STUDENTS LIFTING text from articles and passing it off as their own work is older than the internet, and anti-plagiarism software to detect this has become standard equipment for universities. A new trend is emerging in the plagiarism arms race – ‘internet-savvy students who are proficient in English’ increasingly seek out English language articles online, cut and paste them and then translate them into the language used as their own country’s medium of education.
According to anti-plagiarism software developers iParadigms, plagiarism of English language articles which are then translated has become such a problem that their customers in the university sector regularly ask them for the means to detect plagiarism in translation.
The company has responded to this demand by producing Turnitin, which translates work handed in by students into English and looks for matches between this and material contained in its ‘massive content database’. Current and forthcoming versions of Turnitin can spot cut-and-pastes of English internet articles passed off as students’ own work even after translation into fifteen European languages.
There’s apparently no software yet to do the reverse – spotting whether English language essays by international students on English-medium courses are cut-and-paste translations of works online in other languages. Languages other than English account for an increasing proportion of global internet content, while English-medium degree courses continue to proliferate worldwide.
Since the publication of this article in the March 2012 EL Gazette, iParadigms sent me an update saying they are working on versions that can handle non-European languages, and a version of Turnitin that can do the opposite - spot cut-and-paste translations into English, is in development.
Tuesday, 3 July 2012
Business schools scrap overseas alumni interviews
From the March 2012 EL Gazette
MATT SALUSBURY
writes
GRADUATE BUSINESS school admissions departments in the US have for some time used their large and highly organised volunteer networks of alumni abroad to conduct interviews with applicants for MBAs in the applicant’s country of residence.
But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, US business schools are now beginning to scrap this time-honoured (and cheap) method of screening applicants. Business school admissions officers told the WSJ that their principal reason for abandoning their reliance on international alumni was that they were concerned that some alumni weren’t interviewing candidates in English. Some business schools believe that alumni may make an assessment of candidates’ suitability for an English-medium MBA based on an interview carried out in a local language spoken by both the applicant and the interviewer.
Rob Weiler, assistant dean of admissions at the University of California’s Anderson School of Management, said that the evaluation of applicants’ English language competence had become ‘somewhat less consistent’ overseas. The school will continue to use some of its ‘trained alumni’ to interview applicants, but Weiler has over the previous year been remind ing them of the need to interview applicants in English only.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which has over 88,000 alumni worldwide, previously used ‘several hundred’ of these to interview up to 3,500 MBA applicants in cities around the world for around 800 MBA places. Now Wharton, at considerable expense, is ending this arrangement and flying its six admissions officers to do interviews in Singapore, Sao Paulo and ten other ‘hub’ cities, with a core team of 45 trained current second-year MBA students interviewing on campus in Philadelphia. The remainder of interviews are conducted via Skype.
Other unnamed university admissions officers interviewed by the WSJ expressed continuing confidence and trust in the integrity of their volunteer alumni interviewing teams, but weren’t sure if all reports were based on interviews that had taken place entirely in English. A candidate who came across as ‘engaging and insightful in their native tongue’ could still turn up at an MBA provider unable even to read the orientation material, said one. Graham Richmond, CEO of Clear Admit LLC consultancy, commented of the overseas alumni system, ‘If you get two French people in a room and ask them to speak English together, it’s just not going to happen.’
MATT SALUSBURY
writes
GRADUATE BUSINESS school admissions departments in the US have for some time used their large and highly organised volunteer networks of alumni abroad to conduct interviews with applicants for MBAs in the applicant’s country of residence.
But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, US business schools are now beginning to scrap this time-honoured (and cheap) method of screening applicants. Business school admissions officers told the WSJ that their principal reason for abandoning their reliance on international alumni was that they were concerned that some alumni weren’t interviewing candidates in English. Some business schools believe that alumni may make an assessment of candidates’ suitability for an English-medium MBA based on an interview carried out in a local language spoken by both the applicant and the interviewer.
