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Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

economist.com

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Re: Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

#51

Post by wallace_f »

t34543 wrote: post #39
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…

This should be a crime.

There is too much white collar crime and it seems like it is just becoming ordinary business. People responsible for things like the insulin racket are profiting off of death. But we focus orders of magnitude more resources on jailing people for smoking a harmless plant and minding their own business. Who will take responsibility?

Re: Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

#52

Post by themattress »

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…

It’s very depressing, I also TA’d in college and ended up grading one of the mid terms for a programming class I had the previous semester. I found a group of students who clearly shared some code over gchat or something... weird variable names and unique code structure that was clearly copied among 5 or so students.

I was told by the professor to not fail them, just give them 0 for the question. Cheating was rampant in my program and the institution’s response to push them through was disheartening. We also had a “code of conduct”. These were all US students, I think cheating is just a huge problem in Universities all over the world.

Re: Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

#53

Post by friendlybus »

missosoup wrote: post #4
skissane wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn’t a new problem, people were saying the same thing 20 years ago. And it isn’t accurate or fair to say it is a problem only with students of one single nationality, it’s not. It’s really the conflict of interest inherent in fee-paying international students - if you fail too many of them, they will leave and not come back and you lose out on future revenue from them - worsened by the fact that lowering Englis…

While some milder pressures might exist for full fee paying students, they are not remotely comparable to the political and academic pressure exerted by the CCP through the export of international students. The faculty is explicitly protective of the interests of China[1] You will not find headlines like [2] about any other full fee paying demographic. As much as I hate to say it, Australia more or less belongs to Ch…

Not convinced money has a large enough impact to own a country. There was an old fear of Japan buying everything up.

This concern about cyber is a problem, but if China needs to influence Aus it just needs to pick up the phone line to our PM. It doesn't need to make big moves via covert action, as much as it may try.

Re: Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

#54

Post by friendlybus »

throwaway4888 wrote: post #31

Throwaway account. Local. TAed (USA nomenclature) 6 instances of 4 courses at top 5 AU Comp. Sci. university. Can confirm professorss of 3 courses wanted to fail at leats 1 student (one wanted to fail half a summer school class: approximately 75 students) and not a single student was ever failed because politics. Very few if any candidates for failure were local students. Have many contacts, some with Ph.Ds, some who…

China steals tech, AU's sells fake degrees. ... ??? Profit!

Re: Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

#55

Post by stjohnswarts »

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…

Are the Chinese sending their less astute students there? Most Indian and Chinese students I worked with in engineering college were studious and sharp, which I couldn't say so much for a lot of my American compatriots until the first couple of years of weed out classes made sure only dedicated students made it through.

Re: Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

#56

Post by holografix »

roenxi wrote: post #48
LilBytes wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't Facebook. HackerNews isn't about to go around accusing people of being OneNation sympathises though I do understand the position you're taking here. Being critical of the influence of fee-paying students in University can quickly become hyperbolic.

The original comment was talking about blocking Chinese money from coming into Australia on the basis that it was associated with mainland Chinese ideology. That is unadulturated nationalism and it will almost certainly be interpreted as racist by the worlds up-and-coming superpower and probably in Australia as well. It clearly aligns with the goals of the mid-far right. I'm not accusing anyone of anything, I'm just…

We are happy to take any students’ university fees and provide them with a market competitive educational curriculum.

The reality of China’s population being 56,3 times that of Australia coupled with a non-democratic, expansionist government is great cause for concern.

The amount of influence China already exerts in Australia is alarming, as is evidenced by the property bubble they helped fuel by laundering money outside of the eyes of the communist party. Or the propaganda machine that prints free English language newspapers for distribution in major Australian capitals.

Business and government and intrinsically linked in China and Australia is well advised not to become China’s subservient lap dog.

Re: Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

#57

Post by stjohnswarts »

close04 wrote: post #21
lwakefield wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It was a huge disappointment to realize that this is how the "education system" works. Is there any man made system that isn't eventually run or at least strongly by financial interest? Genuine question.

strongly __________ by ?

Re: Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

#58

Post by stjohnswarts »

holografix wrote: post #7
krn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like there are two sets of standards now. One for Chinese students, and one for everyone else. At least in the UK, University of St Andrews, which has the highest percentage of international students in the country, offers a Foundation Year[1] to the applicants from the third-world countries, which must be taken before the 4-year undergraduate degree. It reduces the knowledge gap, improves the language skills,…

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.

That is rather cynical.

Re: Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

#59

Post by yorwba »

missosoup wrote: post #43
stri8ed wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the motivation behind the cheating and plagiarism? This would seem to imply that students do not care about learning the underlying skill. Why would a country encourage this?

Cheating and plagiarism are perfectly a-ok in China[1]. Not only that, but their education system peaks towards the end of high school with the Gaokao and once they get to tertiary education, they're more or less guaranteed to pass even if they don't do a day of work[2]. Chinese students don't expect to have to work for their degree once in university. This spills over to other topics that could be discussed for hour…

> Cheating and plagiarism are perfectly a-ok in China[1].

[1] doesn't show this and it's not actually true. Cheating is common, but Chinese students know that it's forbidden and they'll be punished if they get caught, so they spend at least some effort changing what they copy before passing it off as their own work. Of course that stops working as soon as they leave the country and their language skills are suddenly not good enough to rewrite everything.

Ironically, when I was an exchange student in China, the non-Chinese students formed a tight-knit group sharing their work and getting passing grades for weak essays in bad Chinese copied from someone else.

Some things are more culturally universal than they appear at first glance.

Re: Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

#60

Post by nitrogen »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #46
phs318u wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d actually rephrase the question as, “is there any system that can’t be gamed?” i.e. a system immune to corruption? Impervious to bad faith intentions? I suspect the answer is no. EDITED to fix a spelling mistake.

"is there any system that can’t be gamed?” Well, I think that's a different thing. Gaming something is AIUI an exploitation of the rules. What's happening here is plain breaking of rules, which I'd call something like corruption.

There are the rules as written, and the "rules" as enforced. Can one build a system where the inevitable "rules" that arise are fully aligned with the intent of the system?
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