More than a dozen academics and students who spoke to Guardian Australia, most on the condition of anonymity, said the universities’ financial reliance on foreign students over many years had hollowed out academic integrity and threatened the international credibility of the sector.
Many said the rise of artificial intelligence was accelerating the crisis to the point where the only way to fail a course would be to hand nothing in, unless universities came up with a coherent institutional response.
A tutor in an arts subject at a leading sandstone university said in recent years the number of overseas students in her classes – who may pay up to $300,000 in upfront costs – had reached as high as 80%.
“Most can’t speak, write or understand basic English,” she said. “They use translators or text capture to translate the lectures and tutorials, translation aids to read the literature and ChatGPT to generate ideas.
“It’s mind blowing that you can walk away with a master’s degree in a variety of subjects without being able to understand a sentence.”