SEVERAL former international students have left Australia or abandoned claims for permanent residency following exposure of fraud at Curtin University's English language test centre.
The HES understands about 20-50 permanent residency cases, almost all involving former students, are under investigation by the federal Department of Immigration and Citizenship.
Nine people, including a former Curtin employee, have been sentenced for bribery offences related to a trade in fake English test results at the Perth centre.
To secure permanent residency as a skilled migrant, former overseas students needed not only their Australian qualification but minimum scores on the International English Language Testing System.
Anyone using a false test result was "essentially stealing a visa place" from others with genuine results, a senior DIAC official told the anti-corruption inquiry into the Curtin centre earlier this year.
DIAC can cancel a visa already granted or refuse an application for a visa if the person has supplied fraudulent information.
Out of fairness the department gives notice before it takes action. Given notice, several people have left the country or withdrawn their PR applications, the HES understands.
Earlier this month, Curtin employee Keith Low was sentenced to two years in prison for 15 counts of accepting bribery over a 10-month period in 2009-10.
The court was told that for many of those counts, involving falsified results, the original paper results for the listening and reading sections of the test could not be found by the IELTS headquarters at Cambridge University in Britain.
Under the IELTS, those papers should have been sent to Cambridge, but theBritish test centre did not notice test papers were missing until August last year, when it notified Curtin of suspect test results.
"The fact there were missing tests was one of the factors that alerted IELTS to possible irregularities at Curtin and triggered our inquiry," a spokesperson for Cambridge said.
Following the scandal, Curtin closed its centre and held the last IELTS test on August 13.
Education broker IDP, which owns the IELTS business in Australia, is stepping in to open its first directly run test centre in Perth.
IDP will use the same Curtin test venue.
The HES understands some other IELTS test centres in Perth are not happy about IDP's entry to the market.
IDP's IELTS director John Belleville said: "Obviously the fewer the centres, the more student numbers they'll get themselves. But we're not adding an additional centre to Perth, we're replacing one that's closing down.
"In that sense, not much has changed."
No comments:
Post a Comment