International students falsely accused of cheating
TurquoiseTastic
Kerygmania Host
in Purgatory
I wonder if any Shipmates are au fait with this scandal about international students falsely accused of cheating on their English language tests and losing their right to to live and study in the UK as a result. It seems that it was almost sorted out 5 years ago but was then kicked into the long grass. To my shame I had never heard about it until today. Is the Guardian's take on it accurate? If it is (or anywhere near) then surely it should be a priority for any current or incoming government to fix!
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And then the system seems designed to assume that they're all criminals.
I guess the government is trying to maximise the potential for the centre to do what it wants to do (make money) while minimising the impact of the scammers (for electoral purposes?). In my view all this is tightly-coupled with running universities on market principles, and given we are not going to change that, unavoidable. But then I work at the university equivalent of Amstrad.
I was just hearing from a senior academic yesterday; they finally completed an investigation for plagiarism in a summer project after 6 months. The issue that alerted the assessor was that the scope of the work was far beyond that which could be expected from a student. With some digging, it was proven to the university's satisfaction that the student had lifted sections from several different sources, reworked them a bit and added a chart they stole from somewhere else.
The "clever" part was that they'd been able to fool the automatic plagiarism checker, so it required the intuition of the assessor and for them to be alert.
Which relates to the issue of international students in several ways. They've paid a lot for the education, they've got a lot riding on the result so maybe there is a lot of pressure.
Of course the main problem here would appear to be the emergence of AI systems instead of human assessors and the high possibility of false positives.
We already have a borked system which apparently has charged innocent foreign students with cheating in English language exams, how much worse will it be when AI is widely used?
I think it's best in situations like this to be able to say "X says that" rather than "I have heard". If you can't recall who X was no-one's in a position to assess the reliability of the claim.
I often joke with the students now that we ought to issue degree certificates on day one (on toilet paper, natch) and then we can get on with actually learning things, for those that want to.
Well my knowledge is of a top university department in the field. British but considered one of the best in the world.
And there are lots of foreign students. 40-50% of the undergraduates, lots of the doctoral students. I'm not sure about the masters students.
Anyway, it is true, to an extent, that the courses have been adjusted to the needs of the International Students (primarily in this situation Chinese).
However, in talking to the academics who are closely involved in the design of courses, this is not about the quality of the courses but the contents and style of delivery. There is a lot of pressure to retain standards even if that means marking down and/or failing international students.
I don't have any knowledge of other institutions but I doubt there is any dumbing-down due to the presence of international students - if anything the presence of motivated and intelligent international students makes everyone up their game.
Because if the Chinese students stop coming, the university (and increasingly the city) is in immediate trouble.
Errr...I think your comment applies to top institutions like yours...it doesn't describe the 'bottom half of the sector'! (This is to say, around here - Manchester in the first group, and MMU / Salford / Bolton / UCLAN in the second.
You remind me of a funny anecdote. The group I currently work in (not a dept - that would imply a degree of financial autonomy which the centre has removed) used to run on >50-60% undergads from one small oil-rich Gulf state. During Covid all assessment was online, and it eventually became clear that epic cheating was going on. After Covid, they failed (at real assessment) en-masse, and even complained to their country's educational attache. (I know about this, because a friend of mine and a top guy, was the focus of their complaint). And, one day, nearly all of them disappeared! Finally, I thought, the university has shown some spine and ejected those caught cheating in line with its published procedures. No - the government concerned noticed that its students had been publicly challenged - and withdrew the lot. Fun times!
KarlLBLet#1 is now at a Russell Group University doing a computing course which attracts a lot of foreign students. He reckons that their main problem is they're often very hot on knowing stuff but rather less strong on problem solving, creative thinking or innovation. It may be down to relative strengths and weaknesses in different education systems.
I'm sure there are courses where it's hard to fail even the laziest students (less so in the UK but I've heard interesting stories from a friend who teaches at an eastern European university that shall remain nameless), with taught Masters being particularly vulnerable with the high fees involved.
Automatic programs to detect plagiarism are not actually bright enough to distinguish between students who like to include lots of quotes from published sources to support their arguments (which is fine, as long as they're attributed to the original author/s) and students who lift huge chunks of other people's work and pass it off as their own. Unfortunately, academic teaching staff are so overworked nowadays (many on short-term and/or part-time contracts) that they more or less have to use these programs to get through their work. There was an interesting article in the Guardian only yesterday about the challenges of using AI in higher education.
