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Australian universities are accused of trading free speech for cash

183 points by baylearn 7y ago

missosoup 7y ago
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 there are two sets of standards now. One for Chinese students, and one for everyone else.
- skissane 7y ago
  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 English language entry requirements improves enrolment and revenue but then the students struggle academically because they can’t understand the course and struggle with writing essays/assignments/exams in English.
  - missosoup 7y ago
    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 China [3] [1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/university-of-qld-agreed-to-promote-china-institute-didnt-disclose/news-story/7e21ed98ec95530842500370c4c44c25 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/university-... [2] https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/05/29/u-s-schools-expelled-8000-chinese-students-for-poor-grades-cheating/ https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/05/29/u-s-schools-e... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/d4slfj/australian_intelligence_determined_china_was/f0h9zra/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/d4slfj/australia...
    - holografix 7y ago
      We need to say it loud and clear and reduce our dependency on Chinese money.
      - roenxi 7y ago
        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/nationalist ideology won't fly in modern Australia.
        hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
        Hang on are you accusing the OPs of racism because they are opposed to corruption?
        roenxi 7y ago
        No. But that policy suggestion aligns with One Nation and is probably either going to be called racist and/or nationalist.
        LilBytes 7y ago
        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.
        roenxi 7y ago
        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 pointing out we have a political ideology that wants this and it is a long way out of the mainstream. "We want to isolate ourselves from China" is a radically fringe position in Australia. We are not a nationalist nation, we are a nation of immigrants with a very fluid identity. It would also be strategic suicide to antagonise the regional superpower. We are not going to exclude China. If China wants to send students to Australia we are going to take them in and accept whatever money they have. That isn't an accusation, that is a frank assessment of what has been obvious in Australian politics for the last decade. I feel for Hong Kong, I truly do, but China has a long reach now; much like America. You can't run from American influence anywhere in the world [0]. There is no hope of escaping China while still basically being in Asia. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Investigations_by_national_governments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Invest...
  - wendyshu 7y ago
    In my experience, among international students the Chinese students were actually not the worst cheaters. But in China there does seem to be a cultural tolerance for what we would consider cheating, from scientific misconduct to IP theft. The education system is usually what's blamed.
- krn 7y ago
  > 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, and brings additional income to the university without affecting the quality and experience of the degree programs. [1] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/subjects/study-options/foundation/why-ifp/ https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/subjects/study-options/foundati...
  - holografix 7y ago
    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.
    - krn 7y ago
      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.
      - holografix 7y ago
        Also had colleagues from Vietnam and China who attended the foundation year. It was clear to me they couldn’t read/write English to a high school level. They still got in
        krn 7y ago
        It might depend on how competitive the general admission process in a particular university is. I wouldn't be surprised, if 70% of the Britain's 100+ universities accepted all Chinese applicants. In the case of University St Andrews, it has plenty of more qualified applicants from North America who pay the same as Chinese and, therefore, can afford not to accept them.
- lwakefield 7y ago
  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 submitting Stephen Hawking's "Space and Time Warps", verbatim. I raised all of these to the professor. Despite all students signing the "I know what plagiarism is, I won't do it and understand there I will be kicked out if I do" - the professor knocked back all of my claims and all students passed. It was a huge disappointment to realize that this is how the "education system" works.
  - mmerlin 7y ago
    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 international students.
    - Vintila 7y ago
      International students actually pay about 4x what a domestic student pay [1]. [1] https://www.adelaide.edu.au/degree-finder/2020/bengh_behe&es1.html#df-acc-fees_scholarships https://www.adelaide.edu.au/degree-finder/2020/bengh_behe&es...
      - nopassrecover 7y ago
        Not if you consider the contribution of the taxpayer on behalf of domestic students (and their tax contributions over their future careers).
    - t34543 7y ago
      This should be a crime.
- peterkelly 7y ago
  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.
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- phs318u 7y ago
  I taught a Masters level Enterprise Architecture unit at Swinburne University for a single semester and concluded that the system is designed to pass students. Specifically, my advice to employers and recruiters is to discount science and technology degrees by at least a single grade i.e. high distinction is really a distinction, distinction is really a credit, credit is really just a pass, and a pass is actually a fail. A decade earlier I had graduated from a Masters and had such a great experience as a mature age student that I vowed I’d try my hand at teaching if the opportunity arose. When the opportunity came, I was excited, thinking I’d experience the same kind of mature, engaged and discursive sessions that I had as a student. Far from it. A handful of my students turned up consistently and at least made an effort. The rubric for the assessments were designed to make it almost impossible to fail. Out of my cohort (27 students), I would be comfortable hiring 2. There was one kid (that passed, barely) who I wouldn’t hire as a cleaner because he wouldn’t know which end of the broom to point at the ground unless someone told him. It was incredibly disheartening and I can’t see myself ever doing that again.
- stri8ed 7y ago
  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?
  - missosoup 7y ago
