Foster sticks to hard truth on soft marks Gigi Foster stands by her 2011 research highlighting soft marking of international students. THE fact that international students have the edge in progress rates does not allay concerns about soft marking, says economist Gigi Foster. Last week, education industry researcher Alan Olsen said criticism of the academic standards of international students was no longer acceptable now that they had a better progress rate than domestic students. He said that for soft marking to occur, academics across the country had to conspire, and dismissed Dr Foster's 2011 study, which suggested the poor performance of international students was being overlooked. Dr Foster, from the University of NSW, said there was no need for an academic conspiracy given the sector-wide financial incentives to pass full-fee-paying international students. And she said any study of soft marking had to focus not just on progress rates but on actual marking. She called on the commonwealth government to force the university sector to release sensitive marking data to allow proper analysis of academic standards. Her 2011 statistical analysis indicated that the marks of international and other students from non-English-speaking backgrounds tended to be "buoyed" upwards, despite their lower performance in tutorials. Drawing on business faculties, her study also found that when there were large numbers of NESB international students in tutorials, it dragged down the performance of domestic students. Following publication of her results, the sector had "clammed up" rather than shared its administrative data with researchers, she said. "The government has a duty here to call the universities to account and force that collaboration (with researchers)," Dr Foster said. She said it was clear that there were ongoing concerns about English proficiency, noting that strengthened draft communications standards had recently been endorsed by her own discipline of economics. "It shows there are still issues out there," said Dr Foster, who serves on the working group that is developing the standards. International students make up 50.5 per cent of the full-time load of university economics classes. The working group chairman, Ross Guest of Griffith Business School, said academics in the discipline had welcomed the draft communication standards, but he said many had warned it would be difficult for a significant minority of students to meet them, such as international students and others from non-English speaking backgrounds. "The general feedback is that this is a stretch target but a laudable one," he said. Among the 137 academics in the field who commented on the draft standards, some felt it set the bar too high, pointing out there were students graduating without being able to write a coherent sentence. Professor Guest said employers were consistently telling universities that they wanted graduates with good communications skills and that anecdotally many graduates were falling short. He hoped the new standards would cause economics faculties to review their curriculum to embed communications skills. This isn't an exercise in compliance. What we want is curriculum change," Professor Guest said. We don't have as many essays as we once did and we do need to return to that. The proposed standard for a bachelor of economics graduate is to "be able to present a clear and coherent exposition of economic knowledge, ideas and empirical evidence both orally and in writing, individually or in collaborative contexts."