More on Australian universities and the overseas student issue

Remember, I like universities and don't have any issue with them being attractive to overseas students.  But they will harm their reputation if they don't get on top of the serious problem of passing students who effectively cheat by use of AI or other assistance.

This is from the second part of a series in The Guardian:

Guardian Australia spoke to multiple academics and students, who described wholesale use of genAI going largely unchecked at many institutions.

A humanities tutor at a leading sandstone university said she was “distressed” to find more than half of her students were flagged to have used AI in their first assignment for all or part of their work this year – a “huge increase” on 2023.

She believed the real number was much higher. But any repercussions were minimal.

“We’re not holding students to a standard,” she said. “It’s not fair on anyone who thinks a degree is worthwhile – a lot are not at the moment. It’s just proof they’ve been paid for.”

She has worked at a number of universities over three decades and said she had seen a “huge dependence” on the international market in recent years, so much so that tutors felt under pressure to pass students in order to keep the revenue coming.

“Nobody is blind to it,” she said. “It’s not a social or educational environment; it’s a box-checking exercise. A master’s degree is not worth what a bachelor’s used to be.”

Up to 80% of her courses were composed of full fee-paying overseas students, she said. Many struggled with English language skills in classes and meetings yet produced perfectly written essays.

It certainly sounds like it causing a lot of consternation amongst staff:

Academics told Guardian Australia they often felt unsupported or discouraged when they spoke up about alleged cheating.

A science tutor at a sandstone university alleged they faced repercussions last year when raising concerns over papers during the first wave of AI.

“There was a near mutiny among the teaching staff when we were told that we had to mark [apparently] bot-written papers as if they had been written by students,” they said.

I almost lost my job raising our common concerns about this to the subject coordinators. About one-fifth of the papers were plagiarised that year. I don’t think many people, if any, got seriously disciplined in the end.

“Far from discouraging AI use, they’re doubling down.”

“Our current directives are not to report them without a smoking gun,” they said.