    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 hours, like China's terrible hospital death rates and laughably incompetent engineering. Australian tertiary education institutions are just catering to these Chinese oddities while holding all other students to a different and higher standard. Because money. [1] https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2019/07/chinese-international-students-cheat/ https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2019/07/chinese-internation... [2] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003440/the-problem-with-chinese-universities%3F-not-enough-dropouts https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003440/the-problem-with-chin...
    - yorwba 7y ago
      > 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.
      - missosoup 7y ago
        > 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-chinese-universities-are-trapping-academic-copycats https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3012741/how-... https://uschinatoday.org/features/2011/03/28/unraveling-plagiarism-in-china/ https://uschinatoday.org/features/2011/03/28/unraveling-plag... https://www.aliesq.com/articles/2018/11/6/academic-plagiarism-and-east-asian-students-chinese-pedagogic-traditions-conflict-with-usa-laws-amp-policies 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?
- stjohnswarts 7y ago
  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.
- lacampbell 7y ago
  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.
- rstuart4133 7y ago
  FWICT, at the University of Queensland Engineering faculty this looking the other way for international students doesn't appear to happen. I can't speak for other faculties. I was stunned by the shear audacity of one recent attempt to cheat. It was a group project involving designing and building a hardware / software thingy. The idea was to pull in students from multiple Engineering disciplines I think. This particular group had both Australian students and overseas. Like all such groups some did some work, others didn't and in this particular case there wasn't enough of the former so things weren't going well. On the due date they had to drop off the the project at a project room, which was locked up until evaluation day. One of the international students decided to break in and continue work. This involved breaking glass windows, jimmying doors, and turning the lights on. Naturally enough security noticed and put a quick end to it - but not before the submitted project was in pieces. That made evaluating the project in the normal manner near impossible, so they put together a panel designed to feel like the Spanish inquisition and quizzed each student on their contribution for a hour or two. They passed one and failed the others - including the international students. I went to UQ myself many years ago, back when it was only Australians who attended, and we also got up to some shenanigans. No country breeds only angels. My student cohort did things that were equally bad. The major one was discovering a security flaw in the PDP 10's operating system (TOPS-10), and using it to crash the system repeatedly so we could get the a little more time on the assignments. It didn't go down so well as that same PDP 10 was used to run the Uni's administration, and so it took out things like payroll. They had no idea who did it and no way of finding out, but needed to put an end to it very quickly. I thought they handled it very well. They put the usual suspects in a room, said no one would be punished, but they really needed to know how it was being done. They didn't have much choice I guess, as everyone in the room knew how it was done but no one was going to admit to doing it. I can't really say which of these two crimes caused the most damage - the one by the Australians or the international student. But I suspect in the eyes of the Uni the international one suffered from a far bigger flaw than damage or inconvenience - it was just plain stupid in a way I had never seen in my day.
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tjpnz 7y ago
Similar stuff is going on in NZ. A university in Auckland recently halted a pro-Democracy protest organised by HK students after a university official was summoned to the Chinese embassy. There were of course no issues when mainland students organised a pro-Beijing rally.
- apta 7y ago
  Any sources on this?
  - tjpnz 7y ago
    https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/395573/aut-denies-cancelling-tiananmen-event-over-china-govt-pressure https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/395573/aut-denies-cancel...
    - elliekelly 7y ago
      Did the University offer any explanation for why the event needed to be cancelled as opposed to just rescheduled or held in a different room/building?
- caf 7y ago
  Pretty sad state of affairs when students will halt a protest on the orders of the university administration.
  - jaimex2 7y ago
    Clearly they weren't Maori. They could learn a lot from them.
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jaimex2 7y ago
While at university here in Australia I was given the opportunity to spend a few weeks in China sponsored by Huawei. I was naive back then. It was just one massive brain washing exercise where we were taken on a propaganda tour and taught how stupid the Australian government was to not contract Huawei to build the NBN.
- boredishBoi 7y ago
  I’m a uni student in aus right now and I’m not a fan of Chinese propaganda but I wouldn’t mind a free trip to China. Do you have any links/tips on how I could get myself on one of these trips? I’m at UNSW btw.
  - jaimex2 7y ago
    Google Huawei seeds of the future and apply.
throwaway4888 7y ago
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 are lecturers in charge of courses now who at least reluctantly admit to this pattern. Universities have indirect policies that penalise LiCs for failing students. Classic example: every failing students requires a report to management. Why did they fail? What is your proposal to prevent this type of failure from happening in the future? When the reason is: how the hell did they get through the prerequisite course (presumably because of the same political pressure) you are met with: they met the prerequsites; you are applying unreasonable expetations on your students. The entire reputation of the univiersity is for sale. How long can it last? If recent history is any guide, a long time. Let's find out.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  China steals tech, AU's sells fake degrees. ... ??? Profit!
- solidsnack9000 7y ago
  LiC ?-
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dghughes 7y ago
When I went back to school I found out about a thing called CourseHero. How? A classmate lab partner submitted the report we submitted for our work. He submitted it verbatim with his name, my name, a third person in our group and even the instructor's name. The only reason I knew of it was a fellow classmate got a new phone and for kicks looked up his name and found the report at CourseHero. By the looks of that website I'd say cheating is rampant. Being drawn into something you're not aware of then nearly expelled is maddening.

