When Paperwork Says "Fluent" but Reality Says Otherwise

A student sits in my office, unable to explain what the assignment requires. Their IELTS score says 6.5. The conversation we're struggling through suggests otherwise. This scene repeats itself across campuses worldwide—a gap between documentation and reality that no one wants to acknowledge.

Universities as Businesses: Survival, Not Malice

Universities today operate less like places of learning and more like businesses driven by recruitment targets. This shift did not occur out of ill intent. It emerged from necessity. Reduced public funding, global competition, and policy pressures have pushed institutions to adopt business models in order to survive. International student recruitment has become central to that survival.

This context matters. Without it, critique risks becoming simplistic. Yet survival strategies reshape classrooms in ways that are rarely acknowledged or openly discussed.

Students are recruited at scale, often through overseas agents whose practices are not always scrutinised closely enough. When recruitment is prioritised upstream, responsibility for quality control quietly shifts downstream—into classrooms, onto academics, and ultimately onto students themselves.

From Semesters to Blocks: The Compression of Learning

Higher education once moved at a human pace. Semester systems allowed learning to unfold over six months, offering time for adjustment, confidence-building, and gradual immersion into academic culture. Over time, semesters compressed into trimesters, while the language of "semester" remained. More recently, many institutions have adopted block teaching models, where an entire unit is delivered in six weeks.

In these block systems, students may receive around nine hours of teaching per week, with assessments arriving quickly—often Assessment 1 in week three and Assessment 2 in week six. Some blocks include intensive teaching weeks, running five full days from 9am to 5pm. During these weeks, students may be expected to complete a short assignment by day three and work towards a final assessment by the end of the week, sometimes with formal submission points aligned to the end of a semester or trimester.

On paper, this looks efficient. In practice, it assumes students arrive already fluent in the academic system.

Late Arrival, Early Failure

International students are expected to attend on campus and engage fully from the outset. Their commitment is rarely in doubt. The challenge is that many enrol late or arrive after teaching has already begun. They enter a new country with little time to orient themselves to unfamiliar academic conventions, learning platforms, assessment criteria, referencing systems, and cultural expectations around independent study.

By the time they begin to understand how to submit an assignment correctly—not how to write one, but how to submit one—the first block or semester is often already over.

Failure in such cases is not always about ability or effort. It is often about time.

English Language Expectations and the Reality in Class

English language proficiency sits at the heart of this tension, yet it is often treated as a box ticked at admission rather than a lived reality in the classroom. In English-speaking countries, universities expect students to operate confidently in academic English—reading complex texts, processing nuance, constructing arguments, and writing under pressure.

For many international students arriving from developing countries, this expectation is significantly higher than their current level of readiness. Some can converse fluently but struggle with academic writing. Others can write with assistance but cannot think and write simultaneously under time pressure. Six weeks is not enough time to bridge that gap.

When the System Enables What It Claims to Prevent

Some students quietly confess what systems already enable: that their agents completed applications, prepared statements, arranged documentation, and in some cases even completed English-language tasks on their behalf. All that was required was payment. These students arrive assuming the same pattern will continue—that support will always appear, that work will be "handled," and that consequences will be minimal.

The shock comes in the classroom, where responsibility suddenly becomes real.

Agents, Proxies, and Third-Party Work

International recruitment is often mediated through agents in host countries. Many operate ethically. Some do not. When incentives reward volume, misalignment becomes predictable. Students may be promised outcomes that cannot be guaranteed. English requirements may be treated as hurdles rather than indicators of readiness. Academic culture may be marketed as "manageable" without explanation of what it actually demands.

This environment allows other practices to flourish. Proxy attendance, imposters sitting in for registered students, third-party assignment services, and open advertising for "assignment help" have become increasingly normalised rather than exceptional. These practices do not emerge in isolation. They thrive in systems where speed and volume take precedence over integrity.

Third-party services promise certainty but often deliver work that is misaligned with unit requirements, marking criteria, and learning outcomes. Students frequently fail anyway—now carrying confusion, shame, and sometimes allegations of misconduct.

AI as Support—and as a Symptom

Artificial intelligence adds another layer of complexity. Used transparently and ethically, AI can support learning, especially for students navigating language barriers. Used under pressure, it can quietly replace thinking rather than support it.

In compressed teaching blocks, the temptation intensifies. Students use AI to translate, paraphrase, structure, and generate content—sometimes responsibly, sometimes unknowingly crossing ethical boundaries, and sometimes knowingly because deadlines arrive before learning does.

AI is often positioned as the solution. But even AI has limits. It cannot replace orientation. It cannot build academic confidence. It cannot hold ethical boundaries on behalf of frightened students. And it cannot compensate indefinitely for systems that move too fast.

Cost of Living, Work, and the Struggle to Stay Present

A further, often unspoken pressure shapes international students' engagement with learning: the cost of living. Many students arrive without fully understanding how expensive life is in host countries. Rent, transport, food, and basic survival quickly become overwhelming. As a result, many international students feel compelled to work long hours alongside their studies.

Work becomes necessary for survival. Learning becomes secondary.

The Visa Risk Students Don't Understand

Some students miss classes because of work commitments. Others attend while exhausted, distracted, or anxious. Many do not fully understand that excessive work or repeated absence can jeopardise their student visas. This lack of awareness adds another layer of vulnerability.

When students are working long hours, they rarely have time or energy to engage with learning management systems, preparatory materials, or independent study. They arrive in class unprepared, not out of disinterest, but out of fatigue. Teaching then becomes repetitive, as educators must re-teach content for those who were absent or unable to engage earlier.

