Raymond da Silva Rosa: The reality about student standards at West Australian universities

In an entertaining recent opinion piece, Dr Mindy McLeod, a tutor at Melbourne University, claimed: “… it’s almost impossible to fail university students these days (believe me, I’ve tried).

Because while the use of AI is most often obvious even without the detection technology (too new to be fool proof), cash is still king. And once you’re selling degrees, you’ve lost any kind of quality control”.

Given that Dr McLeod’s views are probably held by many in Western Australia, it’s worth sharing my own experience as a lecturer in finance at The University of Western Australia’s Business School.

Perhaps aptly, the Business School “sells” more degrees than most other schools at UWA and the units offered in my Department of Accounting & Finance have, I suspect, the biggest proportion of fee-paying customers, that is, foreign students.

Our experience of failure is different. For instance, about nine per cent of students in my third-year Investment Analysis class failed the unit this year notwithstanding that, unlike Dr McLeod, I didn’t try to fail them.

Why would I? I much prefer they understand and pass the exam I set.

Some subjects don’t come naturally to students. In the purgatory that is second-year financial accounting, the failure rate can easily exceed 20 per cent in some years.

If the students are cooking the books to pass the test, they’re inept chefs.

Is UWA the only stronghold of academic standards in Australia? The numbers indicate not, at least for those who judge these things solely by the failure rate, a measure as meaningful as university rankings, which is to say, not much, although we publicise rankings when they favour us.

In February 2024, the now defunct Campus Morning Mail ran a piece headed “Student Progress rates set to slide” where Angel Calderon, Principal Adviser on Policy and Research at RMIT, predicted: “We will see weakening student progress rates across many institutions over the next two to three years … SPR is defined as the pass rate but often referred to as student success … in 2023, the success rate for domestic commencing bachelor students reached a high of 86.2 per cent. This is the first time since 2009 that the success rate for domestic commencing bachelor students has overtaken the rate for overseas students”.

The point is, notwithstanding a widespread moral panic on this issue with anecdotal evidence to match, the Australia-wide statistics show that students are not getting a “free pass”.

The reality is that when a student fails a unit, it reflects some combination of factors in the student’s control, like a failure to prioritise study, others that are in the university’s control — for example quality of teaching — and still others beyond the control of either, such as unfortunate personal circumstances.

There’s no question that we, in particular research-intensive universities, could do better in supporting students’ learning.

However, if you come across a 22-year-old graduate who has overcome all three challenges, they won’t necessarily have the maturity or experience of a 30-year-old but they’ve passed some hard-won tests. Earning a degree is not everything but it’s far from nothing.

I’ve been teaching university students for more than 30 years. Every year I now have children of former students in my class. What I find surprising is how much they resemble their parents in their application to their studies — although the parents might recall otherwise — how little things have changed in the classroom, and how the past is always golden in the eyes of the critics while the present has gone to hell.

In 1990, David Clark, a reliable troll surer of his opinion than his facts, complained of falling standards in a piece in the AFR headed “Trend to Disneyland quality in degrees awarded by universities”.

Clark predicted it was “only a matter of time before most large employers will run their own formal examinations … In short, our universities are in a state of rapid, irreversible decline”.

It was ever thus.

Raymond da Silva Rosa is a professor of finance at UWA Business School, and the immediate-past Chair of Academic Board at The University of Western Australia.