Recent revelations in the Sydney Morning Herald that a number of international students at universities across New South Wales are ‘functionally illiterate’ and have submitted assignments written by ‘ghost writers’ is not exactly striking news, at least not for many university academics and administrators.
Despite all the institutional talk about ‘world class education’, ‘excellence’, ‘quality assurance’ and so forth, educators who mark assignments and engage with students in tutorials and online forums, are acutely aware of literacy problems that beset both international and domestic students.
Many of these problems can – at least in the case of Australian students – be traced back to the education they receive at school. Research by the Australian Council for Educational Research in 2013 clearly indicates a drop in levels of academic performance among Australian school children when compared to their counterparts in many Asian countries.