Rob Weiler, assistant dean of admissions at the University of California’s Anderson School of Management, said that the evaluation of applicants’ English language competence had become ‘somewhat less consistent’ overseas. The school will continue to use some of its ‘trained alumni’ to interview applicants, but Weiler has over the previous year been remind ing them of the need to interview applicants in English only.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which has over 88,000 alumni worldwide, previously used ‘several hundred’ of these to interview up to 3,500 MBA applicants in cities around the world for around 800 MBA places. Now Wharton, at considerable expense, is ending this arrangement and flying its six admissions officers to do interviews in Singapore, Sao Paulo and ten other ‘hub’ cities, with a core team of 45 trained current second-year MBA students interviewing on campus in Philadelphia. The remainder of interviews are conducted via Skype.
Other unnamed university admissions officers interviewed by the WSJ expressed continuing confidence and trust in the integrity of their volunteer alumni interviewing teams, but weren’t sure if all reports were based on interviews that had taken place entirely in English. A candidate who came across as ‘engaging and insightful in their native tongue’ could still turn up at an MBA provider unable even to read the orientation material, said one. Graham Richmond, CEO of Clear Admit LLC consultancy, commented of the overseas alumni system, ‘If you get two French people in a room and ask them to speak English together, it’s just not going to happen.’
Top spot for ‘squeezed middle’
Co-written with Manuela Lanza, From the February 2012 EL Gazette
LEXICOGRAPHERS FROM the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) in both the UK and US have named ‘squeezed middle’ as 2011’s ‘word of the year’, while Collins Dictionaries found that ‘squeeze’ and ‘middle’ are now seven times more likely to occur together than any two random words.
The term is ascribed to Ed Miliband, UK Labour Party leader, who used it last year on BBC radio. However, Susie Dent, spokesperson for Oxford Dictionaries, thinks it may be older, as former US president Bill Clinton used it to talk about ‘hard-pressed working families squeezed in the middle’.
Squeezed middle, which beat ‘bunga bunga’, ‘occupy’ and ‘Arab Spring’ to the top place, is defined by the OED as ‘the section of society regarded as particularly affected by inflation, wage freezes and cuts in public spending … consisting principally of those on low or middle incomes’.
Collins Dictionaries analysis shows ‘greedy’ as the English adjective most commonly used with ‘banker’ since 2009, followed by ‘responsible’ as in ‘responsible for the mess’. The verbs most frequently used with banker from 2009–11 are ‘disgrace’ and ‘shame’, said Ian Brooke, the Collins Dictionaries editor.
Gulf State goes for gold
Matt Salusbury on why the EFL industry is keeping an eye on Qatar
(First appeared in EL Gazette, February 2012)
The small State of Qatar, a peninsula jutting from the side of Saudi Arabia into the Arabian Gulf, is gaining a reputation for punching well above its weight in several fields, and education in English is no exception.
Qatar is best known for its Al Jazeera news channel, with over 30 million viewers worldwide. Al Jazeera’s reputation was enough to attract the Chicago-based Northwestern University to set up an English-medium journalism school in Qatar in 2009, joining the numerous English-medium universities that now have campuses on the vast Education City complex just outside the capital Doha. Many institutions in Education City are supported by the Qatar Foundation – set up by the consort of the ruling Emir with the stated aim of ‘democratising’ the countries of the Arab world, a project which is likely to become increasingly important in the post-Arab-Spring Middle East.
Qatar is also increasingly important in global diplomacy. It was the world’s first state to recognise Libya’s Transitional National Congress, and was crucial in galvanising other Arab League countries to take tough action against Syria. Thanks to vast oil and gas reserves, Qatar has the world’s fastest-rising economic growth rate, with projected US dollar investment in the energy industry expected to be in the tens of billions. It is also hosting the 2022 football World Cup. Qatar is definitely one to watch.
According to the census in 2008, of around one and a half million people resident in Qatar, only a fifth are Qatari citizens. There are about as many nationals of other Arab states there as there are Qataris. Qatar’s English-medium universities cater increasingly to citizens of other Arab countries.
