Interesting to read the state of some Uni’s there in the UK. Parents make sure your kids get a real education, not get profit business degree mill. Some of the people we interview look good on paper, in real life work/interview no so good (often very not good)
From the link:
She later found out that of the 100 students on most of her modules, “maybe 80 or 90 of them bought assignments” from so-called “essay mills” based overseas.
I find many (not all, but more than before) recent grads much less smart
Can’t you just throw your essay into ChatGPT to improve the English? If you use ChatGPT correctly (i.e. not just expecting it to write the essay for you, but working with it collaboratively), I’m not sure why bad English would still be an issue.
Well, if the English is bad then they’re probably just garden gnomes in class. Can’t understand what they read well enough, or read enough, to write something crappy for ChatGPT. Hence the big business of diploma mills, which will be crashing out at undergrad level.
But profs can do things that get around AI and diploma mills, like giving students exams or presentations. But if their English is bad, again it will be an issue.
It’s an issue that has been snowballing in the west for a while. Overpaid and underworked professors, and bloated administrations, having government funding reduced. International students make up the shortfall, but it’s easier to let them all in and pass them all through. For decades it has been an issue. If profs are complaining now it is probably because they are being held accountable, so they are shifting the blame.
Was it a high level university? I didn’t notice that at mine , but foreign students had extra help if their native language was not English. Maybe there are a lot of peasants enrolled these days.
As a native brit with poor written English this is just bollocks. I met my Taiwanese ex while she was doing her masters in the UK. She asked me to go over some of her work, it was atrocious. Hers was far worse than mine.
The overseas students have to pay several times the going rate, the fee for chinese is particularly ridiculous i remember. They have been lapping up this sketchy source of cash for years now. And its starting to backfire…boohoo. F them.
I don’t know if it’s changed now but 15 odd years ago I taught IELTs part time in Taiwan, and yes their written English was really atrocious.
Their reading and speaking was pretty good but essay writing OMG.That’s probably due to their focus on multiple choice test papers at high school.
They maybe are better now.
Back then there were some stats on it, and Taiwan was right down there at the bottom for written English ability in SE Asia. I would also edit scientific papers and the English was also almost unreadable.
I doubt the essay-writing skills have improved. I’m supposed to be teaching essay-writing, but we’re still working with paragraphs, and those are near-impossible for many of my third-year university students. By this point in the semester we used to be working on their first research essays. These days, no way.
In my case, part of what I see is due to demographic collapse: our school used to get the B students from high schools, and these days I think it’s more like the C or C- students. There are definitely better students out there - but I don’t know how the average is doing.
EDIT: Over the years, a fair number of my students have gone on to UK universities. The writing courses I taught used to prepare them reasonably well, I think, for writing university essays overseas. Now, no, they don’t, because teaching that would leave behind all but a tiny number of the students.
I remember one time at uni (Russell Group) we had a conference type event (masters and doctoral students presenting their work). We had to sit through an excruciating 20 minute presentation by a PHD candidate who struggled with normal sentences, let alone some of the latin/academic terms.
When I went to art school in SF they kicked out a Korean guy because he couldn’t speak english. It made critiques hard. edit: he was a good painter. I felt sorry for him
As a writer, I must say this: no one else should write. You can pound 3 notes on a piano? And call yourself a musician? You can scribble a few lines? And you call yourself a painter? Feh! It was amazing how none of the undergrad students in English 101 when I was a TA at university could barely squeak by an acceptable paragraph.
Sorry if that sounds snobbish. My penance is a life of starving artist suffering, as is every liberal arts undergrad,
