College Guide
Blog
Dickinson State University, in North Dakota, was apparently having trouble encouraging high school students to apply. And so, eager for the money, Dickinson State decided it needed a new pipeline of students.
So it decided to enroll a lot of Chinese kids. Just enroll them, however. The college didn’t actually seem to fully educate such students. According to an Associated Press article:
As an audit made public Friday revealed, lax recordkeeping and oversight resulted in hundreds of degrees being awarded to students who didn’t finish their course work. Others enrolled who couldn’t speak English or hadn’t achieved the “C” average normally required for admission.
The report depicts Dickinson State as a diploma mill for foreign students, most of whom were Chinese. Of 410 foreign students who have received four-year degrees since 2003 — most of them in the past four years — 400 did not fulfill all the graduation requirements, it said.
According to the article, the way the program was supposed to work was that Chinese students would begin classes in China, spend a year at Dickinson, and then go back to China to earn their diplomas. What actually seems to have happened in most cases, however, was the school didn’t receive transcripts from Chinese universities but then awarded them Dickinson diplomas. So students got bachelor’s degrees from Dickinson State after a year’s work.
At a news conference on Friday, the school’s new president, D.C. Coston, said that Dickinson “stands ready to work with them individually to figure out what might be necessary for them to reach a point of completion.” He did not indicate what the school plans to do in the future to enroll sufficient students. The Chinese scam, however, will now end.
The administrator in charge of running the China program, Jon Brudvig, resigned last week.
Read the audit here.
Facebook
Twitter
POed Lib on February 14, 2012 12:15 AM:
This is only one of a huge number of scandals with Chinese and Indian students. There are thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people in China who will write your essay, fake the transcript and cheat on the TOEFL. The graduate students that I have worked with (and that would be many indeed) have unbelievably crappy English. I am now an expert in the 30 ways that Chinese slaughter English pronunciations. In addition, there are now enough Chinese who have cheated to get in here that the Chinese do not speak or work with Americans. they only speak to other Chinese, and as a consequence, their English never improves.
I heard a talk last week from another incomprehensible Chinese biologist. Besides presenting a horrible talk involving 15000 Western blots without a single number, his English was simply unbelievably bad. I am going to write a letter to the provost of the University telling them that this guy is an incompetent, and is a disgrace.
I am getting tired, as a liberal and a scientist, of listening to people who cannot speak English understandably. If you can't speak English, get a tutor.
What annoys me beyond this is that undergrads who do not understand the material must listen to a Chinese or Israeli or some other foreign TA who cannot speak English explain it. When you are paying 15,000 + room and board, you should not have to become an expert in Chinese dialects to get the information you are paying for.