Respect for international students means preparing them adequately

Eager for a change after numerous years as a secondary school art teacher, I recently started a new job working for a well-established organisation, which, in partnership with several UK universities, offers pre-university courses to international students.

Its attractive marketing boasts centres on campus, as well as giving the impression of guaranteed progression. In reality, the centre in which I worked was housed in a former office block away from the (Russell Group) university to whose incorporated art school my students were expecting to go. And progression was not guaranteed; the university required students to gain an overall course mark of 60 per cent, and the art college later demanded more influence in the muddled institutional relationship, requesting to see and formally accept student portfolios regardless of the course result. There was also a requirement to pass an English proficiency test.

While the art facilities were disappointing, with carpeted floors and no sink, the foundation course was largely well conceived, with purposeful crossover between contextual written research and creative practice. It quickly became apparent, however, that my students – all Chinese – barely had the linguistic skills required to buy a cup of coffee, despite having completed a term of intensive full-time English classes. They appeared completely unable to understand me for much of the time.

In addition, they regularly turned up late or not at all. They also slept in lessons, used their phones and rarely completed work outside class. They wasted countless hours talking in Mandarin among themselves. Since they were so-called adult learners, the only threat I had was that they might not pass and progress to the art college. But they didn’t respond, and as the first term drew to a dismal close, that possibility seemed increasingly likely.

By the middle of the second term, the problems had worsened. With very little experience in purposeful art education, my students’ conceptual and practical skills were, at best, GCSE (Year 11) standard. The most pressing matter, however, was the written element of the course, in which they were largely reliant on conducting research in their own language before translating it. This often proved either too challenging or time-consuming, resulting in their simply copying and pasting information from the internet and naively attempting to pass it off as their own. In one bizarre example, the copied text came from a German website, the student apparently unable to tell the difference. I began to feel that the students and I had been set up to fail.

Despite plagiarism being explicitly warned against in the course literature, however, there was no disciplinary action. Moreover, my colleague (with whom I moderated samples of work across the cohort) adopted a more generous strategy with regard to the mark scheme in an anxious attempt to improve her own students’ chances of passing (even though they were evidently more able than mine). Inevitably, this not only led to disagreements but also painted me in an unfairly negative light.

Up to this point, my line manager had been noticeably aloof. By the end of the second term, however, I urgently arranged a meeting. Remarkably, despite my having uploaded the previous two terms’ marks (accounting for 30 per cent of the overall grade) on to a spreadsheet at her request, she appeared not to have modelled or even considered the implications of a group average mark of just 10 per cent. I stressed the unlikeliness of a miraculous improvement in the final term, but she was non-committal, remarking: “We can only do so much.”

The final term was a desultory affair, before some anxious last-minute work towards the end. The final results were better than I had hoped for, with an average overall mark of 45 per cent across the class. However, I left for summer depressed, even feeling sorry for my unworthy students.

Some UK universities now rely on international students – in particular, those from China – for as much as half their income. But international students are not just cash cows. They enrich our campuses and culture, and so everyone involved in their education should be treated with respect. This means that these students must be adequately prepared. In this instance, my employer – and, by extension, its agents in China – had enticed my students into parting with a considerable amount of money for a dream that was simply not unachievable in the short time allowed.

Two days into my holiday, however, I was called at home by the centre manager (who, apparently, had only just been made aware of the situation) and was brusquely informed that I must re-mark the work. The art school had accepted all my students’ portfolios, so the course marks needed to reflect this.

This spurious logic did not just negate the university’s academic imperatives. It also ignored the marking criteria, as well as three terms’ worth of thoughtful moderation. I refused, not just because it was unethical, but because it was also absurd.

Shocked and disappointed, I subsequently resigned. Re-marking, meanwhile, ensured that all but the weakest students (as far as I could surmise) eventually got the 60 per cent they needed. In the various emails detailing this remedial process, I noted the apparent consent of key members of the senior team. The university, one assumes, would have felt differently.

Donald Short has been teaching in the private and international secondary sector for the past 20 years. Most recently, he was the head of art at Wellington College International, Shanghai.