State of the Market

[oliverson]

At least your degree was free. Kids are coming out with £40K+ debt these days.

The first lesson they should have would be maths. Is it actually viable incurring a load of debt for the career you plan on pursuing should you graduate?

Better to learn a trade these days. AI won't be rewiring your house.

[jamesbrown]

use AI to write essays etc.

Doubtful, not the story, but that it works. All uni. essays go through automatic screening for generative AI and plagiarism nowadays, also using AI, so unless generative AI can write in a way that evades AI detection, it's doubtful, plus generative AI isn't that great at writing technical content anyway. It goes along fine for a while and then you'll find something outrageously stupid that gives it away. I mean, unless this is a conspiracy at tulipe universities/ex-polys, which it could be, I suppose, because most fee income is generated by overseas master's students nowadays.

[northernladuk]

There was a BBC story the other day about an investigation they have been doing uncovering a scandal where large numbers of foreign students are enrolling on UK degrees but having poor English skills. They then pay people to do their assignments, use AI to write essays etc.

A whistleblower quoted a figure of 70% on some courses who have poor English, even on some masters degrees.

I am absolutely sure this is going on and I'll bet the figures are higher than that... but... it's actually quite difficult to get an AI generated report through. My other half is doing a post grad course at the moment and they run the assignments through a checker and it comes back with a percentage probability that AI or copying has taken place. Looks at old submissions to see similarities amongst other things. It needs checking carefully even if you've not used AI or blatently copied anything. It can bring something as simple as quotation of well known phrases or even reference to her companies policies which are mentioned by most of the students from her work.

I would think any straight up AI document would fail it spectacularly but these people are pros at this con so will be working just as hard to using AI to get around the AI checkers.

[gables]

I am absolutely sure this is going on and I'll bet the figures are higher than that... but... it's actually quite difficult to get an AI generated report through. My other half is doing a post grad course at the moment and they run the assignments through a checker and it comes back with a percentage probability that AI or copying has taken place. Looks at old submissions to see similarities amongst other things. It needs checking carefully even if you've not used AI or blatently copied anything. It can bring something as simple as quotation of well known phrases or even reference to her companies policies which are mentioned by most of the students from her work.

I would think any straight up AI document would fail it spectacularly but these people are pros at this con so will be working just as hard to using AI to get around the AI checkers.

Being simplistic about AI, but as it's trained on past data\publications surely it's bound to fail plagiarism checkers. Seems like it would be easier just to write the thing themselves and then translate if English not the strong point.

[SchumiStars]

Plagiaium has always been rife through every institution, academy and even workplace environment.

Technical degrees, Maths based will always be harder to copy due to their nature.

My wife has just started a PGCE and her submissions are checked by an automatic checker which provides a percentage value. The bar is 25%.

I could not imagine AI writing 5000 words of research and subject matter which references books, archives, videos. I can't imagine some from overseas knowing the subject well enough to compose the text. This also needs to comply with the required questions to answer, defo not easy.

In the old days, lecturers used to use WinZip to check the compression ratio between the authors previous works and current one. Not ideal and. clearly not fool proof, but something.

Reading for a degree, is just that. It does not come easy, regardless of how much money you want to spend.

[edison]

The Masters from Oxford I paid for using savings and did using annual holiday from work. Defo not free, although I did manage to get it for £10k/3yrs after some accounting magic.

Just checked, same course, is £70k in fees alone now. No idea how people can afford that TBH. But when the students are driven to lectures in a rolls, you tend to wonder, if they will ever use it.

Son has just graduated from Notts in Economics has not told me what his debt level is TBF however I suspect it will 70k.

Hopefully your son will do well financially, Economics has been one of the best paying degrees for years. It was in the top 5 highest paying degrees in the last year. Computer Science was a mere 18th, lower than Social Work although I expect the longer term earnings potential for CS is higher than Social Work.

[edison]

Don't you have to present your final paper / project in person? surely then the lack of English skills would be evident?

Clearly not.

A couple of students were quoted as saying they were practically the only native English speaking students on their course.

[edison]

I am absolutely sure this is going on and I'll bet the figures are higher than that... but... it's actually quite difficult to get an AI generated report through. My other half is doing a post grad course at the moment and they run the assignments through a checker and it comes back with a percentage probability that AI or copying has taken place. Looks at old submissions to see similarities amongst other things. It needs checking carefully even if you've not used AI or blatently copied anything. It can bring something as simple as quotation of well known phrases or even reference to her companies policies which are mentioned by most of the students from her work.

I would think any straight up AI document would fail it spectacularly but these people are pros at this con so will be working just as hard to using AI to get around the AI checkers.

I think Bath University was one of the first to introduce a policy that said if you used some AI generated content, so long as you cited the source in your work, you wouldn't be penalised.

A lot of GenAI text content is easy to spot, it just doesn't sound like a typical human would write. However, there are already 'rewriter' apps that take AI content and reword it to make it look human and supposedly guarantee the text will pass AI detectors.

[jamesbrown]

guarantee

"Trading Standards, how can I help you today?..."

Off topic, as usual for this thread, but... as an ex-academic and someone whose wife is an academic, I can say that students are caught for plagiarism all the time, and it doesn't end well, so the idea that students are getting away with this en masse is wide of the mark. Also, it would be pretty obvious in the grade statistics. However, it's certainly true that there are many postgrad (and even some undergrad) courses with few native English speakers because universities are only surviving on overseas fee income at present. They lose money for every home student and have been for years. Also, for the same reason, and as I noted earlier, I wouldn't be too surprised at a conspiracy of silence at a handful of borderline institutions, but this isn't widespread at RG universities, for example.

[edison]

"Trading Standards, how can I help you today?..."

Off topic, as usual for this thread, but... as an ex-academic and someone whose wife is an academic, I can say that students are caught for plagiarism all the time, and it doesn't end well, so the idea that students are getting away with this en masse is wide of the mark. Also, it would be pretty obvious in the grade statistics. However, it's certainly true that there are many postgrad (and even some undergrad) courses with few native English speakers because universities are only surviving on overseas fee income at present. They lose money for every home student and have been for years. Also, for the same reason, and as I noted earlier, I wouldn't be too surprised at a conspiracy of silence at a handful of borderline institutions, but this isn't widespread at RG universities, for example.

I did say 'supposedly' guarantee, LOL.

I was doing a lot of recruitment for junior-ish IT roles back in 2020-22. I was surprised how many applicants had masters degrees from, to put it politely, low ranking universities and were still working in basic, dead end jobs years aftergraduating. And then they were applying to join the IT Service Desk.

I think you are right, the word conspiracy wasn't used in the article, but it seems an open secret, and some senior university staff turn a blind eye to it due to the desperation to get funding via these foreign students.

I think it's more at the undergraduate level, but a lot of these foreign students come from very affluent families and they just want a bit of paper for their kids that says they went to a UK university, which in some quarters at least, is still considered prestigious.