Biden Admits Plagiarism in School But Says It
Was Not 'Malevolent' (1987 Article) ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3875767/posts
In 2017 my Website was migrated to
the clouds and reduced in size.
Hence some links below are broken.
One thing to try if a “www” link is broken is to substitute “faculty” for “www”
For example a broken link
http://www.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
can be changed to corrected link
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Pictures.htm
However in some cases files had to be removed to reduce the size of my Website
Contact me at rjensen@trinity.edu if
you really need to file that is missing
Bob Jensen's Threads on
Plagiarism and Other Cheating
Bob Jensen
at Trinity University
Plagiarism ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
Plagiarism Law and Legal Definition ---
http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/plagiarism/
Also see
http://www1.law.umkc.edu/academic/plagiarism.htm
Video on the Ghost of Plagiarism Past
Et Plagieringseventyr ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mwbw9KF-ACY
Cross-Cultural Differences In Plagiarism In Law Schools And Legal Practice
---
https://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2019/04/cross-cultural-differences-in-plagiarism-in-law-schools-and-legal-practice.html
Jagdish Gangolly clued me in on this link
Tom Lehrer on the great Russian mathgematician Lobachevsky:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNC-aj76zI4&feature=related
Science’s pirate queen: Alexandra Elbakyan is plundering the academic
publishing establishment ---
https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/8/16985666/alexandra-elbakyan-sci-hub-open-access-science-papers-lawsuit
On January 29, 2014 Julie wrote the following on the AAA Commons:
We have completed our work on the plagiarism
policy, and the final version can be found here:
http://aaahq.org/about/manual/current/publications/PlagiarismPolicy.pdf
Where to Begin in When Trying to Detect Plagiarism
and Cheating
Comparison of Plagiarism Detection Tools ---
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/SER07017B.pdf
"Plagiarism Detection: Is Technology the Answer?" at the 2007 EDUCAUSE
Southeast Regional Conference, Liz Johnson, Board of Regents of the University
System of Georgia, provided a chart comparing seven plagiarism detection tools:
Turnitin, MyDropBox, PAIRwise, EVE2, WCopyFind, CopyCatch, and GLATT.
2010 Update:
"Top 10 Tools to Detect Plagiarism Online"
The New Culture of Cheating
Cheating in the Movie
Lady Bird
Socratic Method and
Cases: How Should Teaching Change When Some Students Have Prior Semester
Course Notes?
New Ways of Cheating
Customized Essay
Writing Companies (including custom college admission essays)
Authors Who Lie and Cheat (mainly for money
but sometimes for political or religious reasons)
Psychology of Cheaters vs. Non-cheaters
Wikipedia Policies on Quotations
Plagiarism in Wikipedia
Plagiarism in Legal Documents
CombatingPlagiarism and Other Forms of
Cheating
Combating Plagiarism: Is the Internet
Causing More Students and Ministers to Copy
Includes a module on dissertation plagiarism.
Where is the line of ethical responsibility of using online services
to improve writing?
Market for Admissions Test Questions and Admissions Essay "Consulting"
Ease of Finding Test Banks and Solutions Manuals
Should a doctoral student be allowed to hire an editor to
help write her dissertation?
If the answer is yes, should this also apply to any student writing a course
project, take home exam, or term paper?
This service from Google Answers was disturbing
until Google shut it down.
The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI)
Racial Divide: Are their differences in
cheating by race?
Cheating Issues Somewhat Unique to Online Distance
Education
Huge Cheating
Scandals at the West Point, University of Virginia, Harvard, Ohio, Duke, Cambridge, and Other Universities
Cheating
Across Cultures (Foreign Countries That Cheat)
Plagio-riffing
New Kinds of Cheating
(including automated essay writing)
My Project Files Got Corrupted (it used to be
that the files just got lost)
Cheating in Athletics Academic Standards
Old Kinds of
Cheating
Did Sir Isaac Newton and
Gottfried Leibnitz Plagiarize?
Social/Cultural Construction of Cheating
Ghost Students on
Campus
Smile Professor, You're on Candid Camera
Professors
and Teachers Who Let Students Cheat
Professors
and Teachers Who Plagiarize and/or Otherwise Cheat
Professors Who Fabricate Research Outcomes
and Research Reviews
Colleges That
Cheat
Journal Editors' Reactions to Word of Plagiarism?
Largely Silence
Celebrities Who Plagiarize/Cheat (Vladimir
Putin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jane Goodall, Arianna Huffington, Fareed Zakaria,
Seinfeld's wife, Joe Biden, and others)
Foreign Countries That Cheat (There is no such
thing as international copyright law)
Manipulation of Journal Rankings
Media Sources Who Let Journalists Cheat and Go Unpunished
for Cheating
Plagiarism Goes Unpunished in the Liberal Press
In Defense of Cheating
MBAs most likely (among graduate students) to cheat and
make their own rules
54% of Accounting Students Admit to Cheating
Academic Fraud for Athletes ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
Scientists Behaving Badly
Copyright Issues and Concerns
Also see
The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Undermines Public Access and
Sharing
(Included Copyright Information and Dead Link Archives)
Copyright and
Deep Linking
100 Cases of Cheating at the University of Virginia
Where to Begin in When Trying to Detect Plagiarism
Adventures in Cheating: A guide to Buying
Term papers and Dissertations Online (What's a "virgin prostitute?" in this
context?)
Plagiarism and 'Atonement'
Catching Cheaters with Their Own Computers
Guidelines for Copyrighted Material at Websites,
Blackboard, and WebCT
Resume Lies and Other Credential Frauds
Center for Academic Integrity ---
http://www.academicintegrity.org/
Threads on the
P2P, PDE, Collaboration, and the Napster/Wrapster/Gnutella/Pointera/FreeNet/BearShare/KaZaA/ ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on controlling online cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
Bob Jensen's threads on onsite versus onsite assessment ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
January 6, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
NEW JOURNAL COVERING PLAGIARISM IN THE
UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY
The recently-launched, refereed INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL FOR EDUCATIONAL INTEGRITY [ISSN 1833-2595] intends to provide a
forum to address educational integrity topics: "plagiarism, cheating,
academic integrity, honour codes, teaching and learning, university
governance, and student motivation." The journal, to be published two times
a year, is sponsored by the University of South Australia. For more
information and to read the current issue, go to
http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/journals/index.php/IJEI .
Update Messages
Candidates attempting to cheat in an exam by writing
on a part of their body must be reported to the chief invigilator immediately.
Please speak to an exam attendant who will contact the student administration
office. Keep the students under close observation to ensure that they do not
attempt to erase the evidence. The chief invigilator will arrange for a member
of staff with a camera to come to the exam room to photograph the evidence to
present to the examinations offences panel.
Signs on the walls of Student Administration Office at Queen Mary College in
London, as reported by Abbott Katz, "Inside Higher Ed, May 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/05/31/katz
A World Class Athlete With World Class Ethics That Will Impact Upon Future
Generations
He speaks his mind --- and apologizes later.
He loves to party --- and doesn't care about winning. Yet Bode Miller
is poised to strike Olympic gold. On the slopes with skiing's bad
boy,.
Bill Saporito. As written on the cover of Time Magazine, January 23,
2006 ---
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1149374,00.html
Jensen Comment
Bode Miller is the best of the best in a sport where winners are determined
by hundredths of a second on a stop watch. His picture is on the cover
of the January 23, 2006 edition of Time Magazine. Although he's
relatively unknown in his home country (U.S.A.), he's been an established
hero in Europe where crowds chanted "Bode, Bode, . . . ." while he was on
his way to winning the 2005 World Cup. He's poised to become the Gold
Medal hero in the 2006 and obtained recent U.S. notoriety due to a recent
interview on Sixty Minutes (CBS television) in which he admitted that having
fun is more important than winning and that he sometimes partied too much
when skiing including a few instances when he was a bit tipsy or hung over
when crashing down the slope at over 80 miles per hour.
Chagrined media analysts questioned whether the partying and outspoken
Bode Miller was really a role model for our young people. I contend
that he is largely do to some things buried in the article in Time
Magazine. After discussing his partying and independent nature, the
article goes on to explain how Bode more than any other skier in history
made a science out of the sport. Most of his life has been spent
studying and experimenting with every item of clothing and equipment, every
position for every circumstance on the slopes, and the torques and forces of
every move under every possible slope condition. That sort of makes him my
hero, but what really makes him my hero is the following quotation that
speaks for itself:
Last year, after tinkering with his boots, he
discovered that inserting a composite --- as opposed to aluminum or
plastic --- lift under the sole gave him a better feel on the snow and
better performance. Then he did something really crazy, he shared
the information with everyone, including competitors. His
equipment team flipped, but in the Miller school of philosophy this
makes complete sense. Otherwise, he says, "I'm maintaining an
unfair advantage over my competitors knowingly, for the purpose of
beating them alone. Not for the purpose of enjoying it more or
skiing better. To me that's
ethically unsound."
One has to be reminded of the famous poem painted on the wall of my old
Algona High School gymnasium:
For when the Great Scorer comes
To write against your name.
He marks -- not that you won or lost --
But how you played the game.
Grantland Rice ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grantland_Rice
Setting a bad example for its students: Plagiarized from Alabama
A&M University
A federal judge on Friday blocked the Southern
Association of Colleges and Schools from revoking the accreditation of Edward
Waters College while the institution pursues a due process lawsuit against the
association. In December, the regional accrediting group said that it had
revoked the Florida college's accreditation, citing documents Edward Waters
officials had submitted to the association that appeared to have been
plagiarized from Alabama A&M University, another historically black
institution.
Doug Lederman, "Staying Alive," Inside Higher Ed, March 14, 2005 --- http://www.insidehighered.com/insider/staying_alive
"Tolerance of Cheating: An Analysis Across Countries" --- http://www.indiana.edu/~econed/pdffiles/spring02/magnus.pdf
Bob Jensen's threads on P2P file sharing are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/napster.htm
Forwarded by Chris Nolan on August 28, 2003
With a new academic year starting, I wanted to remind
everyone of the following comprehensive webliography on plagiarism. Each entry
is annotated, and each entry represents a document that is available on the
Web:
http://www.web-miner.com/plagiarism
This Web site also has other guides to ethics issues
on topical areas that you might wish to share with faculty in other
departments on your campus:
Anthropology Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/anthroethics.htm
Art Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/artethics.htm
Bioethics: http://www.web-miner.com/bioethics.htm
Business Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/busethics.htm
Ethics Case Studies: http://www.web-miner.com/ethicscases.htm
History Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/historyethics.htm
Journalism Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/journethics.htm
Research Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/researchethics.htm
Sociology Ethics: http://www.web-miner.com/sociologyethics.htm
Bernie Sloan
Senior Library Information Systems Consultant, ILCSO
University of Illinois Office for Planning and Budgeting
616 E. Green Street, Suite 213
Champaign, IL 61820
Phone: (217) 333-4895
Fax: (217) 265-0454
E-mail: bernies@uillinois.edu
The New Culture of Cheating
Plagiarism ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
Plagiarism Law and Legal Definition ---
http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/plagiarism/
Also see
http://www1.law.umkc.edu/academic/plagiarism.htm
The fight against fake-paper factories that churn out
sham science ---
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00733-5
A Spike in Cheating Since the Move to Remote?
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/02/05/study-finds-nearly-200-percent-jump-questions-submitted-chegg-after-start-pandemic?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=deefae2887-DNU_2021_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-deefae2887-197565045&mc_cid=deefae2887&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
"Damien Hirst in plagiarism row – does it really matter?,"
by Ben East, The National, September 12, 2010 ---
http://www.thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100912/ART/709119970
"Dissertation for Sale: A Cautionary Tale," by
Manuel R. Torres, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Dissertation-for-Sale-A/132401/
"Colleges See More Cheating With Foreign Students,"
Inside Higher Ed, June 6, 2016 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/06/06/colleges-see-more-cheating-foreign-students?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=1a507046c7-DNU20160606&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-1a507046c7-197565045
Retraction Watch (cheating in research) ---
http://retractionwatch.com
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
When Does an Artist’s Appropriation Become Copyright Infringement?
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-artists-appropriation-theft
An admissions officer tells us the most wrongheaded things applicants try.
And Michael Lewis has the incredible story of how a stolen library book got one
man — Emir Kamenica — into his dream school ---
https://www.thisamericanlife.org/504/how-i-got-into-college?elqTrackId=95818572b09741cabed43a11abcd1a38&elq=acaa32d084174e2890e67a6ce7915d0e&elqaid=20380&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9560
When it comes to retracting papers by the world’s most prolific scientific
fraudsters, journals have room for improvement ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/09/06/when-it-comes-to-retracting-papers-by-the-worlds-most-prolific-scientific-fraudsters-journals-have-room-for-improvement/
Plagiarists or innovators? The Led Zeppelin paradox endures ---
https://theconversation.com/plagiarists-or-innovators-the-led-zeppelin-paradox-endures-102368
Course Hero is a site that helps students cheat ---
Search engine targets sharing of course documents on Course Hero (insidehighered.com)
Click Here
China: A Culture of Cheating
A half marathon in China made international news for all the wrong reasons:
Hundreds of participants were caught cheating at the Shenzhen Half Marathon on
November 25.Officials punished 258 runners for cheating ---
https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a25361215/runners-caught-cheating-shenzhen-half-marathon-on-camera/
Students riot over China's crackdown on exam cheating
---
https://www.ucanews.com/news/students-riot-over-chinas-crackdown-on-exam-cheating/68583
NYT Investigation: Louisiana
School Made Headlines for Sending Black Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the
Reality ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/tm-landry-college-prep-black-students.html?elqTrackId=39d876d33bb84ff8ba9ff1d9a3b754f3&elq=a9781e478e4e4ab884c26d9213c9d2ff&elqaid=21547&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=10337
"Me Before You" Author Jojo Moyes Has Been Accused Of Publishing A Novel With
"Alarming Similarities" To Another Author's Book ---
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tomiobaro/jojo-moyes-the-giver-of-stars-kim-richardson-bookwoman-of
Scientist Has Identity Stolen for Fake Peer Reviews ---
https://twitter.com/KamounLab/status/1204659178364645376?s=20
Toronto priest plagiarized when ghostwriting for Canada's most senior Vatican
figure ---
https://nationalpost.com/news/new-revelations-in-the-serial-plagiarism-of-a-canadian-priest-extend-to-his-role-as-ghostwriter-for-vatican-figure/
Publisher retracts nearly two dozen articles, blocks nearly three dozen more,
from alias-employing author who plagiarized ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/09/17/publisher-retracts-nearly-two-dozen-articles-blocks-nearly-three-dozen-more-from-alias-employing-author-who-plagiarized/
Motivation is a key factor in whether students cheat ---
https://theconversation.com/motivation-is-a-key-factor-in-whether-students-cheat-155274
I guess we could say the same as to why professors and others cheat as well, but
to this day we don't really know why
Professor Hunton (see below) cheated
The problem is that when you
take away some motivations to cheat (think grades) you may be creating
counterbalancing motivations. For me an eye opener was why over 60 students
expelled by Harvard University cheated in a course when they were assured of
getting A grade in advance. Their motivation cheating was that it was a waste of
time to honestly do assignments in a course where they were assured in advance
of getting an A grade. Time and time
again some cheaters in life did so because of time management.
