Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

Post by roenxi » Sat, Sep 21, 2019, 1:14 PM UTC

hdfbdtbcdg wrote: post #17

roenxi wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China is big the way oceans are big and unless there is a really ugly war they are going to be the preeminent power in the Asia-Pacific for this century. 'Reduce our dependency on Chinese money' is a nice idea, but that would be like trying to reduce our dependency on the United States. A very difficult tightrope to walk. Besides which, that sounds like a One-nation policy. That sort of sounds-sorta-racist/nationalis…

Hang on are you accusing the OPs of racism because they are opposed to corruption?

Post by holografix » Sat, Sep 21, 2019, 1:20 PM UTC

krn wrote: post #9

holografix wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cynic in me would think this is nothing more than an opportunity to make more money while guaranteeing that after the foundation year anyone can get into university.

There are no such guarantees – as far as I am aware – and as a former student I remember having a single Chinese classmate in my 4-year Computer Science degree program. After the Foundation Year, students of all nationalities were treated equally, and there were much more 1st year students from the US and the EU than from China.

Post by timwaagh » Sat, Sep 21, 2019, 1:24 PM UTC

lwakefield wrote: post #11

missosoup wrote: post #2

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 th…

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…

Post by nopassrecover » Sat, Sep 21, 2019, 1:31 PM UTC

Vintila wrote: post #18

mmerlin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes! My partner eventually quit her job university lecturing because she was explicitly told time and time again she was never allowed to fail any of the international "full fee paying" students. If she lodged a fail mark she was raked over the coals and forced to change it as a passing mark. She was only allowed to give failing marks to Australians who pay approximately half the university fees compared to internati…

International students actually pay about 4x what a domestic student pay [1]. [1] https://www.adelaide.edu.au/degree-finder/2020/bengh_behe&es...

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Sep 21, 2019, 1:33 PM UTC

peterkelly wrote: post #20

missosoup wrote: post #2

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 th…

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.