Imperial College of New Zealand
By Gurbir Singh, Hamilton
New Zealand, June 19, 2017: Imperial College of New Zealand, located in Auckland, has been stopped from enrolling any new international students by the New Zealand Education Authority (NZQA) because of plagiarism by students in their assessments.
NZQA is the government agency that ensures the delivery of quality assurance of non-university education providers.
In an exclusive response to this journalist’s query today, Grant Klinkum, NZQA Deputy Chief Executive, Quality Assurance said that NZQA’s monitoring “identified concerns with the assessment practices at Imperial College of New Zealand in relation to its Level 5 and 6 National Diploma in Business and the Level 7 Diploma in Management”.
Expressing NZQA’s concerns, Grant added “Imperial was passing students whose assessments were not at the appropriate standard and instances where it would appear that students were using synonym replacements on sections of work that had been plagiarised”.
As a result, NZQA initiated certain steps, including putting a stop on enrolments by Imperial. The compliance notice actually “has been in place since 30 November 2016”, Grant added.
Kanwalpreet Kaur
Imperial College of NZ is a private training establishment and is managed by its Principal, Kanwalpreet Kaur who hails from Chandigarh and is a former professor of Gian Jyoti College. Its two Directors, Paramjit Jaswal and Harpal Singh live in Australia and are also involved with other tertiary institutions in Australia and Malaysia. Except for the English course, almost all enrolled students are from India.
Grant informed that NZQA is now “working alongside Imperial, and an approved assessment partner, to quality assure the students’ assessments” and to address the identified concerns.
Grant Klinkum
NZQA has also directed Level 7 students of Imperial “to undergo an additional test to verify that learning outcomes of the programme have been met”.
According to Grant, 75 students have already taken this test and 68% have passed, meaning these students’ qualifications are now verified.
“Without having this test in place”, Grant commented, “the other 32% of students may have been given a qualification they should not have been awarded, without NZQA intervention”.
A small number of Level 7 students are yet to take this additional test.
Imperial Principal, Kanwalpreet Kaur, however has termed this test “as a capstone exam - 3 hours closed book, combination of a lengthy case study and generic questions, with no resit, no rechecking. Still 51 out of 75 students have passed, which means that Imperial offers quality education”.
During the course of this journalist’s phone interview with her this morning, she informed that it received first compliance notice on 4th Nov 2016, NZQA asking Imperial to withhold release of results, followed by stopping of enrolments on 29th Nov.
Contrary to NZQA statement, Kanwalpreet, however, claimed that issue of plagiarism and stopping of enrolments was only confined to Level 7 Management course.
She expressed worry about 62 students who had finished their quals, and their study visas ended last year, but were now on visitors visas.
She thought it was odd that only Imperial was named whereas there were reportedly 11 more education providers whose ability to enrol had been stopped. Moreover, it was strange this news of enrolment stop came out after six months.
Kanwalpreet also felt the NZQA decision was ‘harsh” and difficult to understand the reasons behind it. Explaining this, she said NZQA’s EER June 2016 report (a copy of which is available with this journalist) confirms “Imperial’s excellence in Educational performance, Excellence in value to stakeholders and Excellence in teaching”.
Similarly, “Imperial met NZQA’s external national moderation with 100% in 2014 and 2015”, she added.
To my question as to how plagiarism could slip through despite the claim Imperial uses the ‘turnitin’ moderation tool and scrutiny of teachers, she admitted that ‘slopping marking’ was perhaps one reason, but she attributed other reasons to “(high) student numbers, shortage/availability of good teachers.”
Asked whether there was any management pressure to pass students as private institutes, like any other business, needs to make a profit, she vehemently denied it. “Our motto is “striving for excellence”, she added.
In answer to my question whether Imperial will be able to resolve this issue, Kanwalpreet reiterated that “Imperial has now done internal checks to control plagiarism and we have now 2 independent markers for just marking assessments.Students have also been counselled” In fact, she added, “last year 37 students were issued warning letters for plagiarism and 1 or 2 were terminated also”.
In New Zealand plagiarism has zero tolerance in educational institutions and all students are clearly informed about this. Most institutions, including universities, use ‘turnitin’ software, or similar programmes to monitor plagiarism. It appears, however, students from India especially, do not treat plagiarism seriously and find it easy to copy/paste material either from the net or from books without acknowledging its source.
This is not the first time that Imperial has faced problems. Last year, 86 percent of its student visa applications were declined for “suspected fraud”. But Kanwalpreet blamed the agents in India for the alleged fraud and claimed to have terminated all the contracts.
At the end of June last year, 406 students from India were enrolled in Imperial and it had 26 teachers. As on date the numbers have dwindled to just 7 teachers and 129 students.
This case of NZQA unearthing plagiarism during moderation appears to be part of its increased surveillance of educational institutes in an effort to save the country’s strong reputation and $4.5 billion that education adds to the country’s economy annually.
Moreover, as Grant said, “if quality education has potentially not been delivered, NZQA takes strong action and supports students to minimise any impact on them”.
Now the question remains, what will be the fate of those Imperial College students who fail to provide additional evidence of their knowledge or are unable to pass the additional tests?
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Gurbir Singh is a New Zealand-based feature writer & journalist. He can be reached at: gurbir@journalist.com