A Tale of Two Plagiarists: "As it turns out, at least a couple
passages weren’t written by Rieff or by Sontag" ---
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191011-Gutkin-Sontag?cid=db&source=ams&sourceId=296279
A more common form of cheating is to have a spouse or significant other do
the academic work.
Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers (and took two online
courses for him)
The wife of a star University of South Florida linebacker says she wrote his
academic papers and took two online classes for him. The accusations against Ben
Moffitt, who had been promoted by the university to the news media as a family
man, were made in e-mail messages to The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr.
Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt called the accusations “hearsay,” and
a university spokesman said the matter was a “domestic issue.” If it is found
that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud, the newspaper reported, the
university could be subject to an NCAA investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, January
5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at
Jensen Comment
If Florida investigates this and discovers it was true, I wonder if Moffitt's
diploma will be revoked. Somehow I doubt it.
How to Mislead With Statistics
Do Most Academics Fib on Their Resumes?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Do-Most-Academics-Fib-on-Their/247376?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=296279
Maybe it’s a tiny embellishment — say, turning yourself into a first author
rather than the second. You might list an article that hasn’t yet been
accepted by a journal as “in press.” Or maybe it’s a bigger lie, like
inventing a paper that doesn’t exist.
A
recent study
of 180
academic curricula vitae found that 56 percent that claimed to have at least
one publication contained at least one unverifiable or inaccurate
publication, and it suggests that CV falsification could be much more common
than scholars committed to professional integrity might hope. The study is
small — the 56 percent reflects only 79 CVs, of 141 that claimed to have at
least one publication. The researchers behind the study make no presumption
as to whether the errors were intentional.
While it has popped up in a few high-profile cases, CV falsification is an
instance of academic misconduct that might not make as many headlines as
fudging data or plagiarism. But the difficulty of detecting it could make it
all the more insidious.
The findings “are concerning enough that they would warrant a larger, more
comprehensive look at what’s going on,” said Trisha Phillips, a co-author of
a paper describing the study and an associate professor of political science
at West Virginia University who studies research ethics. She and her
colleagues write in the paper that in the “increasingly social world of
science, researchers need to trust their collaborators,” but if what they’ve
found is any indication, “this trust might not be well placed.”
‘Inaccurate in a Self-Promoting Way’
One
high-profile case of CV falsification occurred at Phillips’s home
institution in 2014. West Virginia University
had been poised to promote
Anoop Shankar, a rising star in epidemiology, to department chair when
officials found that Shankar had crafted more than a few of his credentials.
Turns out he didn’t have a Ph.D., nor was he the author of many of the
papers listed on his CV. After the Shankar incident, and a few of their own
encounters with CV falsification, Phillips and her co-authors — R. Kyle
Saunders, Jeralynn Cossman, and Elizabeth Heitman — were spurred to explore
the prevalence of such misrepresentation.
A literature review turned up plenty of findings on falsification in health
sciences, including that an average of 22 percent of applicants to medical
residency and fellowship programs had falsified research citations. There
didn’t seem to be any research in other areas of academe, so Phillips’s team
decided to run their pilot study.
With permission from the institution in question — an unnamed land-grant
doctoral university — they collected 1,837 unsuccessful applicants’ CVs from
the 2015-16 academic year and reviewed a randomly selected 180. Of those,
141 claimed to have published at least one work — a journal article, book,
or book chapter — and 79 of those were deemed “unverifiable or inaccurate in
a self-promoting way.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I don't disagree that a relatively high proportion of academics cheat on their
resumes. But sample size of 180 means that many disciplines had two or less test
cases. This is important, because I think cheating varies somewhat by
discipline. For example, in disciplines like medical science where outside
research funds are readily available, there's "gold in them thar hills." We need
a much larger sample possibly with stratified sampling.
It's much more common for academics to cheat in other ways. One of the most
common ways these days is for a given publication with multiple authors to have
highly variable academic contribution to that particular article. Much more
common is for these authors to write multiple articles where the academic
contributions vary between articles to more evenly spread workloads while
increasing the odds that at least one of the papers will get published and to
lengthen the publication record for all authors if more than one of the papers
gets published. Sometimes a senior author wanting to help a non-tenured
colleague get tenure will tack that colleagues name to a paper where the
colleague contributed very little other than proof reading.
It's also common for one or more joint authors to contribute to a paper in a
questionable academic way. One of the joint authors may have provided funding
and little else to the academic contents of a particular paper. One of the joint
authors may have a stellar reputation that helps a paper get published when that
author actually contributed little else to the paper. One of the joint authors
may have had access to the data or statistical testing/programming while
contributing little else to the paper.
Suitcase Paper
And there are ways of cheating other than publishing. An extreme case is to have
authored a pretty good paper with no intent of publishing the paper. Instead it
is a suitcase paper. Then that paper can be presented at multiple conferences
over time, especially conferences in popular tourist sites in Europe, Canada,
New Zealand, Australia, etc. I know one professor who had a suitcase paper that
he dusted off every time he wanted to buy a new Mercedes. He would then get his
university to pay for his participation in an obscure European conference where
he bought a new car, tooled around Europe for a bit, and then had the car
shipped back to the USA when he could save money relative to what a new Mercedes
costs in the USA.
Bob Jensen's threads on academic cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Sokal Hoax Publishing Sting ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
‘Sokal Squared’: Is Huge Publishing Hoax ‘Hilarious and Delightful’ or an
Ugly Example of Dishonesty and Bad Faith? ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Sokal-Squared-Is-Huge/244714?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=f24d1573471e4d8b818ead0a76b2858a&elq=b7f95353e47946fbb4ed16fd79876740&elqaid=20814&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9841
Reactions
to an elaborate academic-journal hoax, dubbed "Sokal Squared" by one
observer, came fast and furious on Wednesday. Some scholars applauded the
hoax for unmasking what they called academe’s leftist, victim-obsessed
ideological slant and low publishing standards. Others said it had proved
nothing beyond the bad faith and dishonesty of its authors.
Three scholars — Helen Pluckrose,
a self-described "exile from the humanities" who studies medieval religious
writings about women; James A. Lindsay, an author and mathematician; and
Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State
University — spent 10 months writing
20 hoax papers
that illustrate and parody what they call "grievance studies," and submitted
them to "the best journals in the relevant fields." Of the 20, seven papers
were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when
the authors "had to take the project public prematurely and thus stop the
study, before it could be properly concluded." A skeptical Wall Street
Journal editorial writer, Jillian Kay Melchior, began raising
questions
about some of the papers
over the summer.
Beyond the
acceptances, the authors said, they also received four requests to
peer-review other papers "as a result of our own exemplary scholarship." And
one paper — about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland, Ore. —
"gained special recognition for excellence from its journal, Gender,
Place, and Culture … as one of 12 leading pieces in feminist geography
as a part of the journal’s 25th anniversary celebration."
Not all readers accepted the
work as laudable scholarship. National Review took "Helen Wilson,"
the fictional author of the dog-park study, to task in June for her
approach. "The whole reasoning behind Wilson’s study,"
wrote
a staff writer, Katherine Timpf, "is the belief that researching rape
culture and sexuality among dogs in parks is a brilliant way to understand
more about rape culture and sexuality among humans. This is, of course,
idiotic. Why? Because humans are not dogs."
Another
published
paper, "Going In Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male
Homohysteria, Transhysteria, and Transphobia Through Receptive Penetrative
Sex Toy Use," appeared in Sexuality and Culture. It recommends that
men anally self-penetrate "to become less transphobic, more feminist, and
more concerned about the horrors of rape culture."
The trolling trio
wondered, they write, if a journal might even "publish a feminist rewrite of
a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf." Yup. "Our Struggle Is My
Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and
Choice Feminism" was accepted by the feminist social-work journal
Affilia.
Darts and Laurels
Some scholars
applauded the hoax.
"Is there any idea so outlandish
that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?"
tweeted
the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.
"Three intrepid academics,"
wrote
Yascha Mounk, an
author and lecturer on government at Harvard, "just perpetrated a giant
version of the Sokal Hoax, placing … fake papers in major academic journals.
Call it Sokal Squared. The result is hilarious and delightful. It also
showcases a serious problem with big parts of academia."
Continued in article
Fraud Beat (Diploma Mill Degrees in Developing Countries)
"Politicians, Fake Degrees and Plagiarism," by Philip G. Altbach,
Inside Higher Ed, June 16, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com//blogs/world-view/politicians-fake-degrees-and-plagiarism
Putin did not write his own Ph.D. thesis, and there's some question as to
whether he even read it.
Putin’s plagiarism, fake Ukrainian degrees and other tales of world leaders
accused of academic fraud ---
https://theconversation.com/putins-plagiarism-fake-ukrainian-degrees-and-other-tales-of-world-leaders-accused-of-academic-fraud-112826
Replication ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication
Robustness ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robust_statistics
What Matters for Replication ---
https://replicationnetwork.com/2017/02/17/mueller-langer-fecher-harhoff-wagner-what-matters-for-replication/
Replication Versus Robustness in the American Economic Review ---
Is the AER Replicable? And is it Robust? Evidence from a Class Project
https://replicationnetwork.com/2016/12/27/campbell-is-the-aer-replicable-and-is-it-robust-evidence-from-a-class-project/
MIT: Perverse Incentives and Replication in Science ---
http://infoproc.blogspot.ru/2017/02/perverse-incentives-and-replication-in.html
From Retraction Watch on March 28, 2017
SCOPUS, the
publication database maintained by Elsevier, has
discontinued nearly 300 journals since 2013, including multiple journals
published by OMICS Publishing Group.
Although the reasons the widely used
database gives for discontinuing journals often vary, in all cases OMICS
journals were removed over “Publication Concerns.”
Here’s
what SCOPUS said recently about how it vets
journals.
Two biologists guilty of misconduct, says University investigation ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/03/31/two-biologists-guilty-misconduct-says-university-investigation/
Five retractions for engineering duo in South Korea over duplication,
fraudulent data ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/03/five-retractions-engineering-duo-south-korea-duplication-fraudulent-data/
The Academy Created a Monster: Fraudulent Journals
A fictitious scientist called Anna O. Szust applied to join the editorial
boards of 360 journals—and 48 accepted: Journals without standards harm
science and universities that count them toward tenure and promotion
---
http://www.nature.com/news/predatory-journals-recruit-fake-editor-1.21662
Author Surprised by Unannounced Retraction of Three Papers (for extensive
duplication of her own work)
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/12/author-surprised-publisher-pulls-three-papers/
Book Review/Interview on Retraction Watch ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/03/29/course-deception-scientists-novel-takes-research-misconduct/#more-49016
Jana Rieger is a
researcher in Edmonton, Alberta. And now, she’s
also a novelist. Her new book, “A
Course in Deception,” draws on her experiences in
science, and weaves a tale of how greed and pressures to publish can lead to
even worse outcomes than the sort we write about at Retraction Watch. We
interviewed Rieger about the novel.
Another retraction for medical student who confessed to
cooking data ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/13/another-retraction-student-confessed-cooking-data/
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob Jensen's Threads on Replication ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
"What is the Value of Ethics Education? Are Universities Successfully
Teaching Ethics to Business Students?," by Accounting Professor Steven Mintz,
Ethics Sage, February 12, 2013 ---
http://www.ethicssage.com/2013/02/what-is-the-value-of-ethics-education.html
. . .
This is "academic-speak" for we do not want to hold
the schools accountable for ethics education. AACSB's failure to set
specific goals for business ethics education speaks volumes about the
political pressure from accredited schools that were brought to bear on any
new standards that require specific education. Academic administrators do
not want to be tied down to a specific course of action or program; they
want a more "flexible" approach. The result is a meaningless standard that
fails to address the critical problems that face us today in graduating
business students who become tomorrow's future abusers of the capitalist
system because of narcissitic behavior.
So, what should be done about the failure of
business ethics education over the years to stem the rising tide of
corporate fraud and wrongdoing? I believe the emphasis of business ethics
education has to change from teaching philosophical reasoning methods that
rarely work in practice to a more values-based approach that emphasizes
ethical leadership. Ethical leadership is a must in any discipline --
accounting, finance, information systems, management and marketing.
Therefore, all college instructors should buy into the need to slant their
teaching methods to incorporate leadership -- ethical leadership.
Jensen Comment
Those of us that have had to deal with cheating students over the years,
including those who cheated in ethics classes, discover that ethics behavior or
lack thereof is very, very complicated. Unethical behavior and cheating is very
situational and opportunistic. Sometimes lapses arise when there are heavy
demands on time such as those demands of varsity athletics, troubled marriages,
child illness, etc. Sometimes lapses arise from a follow-the-herd situation such
as that recently observed among 125 students in a recent Harvard political
science course.
In my opinion, most lapses in ethics do not arise from ignorance about the
ethics guidelines. Therefore, teaching about it is not likely to have much
incremental benefit in preventing ethics lapses at the individual level. There
may be some benefit in terms of awareness and better writing of ethics
guidelines. And studying what happens when violations of ethics have severe
consequences may instill some fear. For example, expelling half the 125 students
who were caught cheating in one political science class probably made the
remaining students at Harvard University sit up and take notice that the
Harvard's Student Honor Code is not toothless.
"Anton Chekhov on the 8 Qualities of Cultured People," by Maria Popova,
Brain Pickings, January 29, 2013 ---
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/29/anton-chekhov-8-qualities-of-cultured-people/
Jensen Comment
I suspect there are not many cultured people in the world because of Criterion
Number 4.
