Unfiltered Story #247791

After a forced break from work due to a medical emergency I am finding it hard to find work again. I decide to return to university to complete a Masters in Information Technology to help get work in the IT sector. I am surprised to find during the orientation process that I am only one of two Australian students taking this course, and the only one taking it on campus. The rest of the students are from overseas. I soon find that some of the international students have radically different attitudes towards their work. Here are a couple of memorable examples:

Example 1:
Academic integrity is a big thing in universities in Australia, and it is hammered in to us the necessity of referencing all our sources, and the dire consequences for plagiarism. It transpires that this is not the case in some other countries. Case in point, one of our first subjects requires us to do a group presentation.

The presentations go reasonably smoothly, until we’re ready to pack up for the day, when two groups come in and ask if it’s their turn yet. The lecturer is pretty annoyed, because he’d explicitly told us we needed to be present for the other groups’ presentations, but he lets them present. The first of the two groups gives a fairly ho-hum presentation, getting a few of the basic things completely wrong, and giving the impression that they don’t actually know what they were presenting on. The fun really begins in the second group’s presentation, when half way through they use the same graphics as the first group, just coloured differently. Not sure what the eventual outcome for them was, but I know they didn’t all come back the next semester.

Example 2:
Attendance at lectures and tutorials is important, a fact which was also stressed. More so for international students, who need to maintain an 80% attendance rate to maintain their student visa. So, imagine my surprise when attendance at lectures quickly drops after the first two weeks, until only a handful of students are attending lectures each week.

The most extreme example of this was one particular student who attended no lectures, until the last week, when we were due to do individual presentations. This particular student was taken by surprise when the lecturer challenged their identity. She pointed out that as she’d never seen them in class before, she had no way of knowing if they were an impostor or not.