https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/scandal-plagued-and-unaccountable-austral...

“ Today’s news that Australian universities are falling down international rankings shows the sector is failing even by its own standards,” said Jack Thrower, Senior Economist at The Australia Institute.“


It’s being called the “ seriously pathetic Bill Shorten effect “.

Barely a month into being a vice chancellor and already Australia universities are slipping behind the rest of the world!

Just like NDIS, everything he touches he ruins.

We dodged a bullet not elected him  as Prime Minister!

Is that a challenge?

🤣🤣🤣🤣

John Smith wrote on Jun 19^th, 2025 at 11:17pm:


Not unless you're held up as a measure of pathetic.

Australia’s top universities have defended the number of foreigners on campus, which at one sandstone institution exceeded the number of Australian students last year, as international education groups say not enough ­locals want to study STEM.

The Australian revealed on Thursday that international students accounted for one-third to one-half of all Australian-based students at the elite Group of Eight research-intensive universities, with 51 per cent of all ­Australian-based students at the University of Sydney coming from overseas last year.

Go8 chief executive Vicki Thomson said she would “make no apologies” for the fact that international students choose Go8 universities, and said there needed to be “more public investment, not fewer international students” if “we want to reduce reliance”.

Ms Thomson said nearly two-thirds of their international student cohort were postgraduate students, and there was a “distinct difference between under­graduate and postgraduate international students”.

She also said Go8 universities “set the highest English language requirements in Australia” amid official concerns from Jobs and Skills Australia over the lack of English language proficiency of some graduating international students.

At the University of NSW, 45 per cent of locally enrolled students came from overseas last year. Foreign students made up 40 per cent of local enrolments at the Australian National University, which has blamed falling inter­national enrolments for budget cuts, and 43 per cent at the University of Melbourne.

Higher education policy expert Andrew Norton said it was worth “questioning the judgment” of the University of Sydney in letting the number of inter­national students exceed 50 per cent of enrolments, as it represented a “symbolic tipping point”.

The University of Sydney said it had limited its growth “while pursuing increased diversity” and international students now represented 47.5 per cent of all students. It also said 35 per cent were undergraduates and 64 per cent were postgraduates.


Such massive scdle 'international education' is an absolute racket with no sign of abating.

Australia universities are nothing more than a back door immigration visas scam shops.

They are used by well off overseas students to gain entry to Australia via visas and subsequent permanent residency which then allows the rest of the family to apply to join them.

They are not and haven’t been for a long, long time focus on education or research.

They are simply there as a fancy overseas student school that charges big $$$ in return for Australian citizenship.

Picture this: it’s final exam week at Macquarie University in Sydney and Hayden, 24, is less than a month away from graduating with a bachelor’s degree in social sciences. It has cost him more than $45,000 and this is his final push to the finish line; his assessments are all conducted online, with students given 48 hours to turn in their answers.

It’s 7.40am, 20 minutes before the exam is due to begin, and Hayden is still asleep. Has he slept through his alarm, exhausted from late-night cramming? Nope. The only work he’s done for this exam is researching which AI tool will cheat him the best marks.

In a minute or two, Hayden will roll out of bed, slap some water on his face and fire up his laptop. At 8am he’ll feed his exam paper into ChatGPT. By 8.06am it will have gifted him 30 correct answers. Hayden knows a perfect score might trip the university’s AI detectors, so he’ll deliberately mangle a couple of responses to get him 94 per cent. Then he’ll wait three hours to mimic a genuine exam effort, before firing his A-plus paper back to his examiner.

Welcome to the death of higher education.

Hayden has now graduated with a High ­Distinction. How much of his final year studies did he outsource to AI? “All of it,” he says without skipping a beat. “It’s completely insane. In my smaller units, AI was covering 100 per cent of my coursework and 100 per cent of my exams. And that’s not me outing myself, that’s me ­outing everyone. You’ve got like, five per cent of students still putting in hours and hours of effort, and 95 per cent of us who are crawling out of bed ten minutes before exams and winging it with AI.


“In my whole degree, I never had an in-person exam. That’s why ChatGPT has gone rampant. It’s just so easy to cheat. There are hundreds of AI sites for us to use and dozens of ways to mix them up to make sure you don’t get busted. In first year, we were all too scared to use AI, but in the past 18 months it’s gone crazy. Now you can get ChatGPT to do your entire degree. In fact, you’d be stupid not to use AI if you want to do well.”

In November 2022, the end of Hayden’s first year of university, he finished with a narrow pass of 55 per cent just as OpenAI launched its Artificial Generative Intelligence juggernaut ChatGPT onto the market. By the end of third year, his marks had rocketed to 85-95 per cent.

“I went from being a bare pass C average to being an A-plus student in 18 months. All I was doing was feeding my essay and assignment prompts into ChatGPT and watching it spit out perfect structure, perfect content, perfect grammar, in three minutes flat. It was ridiculously easy. Then I’d ask a bunch of other AI apps to keep improving it to look more like a human wrote it. I scrambled the uni’s detection software into thinking it was all written by me and my lecturers couldn’t prove it wasn’t.”

Bemused, I ask, “Did you feel guilty?”

“Oh, yeah. Definitely at the start. I was very worried about getting into trouble, but the more I heard that everyone was using it, the quicker it swept away the shame because no one was paying the price for cheating. Everyone was getting through, so the guilt just vanished. It’s a free-for-all. Me and my friends can’t believe how blatant the cheating is. We know some random person walking down the street will know more about our degrees than we do.”

Hayden is struck by another recollection and laughs: “You know, one semester a lecturer decided he was gonna make everyone turn up in person for the exam. There was complete panic because we all knew we couldn’t cheat and our marks would be a disaster. It scared us for weeks – so much so, the head lecturer was flooded with written excuses: ‘Sorry, but I can’t be at uni that day’ or ‘Sorry, I have family commitments’ or transport issues or some other random reason they couldn’t show up. Eventually he rolled over and announced, ‘OK, so we’re going to have to make that exam online.’ It was the biggest relief of my life.”

I’ve been interviewing ­studentsacross the country about the rates of AI abuse in universities – and from undergrads to Honours and Masters students, their confessions of cheating are breathtaking. And not just for their brazenness, but for something more disturbing: an almost universal sense of satisfaction at ­having “beaten” the system. Many smugly describe how easy it is to ­escape accountability. Over and over I’ve heard the same defence: “It’s not cheating if everyone’s doing it.”

Young Australians are now cheating their way through ­university at a rate that’s making a mockery of our sandstone institutions. No longer is the ­accumulation of knowledge a rewarding ­process of brainwork, error and painstaking self-correction. AI is giving students top grades for zero intellectual work.

I’ve interviewed six senior academics in three states, including heads of school in media and communications, physics, mathematics, statistics and chemistry. All but one put student fraud at more than 80 per cent. And yet each of the students I spoke to for this story scoffed at that figure, saying the rate of “full-bore” cheating in their units is more like 95 per cent.

Mass education at inflated prices = mass cheating.