"Does Everyone Lie? Are we a Culture of Liars?" by accounting
professor Steven Mintz, Ethics Sage, February 1, 2013 ---
http://www.ethicssage.com/2013/02/does-everyone-lie.html
"The Lying
Culture,"
by J. Edward Ketz & Anthony
H. Catanach Jr.,
SmartPros, February 2011 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x71398.xml
"Duke Begins Checking MBA Applications for Plagiarism," by Erin Ziomek,
Bloomberg Businessweek, April 12, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-12/duke-begins-checking-mba-applications-for-plagiarism
Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business is the
latest MBA program to report using plagiarism detection software to check
applicant essays during the admissions process. It’s the highest-ranked
program by Bloomberg Businessweek to come forward about using the service.
Fuqua rejected one applicant for “blatant
plagiarism” but was cautious about turning away others because the 2012-13
school year was a pilot period for using IParadigms’ Turnitin detection
system, the school said. No details on the rejected applicant were
available.
“We chose to review a large number of applications
to understand what threshold would be appropriate to use in the future to
investigate for plagiarism,” Liz Riley Hargrove, Fuqua’s associate dean for
admissions, said in an e-mail. ”We are still in the process of fine-tuning
the system and understanding what the scores mean and how we will leverage
it next year and what our investigative process will be.”
Riley Hargrove says the school had received
information that led the admissions team to believe some applicants did not
write their essays. There’s no way “to catch every single thing that’s been
manufactured, but we thought this was one step we could take to help,” she
says.
UCLA’s Anderson School of Management has rejected
about 115 applicants on the grounds of plagiarized admissions essays since
it began using Turnitin heading into the 2011-12 school year. Penn State’s
Smeal College of Business has denied about 87 since 2009 for the same
offense.
Other Turnitin users include the business schools
at Wake Forest University and Northeastern University. Most schools don’t
disclose that they are using the service, however, and the company keeps its
client roster private.
UCLA has consistently found that about 2 percent of
its MBA applicants plagiarize their essays and has traced lifted passages
back to the websites of nonprofit organizations as well as websites that
advertise free essays or help with editing essays. The school expects that
pattern to continue into its third application round this year, which means
it may find additional cases of plagiarism before fall.
“Potential” cases of plagiarism at Northeastern’s
business school were expected to double to about 100 cases by April 15,
Evelyn Tate, the school’s director of graduate recruitment and admissions,
told Bloomberg Businessweek in February.
For the 2012-13 school year, Penn State’s Smeal
reports that 40 applicants were flagged for plagiarizing essays,
representing about 8 percent of its applicant pool.
“Over the years it just feels like there is a lot
of pressure among applicants to manage perfect essays,” says Duke’s Riley
Hargrove. “This felt like the right thing to do.”
She did not understand laws and ethics about plagiarism until she got caught:
Promises to stop doing it
"School board: We're satisfied superintendent accused of plagiarism
'understands her mistake'," New Jersey Independent News, January 19,
2013 ---
http://www.nj.com/somerset/index.ssf/2013/01/bedminster_superintendent_unde.html#incart_river_default
Jensen Comment
Makes you wonder what she got away with during her years in school when she
thought plagiarism was acceptable.
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Let's Talk About Academic Integrity: Part II AI (After the Internet),"
by Tracy Mitrano, Inside Higher Ed, August 21, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/law-policy-and-it/lets-talk-about-academic-integrity-part-ii-ai-after-internet-0
That the Internet is a game changer is well-known
phenomenon. In fact, the word most usually associated with this phenomenon
is "disruptive," and it is a good one because more times than not it is
truly a neutral, descriptive term. Depending on what side of the fence you
are on at the time of the disruption, you might think it either a good or
bad thing. Think content industry: bad. Think people without money who want
access to content: good. Of course, life, law and technology are infinitely
more complicated than those Manichaeism terms, but you get the idea. Let's
see how it applies to academic integrity.
But first let's be sure we have a foundational understanding of the concept.
Academic Integrity is larger than plagiarism, but taking other people's
work without attribution and with a notion that it is your own is the lion's
share. How is it to be distinguished from copyright? Copyright is law;
academic integrity is policy. You won't go to jail or pay a fine if you
violate it, but within the community of scholars -- academic or public --
depending on a number of factors, you may lose your job or some degree of
credibility. If you are a student, also depending on a number of factors,
you may have to rewrite a paper, get a failing grade in the assignment, fail
the course, or even be suspended or expelled from the institution.
Copyright is not cured by attribution; in most cases, plagiarism is. Why
is it important? Because it goes straight to the heart of academia: a
community of scholars, stretched throughout all of human history, whose
central dynamic is developing original work while standing on the shoulders
of those who have come before us, irrespective of whether it was 10,000
years or 10 minutes ago. It is to newcomers, i.e. students, a special
community with special rules, hence the difference between law and policy.
It is an invitation to be part of the life of the mind, so long as you play
by the rules.
Now, to be sure, the exact nature and shape of the rules can change given
any number of factors, some obviously larger than others. Technology is a
big one. Cutting and pasting having become so easy suddenly makes wholesale
"copying" a facile process; how that function leads a tired, insecure or
intentionally violative student down the road of perdition is a factor that
educators must take into account no matter whether they like or don't like
the fact of the technology that allows a student to do it. Here is why:
because the best, well intentioned students are anxious that they make a
mistake. That we do not want to cause our students undue anxiety. It is
not warranted, if we pay attention to the world in which they live and help
them clarify the rules to the practices, and nor is it wise for us to allow
undue measure of anxiety to get in the way genuine learning. An overly
cautious student may ultimately learn as little as the too liberal student
when it comes to plagiarism. If learning is the name of the game, it
behooves educators to get it right.
So much has been written about remix that I need not go into detail here
about it (Lessig's books is good start, although more focused on law than
academic integrity). Suffice it to say that remix now constitutes a very
significant approach, trope and motif of contemporary culture that if we do
not think hard about how we want academia to be of but not in this world, we
will not serve either ourselves or our students. Technology has made it
possible, yes, but technology in this instance once again demonstrates its
transfigurative powers. That is, we see the academic dynamic -- something
borrowed, something new -- more clearly than we might have seen it without
technology. We should use that insight to bridge generations of learners
and the tools and methods by which they learn.
For anyone who does not believe there is anything new under the sun worth
talking about, allow me to share some personal experience. In creating a
site on digital literacy, I spent some time talking to students about
academic integrity. <http://digitalliteracy.cornell.edu/>
I also brought Harry Lewis, former Dean of Harvard
College and a good and wise man, to talk with the Cornell community about
any number of related issues. I learned probably more than anyone. Did you
know that you can find whole instructors' manuals on the campus intranet?
That means if at two in the morning you still have not gotten to that
chemical engineering assignment (or name your subject), you can find the
answer with a few keystrokes. Know how we know? Because students who
plagiarize the manual turn in the same mistakes as the manual. Even better,
when anywhere from one to two thirds of class of 200+ students turn in the
same assignment with the same mistake, Houston, we have a problem! I
exaggerate not. But I have not even gotten to the most upsetting part of
this story. Do you know why you don't hear about as often as it occurs?
Because untenured professors who tend to be the ones who teach these large
classes are sufficiently concerned about their teaching evaluations as to
minimize the issue. Having talked to young professors in this situation, I
can report that they are very torn about it, but make their choices in the
calculous of their lives and careers. Have they worked sufficiently with
chairmen, deans and provosts on this matter? The answer to that question
belongs to every institution to address, and not once but continuously. Do
young professors have the understanding of academic leadership at their
institutions? That question should be a part of the conversation.
Continued in article
"The Plagiarism Perplex," by Barbara Fister, Inside Higher Ed,
September 6, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/library-babel-fish/plagiarism-perplex
There is an extraordinary tension in our culture
between individual creativity and the creative community, between
originality and a shared body of knowledge, between the acts of reading
culture and writing culture. And our students are caught in the middle.
In reality, culture exists in that in-between space
where things are shared. When we read, we inscribe what we read with our own
meaning. When we write, we draw inspiration from all of the things we have
read; they follow our words like shadows thrown behind us. When we come up
with a new idea, we’ve built it on ideas that others have already had and
hope our ideas become a platform for new construction. We are never entirely
alone, and our ideas are never entirely original.
These things become murky when students who are
told to work independently break the rules and collaborate on homework or an
exam.
Harvard students are currently in the news for
having done this; a few years ago
students at Ryerson University in Canada formed a
Facebook group to work on homework problems (and were, wittingly or not,
following advice provided on the university’s own website advising students
how to study effectively). One can argue that these students violated a
clearly-stated rule and so are unequivocally guilty of cheating. But it also
seems clear that we are sending mixed messages: forming study groups is good
for learning. Except when you’re told not to, in which case it’s so
unethical it can get you expelled.
Some argue that students’ willingness to cheat is a
symptom of our skewed values as a society – that getting a grade and being
awarded a degree is more important than learning, that an investment in
college has become less to do with knowledge or personal development and
everything to do with material success. This is nothing new; we’ve grumbled
about students being too focused on grades for as long as I can remember.
Students quoted in the Times seemed to feel they were the
ones who had been cheated, that they had been tricked into thinking they
could pass the course without much work and were unfairly given tests that
were harder than expected, that the rules of engagement were violated. Other
commentaries suggest (as
did the Harvard dean of undergraduate
education) that technology feeds cheating because it makes sharing too easy.
(Libraries work hard to make sharing easy, and still largely fail; faulting
our systems for being “too easy” seems a bit perverse.) On the other hand,
it also makes it more detectable. Had the students at Ryerson met face to
face in the library to work on homework problems rather than on Facebook,
they likely would never have faced punishment.
I suspect a large part of the problem is that we
send such mixed messages to students. You may hate group work, but it will
prepare you for the reality of the workplace - but when we tell you to work
alone, don’t discuss the test or homework problems with anybody else or face
severe punishment. When you write a paper, your work must be original - but
back up every point by quoting someone else who thought of it first. Develop
your own voice as a writer – but try to sound as much like us as possible.
The fire and brimstone tone of plagiarism warnings
are another kind of mixed message. Most students understand that it’s
ethically wrong to purchase a paper and hand it in as one’s own. Most
students understand that copying chunks of text without acknowledging the
source is plagiarism. But most students will encounter gray areas. What if
they can’t recall where they first encountered an idea? What if they only
found a source because another source pointed them toward it? Given they
weren’t born knowing what they are writing about, what is there that they
shouldn’t cite? If they check Wikipedia to refresh their memory of
a film, should they cite it, or does the “common knowledge” loophole absolve
them of that duty?
Apparently not.
Conscientious students spend an inordinate amount
of time trying to figure out how to cite new forms of publication that
continually escape the rulebooks, and the rules are updated in ways that are
puzzling and complex. The APA now encourages writers to say they articles
were retrieved from publishers’ websites when, in fact, they were retrieved
from a library website. (Of course, the APA makes a great deal of money as a
publisher, and they probably feel publishers are the rock-solid source of
knowledge, now that libraries are mostly renting information on a temporary
basis.) Deciding how to cite an article requires
a daunting flowchart – which nevertheless fails to
answer the problem of how to locate the link to the publisher’s website when
you actually got the article from a library database. Saying an article was
“retrieved from” a site where it wasn’t seems wrong. Yet following citation
rules is an important part of academic integrity. My head hurts.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism and cheating in general ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"45,000 Students Cheated (and got caught) in British Universities
in 3 Years," Inside Higher Ed, March 11, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/03/12/45000-students-cheated-british-universities-3-years
Question
Why would you suspect that the error in this 45,000 estimate is not symmetrical
about the number 45,000?
The answer is obvious if you accept the fact that many students also cheated
but just did not get caught?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/45000-caught-cheating-at-britains-universities-7555109.html
Jensen Comment
The punishments seem rather light.
The accused
Clare Trayner, 23, was a geography student at
Royal Holloway who was accused of cheating after anti-plagiarism software
flagged up her essay
"Everyone was emailed to collect their essay, but
mine was held back. I was then told to attend a formal meeting as I had been
caught committing plagiarism. I knew I hadn't cheated but I wasn't clear on
what the problem was.
"I was told one paragraph had been flagged up as
resembling the content on an internet site. Eventually I was found guilty of
plagiarism but as it was my first time I would be only marked down by 10 per
cent on that module. My mark for the module went from a high 2:1 to a 2:2."
"Pupils dial 'C' for cheating," by Afshan Ahmed, The National,
February 12, 2012 ---
http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/education/pupils-dial-c-for-cheating
Save this article
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Academic Cheating in the Age of Google: In high school and college,
cheating is an epidemic. To contain it, the author proposes a few simple rules,
including an end to the take-home test," by
Michael Hartnett. Business Week, January 13, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jan2011/bs2011015_632563.htm?link_position=link3
The students are in their seats, and the test has
begun.
And so has the cheating.
BlackBerrys and iPhones need just a couple of taps
of the keypad to offer the right answers. It doesn't matter whether the
subject is math, social studies, science, English, or a foreign language.
Information is available at your fingertips, just as advertised.
Indeed, we have to face a simple fact about
students today: As technology has evolved to provide a vast wealth of
information at any time, anywhere, cheating has never been easier.
In the good old days, cheating was a simple affair
and as a result not too difficult to track down, like the time a girl with
limited English skills in one of my high school English classes handed in a
terrifically written, sophisticated short story. She copied, word for word,
Shirley Jackson's story "Charles," except for changing the title character's
name. I guess she thought I wouldn't have a chance hunting down the story
once she cleverly renamed her story "Bob." Alas, catching a cheater is not
so easy any more.
Smartphone Photos
A few years ago, students would write the answers
on the inside labels of water bottles they brought into tests. Today we have
students photographing the tests from their phones in an earlier period of
the day, so that students in subsequent periods could know the questions
before they walk into the classroom.
Now catching the cheaters requires a level of
vigilance and research better suited for the corridors of the National
Security Agency than the cluttered desk of a humble teacher.
Today, students wouldn't have to rely merely on
CliffNotes to provide them with handy, if highly unoriginal, commentaries on
Hamlet. They have other choices, including study guides from SparkNotes,
PinkMonkey, ClassicNotes, and BookRags, as well as a seemingly endless
supply of articles online from both paid and unpaid sources. Just Google
"Hamlet Essay," and you'll receive a listing of 1,460,000 results, the first
page of which is teeming with free essays.
