Whistleblower warning on degrees

Degrees are being awarded to overseas students who speak almost no English, claims a whistleblowing academic.strong>

The academic, at a world-famous UK university, says postgraduate degrees are awarded to students lacking in the most basic language skills.

There are concerns that financial pressures to recruit overseas students for cash rather than quality could threaten the credibility of degrees.

I can’t say that I’m surprised. I ended up working with a nice guy from China in one of my group projects who didn’t really understand English that well or, for that matter, programming. I suspect the two things were related – the rest of the group would assign him a relatively easy part of the software to work on, but he would never quite understand that he had to write that module in the context of the rest of the software.

On the other hand, while his programming wasn’t good and his spoken English wasn’t great, he could write essays and stuff fairly well. No idea if he got help there – but the benefit of being able to sit down with a dictionary and then get another person to proof-read afterwards probably helped loads there.