International students who cannot speak “basic English” are walking away from Australian universities with prestigious degrees, academics say, a situation one described as “mind-blowing”.
More than a dozen academics and students who spoke to Guardian Australia, most on the condition of anonymity, said the universities’ financial reliance on foreign students over many years had hollowed out academic integrity and threatened the international credibility of the sector.
Many said the rise of artificial intelligence was accelerating the crisis to the point where the only way to fail a course would be to hand nothing in, unless universities came up with a coherent institutional response.
A tutor in an arts subject at a leading sandstone university said in recent years the number of overseas students in her classes – who may pay up to $300,000 in upfront costs – had reached as high as 80%.
“Most can’t speak, write or understand basic English,” she said. “They use translators or text capture to translate the lectures and tutorials, translation aids to read the literature and ChatGPT to generate ideas.
“It’s mind blowing that you can walk away with a master’s degree in a variety of subjects without being able to understand a sentence.”
To gain entrance to Australian universities from overseas, students have to complete a mandatory English language test from an approved provider, of which the largest is the International English Language Testing System (Ielts), which costs a minimum of $445 to sit. It is owned by the $3.5bn student recruitment company IDP Education, the “leading education and migration agents in Australia”.
Australia’s 38 public universities owned a 40% stake in the education giant until Education Australia, which represented them, was dissolved in 2021. As of 2022, 18 universities retained their shares, totalling about 12% of the company.
An IDP Education spokesperson said higher education providers did not have a “controlling interest” in the company, holding at most 0.66% of shares each.
The federal government has proposed a cap on international students and doubled visa application fees to $1,600 as part of its plans to bring down overall immigration numbers.
As part of its overhaul of international student visa requirements, including English language skills, announced late last year, the standard required on the Ielts test was raised from 5.5 to six on a scale of nine bands, where five equates to “modest” English proficiency and six equals “competent”.
The chief executive of Universities Australia, Luke Sheehy, said the university sector “welcomed” the tightening of language testing requirements.
“Universities want students to have the best possible learning experience and, in many cases, already exceed the minimum standards when it comes to language requirements for particular courses,” he said.
But academics who spoke to Guardian Australia said they were continuing to teach courses where as many as half of their cohort did not appear to understand the content, yet still passed. Many blamed an institutional reliance on international student fees.
They questioned whether the minimum score requirement was high enough, and whether universities were adequately scrutinising the language skills of students intending to study a rigorous academic course.
‘It breaks my heart’
An academic who was a sessional teacher for two decades and recently retired said universities that were “once centres of excellence” had become “profit centres chasing enrolments and revenue”.
The academic, who wished to remain anonymous, said supervisors and coordinators in his faculty were “interrogated” if students were failing.
“It breaks my heart reading essay after essay with a strong suspicion students couldn’t have written it,” they said. “The writing is on par with mine but when I ask [students] what a citation and a reference is, they have no idea.
“I’ve interviewed students after grading with suspicions and they could not tell me a single thing about the entire semester, yet wrote beautiful posts online and a beautiful essay.”
Dr Andrew Paterson, a former lecturer in social work at Flinders University, cited master’s tutorials in which more than 50% of the students had language issues that were “obvious and clear”.
Paterson said he frequently graded essays that software – and his intuition – suggested were plagiarised. He said he would fail the student, they would appeal and the outcome was that they would pass.
“You’d gauge the language proficiency [of students] and they would produce something extremely precise, it was common,” he said.
“But they all went on to pass. I’d sit at graduation and think ‘how could that possibly have happened?’
“They’d failed academically, they’d failed placements, yet they received their parchment.”
“It’s a shambles,” he said. “We’re pretending these students are serious, and they’re pretending they’re interested [in the content]. It doesn’t make for a creative academic environment.
“But it’s as though these universities are operating in another universe.”
A spokesperson for Flinders University said Paterson had not worked there since 2019 and the institution “utterly refuted” his claim that the university admitted students with inadequate language skills because of the revenue they represented.
“Flinders does not admit students into courses for which they are not qualified,” the spokesperson said.