Sure, you can track down some of the cheaters by
typing in an excerpt of their essays on the very same Google search engine
to discover the source. And such websites as Turnitin.com, which checks
student papers against a massive archive of published and unpublished work
for signs of plagiarism, can also be useful. But the available materials are
so vast, and the opportunities for students to create hybrid papers so easy,
that students are now one step ahead, especially since underground networks
of materials are constantly cropping up, concealed from the peering eyes of
teachers.
Fonts of Duplicity
Of course, even in this technological age, some
students are so lazy they won't even bother to match the font and the type
size for one section of an assignment to another, as they indiscriminately
cut and paste material from assorted websites. A Spanish teacher I know once
told me of a student who handed in an essay she clearly plagiarized from a
website. Unfortunately, the girl could not explain why her essay was written
in the Catalan language as opposed to Spanish.
Yet, we can't count on incompetence. Many students
are so wily and crafty that they've learned to mask their cheating to
impressive levels. Some can find answers on handheld devices while looking
you straight in the eye or appearing to be in deep, philosophical
contemplation; others plagiarize from a dizzying array of sources and cover
their trail with vigilance worthy of a CIA operative.
Continued in article
54% of Accounting Students Admit to Cheating
SmartPros, August 31, 2007 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x58970.xml
MBAs most likely (among graduate students) to cheat and make their own
rules ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#MBAs
Jensen Comment
I became discouraged with take home exam when one of my students paid to
outsource taking of the examination to an agent. If the agent had not
plagiarized it would've been impossible to catch his boss (the enrolled
student). Most of my take home examinations, however, were only a small portion
of the grade and the heavily-weighted final examination was not a take-home
examination. I think all courses, including online courses, should have a
monitored final examination. There are ways of dealing with this in distance
education courses ---
Bob Jensen's thread on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Ideas for Teaching Online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas
Also see the helpers for teaching in general at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
"UCLA MBA Applicants Rejected for Plagiarism Totals 52," by: Louis
Lavelle, Business Week, February 2, 2012 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2012/02/ucla_mba_applicants_rejected_for_plagiarism_totals_52.html
The number of MBA applicants at UCLA’s
Anderson School of Management that have been
rejected because of plagiarism has grown exponentially, with 40 more
rejected in the second round of applications.
The new cases of plagiarism bring the total to 52.
As we reported yesterday,
12 cases of plagiarism were discovered in a batch
of 870 first-round applications. An additional 40 cases were discovered in
the applications submitted for the second-round, says Elise Anderson, a
spokeswoman for the school. The third round, which has an April 18 deadline,
typically gets another 500 to 700 applications, Anderson says. So it’s
possible that more plagiarized essays will be found in the third round.
The plagiarism was discovered through the use of a
service called Turnitin for Admissions, which scans admissions essays
looking for text that matches any documents in the Turnitin database. The
archive contains billions of pages of web content, books and journals, as
well as student work previously submitted to Turnitin for a plagiarism
check. Turnitin flags any matches it finds, but individual schools determine
if the similarity constitutes plagiarism. The service is now in use by
nearly 20 business schools, including those at
Penn State, Iowa State, Northeastern, and Wake Forest.
Anderson said the school does not currently notify
applicants that their essays will be checked through Turnitin. She said the
school is determining what, if any, disclosure should be made on its web
site.
Research done by Turnitin suggests that plagiarism
in admissions essays is vast. The company's study of 453,000 "personal
statements" received by more than 300 colleges and universities in an
unnamed English-speaking country found that "more that 70,000 applicants
that applied though this system did so with statements that may not have
been their own work." That's more than 15 percent.
For schools that do not currently vet application
essays with Turnitin, the apparent prevalence of plagiarized essays raises
an interesting question: Is it ethical for a school to turn a blind eye to
this and award degrees to people who got their foot in the door by lying?
And for those that do screen essays, there's
another issue. Many students use the same essays (with minor modifications)
at every school they apply to, but there's no mechanism in place to flag
plagiarized essays discovered by one school to all the other schools where
that essay may have been submitted. One way to do this would be for the
school discovering the plagiarism to notify the Graduate Management
Admission Council, and have GMAC send a notice to every school that received
the applicant's GMAT scores.
Continued in article
"Penn State Cracks Down on Plagiarism," by Allison Damast, Business
Week, February 3, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2011/bs2011022_942724.htm?link_position=link1
"Plagiarism, Profanity, Fraud, and Design,"
by Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/crosstalk-plagiarism-profanity-fraud-and-design/34119?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Plagiarism: A study of 24 million college papers by
Turnitin, which makes plagiarism-detection software, finds that
college students are
most likely to lift copy from Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and
Slideshare. The study counted all
suspiciously similar language and did not consider whether students
cited the sources they lifted from. Via the Scholarly Kitchen, where
Phil Davis
noted some of the study’s limitations.
Profanity: A Web site
promoting Oberlin College co-created by its social media
coordinator,
Why the F*** Should I Choose Oberlin?,
drew varied reactions and plenty of attention
last week. The site, which notes it is not officially affiliated
with Oberlin, collects profanity-laced quotes about why Oberlin is
great. Georgy Cohen
interviews the co-creator, Ma’ayan
Plaut, who says she has “tacit and unofficial approval” from her
boss. On Higher Ed Marketing, Andrew Careaga says his inner
15-year-old thought the site is brilliant, but his 51-year-old
“shook his jaded head.”
Fraud:
Educause offers advice on how colleges can
respond to a Dear Colleague letter from
the U.S. Department of Education that asks colleges to limit
student-aid fraud in online programs.
Design: Keith Hampson argues that good
design will play an increasingly important role
in the college student experience as college
move online. “Somehow, though, digital higher education—both its
software and content—has managed to remain untouched by good design.
Design is not even on the agenda,” he says.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education
controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"High-Tech Cheating Abounds, and Professors Bear Some Blame," by
Jeffrey Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/High-Tech-Cheating-on-Homew/64857/
Question
What if everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to failure?
"It’s Culture, Not Morality: What if
everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to failure?" by
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, February 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/02/03/myword
What if everything you learned about fighting plagiarism was doomed to
failure?Computer software, threats on the syllabus, pledges of zero
tolerance, honor
codes — what if all the popular strategies don’t much matter? And what if
all of that anger you feel — as you catch students clearly submitting work
they didn’t write — is clouding your judgment and making it more difficult
to promote academic integrity?
These are
some of the questions raised in
My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture,
in which Susan D. Blum, an
anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, considers
why students so frequently violate norms that seem clear and
just to their professors. The book, about to appear from
Cornell University Press, is sure to be controversial
because it challenges the strategies used by colleges and
professors nationwide. In many ways, Blum is arguing that
the current approach of higher education to plagiarism is a
shock and awe strategy — dazzle students with technology and
make them afraid, very afraid, of what could happen to them.
But since there
isn’t a Guantanamo Bay large enough for the population that
plagiarizes, Blum wants higher education to embrace more of
a hearts and minds strategy in which academics consider why
their students turn in papers as they do, and the logic
behind those choices.
The
book arrives at a time that many professors continue to
voice frustration over plagiarism. Academic blogs are full
of stories about attempting to deal with copying. Services
such as
Turnitin have grown in popularity
to the extent that it is processing more than 130,000 papers
a day, while
Blackboard has added plagiarism
detection features to its course management systems. At the
same time, however, particularly in the world of college
composition, there has been
some backlash against the law
enforcement approach, with professors saying that they fear
they are missing a chance to teach students about how to
write through too much emphasis on fear of detection.
Those who
want to understand the ideas in the book may want to note
the title; it’s no coincidence that Blum wrote about college
“culture,” and not “ethics” or “morality.” And while she did
use “plagiarism” in the title, she faults colleges and
professors for failing to distinguish between buying a paper
to submit as your own, submitting a paper containing
passages from many authors without appropriate credit, and
simply failing to learn how to cite materials. Treating
these violations of academic norms the same way is part of
the problem, she writes.
If you find
yourself thinking that Blum is advocating surrender, that’s
not correct. Her book doesn’t advocate waving a white flag,
but a new kind of campaign against plagiarism. And in an
interview, Blum said that she includes warnings against
plagiarism on her syllabuses, has devoted time trying to
track down evidence against a student she was convinced had
copied work, and has felt anger and betrayal at students who
turned in work that wasn’t original.
“That’s how
I felt when I first started looking into this topic,” she
said. “I was really hurt when I felt students didn’t show
respect for the assignment. I felt a tension between really
liking my students as individuals and that they didn’t take
academic work as seriously as I wanted them to.... I felt it
was a battle. It was ‘How can I make them care?’ “
Blum’s book
is based on her research on the way colleges try to prevent
plagiarism and the way students view college, knowledge and
the writing process. Many of the ideas come from the 234
undergraduates at Notre Dame who participated in in-depth
interviews. The students were given confidentiality and the
procedures for the interviews were approved by Notre Dame’s
institutional review board. While Blum makes clear where she
did her research, she calls the institution “Saints U.” in
the text, with the goal of having readers focus less on
Notre Dame and more on higher education generally.
While the
book doesn’t claim that Notre Dame students are broadly
representative of those in higher education, she suggests
that these students do give an accurate portrayal of
attitudes at competitive, residential colleges. Blum
originally planned a similar study at a less competitive
college, but didn’t have time to finish it. She said she
thinks there may be some differences in attitudes, as part
of the dynamic at elite institutions is a student
expectation about earning A’s and succeeding in everything —
an expectation that she said may not be present elsewhere.
In terms of
explaining student culture, Blum uses many of the student
interviews to show how education has become to many students
more an issue of credentialing and getting ahead than of any
more idealistic love of learning. She quotes one student who
admits that he sounds “awful,” in describing decidedly
unintellectual reasons for going to college and excelling
there. “I think that knowledge is important to me, and to
feel like I’m ahead of the game in a sense is important to
me. And to move on the next step, whatever it is .. is also
important.”
Students
looking for the “next step” may not care as much as they
should about actual learning, Blum suggests.
Then there
is the student concept — or lack thereof — of intellectual
property. She notes the way students routinely ignore
messages from colleges and threats of legal action to share
music online, in violation of business standards of
copyright. As with plagiarism, she notes, the student
generation has embraced an entirely different concept of
ownership, and students who would never shoplift feel no
hesitation about downloading music they haven’t purchased.
And she
notes how much students love to quote from pop culture or
other sources — feeling pride in working into conversation
quotes they never invented — in a way previous generations
wouldn’t have done.
“Student
norms contrast with official norms not just because of this
proliferation of quoting without attribution, but because
students question the very possibility of originality. They
often reveal profound insights into the nature of creation
and demonstrate a considered acceptance of sharing and
collaboration,” Blum writes. At the same time, she notes,
students are less likely than previous generation to
distinguish between formal and informal writing (think of
the importance, to students, of instant messages). And rules
about attribution are seen as silly.
Continued in article
"Far From Honorable," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed,
October 25, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/25/online-students-might-feel-less-accountable-honor-codes
Much of the urgency around creating a “sense of
community” in online courses springs from a desire to keep online students
from dropping out. But a recent paper suggests that strengthening a sense of
social belonging among online students might help universities fight another
problem: cheating.
In a series of experiments, researchers at Ohio
University found that students in fully online psychology courses who signed
an honor code promising not to cheat broke that pledge at a significantly
higher rate than did students in a “blended” course that took place
primarily in a classroom.
“The more distant students are, the more
disconnected they feel, and the more likely it is that they’ll rationalize
cheating,” Frank M. LoSchiavo, one of the authors, conjectured in an
interview with Inside Higher Ed.
While acknowledging the limitations inherent to a
study with such a narrow sample, and the fact that motivations are
particularly hard to pin down when it comes to cheating, LoSchiavo and Mark
A. Shatz, both psychology professors at Ohio University's Zanesville campus,
said their findings may indicate that meeting face-to-face with peers and
professors confers a stronger sense of accountability among students. “Honor
codes,” LoSchiavo said, “are more effective when there are [strong] social
connections.”
Honor codes are not, of course, the only method of
deterring cheating in online courses. The proliferation of online programs
has given rise to a
cottage industry of
remote proctoring technology, including one product that takes periodic
fingerprint readings while monitoring a student’s test-taking environment
with a 360-degree camera. (A 2010 survey by the Campus Computing Project
suggests that a minority of institutions authenticate the identities of
online students as a rule.)
But LoSchiavo said that he and Shatz were more
interested in finding out whether honor codes held any sway online. If so,
then online instructors might add pledges to their arsenal of anti-cheating
tools, LoSchiavo said. If not, it provides yet an intriguing contribution to
the discussion about student engagement and “perceived social distance” in
the online environment.
They experimented with the effectiveness of honor
codes in three introductory psychology courses at Ohio University. The first
course had 40 students and was completely online. These students, like those
in subsequent trials, were a mix of traditional-age and adult students,
mostly from regional campuses in the Ohio University system. There was no
honor code. Over the course of the term, the students took 14
multiple-choice quizzes with no proctoring of any kind. At the end of the
term, 73 percent of the students admitted to cheating on at least one of
them.
The second trial involved another fully online
introductory course in the same subject. LoSchiavo and Shatz divided the
class evenly into two groups of 42 students, and imposed an honor code --
posted online with the other course materials -- to one group but not the
other. The students “digitally signed the code during the first week of the
term, prior to completing any assignments.” The definition of cheating was
the same as in the first trial: no notes, no textbooks, no Internet, no
family or friends. There was no significant difference in the self-reported
cheating between the two groups.
In a third trial, the professors repeated the
experiment with 165 undergraduates in a “blended” course, where only 20
percent of the course was administered online and 80 percent in a
traditional classroom setting. Again, they split the students into two
groups: one in which they were asked to sign an honor code, and another in
which they were not.
This time, when LoSchiavo and Shatz surveyed the
students at the end of the term, there was a significant difference:
Students who promised not to cheat were about 25 percent less likely to
cheat than were those who made no such promise. Among the students who had
not signed the code, 82 percent admitted to cheating.
LoSchiavo concedes that this study offers no
definitive answers on the question of whether students are more likely to
cheat in fully online courses. Cheating is more often than not a crime of
opportunity, and containing integrity violations probably has much more to
do with designing a system that limits the opportunities to cheat and gives
relatively little weight to those assignments for which cheating is hardest
to police.
“The bottom line is that if there are
opportunities, students will cheat,” he said. “And the more opportunities
they have, the more cheating there will be, and it is incumbent upon
professors to put in a system that, when it’s important, cheating will be
contained.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think universities like Trinity University that expanded their honor codes to
include student courts are generally happy with the operations of those honor
codes. However, Trinity has only full time students and no distance education
courses.
