[IP] more on Unclear on American Campus: What the Foreign Teacher Said
Begin forwarded message:
From: Bradley Roberts <brarrr@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 27, 2005 6:56:55 PM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: egor@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] Unclear on American Campus: What the Foreign
Teacher Said
So either the universities in question could not afford rejecting
the grad students that failed or would have fail TOEFL, or
something is wrong with the language tests themselves.
As a current graduate student in engineering, with numerous friends
from both native English speaking countries and other-language-
countries, I'd say that cheating is rampant on both the GRE and TOEFL
in some "foreign" countries. I have no proof other than the near-
complete inability to comprehend the English language coupled with
GRE verbal scores in the 99th percentile for some students. The
native-english speaking students in many research groups get the
dubious pleasure of helping correct and clean up manuscripts for
publication from their colleagues who are supposedly masters of
vocabulary and grammar. I'm not putting this forth as a complaint
but as support for the idea that *something* is wrong with the
language tests/testing methods themselves. These are good people but
some DO lack the necessary oral and written knowledge of the language
in which they're instructing.
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