I’ve worked for a distance learning university for 17 years and we are very experienced at identifying plagiarism, though obviously much is detected via the plagiarism software. It is one of the reasons we expect our students to refer to our own written materials in their essays, not just external. My university already has formal guidelines for the use of AI in essays, students are expected to reference it and provide an appendix explaining its use. As an online university we decided to embrace the technology rather than ignore it.
The OU is very good at it (I used to recommend a couple of OU maths modules as an access course for an MSc I used to organise, where students needed it). I would certainly include the OU in the top half of the sector.
That's been my experience with postgrads from certain cultures. Cultures where one never says 'no' or 'I don't know' to a superior (though what one does, can vary a lot) are particularly hard to deal with!
A funny (to me) story on OU assignments; my relative was doing an OU psychology degree and was learning about Milgram's famous experiments.
Anyway, my relative being extremely conscientious sort to double-check what had been said about the results in their OU textbook. As has been said above, undergraduate assignments are supposed to cite the given materials and nothing else (or at least they are up to a certain point in the course or something).
Anyway, my relative used their access to the OU library to seek out the original published paper of Milgram under discussion and cited it as something they'd read in the assignment.
The OU academic who marked it told them that my relative shouldn't have done this, was not going to get any marks for it and should never do it again.
Generally their impression of the OU was extremely good, but the way they are rigid on this point seemed a bit ridiculous.
I don't think we can discount cultural expectations and differences, particularly when they move uncomfortably against government immigration policy.
Maybe there was widespread cheating on the English test and maybe this led to a number of unjust outcomes for innocent students. Maybe this just shows that the test is not fit-for-purpose and that at least some international students regard it as a hurdle to be overcome in any way available.
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However, I still struggle to see the influx of international students as a Bad Thing even if many are cheating the English test. I'm not even sure I see it as a bad thing if many are cheating on their university tests... Controversial, I know
A student encountering technical terms in their own language is likely to recognise them as such. Students less familiar with the language may be unsure whether it is a subject-area technical term that is the challenge, or simply an insufficient grasp of the language.
In some cases where students don’t have sufficient language skills lecturers may have to spend considerable time and energy offering language support to particular students, to the detriment if their capacity to offer subject support more widely.
Seems to me that's down to the university - both to communicate to prospective students the necessity of a certain level of language and to set/enforce penalties.
The test under discussion here is for the government via the immigration system and is designed to prevent "false migrants". It has only tangential links to whether or not an individual student can keep up in an Engineering class.
I actually have no problem whatsoever with UK universities teaching in languages other than English/Welsh. This is normal practice in many countries, and it is really only the government which is defining the necessary level of English to get a visa.
I don't see the issue with teaching in Arabic or Mandarin or any other language if there is demand.
The thing about needing a "basic level" of English to use British services is kind-of true, but severely dented when International Students have little interaction with anyone outside of the university anyway.
More frequently the visa rules are being used to randomly punish international students. In one example I knew personally, a Nigerian student was left for years in limbo mid-way through the course because the visa authorities suddenly would not grant a visa in time. In another example recently a Palestinian student was prevented from starting a course at a UK university on the whim of a Home Secretary who thought that she did have to give reasons to exclude people.
It's not actually about the level of English any more than the visa system is supposed to regulate migrants.
Cheating would be very obvious once someone has arrived, because they'd not have the language skills the tests said they have (if they cheated but their language skills are, nevertheless, adequate then that may be less obvious but also less important in regard to whether the language condition has been met). At that point the University would be within their rights to say that the language condition for sitting the course had not been met, and refuse to matriculate the student - the student would be out of pocket for the costs of relocating to the UK, and the university could probably justify retaining the fees paid. The Home Office would also be informed, and since the requirement of the student visa that the student be matriculated isn't met then they'd be deported.
Also, the tests here relate to renewing a visa rather than the conditions for offering a university place in the first place. So, have implications for a student being able to complete a degree for which they have already paid fees and the costs of relocation to the UK. I don't think any university has a condition for offering a place that the student not only meets a language requirement but that the student has to demonstrate improved English language skills during their course to continue (though, as students sit through lectures in English, produce written assignments in English, give presentations of their work in English and socialise with others in their classes in English then language skills will improve). If a student has sufficient English language skills to continue to learn then that should be sufficient for the University to continue to offer them classes, if their language skills are insufficient then they're likely to struggle with assessed work and exams - and will need to resit and/or fail their course the same as anyone else. I'm not seeing a role for the HO in this.