They said the university required an Ielts score of seven (meaning a “good” level of English proficiency) for social work entrants – the “upper end” of the spectrum.
They said the university had academic integrity officers across the institution and “rigorously” applied policies and procedures on plagiarism, re-marking and grade moderation.
“Expectations are clearly communicated to students, and all suspected breaches of academic integrity are thoroughly investigated,” they said. “The world is constantly advancing, and we’re moving with it.”
‘No choice’ but to use AI
Domestic and international students who do have sufficient language skills said they often found themselves in silent classrooms and largely empty lecture theatres, and were relied upon to carry their peers through group assignments.
Khan Lewanay, an international student who has spent more than a decade in Australia, said the universities’ willingness to push through students with poor English language skills led to poor outcomes for all concerned.
“The reality is these universities don’t even care about us, these ‘third world’ students, getting an education,” he said.
“Many … students don’t speak the language, let alone have language capabilities to do a master’s degree.”
Lewanay said he started as a bright student but felt he had been “exploited” and “destroyed” by the system, pointing to punitively high degree costs as well as a poor academic experience.
Another student currently studying a Stem course who asked to remain anonymous said of three group projects they had completed this year “all of them had at least one bludge”.
“In one project, a member only wrote one sentence of poorly translated gibberish which wasn’t on topic,” they said.
“A lack of suitable English skills is a hugely prevalent problem – what should be a half-a-minute discussion has taken half an hour trying to explain something technical.”
Those concerned about the language skills of international students also point to opportunities to circumvent the language tests.
The internet is rife with websites that claim to offer fake certificates for hundreds to thousands of dollars or claim to provide proxy candidates to sit exams for students applying to universities around the world – which recognise the same tests as Australian institutions.
But even students who had legitimately passed told Guardian Australia testing language proficiency to a certain level was not enough in itself to give them a secure base to thrive in an Australian university.
One said a lack of support systems after they arrived intensified language barriers and cultural differences, leading students to turn to plagiarism, generative AI and contract cheating to stay afloat.
“When I first arrived, I struggled with understanding the academic expectations here,” they said. “Without that support [of AI], I would have fallen behind.”
Bien, an international student nearing the end of a postgraduate course at a Melbourne university, who asked for her full name to be withheld, said she had to defend herself in front of an academic misconduct committee twice for using artificial intelligence to complete assignments. Both cases were later dropped.
“My first experience with ChatGPT was due to a group assignment where no one else contributed, so I had no choice but to get inspiration from genAI,” she said.
About 60% of her international student friends admitted to AI use, she said. Some paid for copies of previously submitted high marked papers and used layers of genAI to mask the plagiarism before submitting, while others hired ghostwriters to complete their work and run it through detectors to pick up anomalies.
She said she didn’t blame them.
“I get a lot of help,” she said. “I wish I didn’t have to, but having been traumatised and stuck, plus in a rush to get the 485 [temporary graduate] visa, I take any help to graduate as soon as possible.”
‘What is the purpose of higher education?’
Jeryn Chang, the co-president of the University of Queensland Association of Postgraduate Students, said there needed to be a conversation about the welfare of international students to address the depiction of them as “cash cows”.
Chang said international students were often mythologised as being hugely wealthy and profiteering from the system, but they often struggled financially, relying on student loans or family savings to get by. Chang said they were also particularly vulnerable to rental and work scams.
“International students are often the ones who get the short end of the stick because they don’t have institutions to back them,” she said. “They’re taken advantage of.”
Australia’s reliance on international students pointed to a central question, she said: “What is the purpose of higher education?”
“It’s for the public good. The corporatisation of universities and credentialism of degrees is taking the sector in the wrong direction.”
A spokesperson for IDP said Ielts focused on assessing a student’s “real life language skills” and the company prided itself on giving institutions a “true and trusted score of English ability”.
They said the release of the Department of Home Affairs English language test score equivalency review, which has been under way for two years, should address “some of the serious concerns raised by institutions around discrepancy in test scores between popular language tests”.