Student use of machine translation ‘a debate we have to have’

Universities are being forced to reassess requirements for international students to compose their assignments in English, amid rapid improvements in artificial intelligence (AI) tools.

Helen Gniel, head of the integrity unit at Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, told a Melbourne conference that students’ use of machine translation technology was “a debate we have to have”.

Dr Gniel said students were using tools such as Google Translate to convert work from their first languages into English, then polishing it with proofreading apps such as Grammarly – practices they would undoubtedly continue in the workplace after graduation.

But such behaviour was problematic while they were still at university, she said, because of the expectation that they were educated in English. If courses had been delivered in other languages, institutions were legally required to note this on testamurs.

Dr Gniel said professional bodies also wanted reassurance that foreign graduates had “adequate language”, should they remain in Australia and work in places such as hospitals. “There’s a bigger question about what it is that we’re saying students can do at the end of our degrees,” Dr Gniel told the Australian Technology Network’s Future Learning Summit.

“How much is English language a part of that? What are we trying to assess, and why? I don’t think we’ve really given deep thought to what that means now, in a world of such ready translation tools.”

Phillip Dawson, associate director of Deakin University’s Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning, criticised an “underlying” assumption that international students should be as capable in English as in their primary disciplines.

“If students think better in their own first language, what are they gaining out of hand translating rather than machine translating?” he asked.

Professor Dawson speculated that students submitting assignments on decolonisation could find themselves “in trouble” for not drafting their work in the coloniser’s language. “We have a lot of rhetoric around things like decolonising the curriculum, but we’re pretty strict on [how students] engage in it,” he said.

Ant Bagshaw, a higher education policy adviser with LEK Consulting, asked whether universities would find it acceptable for students to use live translation apps during oral examinations. Professor Dawson said it was a live question, amid the increasing use of interactive oral assessment to assess students’ learning outcomes.

He said international students’ “anxiety” around communicating in English could mask their mastery of their subjects. “To what extent can we assist students in those interactive oral assessments to better demonstrate how they’ve actually met the outcome?” he asked.

A recent literature review by Canadian PhD candidate Kate Paterson found that the “ethical and pedagogical implications” of students’ use of machine translation had not been “coherently addressed” by academics or tertiary institutions.

“Human-machine relationships…have the potential to destabilise traditional pedagogies and transform how we teach and learn languages and academic content,” she wrotes in the TESOL Journal. “The challenge…is to re-envision educational policy and practice in ways that maintain academic integrity and promote greater educational equity.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com