One thing that I hated giving up was grading control. For most of my teaching
career I gave F grades to students who seriously cheated in my courses. Under
the revised Trinity Honor Code, instructors can no longer control the granting
of F grades for cheating.
When I was a student at Stanford the Honor Code included a pledge to report
cheating of other students. I think most universities have watered down this
aspect of their honor codes because, in this greatly increased era of
litigation, student whistle blowers can be sued big time. Universities may
continue to encourage such whistle blowing, but they no longer make students
sign pledges that on their honor they will be whistleblowers if they do not want
to bear the risk of litigation by students they report.
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm
Cheating Partly Attributed to the Down Economy’s Need for Higher Grades
(especially in engineering and computer science)
"Stanford finds cheating — especially among computer science students — on
the rise," by Lisa M. Krieger, San Jose Mercury News, February 7,
2010 ---
http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_14351156?nclick_check=1
Allegations of cheating
at Stanford University have more than doubled in the past decade, with the
largest number of violations involving computer science students.
In 10 years, the number
of cases investigated by the university's Judicial Panel has climbed from 52 to
123.
Stanford, one of only 100
U.S. campuses with an "honor code," established its code in 1921 to uphold
academic integrity by prohibiting plagiarism, copying work and getting outside
help. Penalties for violations include denied credit for a class, a rejected
thesis or a one-quarter suspension from the university. Students also pledge to
report cheaters and do honest work without being policed.
"There's been a very
significant increase," although the vast majority of the school's 19,000
students are honest, said Chris Griffith, chief of the Judicial Panel. More men
are reported than women, and more undergraduates than graduates.
"Some of it is due to an
increase in dishonesty," she said, "while some is due to an increase in
reporting by faculty."
The findings came from
new data presented by Griffith at a meeting of Stanford faculty at the academic
senate. Although computer science students represent 6.5 percent of Stanford's
student body, last year those students accounted for 23 percent of the
university's honor code violators.
"My feeling is that the
most important factor is the high frustration levels that typically go along
with trying to get a program
to run," said computer
science professor Eric Roberts, who has studied the problem of academic
cheating. He noted that most violations involve homework assignments rather than
exams.
"The computer is an
unforgiving arbiter of correctness," he said. "Imagine what would happen if
every time you submitted a paper for an English course, it came back with a red
circle around the first syntactic error, along with a notation saying: 'No
credit — resubmit.' After a dozen attempts all meeting the same fate, the
temptation to copy a paper you knew would pass might get pretty high. That
situation is analogous to what happens in computing courses."
A common computer science
violation occurs when students work as a team to complete an assignment, even
though the rules stipulate that work must be done individually.
Also common: students
obtaining someone else's code and submitting that version, after making simple
edits to disguise the work. They find copies by rooting through discarded
program listings taken from a recycling bin, or checking machines in public
clusters to see whether previous students left solutions lying around.
"People know exactly what
they're doing," Roberts said. "One student took code out of the 'recycle bin' of
a laptop, changed the name of the original author and used it in six of the
seven files that were submitted."
As for the problem of
cheating, Stanford is by no means alone. Roberts noted that the largest cheating
episode in the history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology took place
in a 1991 course titled "Introduction to Computers and Problem Solving," when 73
of 239 students were disciplined for "excessive collaboration."
Today, to reveal
similarities in code, Stanford computer professors use a program called MOSS
(Measure Of Software Similarity). That software is boosting the number of
discovered violations.
Other violations,
although fewer, were found in the departments of biology and Introduction to the
Humanities. Art history had only one violation.
Universitywide, 43
percent of violations at Stanford involved "unpermitted collaboration," where
students submit work that was not done independently. About 31 percent involved
plagiarism, using Internet-based work that was not cited. Another 11 percent
involved copying work; 5 percent, receiving outside help; 5 percent,
representing others' work as their own and 5 percent, assorted violations.
The Judicial Panel's
report also noted that cheating was uncommon in professional schools, such as
law and medicine.
"When you're in
professional school at Stanford, it is foolish to cheat. If you pass, there will
be good job opportunities," said law student Eric Osborne.
"That is not as true for
undergraduates in the engineering and computer science fields," said Osborne,
"where in this economy, there is a lot of drive to get into grad school."
Jensen Comment
I would also think that there is motivation to cheat in MBA programs and law
schools where the job markets are bleak.
Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral
Deal: Yeah Right!
Although I admire Professor Fish, I don't quite share his views on plagiarism.
And even if you share his views, this may not protect you or your students from
the thunderbolts of wrath that sometimes strike plagiarists --- such
thunderbolts as loss of job, loss of a degree (yes your prized college degree
can be withdrawn), your publications may be withdrawn, you can be sued for your
life savings, and you may face a lifetime of disgrace.
The scarlet letter "P" around your neck is serious business and becomes even
worse with a record of addiction. Of course there are examples of plagiarists
who are highly regarded in spite of their plagiarism, including Martin Luther
King, Jr. and Vladimir Putin ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities
"Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal," by Stanley Fish, The New York
Times, August 9, 2010 ---
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/09/plagiarism-is-not-a-big-moral-deal/?scp=1&sq=Plagiarism&st=cse
During my tenure as the dean of a college, I
determined that an underperforming program should be closed. My wife asked
me if I had ever set foot on the premises, and when I answered “no,” she
said that I really should do that before wielding the axe.
And so I did, in the company of my senior associate
dean. We toured the offices and spoke to students and staff. In the course
of a conversation, one of the program’s co-directors pressed on me his
latest book. I opened it to the concluding chapter, read the first two
pages, and remarked to my associate dean, “This is really good.”
But on the way back to the administration building,
I suddenly flashed on the pages I admired and began to suspect that the
reason I liked them so much was that I had written them. And sure enough,
when I got back to my office and pulled one of my books off the shelf, there
the pages were, practically word for word. I telephoned the co-director, and
told him that I had been looking at his book, and wanted to talk about it.
He replied eagerly that he would come right over, but when he came in I
pointed him to the two books — his and mine — set out next to each other
with the relevant passages outlined by a marker.
He turned white and said that he and his co-author
had divided the responsibilities for the book’s chapters and that he had not
written (perhaps “written” should be in quotes) this one. I contacted the
co-author and he wrote back to me something about graduate student
researchers who had given him material that was not properly identified. I
made a few half-hearted efforts to contact the book’s publisher, but I
didn’t persist and I pretty much forgot about it, although the memory
returns whenever I read yet another piece (like one that appeared recently
in The Times) about
the ubiquity of plagiarism, the failure of
students to understand what it is, the suspicion that they know what it is
but don’t care, and the outdatedness of notions like originality and single
authorship on which the intelligibility of plagiarism as a concept depends.
Whenever it comes up plagiarism is a hot button
topic and essays about it tend to be philosophically and morally inflated.
But there are really only two points to make. (1) Plagiarism is a learned
sin. (2) Plagiarism is not a philosophical issue.
Of course every sin is learned. Very young children
do not distinguish between themselves and the world; they assume that
everything belongs to them; only in time and through the conditioning of
experience do they learn the distinction between mine and thine and so come
to acquire the concept of stealing. The concept of plagiarism, however, is
learned in more specialized contexts of practice entered into only by a few;
it’s hard to get from the notion that you shouldn’t appropriate your
neighbor’s car to the notion that you should not repeat his words without
citing him.
The rule that you not use words that were first
uttered or written by another without due attribution is less like the rule
against stealing, which is at least culturally universal, than it is like
the rules of golf. I choose golf because its rules are so much more severe
and therefore so much odder than the rules of other sports. In baseball you
can (and should) steal bases and hide the ball. In football you can (and
should) fake a pass or throw your opponent to the ground. In basketball you
will be praised for obstructing an opposing player’s view of the court by
waving your hands in front of his face. In hockey … well let’s not go there.
But in golf, if you so much as move the ball accidentally while breathing on
it far away from anyone who might have seen what you did, you must
immediately report yourself and incur the penalty. (Think of what would
happen to the base-runner called safe at home-plate who said to the umpire,
“Excuse me, sir, but although you missed it, I failed to touch third base.”)
Golf’s rules have been called arcane and it is not
unusual to see play stopped while a P.G.A. official arrives with rule book
in hand and pronounces in the manner of an I.R.S. official. Both fans and
players are aware of how peculiar and “in-house” the rules are; knowledge of
them is what links the members of a small community, and those outside the
community (most people in the world) can be excused if they just don’t see
what the fuss is about.
Plagiarism is like that; it’s an insider’s
obsession. If you’re a professional journalist, or an academic historian, or
a philosopher, or a social scientist or a scientist, the game you play for a
living is underwritten by the assumed value of originality and failure
properly to credit the work of others is a big and obvious no-no. But if
you’re a musician or a novelist, the boundary lines are less clear (although
there certainly are some) and if you’re a politician it may not occur to
you, as it did not at one time to Joe Biden, that you’re doing anything
wrong when you appropriate the speech of a revered statesman.
And if you’re a student, plagiarism will seem to be
an annoying guild imposition without a persuasive rationale (who cares?);
for students, learning the rules of plagiarism is worse than learning the
irregular conjugations of a foreign language. It takes years, and while a
knowledge of irregular verbs might conceivably come in handy if you travel,
knowledge of what is and is not plagiarism in this or that professional
practice is not something that will be of very much use to you unless you
end up becoming a member of the profession yourself. It follows that
students who never quite get the concept right are by and large not
committing a crime; they are just failing to become acclimated to the
conventions of the little insular world they have, often through no choice
of their own, wandered into. It’s no big moral deal; which doesn’t mean, I
hasten to add, that plagiarism shouldn’t be punished — if you’re in our
house, you’ve got to play by our rules — just that what you’re punishing is
a breach of disciplinary decorum, not a breach of the moral universe.
Now if plagiarism is an idea that makes sense only
in the precincts of certain specialized practices and is not a normative
philosophical notion, inquiries into its philosophical underpinnings are of
no practical interest or import. In recent years there have been a number of
assaults on the notion of originality, issuing from fields as diverse as
literary theory, history, cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology,
Internet studies. Single authorship, we have been told, is a recent
invention of a bourgeois culture obsessed with individualism, individual
rights and the myth of progress. All texts are palimpsests of earlier texts;
there’s been nothing new under the sun since Plato and Aristotle and they
weren’t new either; everything belongs to everybody. In earlier periods
works of art were produced in workshops by teams; the master artisan may
have signed them, but they were communal products. In some cultures, even
contemporary ones, the imitation of standard models is valued more than work
that sets out to be path-breaking. (This was one of the positions in the
famous quarrel between the ancients and the moderns in England and France in
the 17th and 18th centuries.)
Arguments like these (which I am reporting, not
endorsing) have been so successful in academic circles that the very word
“originality” often appears in quotation marks, and it has seemed to many
that there is a direct path from this line of reasoning to the conclusion
that plagiarism is an incoherent, even impossible, concept and that a writer
or artist accused of plagiarism is being faulted for doing something that
cannot be avoided. R.M. Howard makes the point succinctly “If there is no
originality and no literary property, there is no basis for the notion of
plagiarism” (“College English,” 1995).
That might be true or at least plausible if, in
order to have a basis, plagiarism would have to stand on some philosophical
ground. But the ground plagiarism stands on is more mundane and firm; it is
the ground of disciplinary practices and of the histories that have
conferred on those practices a strong, even undoubted (though revisable)
sense of what kind of work can be appropriately done and what kind of
behavior cannot be tolerated. If it is wrong to plagiarize in some context
of practice, it is not because the idea of originality has been affirmed by
deep philosophical reasoning, but because the ensemble of activities that
take place in the practice would be unintelligible if the possibility of
being original were not presupposed.
And if there should emerge a powerful philosophical
argument saying there’s no such thing as originality, its emergence needn’t
alter or even bother for a second a practice that can only get started if
originality is assumed as a baseline. It may be (to offer another example),
as I have argued elsewhere, that there’s no such thing as free speech, but
if you want to have a free speech regime because you believe that it is
essential to the maintenance of democracy, just forget what Stanley Fish
said — after all it’s just a theoretical argument — and get down to it as
lawyers and judges in fact do all the time without the benefit or hindrance
of any metaphysical rap. Everyday disciplinary practices do not rest on a
foundation of philosophy or theory; they rest on a foundation of themselves;
no theory or philosophy can either prop them up or topple them. As long as
the practice is ongoing and flourishing its conventions will command respect
and allegiance and flouting them will have negative consequences.
This brings me back to the (true) story I began
with. Whether there is something called originality or not, the two scholars
who began their concluding chapter by reproducing two of my pages are
professionally culpable. They took something from me without asking and
without acknowledgment, and they profited — if only in the currency of
academic reputation — from work that I had done and signed. That’s the
bottom line and no fancy philosophical argument can erase it.
Jensen Comment
The really sad fact about professors who plagiarize or otherwise cheat is that
their employers may be tougher on student plagiarists than on faculty
plagiarists ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
"Our most original compositions are composed exclusively of expressions
derived from others."
When
Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism after the publication of her
autobiography,
The Story of My Life (public
library), Mark Twain sent her
a note of solidarity and support, assuring her that "substantially
all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a
million outside sources." Shortly thereafter, Alexander Graham
Bell – father of the telephone – wrote Annie Sullivan, Keller's
teacher, a
letter with a similar sentiment. Bell argued that it is "difficult
for us to trace the origin of our expressions" and "we are all of
us … unconscious plagiarists, especially in childhood" – a notion
neurologist Oliver Sacks has affirmed more than a century later with his
recent insights on
memory and plagiarism, and one the poet Kenneth Goldsmith has
institutionalized with his
class on "uncreative writing."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think in the case of students, most plagiarism investigations center around
verbatim or nearly-verbatim passages without attribution. Sometimes, as in the
case of dissertation research, focus may be placed upon suspected and non-cited
earlier ideas and possibly mathematical proofs that are sometimes relatively
easy to reformulate in slightly different ways.
The non-cited verbatim plagiarisms of other writers and composers of course
are much more difficult to justify on ethical or legal grounds. So are the
reformulated plagiarisms of ideas, although these are much more difficult to
detect and prosecute in court.