This impacts the overall educational experience—for students who fall behind and for academics who are forced to stretch already compressed teaching time even further.

The Invisible Labour of Educators

For academics, this environment produces profound exhaustion. Many of us teach while constantly adjusting our language, switching registers, slowing our pace, re-phrasing concepts, and absorbing the emotional labour of confusion, anxiety, and silence.

Those who are multilingual often teach in English while also supporting students in their native languages—translating expectations, clarifying concepts, and bridging cultural gaps in real time. This work is rarely recognised in workload models. It is physically tiring, cognitively draining, and emotionally demanding.

At the same time, academics face an unspoken pressure: if a large number of students fail a unit or course, it is often interpreted as poor teaching. Structural issues—late enrolment, language readiness, compressed delivery, agent misalignment, cost-of-living pressures—fade into the background. Responsibility concentrates at the point of delivery.

Teaching becomes not only instruction, but containment.

When Integrity Frays and Humans Burn Out

The irony is that when outcomes fall short, academics are frequently positioned as the problem. The structural conditions under which teaching takes place are rarely questioned. When education becomes transactional, learning becomes fragile. When integrity is compromised upstream, the burden downstream becomes unbearable.

This is not a rejection of international students. Many arrive with courage, hope, financial sacrifice, visa pressure, and family expectations. Many work extraordinarily hard. Nor is this a denial of financial reality. Universities may need business models to survive.

But access without adequate time, care, and orientation is not inclusion. Recruitment without responsibility erodes trust. Speed carries ethical costs.

Those costs are paid quietly—in student failure, educator exhaustion, and the slow erosion of what higher education claims to stand for.

Academics are human.And no system can keep extracting care without eventually breaking those who provide it.

When Documented Proficiency Meets Classroom Reality

Among all the systemic pressures described above, one issue deserves particular attention because it sits at the foundation of everything else: the gap between documented English proficiency and actual classroom readiness.

A particularly difficult tension emerges when documented English language proficiency does not match what is observed in practice. In some cohorts, students disclose directly that they cannot speak or understand English at the level required to participate meaningfully in class discussions, follow lectures, or interpret assessment briefs. Yet their admission records indicate they have met the English language threshold, often through IELTS or equivalent evidence.

This mismatch creates confusion for everyone involved. Students may arrive believing they are "ready" because their paperwork says so, only to experience immediate disorientation once teaching begins. Educators, in turn, are placed in an impossible position: expected to deliver university-level content at pace while simultaneously supporting learners who may not yet have the language foundation needed to access that content.

It also raises a wider question that is rarely explored openly: how reliably are language standards being verified across recruitment pathways, particularly when admission is mediated through external agents or multiple layers of documentation? The issue is not simply individual student capacity. It is the integrity of the process that determines who is admitted, on what basis, and with what support once they arrive.

When the language baseline is uncertain, everything that follows becomes unstable—teaching, assessment, academic integrity, and student wellbeing. The result is predictable: students struggle to engage, educators intensify support beyond sustainable limits, and the system quietly normalises a level of mismatch that undermines learning for everyone.

The Cascade of Consequences

When foundational readiness is compromised upstream, maintaining standards downstream becomes nearly impossible:

For students: They struggle to engage meaningfully with content, experience repeated failure despite effort, and may turn to third-party services or AI tools not out of dishonesty but out of desperation.

For educators: Teaching becomes remedial, repetitive, and emotionally exhausting. We stretch beyond our roles—becoming translators, counsellors, and bridges between expectation and reality. The invisible labour compounds, yet workload models rarely account for it.

For academic integrity: Systems quietly normalise a level of mismatch that undermines learning for everyone—those who are struggling and those who are ready but held back by the pace of constant re-teaching.

A Call for Honest Reckoning

This is not about blaming students who arrive with hope, courage, and significant financial sacrifice. Nor is it about denying the financial realities universities face. But access without adequate preparation is not inclusion. Recruitment without responsibility erodes trust.

If universities are businesses driven by necessity, they must still ask: what responsibility accompanies recruitment at scale? How do we ensure that documented proficiency reflects genuine readiness? What support structures need to exist before students arrive, not just after they begin to fail?

The current model asks educators to absorb the consequences of upstream decisions while holding us accountable for outcomes we cannot control. It asks students to succeed in environments they were never adequately prepared to enter.

Both groups pay the price. And the erosion of trust—in qualifications, in standards, in the value of degrees—affects us all.

Questions Universities Must Answer:

• How are English language qualifications verified when admission is mediated through agents?

• What orientation and language support exists before teaching begins, not just after students start failing?

• How do workload models account for the linguistic and cultural translation work multilingual academics perform?

• When progression rates are poor, how do we distinguish between teaching quality and structural readiness issues?

• What responsibility accompanies recruitment at scale?

Higher education can survive as a business. But it cannot thrive if survival requires compromising the very foundations upon which learning depends.

Those foundations include honest assessment of readiness, transparent verification of language proficiency, and systems that prioritise integrity alongside access. Without them, we are not educating. We are processing.

And eventually, everyone bears the cost: students who fail despite courage and sacrifice, educators who burn out absorbing systemic failures, and institutions whose degrees lose credibility in a market built on trust.

The question is not whether we can afford to address this. It's whether we can afford not to.

This piece reflects observations drawn from two decades of international academic practice across multiple institutions and educational systems. The patterns described are structural, not institution-specific, and the questions raised are offered in service of improving outcomes for students and educators alike.