 This video is going to be different. Today I'm going to tell you a story. It's the story of 58,464 foreign students in the United Kingdom. It's the story of how the UK stole their future. These students were a lot like you, young people with big dreams of going to the UK to get a better education, a better job, a better future. This is the story of how the United Kingdom stole that future from thousands of those students. A visa scandal over this English test is seeing thousands of overseas students being wrongly caught up in the government's so-called hostile environment. Nothing has been announced. Many students face desperate hardship and need urgently to know the decision because their future depends on it. No scandal has been another example of the government's hostile environment plunging thousands of lives into uncertainty. No job. I can't involve myself with any business or anything. So it's, life is terrible. Before I can tell you their story, I kind of want to tell you my story, how I got involved in this at all and how I found out about it. The United Kingdom is easily one of the most requested countries that we get at score. Plenty of students want to know how to study in the UK. Most students will ask me which English exam they should take. And even though the TOEFL website will tell you that 100% of universities in the United Kingdom take the TOEFL, that's not the whole story. See, if you're one of the people that needs a visa to study in the UK, which after Brexit is pretty much everyone, you'll notice that you have to take what's called a Secure English Language Test. And if you look at that list, conspicuously, TOEFL is nowhere to be found on the Secure English Language Test list of the United Kingdom. Now, for the most part, I just ignored this. I figured it was simply because it's the UK and the TOEFL is American and maybe they just didn't want to have the Americans deciding who speaks English or not. So I would just tell students to take the IELTS and that was that. As I was working on my video about the TOEFL or the IELTS, I kept coming across this topic and I wanted to address it, but I didn't know how. And furthermore, the more I dove into this topic, the more complicated it got. This rabbit hole runs deep. I want you to jump in with me. To totally understand what happened to these students and what happened to the TOEFL exam in the United Kingdom, we need to go back a few years. In the late 2000s, the United Kingdom was experiencing a net migration of about a quarter million people a year. But starting in 2008, you'll notice there's a trend that changes. Suddenly, work visas drop while student visas skyrocket. In fact, student visas overtake work visas during 2009 and 2010. It's one of the only times that's ever happened. Kind of makes you wonder if something important happened around that time. Talk about the speed with which we are watching this market deteriorate has fallen about 18 percent. Worst day on Wall Street since the crash of 1987. No, probably nothing. So for some completely unrelated reason, unemployment goes way up at the same time that more and more people are coming to the UK to study and not work. The Secretary of the Home Office was a certain Theresa May. Now she had a theory as to what was happening with the sudden change in the types of visas that were being ordered. We estimate that nearly half of all students coming here from abroad are coming to study, of course, below degree level. We have to question whether these are the brightest and the best that Britain wants to attract. They may be or they may not. It could be that tough economic times mean that people decided to go to the UK and take a year or two to wait it out and see what happens. And maybe some of those people did that in order to game the system to stick around a little bit longer after their visa was over. We're trying to talk about an important topic right now, kitty. I'm going to need you to not. I know this video is supposed to be about the TOEFL and you're wondering what this has to do with it. I promise we're going to get there, but it's important for you to understand the context of this story. In these tough economic times, Lady May starts to kind of blame immigrants for the problem. She says, we need employers to look first to people who are out of work and who are already in this country. And that's not just her opinion. In fact, the entire Conservative Party published a manifesto, their words, not mine, they published a manifesto in 2010, an updated platform of the Conservative Party, which on this page in particular specifically talks about immigration. It says, we do not need to attract people to do jobs that could be carried out by British citizens. So there's this growing sentiment that the high unemployment rate is directly being caused by immigrants taking their jobs. They took our jobs! It also specifically called out the student visa system as the biggest weakness in Britain's border security. Now, you have a dramatic situation economically, you have a party that claims to have all the answers, it's the immigrants, they're the problem, and the Tories win the elections in 2010 pretty handily. They get straight to work, they start by hiking the cost of visa applications and citizenship applications, they start slowing down the system a little bit to make it a little harder for people to get their paperwork done, and before long immigration drops. You see the chart, it goes down to reaching a low point in 2012, not quite as low as they promised, but a pretty significant decline. The UK claims that student visa fraud was rampant, that people were essentially gaming the system, so how did the system work back then? It was pretty straightforward, a university or college, any sort of educational institution could apply for a license to sponsor people for visas. The British government says, okay, you agree to follow these rules? And they say, of