Derrick Moloney, PR director of English teachers’ association Qatar Tesol, teaches at the Academic Bridge Program (ABP), a co-educational English language ‘preparatory school’ (preparing for university admission) and part of Hamad bin Khalifa University at their campus in Education City.
ABP has a small intake (about 300 a year) and only admits ‘students who meet the stringent admission requirements and successfully pass the placement tests’ including a high Toefl or equivalent score. ABP’s students are, according to Moloney, from thirty countries, nearly all Arabic speakers and mostly from ‘Arabian Gulf, Middle East and North African regions’.
Moloney describes the ABP curriculum as a ‘nine-month, highly intensive English-language foundation programme’ for EFL/academic English, maths, science and computer science. Its teaching staff are drawn from ‘over twenty different countries’ and all have at least five years’ teaching experience. Many students graduate to one of the English-medium university annexes nearby on the Education City campus – US universities such as Georgetown and Cornell Medical College, University College London and HEC international business school Paris all have a presence there.
Mark Moulding of the British Council told the Gazette that the BC provides a lot of training in Qatar for government school teachers, from kindergarten through to secondary school, via the BC’s English Language Teachers’ Network and through tailor-made courses, which include ‘trainer training and training to teach Ielts’. The BC in Qater also runs Celta and Young Learners Extension training.
Of the private language school sector in Qatar, the BC said, ‘The range is very broad and includes … vocational and soft skills.’
According to the BC, ‘Qatar has prioritised English for work and this is reflected in the education reform programme, which involves English-medium education in schools. There are some [English-medium] vocational colleges, including College of the North Atlantic, the Community College and Qatar Skills Academy.’
Some Qataris receive funding for study on English-medium courses abroad from potential employers, the government and the nation’s Higher Education Institute. These students ‘go primarily to the USA, UK, Australia and Canada’, according to the BC.
(First appeared in EL Gazette, February 2012)
The small State of Qatar, a peninsula jutting from the side of Saudi Arabia into the Arabian Gulf, is gaining a reputation for punching well above its weight in several fields, and education in English is no exception.
Qatar is best known for its Al Jazeera news channel, with over 30 million viewers worldwide. Al Jazeera’s reputation was enough to attract the Chicago-based Northwestern University to set up an English-medium journalism school in Qatar in 2009, joining the numerous English-medium universities that now have campuses on the vast Education City complex just outside the capital Doha. Many institutions in Education City are supported by the Qatar Foundation – set up by the consort of the ruling Emir with the stated aim of ‘democratising’ the countries of the Arab world, a project which is likely to become increasingly important in the post-Arab-Spring Middle East.
Qatar is also increasingly important in global diplomacy. It was the world’s first state to recognise Libya’s Transitional National Congress, and was crucial in galvanising other Arab League countries to take tough action against Syria. Thanks to vast oil and gas reserves, Qatar has the world’s fastest-rising economic growth rate, with projected US dollar investment in the energy industry expected to be in the tens of billions. It is also hosting the 2022 football World Cup. Qatar is definitely one to watch.
According to the census in 2008, of around one and a half million people resident in Qatar, only a fifth are Qatari citizens. There are about as many nationals of other Arab states there as there are Qataris. Qatar’s English-medium universities cater increasingly to citizens of other Arab countries.
Derrick Moloney, PR director of English teachers’ association Qatar Tesol, teaches at the Academic Bridge Program (ABP), a co-educational English language ‘preparatory school’ (preparing for university admission) and part of Hamad bin Khalifa University at their campus in Education City.
ABP has a small intake (about 300 a year) and only admits ‘students who meet the stringent admission requirements and successfully pass the placement tests’ including a high Toefl or equivalent score. ABP’s students are, according to Moloney, from thirty countries, nearly all Arabic speakers and mostly from ‘Arabian Gulf, Middle East and North African regions’.