"Admissions Weakness Exposed at Oxford University in the United Kingdom,"
Inside Higher Ed, February 8, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/02/08/qt#219531
The case of a first-year
student at the University of Oxford, apparently admitted courtesy of a high
school and testing record he didn't earn, has led to increased scrutiny of the
admissions system there,
Times Higher Education reported. The student
in question reported 10 A-grade A-level exams, a notable accomplishment in the
British system -- except that it was false. A teacher's recommendation was also
forged. The Times Higher reported that the student, who has been
suspended, was admitted through a program for applicants who are not sponsored
by schools, and that questions have been raised by critics about whether such
applicants' materials receive enough scrutiny.
June 12, 2010 message from
Keith Weidkamp
From:
Keith Weidkamp [mailto:weidkamp@surewest.net]
Sent: Saturday, June 12, 2010 7:26 PM
To: Jensen, Robert
Subject:
Hello Professor Jensen
I have followed ACEM and the many
daily contributions for over two years. On two occasions I have commented
back to individual professors. My name is Keith Weidkamp and I am a retired
Professor of Accounting at Sierra College in Rocklin California. For over
20 years I have worked with Professor Leland Mansuetti, and for the past
five years also with Professor Perry Edwards, developing, testing, and also
publishing web-based practice sets, homework problems, study and review
packets for Principles, Financial, Managerial, and Intermediate Accounting.
We have with limited advertising and a few conference presentations added
many schools to our adoption list. Texas A & M, Clemson, Trinity, Chicago,
Mary Harden Baylor, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and many other smaller colleges
and universities currently use one or more of our software products
As recently as yesterday and
quite often over the last few months there have been comments and
information regarding cheating and plagiarism. Over the past two
years we have been working on and have developed and tested two web-based
systems for Accounting practice sets and for Accounting homework that
virtually eliminates the copying of work, and answers to questions and
project examinations. In our first presentation a month ago at the
National TACTYC Convention in Phoenix, as the word got out regarding our new
algorithmic products and software, we had over 50 Four-year and Two-year
schools, from across the country ask for more information and an on-line
demonstration.
Our new web-based software has
added new opportunity to control a problem that has been an unfortunate
issue to deal with for many years. While
realizing that AECM is not a place to advertise, since the focus of AECM is
Accounting Education and Multi-Media, I am asking you what you would
recommend I do to get this information out to our large group professors as
an informational item.
Attached you will find two
information documents that outline our two new Algorithmic products. We
have now two algorithmic practice sets and a full set of algorithmic topical
problems (25 topics). Both of these products have the same key features.
On all practice sets each
student starts with a different set of beginning balances. A unique set of
check figures is available for each student user. Answers to key questions
at the mid-point and at the end of the project, are different for each
student. With a single click an Instructor can view the work file of any
student. With two clicks an instructor can print a copy of the student's
graded examination showing their answers and the correct answers for that
student.
On the Accounting Coach
homework and/or study software, there are 25 topics for a student to choose
from. Students are provided unlimited practice and Teacher Help screens for
every topic and sub-topic. Every homework assignment ends with a short 5-8
minute algorithmic examination. This exam is scored and the grade
automatically entered into the instructor grade book. A well-prepared
student can complete a topic assignment in 15-20 minutes. A student needing
more assistance can continue the algorithmic practice and retake the
algorithmic examination as many times as necessary to achieve a satisfactory
score.
Special Features of this
Software:
1. Cheating and copying
others work is eliminated.
2. All student work is
automatically graded and the score recorded into the instructor
grade book.
3. Each practice set and
problem has unlimited opportunity for practice, assistance,
reinforcement and
learning.
4. Student clerical time as
well as homework and practice time is significantly
reduced.
5. Instructor grading and
recording time is almost completely eliminated.
6. Direct on-line support is
provided from the Professor Authors!
The three authors of this
software have a combined classroom experience of over 75 years. They use
this software daily in their classes. Over 500 students use this software
each semester at their school.
The new web-based software,
with all of the special improvements not possible in a CD version, has
eliminated all publishing, shipping, and markup costs. All products can be
purchased via PayPal for just $19.95 per student copy.
June 13, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Keith,
I am forwarding your
message to the AECM, because I think what you’ve accomplished is probably
valuable to some instructors although not to the extent that I buy into your
claim that “cheating and copying others’ work is eliminated.”
Your pedagogy is very
limited in that it does not allow for creative solutions that differ from
your templates. This is why some instructors assign term papers rather than
practice sets. But term papers both increase and decrease opportunities to
cheat.
And you’ve not eliminated
advanced forms of cheating.
For one thing, students
have very clever ways of communicating with one another and with answer
files ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#NewKindOfCheating
In very large classes, it
is often possible for surrogate students to pretend to be somebody else.
Adopters of Your
Practice Sets May Have a False Sense of Security
You’re assuming that clever students
(possibly advanced students) will not write answer templates such as Excel
workbooks that are archived (e.g., in a fraternity’s database). Those
templates may be just as efficient in finding solutions as your own answer
templates that you use for grading purposes.
It has long been a
practice of case-method teachers to recycle cases with changed numbers and
sometimes even changed contexts and assumptions. However, students still
find value added in having archives of the solutions answers of former
versions of a case. This is one of the things that makes case method
teaching very frustrating. It’s almost imperative to continually use new
cases rather than recycled cases.
Seeking Creative
Solutions Both Increases and Decreases Opportunities to Cheat
I defy anybody or any software from
detecting all forms of plagiarism. Out of trillions upon trillions of pages
of writings in history, a student can simply type in a sentence or a
paragraph or an entire page of writing that has a 99% probability of being
detected.
Unless somebody, like
Tournitin, archives student term papers and problem solutions, plagiarism
detection has more than a 99% chance of failing. For example, if a student
writes an unpublished essay at Florida International that is never archived
anywhere except in one professor’s brain, I defy you to detect its
plagiarism in unpublished term papers elsewhere in the world.
Turnitin and other
plagiarism services attempt to archive unpublished writings so that such
works are not so easily plagiarized ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Detection
Even Turnitin cannot
archive more than a miniscule fraction of writings that have never been
digitized.
The Best Way to Prevent
Cheating
The real trick for professors is to
assign unique projects where finding works or people to plagiarize will be
an education in and of itself. For example, if I assign a project on
accounting for contango swaps in Iceland I’ve eliminated 99.99999999999% of
writings that can be safely plagiarized in a student term project at the
University of Southern California. And I defy you to find a term paper
writing service that will take this project on at reasonable prices. Of
course there is an epsilon chance of finding something or somebody to
plagiarize, but like I said doing this may be an education in and of itself.
And I think cheating on this project will be more difficult than writing an
Excel workbook for solution templates to your practice cses.
Bob Jensen
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Where does responsibility for plagiarism
stop?
Is a sole author responsible for the plagiarism of assistants?
Are all co-authors responsible for the plagiarism of one of the co-authors?
Is a student responsible for plagiarism caused by the student's hired assistant?
(one of Bob Jensen's former students offered this line of defense)
Including Plagiarism
"Ward Churchill Loses Again," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
September 11, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/11/colorado-supreme-court-rejects-ward-churchills-appeal
The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday rejected an
appeal in which Ward Churchill sought to get back his job as a tenured
professor of ethnic studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
The court's
50-page decision focused on whether the University
of Colorado had acted in a "quasi-judicial" fashion when it reviewed charges
of research misconduct against Churchill. The state's highest court ruled
that the university did act in that way, and so was entitled to immunity
from being sued, much as judges are immune from being sued for their
decisions. The university's Board of Regents
fired Churchill in 2007, based on the findings of a faculty panel,
which found that he had engaged in repeated instances of research misconduct
-- including
plagiarism, fabrication and
falsification.
Churchill has maintained from the start that the
investigation and his dismissal were motivated by outrage over his political
views, and that the university had violated his First Amendment rights and
taken away his academic freedom. The Colorado Supreme Court's ruling didn't
weigh these claims directly, but several times in the opinion cited evidence
that the university's procedures gave Churchill important due process rights
and reflected the legitimate needs of a university to assure professional
conduct by its faculty members.
As the Churchill case has dragged on, the various
rulings have had an impact beyond the plaintiff. In fact, several college
associations had urged the Colorado Supreme Court to rule as it did, arguing
that failure to respect the university's quasi-judicial role would open up
many other universities to lawsuits by anyone found to have engaged in
research misconduct.
But some civil liberties and faculty groups --
including the Colorado chapter of the American Association of University
Professors -- backed Churchill. They argued that affirming the university's
quasi-judicial status would effectively enable public universities to fire
controversial professors without appropriate opportunity for them to bring
grievances to the courts. Both the college groups and the faculty
associations argued in their briefs to the court that academic freedom was
at stake in the case, although they argued for opposite outcomes.
In Monday's ruling, the Colorado Supreme Court
noted the lengthy process that the university used to investigate the
allegations against Churchill and to determine that dismissal was
appropriate. "The proceedings against Churchill took more than two years and
included five separate opportunities for Churchill to present witnesses,
cross-examine adverse witnesses, and argue his positions," the Supreme Court
opinion said. "It possessed the characteristics of an adversary proceeding
and was functionally comparable to a judicial proceeding." For this reason,
the justices ruled, the university was acting sufficiently closely to the
judicial function of government that it was immune from being sued.
The ruling cited a series of procedural and
fairness tests in case law to determine whether the Board of Regents acted
in a judicial manner, and said that the governing board met all the relevant
tests. While that finding was the crucial one, various parts of the decision
also suggested that the Supreme Court viewed the findings against Churchill
to be reasonable ones. For instance, the Supreme Court said that the trial
judge in the case -- who rejected Churchill's request for reinstatement --
had acted on the basis of "credible evidence" about Churchill's conduct.
An Inflammatory Essay and Its Aftermath
The University of Colorado hired Churchill in 1991,
and promoted him to full professor in 1997. He was active in Native American
political movements, and gave lectures on college campuses nationwide --
regularly criticizing U.S. policies but doing so largely without attention
in the mainstream press.
Then early in 2005, he became a flashpoint in the
culture wars. He had been invited to give a talk at Hamilton College -- the
kind of speaking invitation Churchill had accepted for years. Hamilton
professors unhappy about the invitation circulated some of his writings,
including the now-notorious
"little Eichmanns" speech in which he derided the
people killed at the World Trade Center on September 11.
The attention led both to calls for Colorado to
fire him and to reports of incidents of research misconduct. The university
said it couldn't fire him for the essay, but could investigate the
allegations -- and that started the process that was reviewed by the
Colorado Supreme Court.
David A. Lane, Churchill's lawyer, issued a
statement blasting the decision and vowing an appeal to the U.S. Supreme
Court.
Continued in article
Ward Churchill, who is
suing the University of Colorado at Boulder to get his job back, admitted on
Tuesday that portions of a book he edited and wrote parts of were plagiarized,
but he said he wasn't responsible for doing so,
9 News reported. "Plagiarism occurred," Churchill said
in reference to the writings. But Churchill (who prefers to be called "Doctor"
Churchill) said that others who were involved in the project did the
plagiarizing and that he was unaware of it. Churchill has generally not
admitted that any plagiarism occurred in his work, arguing that minor errors
have been stretched by the university to fire him for his controversial
political views. University of Colorado officials also asked Churchill on
Tuesday why he had indicated that he wanted to be called "Dr. Churchill" when he
has only a master's degree. Churchill responded that he has an honorary
doctorate and asked the lawyer, "You wish to dishonor it?"
The
Denver Post noted that while there were some sharp
exchanges in the testimony, much of it was detailed discussion of sources and
the details of scholarly writing, and that the judge had to call a recess at one
point when a juror appeared to be having difficulty staying awake.
"Churchill: 'Plagiarism Occurred' (But He Didn't Do It)
Jensen Comment
If Doctor Churchill pursues this babe-in-the woods line of defense it seems to
me he should name the plagiarists who led him on.
One of the most liberal academic associations is
the highly liberal Modern Language Association. However, even the MLA could not
muster up a vote critical of the firing of Ward Churchill by the University of
Colorado.
While material distributed by those seeking to condemn
Churchill’s firing portrayed him favorably, and as a victim of the right wing,
some of those who criticized the pro-Churchill effort at the meeting are
long-time experts in Native American studies and decidedly not conservative.
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, December 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/mla
Question
What does a leading Native American scholar think of Ward
Churchill's scholarship and integrity?
And this
was the judgment of Churchill's academic peers. UCLA professor
Russell Thornton, a Cherokee tribe member whose work was
misrepresented by Churchill, said "I don't see how the
University of Colorado can keep him with a straight face,"
calling his material on smallpox a "fabrication" of history, and
accusing him of "gross, gross scholarly misconduct." Real
American Indian history, he told the Rocky Mountain News, is
vitally important, not "a bunch of B.S. that someone made up."
R.G. Robertson, author of Rotting Face: Smallpox and the
American Indian and another scholar who has accused Churchill of
misrepresenting his work, says that he's "happy that [he was
fired], that he's been found out, and by his peers—meaning other
university people—and been called what he is, a plagiarizer and
a liar." Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar
University who has also investigated Churchill's smallpox
research, said his work on the subject is "fabricated almost
entirely from scratch."
Michael C. Moynihan, "Ward of the State: Why the
state of Colorado was right to sack Ward Churchill," Reason
Magazine, August 1, 2007 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/121682.html
A huge factor in the granting of tenure to Ward
Churchill was purportedly his affirmative action claim of being Native American.
Bob Jensen's threads on Doctor Churchill, the "Cherokee Wannabe" who most likely
does not have drop of Native American blood, are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
"Ward Churchill Will Get Another Day in Court," Inside Higher Ed,
June 4, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/06/04/ward-churchill-will-get-another-day-court
Jensen Comment
The outcome of this appeal could have wide-ranging implications in terms of a
college's authority to terminate a plagiarizing tenured faculty member. I hope
that the University of Colorado appeals this to the U.S. Supreme Court if the
Colorado Supreme Court rules in favor of Churchill.
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Bob Jensen's threads on Ward Churchill are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
Cheating Issues in the Movie Lady Bird: Christine's Repeated
Academic Cheating is Not Trivial and She Knows it ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/em-Lady-Bird-em-s/242392?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=07abeb72b8cf4e8b91a08feffa6ae104&elq=0515db7ba933405d9a0b43dbf66fd755&elqaid=17702&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=7796
When I went to see Lady Bird I fully expected to enjoy it. I knew
people who had and it was the sort of film, by description, I knew I would
like. I did not expect to see a movie that presented academic dishonesty as
a forgettable, perhaps even laudable, act.