course we agree to follow these rules, what do we look like, some sort of shady institution? The problem was that the UK government was kind of giving out these licenses pretty freely, it seems like maybe too freely. So in 2011, the UK government now led by the Conservative Party starts to call the licenses from the system. They take out hundreds of licenses every year, some of them a little bit unfairly, which in many cases leaves legitimate students stranded. They have lost money because their tuition cannot be refunded since they've already taken classes. While a lot of them were able to transfer, many more had to return home empty-handed. But that's not what happened to these 58,000 students. No, something far more sinister occurred here and we're about to get to it. During this three to four year operation where over a thousand educational institutions lost their licenses, one in particular did not get caught. That was Eden College International. Eden College was a small private college that had tier four recognition by the government. They could bring people in to study for four year programs. And they also were running a very interesting racket with the TOEIC. The TOEIC was the test of English for international communication. It predates the TOEFL and it was the main test that everyone used. You can actually still take the TOEIC, by the way, although pretty much nobody uses it anymore. So Eden College doesn't get caught by the initial operations, but that's all about the change. BBC has this regular documentary investigative journalism program called Panorama. Panorama highlighted in this episode a lot of problems with the student visa system in the UK. One of the sections of this documentary was focused on the English exams, particularly the TOEIC, and in particular in Eden College. This is the footage that they showed. But we're sent to this government approved test centre in East London for her exam. In the exam hall, an invigilator logs her into a secure computer terminal, but neither she nor any of the 13 other candidates will have to do the test themselves. Moments before the exam starts, new people arrive to take their places. What you are seeing here is cheating. Those people in the hall, the aisle way there, those are the actual applicants. And the people sitting down at the computers are proxies. Proxies are people that you pay to take the test for you. You still get the credential because you show up and they take your picture. As you can see here, the invigilator, that's the person who's in charge of the test, is taking the pictures of everyone who is actually supposed to be there. The next shot from Panorama shows the invigilator reading all of the answers to an exam. So this is definitely cheating and it's definitely illegal and it's definitely bad, but how does this affect 58,000 people? The documentary hits the airwaves and all hell breaks loose. We showed our footage of the exams to the home secretary. We've done a lot over the last three and a half years. We've rooted out abuse. This number of student visas has gone down and the amount of abuse has gone down, but it's clear that people are finding other ways around the system. The UK's responds by simply cutting off ETS, that's the company that runs the TOEIC, Educational Testing Service. They cut them off from all visa applications in the country. All testing is suspended and anyone trying to apply for a visa with an ETS test like the TOEIC on their record is immediately frozen. The UK then asks ETS to go in and review their test files and say, hey, how bad is it? ETS comes back with an incredible report that says that 97% of all of the tests given in the UK had fraud, deception, cheating involved. You don't need to be a genius to understand that 97% is a very big number and in general in life few things are ever 97% anything. To claim that 97% of the tests taken were either definitively deceptive and fraudulent or at the very least looked to be fraudulent is questionable at best and probably downright false. In fact, we know it's false today. How does the ETS come up with this number? How do you get 97%? So ETS used a voice recognition program that listened to the audio recordings from every single test. I'm a real student. I'm a real student. I'm a real student. And if it found a match, I'm a real student, two tests had one voice, then that would indicate that someone was using proxies, the same person sat for multiple people and therefore we can identify that maybe one proxy had four or five or six tests to their name and therefore all of the applicants were committing fraud and should be punished. Now, that sounds good on paper, but there's a couple of problems with this program. First of all, this software, this specific piece of software that was used to evaluate these tests had never been tested before for this purpose. Not only that, but this software didn't even come with a control group. ETS did not set aside a known quantity of verified legitimate tests to test this program to give us some measure of how accurate it was. Now, ETS claims that their test was backed up by two independent individuals in the organization with speech training and that these two individuals listened to over 60,000 tests individually during 2014. Is that how it actually happened? Oh, no. Are you insane? That's freaking impossible. Even if you did do it, you would no longer be accurate by the end of the day. It's impossible to do that correctly. The truth came out several years later in 2018 when the head of the ETS at the time said that there was a team of about 20 people working on this and not all of them had accurate training. Many of them were working alongside a buddy who was more experienced in the topic. It's not looking good. So even though ETS comes back with this crazy number of 97% and a very questionable methodology, the United Kingdom took ETS at their word in every step of the way. Ultimately, the