A search for answers as business students flunk final

Hundreds of students studying postgraduate business programs at the University of Sydney have failed core subjects, leaving many shocked and confused. Almost 40 per cent of the more than 1200 students enrolled in Critical Thinking in Business failed, the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association (SUPRA) said. The fail rate for another subject, Succeeding in Business, jumped from 1.5 per cent to 10.6 per cent between semester 2, 2014 and semester 1 this year. Students must pass both these units in order to complete a master's of commerce. Jinyuan Li is just one student who says the high failure rate is unfair, blaming inadequate teaching support for the disastrous results. “I failed this course due to the lack of proper support from the teaching team,” Li said, adding that a general lack of feedback throughout the course and little guidance for the final mandatory exam were to blame for the poor outcomes. “There were never any boundaries given to students’ answers in either lectures or tutorials," Li said. "Any reasonable answers had been acceptable and favourable in class. However, in the exam, there was only very limited marking criteria. Any answers beyond that scope would be marked fail. There has been a huge contradiction between the philosophy of teaching and the marking of the exam.” Li said he believed if he had been provided with adequate support and feedback he would not have failed. Another student who did pass one of the subjects in question said even though he passed, he felt teachers didn’t properly respond to students’ questions throughout the course, saying they were routinely told by tutors to “ask these questions online”. The majority of students enrolled in the courses were Chinese international students and SUPRA president Christian Jones said one factor that related to the high rate of failure was the final exams' reliance upon grammar and expression skills. “If you have substandard English language feeder programs, inconsistency in teaching delivery as attested by student comments on social media such as in Facebook’s USyd Rants, and problems preparing students for exams because you don’t give them reasonable formative and practice assessment, you have a triple tsunami of failures that sets students up to fail,” Jones said. The Business School has denied allegations it unreasonably failed international students, saying it is committed to “fairness and world-class academic standards”. The university Business School's deputy dean, professor John Shields, said: “Mandatory exams allow students to demonstrate that the work they present is their own and that they have achieved a required level of proficiency. Students who fail to achieve a minimum standard are given a fail grade.” In response to a question from an ABC interviewer, he said the Business School had “a large number of students coming from bachelor degrees undertaken elsewhere, including in mainland China, where the dominant mode is passive learning, rather than critical thinking and engaged learning”. Shields said the university made services available to students who had difficulty with English. “We have put in place quite systematic and comprehensive additional support for students we identify as being at risk,” he said. He went on to say students had been made fully aware of the requirements “from day one” of the semester. “Unit of Study Outlines were made available to students from the first day of teaching,” Shields said. “Information concerning the assessment was also made available in lectures and on the internet.” SUPRA said in a statement that the university has since stated its commitment to improving formative and practice assessment for future students. Jones said the high failure rate of students exposed systemic shortcomings that need addressing. “That the university has scrambled to make so many changes for future students is a backhanded admission of their own failures," Jones said. "SUPRA applauds all the changes promised, but that still means last semester’s cohort of students were used as experimental guinea pigs."