International students now have a better grasp of the English language than their Irish peers due to a dramatic drop in educational standards here, according to senior academics in third level institutions.

Despite an overall increase in high grades in the Leaving Certificate exam, many students are entering college without fundamental abilities in core subjects such as English and Mathematics, say the academics who teach them at third level.

And while some education researchers argue that students today are working harder to achieve high points, others believe that students are also trying to "beat the system" by predicting what will come up on Leaving Cert exam papers.

The third level academics' views on falling standards come as more than 50,000 students enter the final stages of the Leaving Certificate, trying to earn enough points to enter their first choice college course. They also support a recent study that found the Leaving Cert exam has been significantly dumbed down and that there is evidence of widespread grade inflation.

"The standard of written English certainly seems to have dropped," said Dr Joseph Coughlan, lecturer in Corporate Finance and Head of Research in the Faculty of Business in the Dublin Institute of Technology (DIT).

"I would have assumed that someone who is able to get a good grade in higher level English in the Leaving Cert should be able to construct a sentence properly, but we are finding that that is not the case. Students are leaving out verbs, their punctuation is deplorable and capital letters are sometimes wishful thinking. There is also a tendency for them to write in 'text speak'."

Coughlan said that this was not reflective of the intelligence of Irish students, but rather of the education system that allowed students to progress to third level without a proper grounding in English. "We have a number of international students and often their English is better than their Irish peers," he said. "Quite simply, they have been taught English grammar, whereas Irish students haven't. It's not that they're not able to do it, but it's not being emphasised enough at second level. I know from anecdotal evidence that students at second level are getting high marks for writing down the facts, regardless of how those facts are expressed."

There has also been a very evident drop in standards in maths to the extent that DIT have set up a 'drop-in' centre for students who are struggling with the third level maths requirements, said Coughlan.

"We get students coming in with very good maths grades in the Leaving Cert and yet they are having difficulty with very basic maths skills at third level," he said. "The grades are going up but we are not finding that the ability is going up accordingly. We've set up a drop-in centre for maths in response to the drop in standards."

Plummeting educational standards have also been noted in Irish universities, according to Professor Eugene O'Brien, from the School of Architecture in University College Dublin.

"I think 400 or 500 points in the Leaving Cert now does not mean what it used to 10 years ago," he said. "A student who gets 500 points used to be a really good student, whereas now often they are reasonably ordinary students."

O'Brien said that there had also been a noticeable shift in the mentality of students entering third level, with an increasing focus on how to 'beat the system'. "They are much more inclined to be looking for patterns in the exams, they are more inclined to take grinds and they are more inclined to challenge exam results," he said.

"They're coming from the culture in second level of trying to predict what's coming up in exams. It is harder to make them think. They're looking for the easy way to get through. As a result of this we are now moving towards forming exams where there is no choice, and therefore are less predictable."