NSCAD changes design program for international students

University offers a “softer program” for struggling students from China

Pat Zeng, an international master of design student, sits outside a design studio at the NSCAD Granville campus. Josh Brown photo.

The Nova Scotia College of Art and Design has revamped its design program for a group of international students in the master of design program.

Professor Hanno Ehses, the program's director, says it has to do with the composition of English speakers to non-English speakers in the class. Language and cultural barriers make it hard for the program's large number of Chinese students to keep up.

"If it's more than half-half it becomes problematic," says Ehses.

In Ehses' program there were 17 students, 14 of them international students from China.

Enlarge Image
Design student, Milky Xie and Professor Grant Tomchuk work in a studio at the NSCAD Granville campus. Josh Brown photo.

At the end of the summer session Chinese students in the program were struggling to keep up and English-speaking students were frustrated with the pace. About half of the international students in that group finished classes in August, failing or nearly failing.

"The question was ‘did we do enough?' I think we could have done better," said Ehses.

The school has since created a specialized version of the program for six of the struggling international students.
Students who weren't able to keep up were streamlined into the new program. The program doesn't include the 50-page master's thesis required of regular master's students.

Ehses called it a "softer program."

International students also take different courses, such as western design culture and history classes.

But students in the newly created international program say they don't like the segregation. International students pay about $23,000 in tuition fees for the three-semester program and want the most out of their experience abroad.

"I think we are worse off than the other group," says Roddy Shi, a Chinese international student who didn't make the cut.

"We are taking different classes with different teachers and have different people in our classes. In the international program we all study together and it's not good for our language improvement.

"We came to Canada to improve our western language and western design, we came to work with western students, and now we can't."

NSCAD Chairman Michael Leblanc is in China this week recruiting students for NSCAD but Ehses says nothing like this will be allowed again.

"We'll look at the composition in the classes in the future," says Ehses.

"But if this does happen again we'll really have to get clear on how we run the program."

NSCAD is looking at creating a prerequisite certificate program for non-English speakers who want to enrol in the master's program.

Comments on this story are now closed