As a former grad student who has interacted with both the good and the bad of your group, I understand the differences... and regret the unfortunate realities.
I remember a Chinese PhD student who could not function in spoken English . Nice guy. Always smiled, bobbed his head, and said "hi", and that was the extent of his verbal vocab. Still don't know how he got into an American graduate school. Really brings the department down. :-/
I attended a conference where young Chinese PhD was giving presentation and nobody could understand what he was saying. Finally one of the organizing professors interrupted him and requested that he should speak English. "But I'm speaking English." he replied with desperation in his voice.
He knew his stuff and could write and read English well, but it was very hard to understand what he was saying.
> He knew his stuff and could write and read English well,
Right, I really don't have any way to assess that of a grad student I meet in the halls if they can't speak to me. They may be brilliant, they may be the best student there, and be totally walled off from everyone who doesn't speak their native tongue. I feel bad for them... but I don't think they should be in a grad school where English is the lingua franca.
I would vastly prefer "adequate English proficiency" be a hard criteria for attending a US graduate school. Not only are grad students part of a cohort themselves, they often are TAs and provide assistance and guidance to undergraduates. English adequacy is generally the de facto requirement to adequately assist others who are in college (in the US).
It is a requirement, it's just that apparently the test of English as a foreign language (TOEFL?) either are too easily cheated or aren't adequately checking for that. I should add I knew many excellent students in grad school, from dozens of countries, and good and bad us students :-) I never achieved any fluency in other languages, it would be incredibly hard to learn Mandarian or another non-romance language,and I appreciate the challenge for them.
At my grad school, there were students from two countries that there seemed to be widespread believe that there was widespread cheating. This included (not really cheating things) like copies of all tests given by any professor in the past. I didn't believe it at first, but then someone from said country showed it to me.
It's hard to believe if you really were cheating, how could you make it through a bachelors in CS? Someone should notice, right? I was a TA of a class where the prof eventually figured out one student was copying from another student. He gave him an F.
In my masters CS course we had 12 Chinese students, out of which only 1 did any work, the rest played LoL on university's computers, then when the time came to hand in work they all simply dropped out, they haven't had any notes, nothing. The remaining student said that to them, just coming to a foreign university is prestigious enough for when they go home, no one cares that they dropped out as long as they can also say they went. Obviously an anecdote, I met a lot of very hard working Chinese students too.
I remember a Chinese PhD student who could not function in spoken English . Nice guy. Always smiled, bobbed his head, and said "hi", and that was the extent of his verbal vocab. Still don't know how he got into an American graduate school. Really brings the department down. :-/