The young woman insisted she could do better. All she had to do was work harder, she said. Apply herself more. There was no need for anything to change.

"I'm concerned you aren't going to be successful," her Niagara College instructor said outside the school's international centre on the Welland campus. "If you accept the alternative, then ."

"No," the student insisted. "I will work harder."

The alternative to the young woman's studies at Niagara College was an intensive English class. She is an international student from India whose first language is Punjabi. While she speaks some English, she had been unable to function in the language necessary for a Canadian post-secondary institution.

Like hundreds of other students from India at the college last semester, she struggled academically. The problem became evident early in the fall 2018 semester. Eight weeks in, some teachers regarded the issue as a full-blown crisis, negatively impacting domestic and international students alike.

Frustrated instructors, unable to communicate with a large cohort of their students, began pressing the school's administration for solutions.

In September, the college's director of student services, Lianne Gagnon, called a meeting by email of teachers to "strategize how best to address challenges" and come up with "creative and effective solutions."

Incredulous teachers said the problem eclipsed mere teaching strategies. In emails obtained by The Standard, teachers said some of the students could not read, write or converse in English. Without a linguistic common ground, the classroom situation was in free fall.

Teachers could not talk to their students, according to some instructors interviewed by The Standard who said as many as a quarter of some first-year classes were filled with students who could not communicate effectively in English. As teachers struggled to help them, students who did not have a language issue were not getting the attention they needed.

The college eventually retested the English skills of students teachers had identified as struggling.

According to the school's administration, more than 200 students, most of them Punjabi speakers from the same region of India, were found to be failing due to insufficient English skills.

Teachers who spoke to The Standard on the condition of anonymity because they fear reprisals from the school's administration believe the number to be more than twice that, although they admit this is an anecdotal assessment based on classroom experience.

Eventually, the college administration came up with a solution. Students who scored poorly on the retests would be given the option of moving their tuition from their area of study into an English instruction course.

The idea was the intensive course might bring the students' English skills to a high enough level to return to regular academic focus, while the college attempted to understand how so many students could have passed their admission tests with such limited English abilities.

Steven Hudson, Niagara College vice-president, academic and learner services, said only 10 students accepted the offer.

The others were like the student outside the counselling office. They said they would just work harder.

"You have to remember these students have a lot of family and community pressure on them to succeed," Hudson said in an interview. "Their families have spent a great deal of money to send them here. So you calling your parents and telling them you aren't succeeding is a difficult call to make."

Many of the students failed their courses. Some returned home and others moved to other Ontario colleges. Hudson did not immediately have data on how many students passed their classes and continued on this semester.

A growing problem

Hudson said Niagara College is still trying to gather data to understand exactly what happened and find ways to prevent it from happening again.

The college has requested retests for 400 students in India who applied to attend classes for the 2019 winter term and found more than a quarter of them need additional help.

Those students are now required to take an English evening class as part of their class load, he said.

"This is not new to us, and it's not new to Ontario colleges," said Niagara College president Dan Patterson in an interview. "What's different is the scale. The volume has been larger."

Patterson framed the issue as a consequence of an expanding international student body. A small number of students who need language support is manageable, but when the number of international students rises into the thousands, the problem becomes more acute.

Last year, Niagara College had its largest ever international enrolment with 4,100 foreign students out of a total student population of more than 9,000 people.

The largest cohort of new arrivals in 2018 was from India.

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The English skills of international students applying to Niagara College are assessed by The International English Language Testing System (IELTS), which is accepted by most Canadian academic institutions.

The IELTS exam is three hours long and assesses reading, writing and listening skills on a scale from 1 to 9, with the top score labelled as an "expert user."

Niagara College requires an overall score of 6, labelled as a "competent user," with no test results below 5.5 securing admission.

Yet, hundreds of students who passed their IELTS exam arrived in Niagara unable to function academically in English.

The Standard attempted to interview about a dozen of those students during the fall semester. However, without a Punjabi translator, the language barrier was such that the paper could not ethically publish those interviews.

Preparing for the test

Hudson said retests, done using an in-house exam, found more than 200 students did not have required Englished skills.

Hudson said the college is confident there was no fraud in the original IELTS exams and offered a possible explanation for the situation: Would-be students in India could have prepared specifically for the IELTS test.

Hudson said the IELTS exams are structured similarly to other standardized tests like The Law School Admission Test, or LSAT.

Students scheduled to take exams study specifically for the tests, which themselves are constructed in such a way that the method of answering questions can be found in the questions themselves, Hudson said. As as a result, a student might score well enough on an IELTS test to be admitted to the college, even though they don't broadly have the English skills to operate in a classroom.

Hudson said the college is reviewing its program entry requirements and for those courses that involve a higher degree of language skills, the school may require a minimum score of higher than 6 on the IELTS exam.

Meanwhile, the union representing the college teachers is concerned the problem may get worse before it gets better.

Ravi Ramkissoonsingh, vice-president of OPSEU Local 242, said the issue of international students arriving without necessary English skills has been around for years, and the arrival of such a large group from India has highlighted the scope of the problem.

However, there are high financial stakes for Ontario colleges. International students pay three times the amount of tuition as domestic students. And now that Ontario's provincial government is ending tuition subsidies, Ramkissoonsingh worries schools like Niagara College may try to make up the monetary shortfall by admitting more international students by keeping admission standards lower.

Patterson denied the college would lighten up admission standards for the sake of tuition fees, and defended the school's long history of accepting students from around the world.