Moloney describes the ABP curriculum as a ‘nine-month, highly intensive English-language foundation programme’ for EFL/academic English, maths, science and computer science. Its teaching staff are drawn from ‘over twenty different countries’ and all have at least five years’ teaching experience. Many students graduate to one of the English-medium university annexes nearby on the Education City campus – US universities such as Georgetown and Cornell Medical College, University College London and HEC international business school Paris all have a presence there.
Mark Moulding of the British Council told the Gazette that the BC provides a lot of training in Qatar for government school teachers, from kindergarten through to secondary school, via the BC’s English Language Teachers’ Network and through tailor-made courses, which include ‘trainer training and training to teach Ielts’. The BC in Qater also runs Celta and Young Learners Extension training.
Of the private language school sector in Qatar, the BC said, ‘The range is very broad and includes … vocational and soft skills.’
According to the BC, ‘Qatar has prioritised English for work and this is reflected in the education reform programme, which involves English-medium education in schools. There are some [English-medium] vocational colleges, including College of the North Atlantic, the Community College and Qatar Skills Academy.’
Some Qataris receive funding for study on English-medium courses abroad from potential employers, the government and the nation’s Higher Education Institute. These students ‘go primarily to the USA, UK, Australia and Canada’, according to the BC.
Looking to the future - wearble simultaneous translation devices update
Wearable simultaneous translation devices may not yet have arrived, but a new wearable computer for corporate ‘field operations’ brings translators that convert voice to text on the fly a step closer to reality.
Japanese electronics giant NEC’s long-awaited Tele Scouter gadget was finally launched in October. Resembling a pair of spectacles, it has frames but lacks lenses and projects text directly onto the user’s retina. Back in 2010, tech blogs reported that there would be an English-to-Japanese version available for use in sensitive situations where ‘confidential translations’ without an interpreter were needed.
When Tele Scouter eventually appeared, NEC told the Gazette, ‘The translation application is not available yet and a release date remains to be decided,’ but it seems to be on the way. See the September 2010 Gazette for Babelfisk, voice-to-text spectacles for the deaf still at the concept design stage.
(This first appeared in the EL Gazette, February 2012, since then Google unveiled a prototype of its simultaneous translation spectacles.)
Japanese electronics giant NEC’s long-awaited Tele Scouter gadget was finally launched in October. Resembling a pair of spectacles, it has frames but lacks lenses and projects text directly onto the user’s retina. Back in 2010, tech blogs reported that there would be an English-to-Japanese version available for use in sensitive situations where ‘confidential translations’ without an interpreter were needed.
When Tele Scouter eventually appeared, NEC told the Gazette, ‘The translation application is not available yet and a release date remains to be decided,’ but it seems to be on the way. See the September 2010 Gazette for Babelfisk, voice-to-text spectacles for the deaf still at the concept design stage.
(This first appeared in the EL Gazette, February 2012, since then Google unveiled a prototype of its simultaneous translation spectacles.)
US unis favour ban on agents
MATT SALUSBURY
writes
This first appeared in the EL Gazette of February 2012
TWO THIRDS of admissions officers in US universities and tertiary education colleges favour a ban on the use of commercial agents who recruit international students, according to a recent survey, and over 46 per cent believe that ‘agents often help their clients fabricate information on applications’.
The ‘Survey of College and University Admissions Directors’, published in Inside Higher Ed in early December, also revealed that over a fifth of admissions officers reported a ‘problem with fabricated admissions applications for international students’, while over a quarter of respondents said they ‘strongly agree’ that international students turn up with ‘inadequate requirements for entry’.
The survey’s section on international student recruitment noted, ‘At issue is the growing use of commission-paid agents both by students seeking admission and by institutions recruiting international students.’ The survey concluded that ‘many institutions admit some applicants who apply with lower grades and test scores than those typically admitted’. But this was not restricted to admission of international students – institutions taking in under qualified athletes was perceived as a more common practice.
