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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

#61

Post by holografix »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #44
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.

The alternative would be to admit underprepared students without offering any kind of support and take their tuition money until they fail out. That's no better.

Or, and you may be shocked by this, another alternative would be to make them take an IELTS exam, set the minimum score high and deny them entry if they don’t pass.

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

#62

Post by ACow_Adonis »

stri8ed wrote: post #42
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…

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?

I don't know if it's universal, but Australian culture (and maybe Chinese for all i know) has gone fully down the route that the purpose of universities and education is purely for certificates to present to employers.

Indeed, the notion that you would go to university to "learn", or god forbid, continue learning irrespective of employment and wage opportunities, or pay money for learning that didn't have an employment or wage outcome, would be seen as some kind of mixture of stupid/bad decision/literally non sensical.

University, and academic publications and structure, makes a lot more sense once you accept almost no one there is interested in knowledge.

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

#63

Post by lacampbell »

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…

Same issue in New Zealand. There's even a cottage industry of corrupt TEFL schools so you can meet the language requirements.

In a way I hope it gets worse, to damage beyond repair the integrity of a university education. I think it's a tragedy we extend everyones childhood by 3 years, and at the end of it half of all graduates can't even earn themselves an upper working class lifestyle.

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

#64

Post by solidsnack9000 »

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…

LiC ?-

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

#65

Post by pkaye »

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…

I had an international student as a teammate for an engineering class. We had to write a couple papers and we alternated being leads on the paper. The first paper he wrote was quite well written. He didn't have any references so I googled a few line and found the entire first two pages were directly plagiarized. I pushed him to fix it up and somehow he managed.

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

#66

Post by missosoup »

yorwba wrote: post #59
missosoup wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> doesn't show this and it's not actually true.

Please. Some action is being taken against it in recent years, but in tertiary education it's considered socially acceptable to cheat and plagiarise.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3012741/how-...

https://uschinatoday.org/features/2011/03/28/unraveling-plag...

https://www.aliesq.com/articles/2018/11/6/academic-plagiaris...

How do you reconcile your viewpoint with all the evidence even in the comments here of Chinese students blatantly copying entire published works, after they sign disclaimers saying they understand the penalties for doing that?

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

#67

Post by the_resistence »

ksec wrote: post #37
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…

I dont think plagiarism is just a Internaional Student thing, but they do take it to a whole different level. I am sure as a Student, we have all see or even been part of plagiarism. The difference is that while others may look at your work, question why this is done this way, think for it ( hopefully ) yourself , and try to rewrite it in likely much worst adaptation of it. ( Since the level of understand is usually…

there's a hyper level of pragmatism. The ends always justifies the means. there is no ethics or morals in these circles, none whatsoever.

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

#68

Post by Richard_East »

stri8ed wrote: post #42
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…

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?

University education in Australia is a major migration pathway. By studying at a University there, you are basically guaranteed permanent residency at the end.

That's why the USA and UK should oppose efforts to allow students to stay in the country after they graduate. International student graduates should have to go through the same migration process as anyone else.

Additionally, Governments should place a cap on the number of student visas they issue each year, require universities charge a minimum amount, and require the full three years be paid upfront. Universities will be more willing to fail poor students under these conditions; it will also prevent/reverse a race to the bottom.

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

#69

Post by [deleted] »

solidsnack9000 wrote: post #64
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…

LiC ?-

[deleted]

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

#70

Post by yorwba »

missosoup wrote: post #66
yorwba wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> doesn't show this and it's not actually true. Please. Some action is being taken against it in recent years, but in tertiary education it's considered socially acceptable to cheat and plagiarise. https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3012741/how-... https://uschinatoday.org/features/2011/03/28/unraveling-plag... https://www.aliesq.com/articles/2018/11/6/academic-plagiaris... How do you reconcile your view…

I have signed dozens of those same disclaimers in China. During exams, everything but pencil and paper needs to be left in your bag in a corner of the examination room. I hear security during Gaokao is even stricter. If you do something stupid like submitting your program's benchmark results with nanosecond precision and they're identical to another student's, you're going to get caught and punished. I had to take a mandatory course in academic writing despite having already taken a similar one in Germany, allowing me to compare the two. There was all the same content about quotations without proper attribution of the source being plagiarism and how to correctly format references and so on. (Quotations are why the threshold for duplicated content in your first link can't be 0, by the way.)

Do you think they'd do all that if it were considered socially acceptable to cheat? Teachers don't want their students to pass a course by cheating and they try to find and punish those who do. Students are obviously aware of that; they simply cheat anyway if they think they can get away with it.

Not getting away with it is what I think causes the perception that Chinese students cheat more than others. Writing assignments in their native language would allow them to discuss with their friends, take a look at their answers, then write it up in their own words. Not having the language skills to do that makes evading detection a lot harder. As I said, I have observed essentially the same dynamic with international students in China.

So based on my personal experience, I don't think Chinese students cheat more than those of other countries. Of course the only other education system I know from the inside is that of Germany, where several ministers (including the minister of education [1]) had to resign after plagiarism was found in their dissertations. Maybe in other countries students who are faced with the choice of probably failing a course because they can't do an assignment or possibly failing after getting caught cheating will take the honorable option. I doubt it, though.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annette_Schavan

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