183 points by baylearn 7y ago

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 there are two sets of standards now. One for Chinese students, and one for everyone else.

skissane 7y ago
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 English language entry requirements improves enrolment and revenue but then the students struggle academically because they can’t understand the course and struggle with writing essays/assignments/exams in English.
- missosoup 7y ago
  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 China [3] [1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/university-of-qld-agreed-to-promote-china-institute-didnt-disclose/news-story/7e21ed98ec95530842500370c4c44c25 https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/university-... [2] https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/05/29/u-s-schools-expelled-8000-chinese-students-for-poor-grades-cheating/ https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2015/05/29/u-s-schools-e... [3] https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/d4slfj/australian_intelligence_determined_china_was/f0h9zra/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/d4slfj/australia...
  - holografix 7y ago
    We need to say it loud and clear and reduce our dependency on Chinese money.
    - roenxi 7y ago
      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/nationalist ideology won't fly in modern Australia.
      - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
        Hang on are you accusing the OPs of racism because they are opposed to corruption?
        roenxi 7y ago
        No. But that policy suggestion aligns with One Nation and is probably either going to be called racist and/or nationalist.
        LilBytes 7y ago
        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.
        roenxi 7y ago
        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 pointing out we have a political ideology that wants this and it is a long way out of the mainstream. "We want to isolate ourselves from China" is a radically fringe position in Australia. We are not a nationalist nation, we are a nation of immigrants with a very fluid identity. It would also be strategic suicide to antagonise the regional superpower. We are not going to exclude China. If China wants to send students to Australia we are going to take them in and accept whatever money they have. That isn't an accusation, that is a frank assessment of what has been obvious in Australian politics for the last decade. I feel for Hong Kong, I truly do, but China has a long reach now; much like America. You can't run from American influence anywhere in the world [0]. There is no hope of escaping China while still basically being in Asia. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Investigations_by_national_governments https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition#Invest...
- wendyshu 7y ago
  In my experience, among international students the Chinese students were actually not the worst cheaters. But in China there does seem to be a cultural tolerance for what we would consider cheating, from scientific misconduct to IP theft. The education system is usually what's blamed.
krn 7y ago
> 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, and brings additional income to the university without affecting the quality and experience of the degree programs. [1] https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/subjects/study-options/foundation/why-ifp/ https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/subjects/study-options/foundati...
- holografix 7y ago
  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.
  - krn 7y ago
    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.
    - holografix 7y ago
      Also had colleagues from Vietnam and China who attended the foundation year. It was clear to me they couldn’t read/write English to a high school level. They still got in
      - krn 7y ago
        It might depend on how competitive the general admission process in a particular university is. I wouldn't be surprised, if 70% of the Britain's 100+ universities accepted all Chinese applicants. In the case of University St Andrews, it has plenty of more qualified applicants from North America who pay the same as Chinese and, therefore, can afford not to accept them.
lwakefield 7y ago
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 submitting Stephen Hawking's "Space and Time Warps", verbatim. I raised all of these to the professor. Despite all students signing the "I know what plagiarism is, I won't do it and understand there I will be kicked out if I do" - the professor knocked back all of my claims and all students passed. It was a huge disappointment to realize that this is how the "education system" works.
- mmerlin 7y ago
  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 international students.
  - Vintila 7y ago
    International students actually pay about 4x what a domestic student pay [1]. [1] https://www.adelaide.edu.au/degree-finder/2020/bengh_behe&es1.html#df-acc-fees_scholarships https://www.adelaide.edu.au/degree-finder/2020/bengh_behe&es...
    - nopassrecover 7y ago
      Not if you consider the contribution of the taxpayer on behalf of domestic students (and their tax contributions over their future careers).
  - t34543 7y ago
    This should be a crime.
peterkelly 7y ago
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.
