Wednesday, October 19, 2016

Foreign students recruited to Canadian Universities

Inside Higher Ed reports on concerns that universities' eagerness for high tuition payments is leading to unqualified students are being recruited:
Corruption in Higher Ed: Canada in the Crosshairs
It is overwhelmingly evident that there is a remarkable and callous disregard for academic ethics and standards in a scramble by Canadian universities to sign up foreign students.

"It is overwhelmingly evident that in the last two decades we have witnessed first-hand a remarkable and callous disregard for academic ethics and standards in a scramble by Canadian universities and colleges to sign up foreign students, who represent tens of millions of dollars to their bottom lines.
We have been in a school auditorium in China and listened to the school owner tell prospective parents that the Grade 12 marks from the Canadian provincial school board program can be manipulated to secure admission for their children into Canadian universities. This, while the Canadian teachers sat oblivious to the presentation in Chinese.
In hundreds of our own interaction with students who completed the Canadian provincial school board’s curriculum in China and who achieved grades of 70% and higher in their English class have been unable to achieve even a basic level of English literacy in the written tests we have administered.   But when the largest country of origin for incoming international students and revenue is China - the Canadian universities admitting these students salivate over the dollars and focus less on due diligence.
We were once asked by a university on Canada’s west coast to review 200 applications from Saudi Arabia, in order to identify the two or three Saudi students who were actually eligible for conditional admission to that university's undergraduate engineering program. But the proposal was scuttled by the university's ESL department that wanted all 200 to enroll in its language courses. It insisted on and managed conditional admissions for all 200. It’s common at Canadian universities for the ESL program “tail” to wag the campus “dog” when it comes to admissions. In fact, recent Canadian government regulations have been proposed to crack down on this practice as it is an affront to academic integrity."

1 comment:

Sarah said...

Because they just can’t create a normal support service for a foreign students. As The Huffingtonpost says - such things in common cause incapability of writing dissertation and finishing degree