To be clear, I don’t expect all good films to have a moral compass or
message. I won’t be flogging a commentary decrying the lack of just deserts
in A Clockwork Orange, or complaining that the Fast and Furious
franchise encourages casual misuse of resources.
But Lady Bird is not an amoral film, nor is it a live-action cartoon,
fable, or fairy tale. It’s a film praised for its realism, and one that
repeatedly states its moral beliefs about interpersonal responsibility —
loudly and clearly. Many characters — including Christine, the willful,
complex, and lovable protagonist — commit numerous transgressions, all of
which are judged and/or forgiven over the course of the movie, with one
notable exception. Consider:
-
Christine
lies about her background to make herself feel less insecure, but is
found out and socially punished.
-
Her gay
boyfriend cheats on her, but she shows her good ethics by not taking
vengeance and outing him.
-
Another
boyfriend lies to her, but we are allowed to safely judge him as a jerk,
and Christine is hurt but righteously breaks up with him.
-
She
"decorates" a nun’s car as a prank, and lies about it and is absolved by
the amused, understanding nun.
-
She
cold-shoulders her best friend to improve her social standing with a
rich girl, but realizes this is wrong, regrets it, and is forgiven.
-
Christine
is cruel to her mother but ultimately grasps her mother’s limitations,
and feels remorse for lying to her and judging her harshly.
The film exhibits one example after another of interpersonal offenses and
offers retributions or resolutions for each —
except when it comes to academic cheating.
And Christine cheats. Quite deliberately. She destroys her math records and
then lies about her grades to improve her standing. Then she cheats on an
exam to continue improving her grade. And it is clear that she is concerned
about grades, anxious to get into a good college, and understands that
grades matter. Several scenes show her discussing grades, whether she can
get into the college she wants, and so on.
Does being sweet and funny and interesting make cheating OK? Is that what we
as faculty members should tell our students?
In short, the cheating is not a trivial act, and she knows it. Yet there is
not a single moment in the film in which Christine acknowledges even to
herself that it is wrong, or a moment in which she experiences any negative
consequence that would suggest that academic dishonesty is, in fact, wrong.
At the end of the movie, she is off to her new life at an exclusive East
Coast college, which she has gotten into by cheating, and it seems the new
life will give her great insight into herself and her relationship with her
mother. So, in fact: Yay cheating! The end.
As an instructor I’m wondering what to say to my students about cheating
after seeing this movie.
Some threads in the film seem to suggest that the cheating is justified:
We’re shown that Christine is talented and unique, desperate to escape her
mother, and that she lacks resources others have. Her rich friend, after
discovering that Christine has lied about her background, says she can’t
imagine having to do that. The implication that rich people don’t have to
lie — but the rest of us might — is clear. There is a suggestion that her
older adopted brother got into Berkeley because he was a minority student,
so as a white person Christine lacks that advantage. She has needs but not
resources, so cheating is a legitimate response.
Or maybe the cheating is excusable because it demonstrates Christine’s
ambitiousness. Her peers are content to stay in Sacramento and go to
community college, or nearby universities. She wants more from life. She’s
willing to go to the wall — i.e., cheat — to get it. So we should respect
that. Which doesn’t sound at all like any politicians currently in office.
Perhaps she doesn’t know any better. Which is plausible … I guess? But
there’s no suggestion that Christine should have known better, and no
indication whatsoever that she has actually done something wrong by
cheating.
Maybe the film’s failure to deal with her academic dishonesty is a statement
about its very seriousness: It is such a violation that it can’t be
rectified. Certainly there is no easy or subtle cinematic method to resolve
it and still have Christine experience her happy ending at the college of
her choice. A more thoughtful approach would have allowed the viewer to
understand that cheating — the one act in the film that dramatically changes
Christine’s life — wasn’t beyond judgment in this otherwise quite morally
conventional film.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on academic cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Socratic Method ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_method
How should teaching change when assuming some students in class, but not
all students, have access to prior semester course notes and class discussion
solutions?
One way teachers should adjust their teaching is to be aware that student
notes from prior terms are selectively available to current students in a class.
To some extent this has always been true for students in fraternities and
sororities that kept files on course notes and examinations. But now this is
increasingly a problem for teachers trying to keep courses fair for all enrolled
students whether or not they have access to notes and examinations from prior
terms of a course.
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Testbanks
This is now an increasing problem since students may be able to buy course
notes, textbook solutions manuals, and publisher test banks online. For exampel,
course notes may now be purchased from
https://studysoup.com/
Thank you David Perkins for the heads up.
I find zero results thus far for smaller colleges and universities, but
the mega universities are covered such as the University of Texas, but to date
UT only has 30 courses with notes for sale. Hence, this site is not yet such a
big deal, but it could grow quickly.
At the moment free files for selected students on a particular campus are more
of a problem such as fraternity files. Think of how this can affect student
performance grading. Many instructors use the Socratic Method in a way where
classroom performances of students can affect grades. If the instructor pretty
much teaches the Socratic Method course the same way each semester students
having access to course notes from prior semesters can take competitive
advantage over students in the class who did not see course notes of prior
semester.
This is especially problematic when teaching cases like Harvard Business School
cases. Harvard's instructors pretty much limit the use of a case to one semester
or take great pains to disguise cases used in prior semesters.
In addition, instructors should probably assume that some students in a class
have purchased and possibly shared textbook end-of-chapter solutions manuals and
test banks that are now frequently available from eBay and other online vendors.
Teaching a course each semester on automatic pilot with the same course content
can be a disaster in terms of fairness to all students in a class.
"From Law School to Business School — evolution of the case method,"
Harvard Gazette, April 3, 2008
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2008/04/from-law-school-to-business-school-%E2%80%94-evolution-of-the-case-method/
On a recent Wednesday morning, 90 high achievers
from around the world prepared to get down to cases.
Their professor buzzed through the classroom like a
worker bee. Armed with large, multicolored pieces of chalk, he organized his
notes, copied pastel-coded facts and figures on the blackboard, and set up a
film screen. Soon his students would be equally hard at work, but in a
strictly cerebral way.
This day the instructor was inclined to be kind,
giving the young man who would open the class discussion an early heads-up,
allowing some time to prepare. Often in this setting, classes start with the
heart-pounding “cold call,” where a student is put to the test without
warning. The deceptively simple “start us off” translates into “as quickly
and coherently and convincingly as possible, tell us everything known about
this situation and give us your best insight.”
As well as being busy and congenial, Jan Rivkin, a
professor in the strategy unit at Harvard Business School (HBS), was clearly
engaging, his enthusiasm infectious, his sense of humor unmistakable.
He started with a brief refresher video, one he’d
secured from a colleague on holiday in the Bahamas. The class watched their
vacationing instructor drop to his knees on the beach as the tape rolled.
With a straight face, he reviewed the finer points of his recent
technology-operations-management discussion with the class, drawing a series
of overlapping diagrams in the sand. When done, he promptly jumped into the
ocean.
The crowd loved it, but it was the last light
moment. For the next hour-and-a-half the class examined whether the Spanish
clothing company Zara should update its retailers’ IT infrastructure.
During the ensuing discussion and debate, Jan
Rivkin, deftly prodded, questioned, and encouraged his deeply engaged class.
It was just another day at HBS — and one of its
standard case-classes. The case method is the primary mode of teaching and
learning at the institution, which celebrates its 100th anniversary this
year. In honor of its centennial, the School will host a series of events on
Tuesday (April 8) that will include a number of panels, a birthday
celebration, and a case discussion on the future of HBS.
While it didn’t begin with the School’s inception,
the revolutionary instructional approach followed shortly thereafter. But it
wasn’t an entirely novel concept. The model was actually borrowed from the
Harvard Law School and Christopher Columbus Langdell HLS Class of 1853 and
dean of the Law School in 1870, who pioneered the technique for the
examination of Harvard Law School cases.
Later, at HBS, it was Dean Wallace P. Donham, a Law
School grad familiar with the technique, who pushed for the full inclusion
of the case method at the Business School, where it was altered and adapted
to a business perspective. Since 1921, it has been a core part of the
curriculum.
The method of teaching differs greatly from the
traditional lecture format, in which students take notes as the professor
speaks. Instead, students are engaged in a dynamic back-and-forth with one
another and their professor, discussing a topic typically pulled from a
relevant, real-life business scenario and featuring a dilemma or challenge.
Sometimes, once the class has examined and discussed the case, the actual
CEO or president of the company in question will appear in person to explain
how the situation ultimately unfolded.
The case topics are wide-ranging and include
everything from the world of finance to semiconductors to sweeteners to
satellite television.
Some cases offer historic reflections, employing
the lessons tragedy imparts. Cases have been written, for example, about the
space shuttle Columbia’s final mission in 2003 and the management decisions
made prior to its fatal re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, Abraham
Lincoln’s leadership during the Civil War, and the management of national
intelligence prior to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Students are given an overview of the case’s
material to read ahead of time. The packets, roughly 20 to 25 pages long,
include a list of facts, an outline of the challenge at hand, and a history
of the company or situation in text, charts, and graphs, all compiled into a
neat brief.
More than 80 percent of HBS classes are built on
the case method. Each week students prepare approximately 14 cases both
alone and with the help of study groups. But in the end they are on their
own. In class, it is up to the individual to articulate his or her argument
and persuade others of its merits. A hefty 50 percent of a student’s grade
is determined by class participation, so taking part in the conversation is
crucial. Students raise their hands energetically, trying to get quality
“air time,” as they call it. Two important unwritten rules, self-enforced by
the students themselves: Never speak unless you have something valuable to
contribute, and keep it brief.
The teaching technique most effectively prepares
the CEOs of tomorrow for what they will inevitably face in the real world,
say the professors who employ it.
“Getting a piece of material, having to sift
through it, figure out what’s important, … come to a point of view, [then]
come to class both prepared to argue that point of view … [and] prepared to
listen and be open to others’ viewpoints — those are the skills that the
business world demands, and via the case method they get to practice those
in the classroom,” said Michael J. Roberts, senior lecturer of business
administration and executive director of the Arthur Rock Center for
Entrepreneurship.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on case method teaching ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Cases
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
New Ways of Cheating
Course Hero is a site that helps students cheat ---
Search engine targets sharing of course documents on Course Hero (insidehighered.com)
Click Here
Researchers at Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology have discovered a new form of cheating for MOOC credits
"Multiple Personalities, Disorder," by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed,
August 26, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/08/26/harvard-mit-researchers-find-mooc-learners-using-multiple-accounts-cheat?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=e257aae0b9-DNU20150826&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-e257aae0b9-197565045
Bob Jensen's threads on MOOCs, SMOCS, Future Learn, iversity, and OKI Free
Learning Alternatives Around the World ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
A Plagiarism Guide for Students ---
http://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/student-copyright/#page-2
Scientist Has Identity Stolen for Fake Peer Reviews ---
https://twitter.com/KamounLab/status/1204659178364645376?s=20
These students figured out their tests were graded by artificial
intelligence — and the easy way to cheat ---
https://www.theverge.com/2020/9/2/21419012/edgenuity-online-class-ai-grading-keyword-mashing-students-school-cheating-algorithm-glitch
The Latest Thing in Cheating: Use Google Translate to Plagiarize
Google Translate ---
https://translate.google.com/
Stacey Guney, assistant vice president for academic
affairs at Aims Community College, in Fort Collins, Colo., wrote that students
may use Google Translate to avoid plagiarism-detection software. Students start
by translating the text into another language, and then back to English. After
they clean up the result a bit, the text will be different enough to evade the
software.
Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on September 1, 2017
Jensen Comment
Having grown up in Munich my wife speaks German. Yet whenever we went back to
Germany years later she never could explain what I did for a living to her
relatives (who don't speak English).
My point here is
that it may be easier to get a decent translation of a history article in Google
Translate than to get a translation of an accounting article. The reason is that
translation software and even human translators generally have trouble
translating articles where the vocabulary is quite technical and specialized. I
speculate that college admissions essays are more apt to be plagiarized using
Google Translate than will articles on accounting for interest rate swaps and
other hedging transactions.
As for me I have a terrible time writing a mystery novel. Today I'm going to
start translating my new novel.
How Students Cheat in a High Tech World ---
http://www.chronicle.com/resource/how-students-cheat-in-a-high-t/6122/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=0eb2e027093e46e093c78bc89de8e9a8&elq=a39bfe53376f4fd49972af646aac5c8e&elqaid=14674&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=6206
Cheating has always involved
elaborate schemes, but now they are increasingly complex and multinational –
and sometimes quite expensive. Our reporters look at how students in the
United States use Google searches to find surrogates in Kenya or the
Philippines to do their work for them, and how those surrogates can raise
their standard of living by writing one paper after another. Cheating
technology has also infiltrated classrooms, with social-media sites
sometimes acting as vehicles for sharing correct test responses. This
collection of articles prepares educators for new challenges in stemming a
tide of deception that could undermine the value of college degrees.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TOPICS
The New Cheating
Economy Business is booming right under colleges’ noses. It’s not just
papers anymore. It’s the whole course.
Contract Cheating’s
African Labor Among Kenyan college graduates, competition for jobs writing
papers for American students is fierce.
In a Fake Online
Class, Could Professors Catch Students Who Are Paid to Cheat? The experiment
shows how easily online education can be exploited by people intent on
deception.
3 Modern Methods of
Cheating Extra online accounts, smart watches, and Yik Yak are among the
tools employed by dishonest students.
Online Classes See
Cheating Go High-Tech Test takers are finding ways to score easy A’s by
teaming up with their friends.
Memorization,
Cheating, and Technology What can we do to stem the increased use of phones
and laptops to cheat on exams in class?
Behind the Webcam’s
Watchful Eye, Online Proctoring Takes Hold Universities are hiring companies
that have cropped up to police the integrity of online courses.
Cheating Goes Global
as Essay Mills Multiply Current and former essay-mill writers help provide
an inside look at an essay-writing company.
The Shadow Scholar A man who writes students’ essays explains how he makes
his living off their desperationContinued in article
A law
student was caught using invisible ink and a UV light to cheat on an exam. The
woman had legitimately taken her law textbook into an exam. However, it had 24
pages of secret notes written throughout it. She used a "black light" attached
to her pen to read them ---
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/student-caught-using-invisible-ink-to-cheat-during-law-exam/ar-BBAMsr3?ocid=spartandhp
She Cheated to Get an A in an
Ethics Class
Former Suffolk University
Employee Pleads Guilty to Stealing Over $40,000 in Student Loans by Changing
(her own) Grades ---
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/former-suffolk-university-employee-pleads-guilty-stealing-over-40000-student-loans
BOSTON – A Suffolk University employee pleaded
guilty today in U.S. District Court in Boston in connection with
fraudulently obtaining over $40,000 in federal student loan funds by
falsifying her own records to make it appear that she was a Suffolk
University graduate student when in fact she was not.
