Beaten by the Language Barrier

FOR some international students, passing their university course is worth offering their body. Desperate to up her grades, one student proposed such a deal with her lecturer.

"This is an offer that will change her life in terms of her potential in the future in her society or whether she could get married at the right level and everything else. Because that's how important [the grade] was for her," a Deakin university academic is quoted as saying in a state Ombudsman's report tabled in Parliament last week.

"What really was damaging to me was that the stakes are so high, absolutely sky-high, that you can get to that point as a student."

Such desperation is part of life for some international students, who struggle with English and do not get the support they need to complete their studies satisfactorily, according to acting Victorian Ombudsman John Taylor.

The Ombudsman initiated an investigation into international students at four of Victoria's eight universities — RMIT, Deakin, Swinburne and Ballarat —in December last year, after his office received a number of complaints.

Over three years to the middle of this year, the number of student complaints more than tripled. The report says a large number of those were from international students unhappy with their treatment.

Why are they unhappy? Because, the report concludes, universities are not always meeting their obligation to admit only those who can handle the coursework. Once students who cannot cope enter the system, they begin — quite rapidly — to flounder.

"Witnesses expressed concern that students with very low levels of English were being 'set up to fail'," the report says.

A lecturer told the Ombudsman:"For the ones that haven't got the English, they do fail. And quite often you can see a pattern. They will have failed two or three subjects [in one semester] and they'll fail some more in the second semester."

The report says international students — while having similar pass rates overall to domestic students — are over-represented among the worst-performing group.

"At Swinburne, 36 per cent of excluded higher education students in 2010 were onshore international students, even though they made up only 29 per cent of the university's higher education students," the report says.

At Deakin, the figure was closer to 30 per cent, with international students making up 19 per cent of the student body.

But the universities reject the suggestion they are admitting students who simply cannot cope.

Responding to the report, RMIT vice-chancellor Margaret Gardner said the Ombudsman's recommendations to regulate English language requirements more robustly were unnecessary. "Successive commonwealth and state governments have set exacting regulatory standards for universities and RMIT meets, and often exceeds, these standards," she said.

"RMIT has confidence in existing [government] regulation ... and does not agree with the Victorian Ombudsman's criticisms of the current regulatory framework. Further regulation ... is an unjustified burden, taking away scarce resources from teaching and research."

One of the causes of language problems, Mr Taylor says, lies with pathways programs — where students enroll in courses run by the university to gain entry into a degree program later. Not enough checks are in place to ensure language skills of students signing up for these programs are up to scratch, allowing in those who otherwise might not have met the requirements.

The Ombudsman wants universities to change the way they determine language competency. Among the 17 recommendations he made were a series of possible changes relating to language.

They included:

*Reviewing the minimum requirements in place and reporting to the Ombudsman about the findings.

*Changing the admissions process to ensure language tests are verified.

*Making all international students submit independent language test results that are no more than 12 months old.

Language competency was singled out by the Ombudsman as the key issue — the one that causes students to fail and to approach academics with offers of money — or sex — to bump up their grades.

And it is students who struggle with English who get caught out plagiarising and buying essays, although academics quoted in the report suggest those problems occur across the student body; it is just easier to catch the ones with poor English.

"They don't have the same eloquence of phrase as a native speaker," said one academic. "You can really see the difference between a really good writer's sentences stuck amongst the very poor grammar."

Universities, the Ombudsman says, are enrolling these students because of their monetary value, not academic capacity. "I am concerned by evidence of tensions between academic standards and the need to maintain revenue and market share," Mr Taylor said in his report.

"Universities need to shift their current focus from recruiting students and therefore boosting their revenue to ensuring international students have a reasonable chance of academic success."

Universities reject the suggestion that they admit students who are not up to scratch, with Swinburne vice-chancellor Linda Kristjanson saying standards at the university are carefully monitored.

"Swinburne analyses the performance of thousands of domestic and international students each year, providing an invaluable evidence-base to inform changes to our English and academic entry standards," she said.

"Our analysis has enabled us to make important changes to our own English language and academic pathways. The analysis helps to identify the fields of study in which students face barriers to success, and make changes to entry criteria and pathways accordingly."

Still, international students graduating from university are finding it difficult to get work. Industry bodies told Mr Taylor this was due in part to poor language skills.

The report cites a federal government study that found 13 per cent of international student graduates were looking for work, more than double the 6 per cent of local graduates.

One Victorian nursing service manager told the Ombudsman that language proficiency was a significant barrier.

"We have had graduates walk out of [interviews] where [the panel] has said 'we don't understand a word they were saying', we couldn't write anything down because we couldn't comprehend a word. How were they ever going to look after a patient?"

Universities involved have in most cases been cautious of the report, saying the Ombudsman's sample size was too small, and evidence of problems was anecdotal.

Deakin University vice-chancellor Jane den Hollander said international student satisfaction with Deakin was very high.

"We note that much of the evidence quoted in the investigation is anecdotal and that the number of complaints is very small when considered in context with the number of student enrolments," she said.

"The Ombudsman identified 67 complaints having been received by his office in 2010-11 from Deakin's 8500 international students. This represents a complaint rate of less than 1 per cent."

The Victorian president of the National Tertiary Education Union, Colin Long, said the report showed there were problems in the system.

"The most pressing problem is the heavy reliance on overseas students for revenue, as a result of a long-term decline in commonwealth government funding," he said.

"This leads to universities engaging in cut-throat competition for international students, and an unhealthy reliance on them as sources of money for the everyday running of the university."

Dr Long — previously an academic at Deakin — said he had heard of instances of attempted bribery and of students pressuring for changes to their results, but had not experienced these himself.

He said universities should take the Ombudsman's report seriously, despite misgivings about the strength of the methodology.

"The fact that the Ombudsman came up with evidence that there is a problem at all is concerning, and it would be foolish of any university to dismiss the concerns out of hand," he said.

This piece was originally published in The Age. You can read it here.