Masters in deception

Sat up here in gair rhydd towers putting together our final paper of the year, we’ve been blessed with a university that seems more than willing to give us lots of material to work with.

An enormous carnival of ineptitude seems to be slowly edging its way around campus, be it cancelled graduations, the absolute farce of exams at the medical school, or the fact you can now just buy your qualifications here without bothering to do any work.

A postgraduate friend of mine has recently been offered his dissertation to be written for him in exchange for money.

Ever felt that Cardiff University is more geared towards making money out of you than actually getting down to some education? The consumerisation of education here is not a new phenomenon, but it is certainly something that is gathering pace. And one of the easiest ways for the university to make money is through international students.

While undergraduate course costs are capped, universities can charge whatever they like for postgraduate courses - over £40,000 for the most expensive in the country. And with so many international students taken on at exorbitant rates, they unsurprisingly feel like consumers. Having paid for the privilege to study here, they expect a guaranteed qualification out of the other side of it.

This would perhaps go some way to explain why some students have paid to have their dissertations written for them.

But there is more to it than that. For many students, the language barrier is so high that they would have little choice but to find someone else to write their dissertations for them. The anecdotal evidence points to some international students relying on ghost-written dissertations and group work to pull through subjects they would otherwise fail.

The department in question says that English levels are ensured by language tests in order to join the masters scheme. When a British student off the course claims that “some of the students I do group work with are shocking; I’m amazed they make it here from Heathrow,” then it’s time to think otherwise.

This is not a problem that the university does not know about. It is alleged that last year four students were ejected from the course as their dissertations were clearly not written by them, although the University will neither confirm nor deny this. Whilst they were written in word-perfect English, the students could barely even speak the language.

But this is clearly not enough. A current student claims that “international students go home for the summer, so they can’t be kept tabs on…maybe there are different standards. I’ve had work handed to me that’s obviously been copied off the internet as it still has the company name on it.”

Is the University willingly turning a blind eye to the problem? An incredible story has emerged from one postgraduate module earlier this year. While a lecturer was out of the room, two students ran down to the logged-in computer and opened the module’s exam paper on the screen in front of 300 students. Then another student ran to the front and took a copy of the paper on disk.

Think this sounds ridiculous? It gets better. Other students unhappy with what was going on took pictures on their phones and showed them to the university. But with the student in question denying that the files copied across, all they had to do was make a half-hearted apology in front of his fellow students, and no further action was taken. The examination paper has since been replaced.

Academic staff have limits as to how much they can do, with subjects often limiting the contact time they have with students to just an hour a week. But shouldn’t it be possible for a department to test students on how much they actually know on their topic, much in the same way that Vivas are used in other subjects (effectively interviews on the year’s work)?

These are incredible stories that show the depths that the university will go to keep hold of fee-paying students. To international students the problem represents a massive blemish on the reputation of the majority who not only complete qualifications here, but often do so with the handicap of not using their primary language. And for the rest of us, the reputation of gaining a qualification from a university willing to take money as a higher priority than learning is self-evident.

The risk as always here is that the University is overspending the dividend we have of being an English speaking university. As I’ve written before, we currently have strong interest in postgraduate courses because for foreign students there is a premium attached to Anglophonic universities, coupled with a belief that British universities are of a high standard.

As universities in foreign students’ home countries improve, not to mention the various visa barriers that are being erected by the government to block international students, then they are not going to be convinced by the empty rhetoric of our standards.

The numbers of foreign students coming to Cardiff has slowed over the past four years, and is now such a small increase it doesn’t register a change.
Short-term money chasing does nothing but frustrate the long-term chances of the university maintaining standards in the face of international competition.

Masters degrees are already touted in emails from US institutions, for those willing to pay enough money. How long before the click-and-buy masters come to the UK?

You’ve probably noticed by now that we have avoided mentioning the name of the department in question. To do that would sabotage the reputation of the people that actually do the work they’ve paid an incredible amount of money for. But this is a warning to the department that what goes on in your grubby money-making schemes does not go unnoticed. The gair rhydd team will be keeping an eye on the story next year.

The short-term solution is for tightened standards in departments that currently do not monitor their international students closely.

But there’s a darker, more engrained problem beneath that the university doesn’t seem even remotely interested in dealing with.