The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), which represents university and further education college admissions officers, proposed a bar on such institutions using agents back in the spring of 2011, but so far this has not been implemented. At the time NACAC cited ‘complications involving misrepresentation, conflict of interest and fraud’ and an ‘incentive for recruiters to ignore the student interest’ as consequences of using agents.
A group of over 135 educational agents in the US, the American International Recruitment Council (AIRC), whose stated aim is to raise the professional standards of agents who recruit for US higher education, released new proposed guidelines shortly before the survey was published. AIRC’s proposals for ‘revisions to compliance standards’ included forbidding agents from taking a cut of scholarships or financial aid awarded to their clients’, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
John Segota, associate executive director for professional relations at Tesol Inc, whose members include English language units at US universities, told the Gazette, ‘Tesol International Association does not have a specific position [on] the use of educational agents.’
writes
This first appeared in the EL Gazette of February 2012
TWO THIRDS of admissions officers in US universities and tertiary education colleges favour a ban on the use of commercial agents who recruit international students, according to a recent survey, and over 46 per cent believe that ‘agents often help their clients fabricate information on applications’.
The ‘Survey of College and University Admissions Directors’, published in Inside Higher Ed in early December, also revealed that over a fifth of admissions officers reported a ‘problem with fabricated admissions applications for international students’, while over a quarter of respondents said they ‘strongly agree’ that international students turn up with ‘inadequate requirements for entry’.
The survey’s section on international student recruitment noted, ‘At issue is the growing use of commission-paid agents both by students seeking admission and by institutions recruiting international students.’ The survey concluded that ‘many institutions admit some applicants who apply with lower grades and test scores than those typically admitted’. But this was not restricted to admission of international students – institutions taking in under qualified athletes was perceived as a more common practice.
The National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), which represents university and further education college admissions officers, proposed a bar on such institutions using agents back in the spring of 2011, but so far this has not been implemented. At the time NACAC cited ‘complications involving misrepresentation, conflict of interest and fraud’ and an ‘incentive for recruiters to ignore the student interest’ as consequences of using agents.
A group of over 135 educational agents in the US, the American International Recruitment Council (AIRC), whose stated aim is to raise the professional standards of agents who recruit for US higher education, released new proposed guidelines shortly before the survey was published. AIRC’s proposals for ‘revisions to compliance standards’ included forbidding agents from taking a cut of scholarships or financial aid awarded to their clients’, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
John Segota, associate executive director for professional relations at Tesol Inc, whose members include English language units at US universities, told the Gazette, ‘Tesol International Association does not have a specific position [on] the use of educational agents.’
Every Time I Think of You - Islington in the 80s
A couple of my photos of Islington in the 1980s appear on screen briefly in the film Every Time I Think of You, which had its one and only showing at the Screen on the Green in Upper Street (Islington, of course!) recently.
The film will be free to view online soon via the link above. It's based on interviews by people living and working in Islington (Chapel Market in particular) in that decade, some spoken by the interviewees themselves, some revoiced by actors. Actors and interviewees alike were persuaded to improvise something about a mystery woman who was known and loved by all in that era, and who went missing on New Year's Eve 1989 - Toni Sling. We only get to see a blurred photo of her. I don't need to tell you it's an anagram of Islington.
As usual, my name was spelt wrong in the film credits, I was down as "Matt Salisbury" in the "photos supplied by" section. My nephew Luke Reilly, like me also Islington born and bred, is credited for "additional dialogue" and "interviews conducted by". Regretably, his interviews of me, centering on working as a bike messenger among the typesetters of 1980s Clerkenwell, didn't make it into the script.
I recommend the film, and there's also an online photo exhibition of Islington in the 80s from which the photos in the film were taken. Click through this, and you can see all my photos from that bygone age, with my credit on them.
The two photos that made it into the film are a legal observer from the 1984 Stop the City demo in Finsbury Square - funny how history repeats itself! - and if you look closely you can see the Islington Council creche bus that someone's borrowed for the occasion. Finsbury Square was just outside the City, and sympathisers among Council workers ran the demo's first aid point and so on from there. While bank-bashing by the likes of Stop the City was the pastime of a tiny minority of mostly marginal punk anarchists in those days, it has become mainstream now.
