Sigma’s Simulacrum of Reality

Tony Pua, Oxford grad and CEO of an IT company has blogged about the decline in the quality of Australian unis recently, and I’ve incidentally commented on it under the moniker of xero there. He quoted the new report which I read in The Australian stating that many foreign students suck in English but still miraculously gained admission to Aussie unis as anecdotal evidence.

As a Sydney Uni student, I must sadly agree with him. I feel Aussie unis still have good lecturers and academics, rigorous assessments and exams, and good ‘local’ students who got in through the HSC and UAI. But I have very little sympathy for foreign students with atrocious command of English . They may be smart students, but heck, if they wanna study at a Western educational institution, they have to fulfill one of its requirements, and that’s an adequate command of English. I feel that the TOEFL requirements for them at the moment is still too low, being set at a 6 out of a possible 9. I got a score of 7.5. So screw them, I advocate raising it to at least a 7, if 6 lets in students from China who can hardly string together two English sentences. I mean, if they can’t speak English well, then I think it would be better if they just try gaining admission to their own local unis, where the medium of instruction would be in their mother-tongue.

As an example, one of the most popular courses in Sydney Uni for foreign students is B. Commerce, with majors in Accounting and Finance. Incidentally, exactly what I’m taking right now, after I transferred from UTS. The UAI requirements for it for local students was 94.5 out of 100 in 2007. Btw, a UAI is a ranking system. If you got 94.5, it means that you’re the among the top 5.5% of students in the state of NSW in terms of your achievement in your HSC (Aussie’s pre-uni exam). In short, a pretty impressive score. So pray explain how those “I no speakhe Engerish” students manage to get into this course in droves?

Australian unis are guilty of lowering their language requirements for many foreign students for the sake of getting more cash, and this should stop soon. So much for the economic liberalism treatment of unis here by John Howard. Educational institutions in my opinion should always be afforded the maximum subsidisation possible by the government. What could be more worthy of the taxpayer’s money than a country’s educational infrastructure?

Already, I am quite suprise that Aussie unis were placed in the top 50 unis in the world in the THES and Shanghai JiaoTong rankings. They should be placed lower than that due to their foreign student factor.

Here’s to hoping that there would be a change in policy to Australia’s tertiary education sector soon.