English regulator launches spelling and grammar standards review

Universities located in *England* cannot expect its students and staff to be proficient in *English* - this is the stage HE has come to! The 'leaders' in universities who are involved in passing this policy ought to be taken to task for diluting HE standards!

Academic standards are not reducible to linguistic performance skills, just as relying on an impressive presentation by a job applicant will not tell you whether they will be a competent employee. In the education system in Britain (at whatever level) we have a tendency to over-value essays by the quality of exposition, rather than by the content of their argument. To cut to the chase, English fluency is not a good criterion for academic excellence in a particular subject. When assessing mathematics, one uses a mathematics standard; in architecture, an architectural one, and so on.

Teaching Computer Science in a Sixth Form college prior to my current role in academia, some students grumbled that I expected better English from them than their English teachers had! I had 2 points to make in response: firstly, they might be the only 'computer person' in a company & might need to explain things clearly to non-technical people and secondly, computers are really stupid: they do precisely what you tell them to. They cannot guess what you are on about, what you input must be accurate and correct. If a student writes 'costumer' I can guess they really intended to say 'customer', but a computer would not! They saw the point... and one, who was dyslexic, came for lessons in formal proofreading techniques so that he could check his code (and serendipitously improved his written English!). When I mark work done under conventional examination conditions I ignore errors in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. When students submit reports or essays I expect them to take the trouble to get it right.