gotta get up near the teacher if you can if you wanna learn anything

This person is a representative of an Australian university:

If you don’t get your grammar quite right but if you know your subject and if you can solve a problem in IT or if you can provide a profit and loss report for a business person, what does it matter that you managed in the wrong tense at that point or that you’ve got the article where you shouldn’t have it, you know?

“The building was on fire.”

“The building is on fire.”

“The building will be on fire.”

Hmm. But have no fear, because as you burn to death your IT problems will be solved.

The quote is from a story on the 7:30 Report about how university lecturers are feeling pressured into passing foreign students whose work is far below standard. The source of the pressure is the need for universities to attract foreign students to generate funding. (One would think that anybody wishing to be taken seriously when arguing about standards of English amongst university students would try to construct a slightly more coherent sentence …you know? But anyway).

From personal experience and observation I can say that students are passing undergraduate courses at (relatively) well respected universities in Australia who are far below standard, and in some cases utterly incompetent. And we are not talking about fields of study which are already inherently evil (e.g. those which help you towards providing profit and loss reports as a career) or ‘IT’ in the sense of “the certification earned by the person who is unhelpful when you phone up about your broken DVD player”, we’re talking about highly technical and complex degrees in which people ostensibly gain the skills to design bridges, write air traffic control software, build systems to safely process sewage into drinking water, tell you that the building is on fire, and so on.

There are so many counter-arguments to the above quote that it’s hard to pick one. For instance, if the individual in question cannot adequately express ideas, how can the university be sure that he or she is competent? What, according to this view of the value of correct language, is the point of having a common language at all? Is the future of human communication to be nothing more than a series of grunts and gestures, punctuated by the presentation of high quality profit and loss reports through which all meaningful content will flow?

Of course, we are not talking about (for example) Chinese students being assessed in Mandarin or Cantonese, Vietnamese students being assessed in Vietnamese, and so on – and there is no suggestion that many of the students in question are not articulate and intelligent individuals, albeit perhaps not when consulted in English. But no matter how able students may be when assessed properly, if they can’t understand the material which is presented and are assessed favourably due to financial pressures on a university then there is no doubt that underqualified and underperforming students will graduate from Australian universities. This should be a concern to anyone who has a degree, relies on anyone else who has a degree, drives over bridges, flies on planes, or is concerned about unexpected office fires.