The other photo is Islington Town Hall, when it was a "Red" council driven by gesture politics of this sort. Nobody bats an eyelid at much higher unemployment figures but it was a national scandal at the time. And beggars in the streets of London started to make their first appearance in my lifetime around then, to the shock of many. The Town Hall's not flying the Red Flag in the photo although it regularly did in those days. They gave up when firemen from the fire station a few doors down allegedly abseiled up the building and took it down, on several occasions. There was also an old bust of Lenin on display at the top of the stairs of the Town Hall at the time, which once had green paint tipped over it. Why green? No one knows. The opposite of red, perhaps>
An image pasted into my early 1980s scrapbook - a strip from the not very funny "Lazarus Lamb" cartoon, from the contemporary Islington Gutter Press, also flits briefly across the screen in the film.
I'm afraid I don't agree with the view expressed in the film that the 1980s was an age of innocence before the internet and mobile phones. The Eighties sucked. They were the low point of human history, when thousand of years of progress stopped overnight, to be replaced with Thatcherite/Reaganite Free Market Fever, which is bizarrely still with us today, only more so.
Update (November 2025): The film is no longer linked from the Blueprint Theatre website, I've added above the link to it on YouTube.
The film will be free to view online soon via the link above. It's based on interviews by people living and working in Islington (Chapel Market in particular) in that decade, some spoken by the interviewees themselves, some revoiced by actors. Actors and interviewees alike were persuaded to improvise something about a mystery woman who was known and loved by all in that era, and who went missing on New Year's Eve 1989 - Toni Sling. We only get to see a blurred photo of her. I don't need to tell you it's an anagram of Islington.
As usual, my name was spelt wrong in the film credits, I was down as "Matt Salisbury" in the "photos supplied by" section. My nephew Luke Reilly, like me also Islington born and bred, is credited for "additional dialogue" and "interviews conducted by". Regretably, his interviews of me, centering on working as a bike messenger among the typesetters of 1980s Clerkenwell, didn't make it into the script.
I recommend the film, and there's also an online photo exhibition of Islington in the 80s from which the photos in the film were taken. Click through this, and you can see all my photos from that bygone age, with my credit on them.
The two photos that made it into the film are a legal observer from the 1984 Stop the City demo in Finsbury Square - funny how history repeats itself! - and if you look closely you can see the Islington Council creche bus that someone's borrowed for the occasion. Finsbury Square was just outside the City, and sympathisers among Council workers ran the demo's first aid point and so on from there. While bank-bashing by the likes of Stop the City was the pastime of a tiny minority of mostly marginal punk anarchists in those days, it has become mainstream now.
The other photo is Islington Town Hall, when it was a "Red" council driven by gesture politics of this sort. Nobody bats an eyelid at much higher unemployment figures but it was a national scandal at the time. And beggars in the streets of London started to make their first appearance in my lifetime around then, to the shock of many. The Town Hall's not flying the Red Flag in the photo although it regularly did in those days. They gave up when firemen from the fire station a few doors down allegedly abseiled up the building and took it down, on several occasions. There was also an old bust of Lenin on display at the top of the stairs of the Town Hall at the time, which once had green paint tipped over it. Why green? No one knows. The opposite of red, perhaps>
An image pasted into my early 1980s scrapbook - a strip from the not very funny "Lazarus Lamb" cartoon, from the contemporary Islington Gutter Press, also flits briefly across the screen in the film.
I'm afraid I don't agree with the view expressed in the film that the 1980s was an age of innocence before the internet and mobile phones. The Eighties sucked. They were the low point of human history, when thousand of years of progress stopped overnight, to be replaced with Thatcherite/Reaganite Free Market Fever, which is bizarrely still with us today, only more so.
Update (November 2025): The film is no longer linked from the Blueprint Theatre website, I've added above the link to it on YouTube.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
