but you can't fail anyone......) now obviously they won't admit that in public!!

Gingernutmeg

Sounds true to me too. I went to uni as a mature student and ended up living in the postgrad halls, so almost all of the people I lived with were international postgrads. A lot of them were perfectly fluent, but a good majority of them really weren't. It amazed me that they all kept 'passing' despite their lack of written and spoken English, but they did. I was asked to 'proofread' quite a few MA/MSc essays during the time I was in halls and a lot of them were not good at all, and yet they still passed. The university was incredibly lenient with the international students - they'd get a LOT of help to write essays and there was no such thing as a deadline ...

Quite apart from the academic side, a lot of the international students who didn't speak English were absolutely miserable during their courses. Socially they didn't/couldn't mix at all, and they (especially the Asian students) tended to be incredibly isolated. A lot of them ended up really depressed - not surprising given the academic issues combined with the social problems - and there were all kinds of incidents. The university just couldn't cope with postgrad students who needed such intensive support - all they could do was offer counselling which was pretty useless when the students couldn't speak English and the counsellors couldn't speak Mandarin/Korean/Japanese etc, and most of them came from cultures where that wasn't an acceptable way to deal with problems. Seems to me that this part of the problem needs to be investigated too.

celyn90

I used to date someone that was responsible for admissions in his department at a top University (will remained unnamed) - he said that for undergraduate courses he was responsbile for the academic requirements for full fee paying students was less than it would be for home students and that he was supposed to fill a quota of full fee paying persons. So this doesn't suprise me. I think it is really sad for anyone to come and study and have to struggle for whatever reason.

I do think it is unfair to present the data in terms of percentage of overseas students though - the majority of overseas students I have met have been perfectly capable, very hard working and very intelligent. I think it says more about the standard of the degree really, if a university is prepared to pass any student when they shouldn't then this is the issue that needs to be dealt with.

melancholly

i was also told i couldn't mark down the essays of dyslexic students if the grammar was bad. now that makes sense too, but if there is already a double standard of what is required for a mark depending on a 'label', then is it really that much worse if the label happens to be 'foreign student' rather than 'learning difficulty'?

celyn90

melancholly wrote: »

i was also told i couldn't mark down the essays of dyslexic students if the grammar was bad. now that makes sense too, but if there is already a double standard of what is required for a mark depending on a 'label', then is it really that much worse if the label happens to be 'foreign student' rather than 'learning difficulty'?

In pre-university education marking tends to be done without knowing anything about the student. So student with a learning difficulty may have been given a concession such as extra time or an amanuensis in an exam - hence the exam would then be judged in the same way as all the others as "compensation" for the difficulty would already have been provided for. You don't know about the candidate when you get the papers to mark and you treat them all in the same way. It was the same at my University, provision for those that needed special conditions (myself included) was made for the exam itself, marking was after that was standard and anonymous - only if a paper was borderline after these concessions would the examiners get to know who the candidate was and if were any other contributing factors to take into account - same for all borderline candidates.

Although the ability to exercise a modicum of discretion is needs to be in place for compassionate reasons (such as for a friend of mine who found a lump on the day of her finals ), I don't believe that there should be a different standard at all. But I do think that the help and support should be in place to allow people to reach that standard. The exam or final dissertation is not the place for that, real support should be in place from the beginning. I do think if the university decides to admit students of a differing academic standards then they should be oblidged to make provision for that and ensure they are supported right from the start.

melancholly

we had a big yellow sticker on all papers for dyslexic students and i agree it's a bad way of doing things - but it happens........ and is probably on the increase. unless there is a systematic rethink on this whole situation, across the whole country, it will continue to get worse. while league tables focus on the %age of students who get high grades, universities will still allow very weak students to pass. although the only places that will happily kick you out without resits are probably oxford/cambridge as they have more than enough money and don't care about the consequences!

the whole direction that the higher education system is moving towards is very scary. and when the people in charge of universities are thinking about business models first, and educational standards second (and some way behind), i can't see it changing in the near future......