- deleted 7y ago
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phs318u 7y ago
I taught a Masters level Enterprise Architecture unit at Swinburne University for a single semester and concluded that the system is designed to pass students. Specifically, my advice to employers and recruiters is to discount science and technology degrees by at least a single grade i.e. high distinction is really a distinction, distinction is really a credit, credit is really just a pass, and a pass is actually a fail. A decade earlier I had graduated from a Masters and had such a great experience as a mature age student that I vowed I’d try my hand at teaching if the opportunity arose. When the opportunity came, I was excited, thinking I’d experience the same kind of mature, engaged and discursive sessions that I had as a student. Far from it. A handful of my students turned up consistently and at least made an effort. The rubric for the assessments were designed to make it almost impossible to fail. Out of my cohort (27 students), I would be comfortable hiring 2. There was one kid (that passed, barely) who I wouldn’t hire as a cleaner because he wouldn’t know which end of the broom to point at the ground unless someone told him. It was incredibly disheartening and I can’t see myself ever doing that again.
stri8ed 7y ago
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?
- missosoup 7y ago
  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 hours, like China's terrible hospital death rates and laughably incompetent engineering. Australian tertiary education institutions are just catering to these Chinese oddities while holding all other students to a different and higher standard. Because money. [1] https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2019/07/chinese-international-students-cheat/ https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2019/07/chinese-internation... [2] https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003440/the-problem-with-chinese-universities%3F-not-enough-dropouts https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1003440/the-problem-with-chin...
  - yorwba 7y ago
    > 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.
    - missosoup 7y ago
      > 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-chinese-universities-are-trapping-academic-copycats https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3012741/how-... https://uschinatoday.org/features/2011/03/28/unraveling-plagiarism-in-china/ https://uschinatoday.org/features/2011/03/28/unraveling-plag... https://www.aliesq.com/articles/2018/11/6/academic-plagiarism-and-east-asian-students-chinese-pedagogic-traditions-conflict-with-usa-laws-amp-policies 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?
stjohnswarts 7y ago
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.
lacampbell 7y ago
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.
rstuart4133 7y ago
FWICT, at the University of Queensland Engineering faculty this looking the other way for international students doesn't appear to happen. I can't speak for other faculties. I was stunned by the shear audacity of one recent attempt to cheat. It was a group project involving designing and building a hardware / software thingy. The idea was to pull in students from multiple Engineering disciplines I think. This particular group had both Australian students and overseas. Like all such groups some did some work, others didn't and in this particular case there wasn't enough of the former so things weren't going well. On the due date they had to drop off the the project at a project room, which was locked up until evaluation day. One of the international students decided to break in and continue work. This involved breaking glass windows, jimmying doors, and turning the lights on. Naturally enough security noticed and put a quick end to it - but not before the submitted project was in pieces. That made evaluating the project in the normal manner near impossible, so they put together a panel designed to feel like the Spanish inquisition and quizzed each student on their contribution for a hour or two. They passed one and failed the others - including the international students. I went to UQ myself many years ago, back when it was only Australians who attended, and we also got up to some shenanigans. No country breeds only angels. My student cohort did things that were equally bad. The major one was discovering a security flaw in the PDP 10's operating system (TOPS-10), and using it to crash the system repeatedly so we could get the a little more time on the assignments. It didn't go down so well as that same PDP 10 was used to run the Uni's administration, and so it took out things like payroll. They had no idea who did it and no way of finding out, but needed to put an end to it very quickly. I thought they handled it very well. They put the usual suspects in a room, said no one would be punished, but they really needed to know how it was being done. They didn't have much choice I guess, as everyone in the room knew how it was done but no one was going to admit to doing it. I can't really say which of these two crimes caused the most damage - the one by the Australians or the international student. But I suspect in the eyes of the Uni the international one suffered from a far bigger flaw than damage or inconvenience - it was just plain stupid in a way I had never seen in my day.