ETS reviews said that 58% of the tests were definitely fraudulent and the other 42 were maybe the 33,663 tests that ETS labeled as fraudulent is exactly the number that the UK believed as well. And they found every one of those applicants and accused them of fraud and sent them papers to be deported. Those who had not been in the country already who were applying from abroad were not allowed to come in. Now mind you, these tests go all the way back to 2011. Some of these people had already been studying for two, three years. Oh and those 22,476 tests that were considered questionable, those people also got letters. They were told that they would have to take a new test or they would have to leave the country. They were also told they had to go sit down and do an interview with the Home Office to clear them of any suspicion. And that's how we get our number of 58,464 people whose lives were directly impacted by this scandal. I'm sure that thousands of people used fraudulent exams to get their visa, but not 58,464. And the UK didn't care. Now you're thinking, well hang on a second, this is the United Kingdom we're talking about. Surely these students could have appealed the decision and defended themselves and gotten a fair trial. And that's exactly what would have happened. However, during those years while the UK was busting up all these universities and taking away their licenses, they also passed a very important law that reduced the number of reasons a foreigner could appeal a court decision in the UK. Needless to say the government thinks I cheated on my English test was not one of the reasons on that list. As a result, all of the students were told that if they wanted to appeal their case, they would have to go back home and appeal from there. Many Kingdoms courts would later reverse this decision and agree that this was an abuse of human rights and a violation of the rights that immigrants have in the UK. But by then it was too late. 35,000 cases had already been decided. Now this limiting of appeals didn't take place until later in 2014 when the actual law kicked in. So during that time, 12,000 students rushed to get an appeal in the UK and more than a quarter of them were exonerated. They were proven innocent. It's clear that a ton of these cases were not illegitimate exams. So why? Why do this? Why simply treat all of these people the same? Why treat all of them as criminals? People like Camruta Rajeeb, he took the IELTS and was still caught up in this. Or people like Piash who spent 18,000 pounds in legal fees only to go nowhere for five years. And then there's people like Farsana who were seen as a disappointment to their parents. Parents who refused to believe that the UK government would lie about something like this. Farsana went home without a degree after spending all of her family's savings for her education only to be seen as a criminal by her community. She's since gone through suicidal thoughts. So again, I ask why? Why do this to so many people? So many good innocent people? Ultimately the UK has only made 21 convictions. 21 people were sentenced for facilitating visa fraud. Why punish 58,000? Remember who I said was the home office secretary at the time, Theresa May? It might be good to look at something she repeatedly said in those early 2010 years. And this is not just about making the UK a more hostile place for illegal migrants. Looks like you did a good job. I brought this up because it's a story that I think people should know about. It's a story that needs to be told and not forgotten. International students are people that deserve protection and support, not blanket accusations of fraud and cheating. I also feel like I needed to tell this story because it does directly apply to you. If you want to study in the UK, you can't go with a TOEFL exam. They won't take it. It's still off the list of secure English language tests. So if you're going to apply to the UK, you'd better take the IELTS and you'd better take the paper version and you'd better take it in one of the few centers that the UK deems trustworthy. Because after this scandal, the UK set up more barriers and made it harder for international students to get in. And before long, they started making more dramatic decisions to make it harder for foreigners to come to the UK. For their major story, the historic decision by British voters for their country to exit the European Union. An immigration bill ending free movement will lay the foundation for a fair, modern and global immigration system. If you want to support these people, you should check out Migrant Voice. Progress was being made until 2020, of course, put everything on ice. There are still thousands of people that have not had a decision made and they are struggling to make ends meet in the UK. The Bindman's law firm took up the case and has been defending these people for the past six, seven years. I hope personally that I can come back to this video and make a better one. Make one about how these people stole their future back from the UK. How they got compensation for all the punishment and suffering they went through. I don't intend on making videos like this. This is something that just kind of happened because I got deep into a topic and when I do that I go all the way down to the rabbit hole until I reach the other side of the world. But if you like it, let me know because I can make more stuff like this if this is something you're interested in. I think that the world of college admissions is actually a little more interesting than we give it credit for. It's got scandals, it's got hot takes, it's got secret deals and shady relations and I wouldn't mind exposing them. So until the next time I publish another video like this, subscribe to the channel and stick around for the more regular content like stuff about how to study in other countries and how to get better scores on tests. I'll see you next time.