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tjpnz 7y ago

Similar stuff is going on in NZ. A university in Auckland recently halted a pro-Democracy protest organised by HK students after a university official was summoned to the Chinese embassy. There were of course no issues when mainland students organised a pro-Beijing rally.

apta 7y ago
Any sources on this?
- tjpnz 7y ago
  https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/395573/aut-denies-cancelling-tiananmen-event-over-china-govt-pressure https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/395573/aut-denies-cancel...
  - elliekelly 7y ago
    Did the University offer any explanation for why the event needed to be cancelled as opposed to just rescheduled or held in a different room/building?
caf 7y ago
Pretty sad state of affairs when students will halt a protest on the orders of the university administration.
- jaimex2 7y ago
  Clearly they weren't Maori. They could learn a lot from them.

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jaimex2 7y ago

While at university here in Australia I was given the opportunity to spend a few weeks in China sponsored by Huawei. I was naive back then. It was just one massive brain washing exercise where we were taken on a propaganda tour and taught how stupid the Australian government was to not contract Huawei to build the NBN.

boredishBoi 7y ago
I’m a uni student in aus right now and I’m not a fan of Chinese propaganda but I wouldn’t mind a free trip to China. Do you have any links/tips on how I could get myself on one of these trips? I’m at UNSW btw.
- jaimex2 7y ago
  Google Huawei seeds of the future and apply.

throwaway4888 7y ago

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 are lecturers in charge of courses now who at least reluctantly admit to this pattern. Universities have indirect policies that penalise LiCs for failing students. Classic example: every failing students requires a report to management. Why did they fail? What is your proposal to prevent this type of failure from happening in the future? When the reason is: how the hell did they get through the prerequisite course (presumably because of the same political pressure) you are met with: they met the prerequsites; you are applying unreasonable expetations on your students. The entire reputation of the univiersity is for sale. How long can it last? If recent history is any guide, a long time. Let's find out.

friendlybus 7y ago
China steals tech, AU's sells fake degrees. ... ??? Profit!
solidsnack9000 7y ago
LiC ?-
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dghughes 7y ago

When I went back to school I found out about a thing called CourseHero. How? A classmate lab partner submitted the report we submitted for our work. He submitted it verbatim with his name, my name, a third person in our group and even the instructor's name. The only reason I knew of it was a fellow classmate got a new phone and for kicks looked up his name and found the report at CourseHero. By the looks of that website I'd say cheating is rampant. Being drawn into something you're not aware of then nearly expelled is maddening.