Ashley Ciampa, 28, of Medford, pleaded guilty today
to student loan fraud. U.S. District Court Judge F. Dennis Saylor, IV
scheduled sentencing for Oct. 5, 2016.
In 2009, Ciampa began working in the Registrar’s
Office at Suffolk University. In 2013, she enrolled in Suffolk’s MBA program
free of charge as an employee. In a first-semester business ethics class,
Ciampa failed to attend class or complete the required coursework, but
instead used her computer access in the Registrar’s Office to assign herself
an “A” for the course. In subsequent semesters, she repeatedly assigned
herself passing grades for classes she never attended. By maintaining the
appearance that she was a graduate student, she was able to borrow $47,453
in federal student loans beginning in 2014, which she spent for vacations
and other personal expenses.
The charge of student loan fraud provides for a
sentence of no greater than five years in prison, three years of supervised
release, and a fine of $20,000. Actual sentences for federal crimes are
typically less than the maximum penalties. Sentences are imposed by a
federal district court judge based upon the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and
other statutory factors.
Continued in article
"Kyoto U Bans All Watches During Exams,"
Inside Higher Ed, December 15, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/12/15/kyoto-u-bans-all-watches-during-exams?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=2dc9d50965-DNU20151215&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-2dc9d50965-197565045
Kyoto University has
become the first national university in Japan to ban all watches during
exams,
The Wall Street Journal reported. Officials
cited the proliferation of smartwatches and said that they couldn't quickly
determine which watches could be used for cheating and which could not.
2021: Dartmouth Med Students Say They Were Coerced Into Cheating ---
https://nhjournal.com/dartmouth-med-students-say-they-were-coerced/
Thank you Denny Beresford for the heads up.
"Click for Me if I'm Not There" sounds like it could be a title of a country
song
2015: Dartmouth Accuses 64 Students of Cheating in Popular Course, by Andy
Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/dartmouth-accuses-64-students-of-cheating-in-popular-course/91857?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Dartmouth College has accused 64 students of
cheating in a “Sports, Ethics, and Religion” course taught last fall, the Valley
News
reports. Randall
Balmer, chairman of the religion department, discovered in October that
absent students in his class were passing their clickers to classmates who
were present to answer in-class questions on their behalf.
Mr. Balmer told the newspaper that most of the
students involved had been suspended for a semester. In the fall he counted
43 students who handed off their clickers in the roughly 275-person class,
but that number does not include the students who facilitated the cheating.
Think Students in Your Class Might Be Cheating? Here’s What to Do
The popular class was initially designed to help
the college’s athletes, many of whom struggled with freshman-year
coursework.
Diana Lawrence, a spokeswoman for the college, said
it would not offer more-detailed comment on the proceedings until the
appeals process ends this month.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It would be interesting to know the grading distribution in this course. My
hypothesis is that students are more apt to skip class and cheat in a course
where they are assured of an A grade with very little effort. This is what
happened when over 120 students cheated in a political science course assignment
at Harvard University. All students in that course were assured of getting A
grades such that there's less incentive to work hard in the course. In Harvard's
case over half the cheaters were expelled from the University. It appears that
Dartmouth College will be a little less harsh.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism detection tools ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"What Is Detected?" by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, July
14, 2014 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/07/14/turnitin-faces-new-questions-about-efficacy-plagiarism-detection-software
Jensen Comment
It's hardly surprising that most student plagiarism goes undetected. As
detection tools get more sophisticated so do the criminals in general except for
the ones that are probably too stupid to get into college or crazed out of their
minds with drug addiction.
One way to beat the plagiarism detection tools is to take the time to
cleverly rewrite and paraphrase that which is essentially copied.
Another reason that students get away with plagiarism is that in most
instances their writings are not read by many people other than a weary
professor who is probably grading their writing along with the submissions of 30
or more other students.
For professors who plagiarize the risks are greater due, in large part, to a
wider audience of readers who are also experts on the subject matter. Professor
plagiarism rewritings and paraphrasing of copied works need to be much more
clever than those of students. History Professor Matthew C. Whitaker at Arizona
State University rewrote/paraphrased and may have gotten away with it had he not
done so much of it in a book that would be carefully read by experts on the
subject matter.
Professor Whitaker got caught! But I doubt that credit can be given to
plagiarism detectors like Turnitin. I suspect he was much too clever for that
type of detection.
Some professors and students who plagiarize may not have done so directly
They may have copied the works of their assistants or used services of companies
that ghost write papers and books. How does one account for the fact that the
famous anthropologist Jane Goodall plagiarized from Wikipedia? She surely is too
smart to plagiarize directly herself. I guess (with no evidence whatsoever) that
she may have borrowed the writings of a subordinate who did the plagiarizing.
In previous centuries in Europe lifting works of subordinates would not
even have been considered cheating since the writings (and sometimes even
paintings) of subordinates was considered the works of their masters. In modern
times this is academic cheating.
Monkey See Monkey Do
"Jane Goodall apologizes for lifting passages from Wikipedia for her new book,"
by Elizabeth Foster, National Post, March 20, 2013 ---
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/03/20/jane-goodall-apologizes-for-failing-to-cite-passages-from-wikipedia-and-elsewhere-in-her-new-book/
Jane Goodall, the primatologist famous for her
painstaking research, has apologized for including dozens of passages
without attribution in her new book.
Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of
Plants is an exploration of the critical role nature plays in our world. The
book’s focus on plant life is a departure for Goodall, whose expertise has
long been primates.
While much of the book details Goodall’s personal
experiences and opinions, sections ranging from a sentence to entire
paragraphs were borrowed from websites like Wikipedia without attribution or
footnotes.
Professor Accused of Plagiarism Quits for
$200,000 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/01/18/professor-accused-plagiarism-quits-200000?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=84002272f5-DNU20160118&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-84002272f5-197565045
Once a serial plagiarist always a serial
plagiarist
"Alleged Serial Plagiarizer on Leave From Arizona State," Chronicle of
Higher Education, September 18, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/09/18/alleged-serial-plagiarizer-leave-arizona-state?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=52fbbd44c7-DNU20150918&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-52fbbd44c7-197565045
A professor of history at Arizona State University who’s been accused of plagiarism multiple times was placed on administrative leave this week as the university looks into new allegations of misconduct, The Arizona Republic reported. While previous allegations against Matthew Whitacker involve his published research, the most recent complaint involves Whitacker’s extracurricular consulting business.Last month, the city of Phoenix demanded a refund of the $21,900 it had already paid the Whitacker Group to develop cultural consciousness training material for its police force, according to The Republic. The city said more than half of some 80 slides Whitaker produced were ripped from the Chicago Police Department, with minor, if any, changes. Lonnie J. Williams Jr., Whitacker’s attorney, said he questioned why the university would investigate a matter in which it’s not involved, and that Whitacker had been up front about his intention to borrow the Chicago material.
Continued in article
From Full to Associate Professor: A Rare Demotion in the Academy
"Anonymous Charges Vindicated," by Scott Jaschik, July 13, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/07/13/arizona-state-demotes-history-professor-after-investigation-his-book
When an anonymous blog last year accused
Matthew C. Whitaker of plagiarizing portions of
Peace Be Still: Modern Black America from World War II to Barack Obama,
he said that he wouldn't respond to charges
presented in that way. His publisher, the University of Nebraska Press,
backed him.
The anonymous nature of the charges bothered
some at Arizona State University, where Whitaker was a full professor
and led a research center. But after the university conducted an
investigation and found misconduct, Whitaker now says that he agrees
that he made significant mistakes in the book.
Mark S. Searle, Arizona State's interim
provost, last week sent an email message to history faculty members in
which he said an investigation into the book had "identified significant
issues with the content of the aforementioned book." Searle went on to
say that "as a result of the outcomes from that investigation, Dr.
Whitaker has accepted a position as associate professor without a
Foundation Professorship [an honor he previously held], and now
co-directs his center."
Searle also forwarded a letter from Whitaker,
in which he admitted wrongdoing. Both letters were forwarded by someone
other than the authors to Inside Higher Ed.
"I have struggled to overlook the personal
nature of the criticisms, and to evaluate and recognize that there was
merit to some of them. I alerted ASU administration to the fact that the
text contained unattributed and poorly paraphrased material. I accept
responsibility for these errors and I am working with my publisher to
make the appropriate corrections," he wrote.
Continued in article
"New Book, New Allegations," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed,
May 13, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/05/13/arizona-state-professor-accused-plagiarism-second-time#sthash.OmcGllGb.dpbs
An investigation into plagiarism allegations
against an Arizona State University professor of history in 2011 found him
not guilty of deliberate academic misconduct, but the case remained
controversial. The chair of his department’s tenure committee resigned in
protest and other faculty members spoke out against the findings, saying
their colleague – who recently had been promoted to full professor – was
cleared even though what he did likely would have gotten an undergraduate in
trouble.
Now, Matthew C. Whitaker has written a new book,
and allegations of plagiarism are being levied against him once again.
Several blogs – one anonymously, and in great detail – have documented
alleged examples of plagiarism in the work. Several of his colleagues have
seen them, and say they raise serious questions about Whitaker’s academic
integrity.
Meanwhile, Whitaker says he won’t comment on
allegations brought forth anonymously, and his publisher, the University of
Nebraska Press, says it’s standing by him.
Three years ago, several senior faculty members in
Whitaker’s department accused him of uncited borrowing of texts and ideas
from books, Wikipedia and a newspaper article in his written work and a
speech. In response, the university appointed a three-member committee to
investigate. The group found that Whitaker’s work contained no “substantial
or systematic plagiarism,” but that he had been careless in some instances,
as reported by Inside Higher Ed at the
time. As a result, the university did not impose serious sanctions on the
scholar, who is the founding director of Arizona State’s Center for the
Study of Race and Democracy.
In response, Monica Green, professor of history,
resigned as department tenure committee chair. Several other professors
called the investigation flawed and incomplete in a formal complaint to the
university and in public statements.
Whitaker at the time told the university that his
colleagues were pursuing a personal vendetta, possibly due to his race and
the fact that they disagreed with his promotion,
The Arizona Republic reported.
The university backed Whitaker, saying that the
investigation had been thorough and carried out by distinguished scholars.
In January, the University of Nebraska Press
published Whitaker’s newest book,
Peace Be Still: Modern Black America from World War II to Barack Obama.
Several prominent professors of history have written
blurbs for the book, which won the Bayard Rustin Book Award from the Tufts
University Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.
But not everyone is impressed.
Since the book’s publication, a blog called the
Cabinet
of Plagiarism has detailed numerous alleged
instances of plagiarism in the book, including text and ideas taken from
information websites and published scholarship. The blog is
moderated by someone using the name Ann Ribidoux, who did not return a
posted request for comment. There is no one on the Arizona State faculty by
that name.
Matthew C. Whitaker Homepage at ASU ---
https://webapp4.asu.edu/directory/person/91993
Scary!
"Chinese Teens Have Found Remarkable High-Tech Ways To Cheat On Tests,"
by Kayla Ruble, Business Insider, June 14, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/high-tech-ways-to-cheat-2014-6
China’s students have apparently developed skills for
building cheating devices to use during an SAT-like exam that look like they
have been pulled straight from a James Bond movie.
Ahead of China’s
massive college entrance exam — the Gaokao — that took
place on Saturday and Sunday, local media outlets released
photos of cheating devices confiscated by police
around the country in recent weeks.
The photos show intricate cheating equipment, a
majority of which were created
by students in the southwestern city of Chengdu
before taking a different test, the National Professional and Technological
Personnel Qualification Examination.
Around 40 students, all originally from Shanghai,
were reportedly caught with the devices, which were disguised to look like
everyday objects.
Some of the uncovered equipment included miniature
cameras installed into both a pen and a set of glasses, as well as wireless
earphones resembling small earplugs. In one instance, a grey tank top was
wired with a plug capable of connecting to a mobile phone that could be used
to send out information. There was also a camera installed in the shirt.
“Cheating happens in every country, but it’s
extremely rampant in China," Yong Zhao, the presidential chair at the
University of Oregon's College of Education, told VICE News. "This isn’t the
first time and it won’t be the last.”
Cheating has been an enduring issue in China, where
the emphasis placed on standardized tests can create high-pressure
environments.
“For over a thousand years China has been using
tests,” Zhao said. “Standardized tests tend to be the only way for upward
social mobility, passing the test has been a way to change people’s lives.”
Ahead of this year’s exam, which was taken by
nearly 9.4 million students across the country, Beijing was preparing to
send police out to monitor and handle cheating incidents.
In fact, students practically expect to be able to
cheat on exams.
During protests last summer against a crackdown on
Gaokao cheating, students chanted, "We want fairness. There is no fairness
if you do not let us cheat."
The Gaokao is China’s SAT or A-level equivalent,
with many students' chances at matriculating into college reliant on their
exam results.
One of this year's essay questions from a Shanghai
version of the test translated into English reads: "You can choose your own
road and method to make it across the desert, which means you are free; you
have no choice but finding a way to make it across the desert, which makes
you not free.Choose your own angle and title to write an article that is not
less than 800 words."
"Custom Writing Service Says Students 'No
Longer Have to Face the Burden of Academic Coursework'," by Susan Jones,
CNS News, January 20, 2014 ---
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/custom-writing-service-says-students-no-longer-have-face-burden-academic#
A Dallas-based company that writes research
papers, essays and other classroom assignments -- so students don't have
to -- says it is doing so well that it has expanded its staff from just
a few writers to more than 100 in the past year.
The company bills itself as the one "students trust to write
professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the
highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to
face the burden of academic coursework."
It says the writing is done for an "affordable" fee; and it has foreign
writers on staff for non-American students.
In a news release announcing the "custom writing service" for students
in the United States, the company includes the following testimonial:
"I enjoyed using the service," one student is quoted as saying. "The
paper was written excellent (sic)...My professor was satisfied, and so
am I."
Other testimonials on the company's website read:
"I've sent the paper to evaluation first 'cause I wasn't sure if they
can find a writer with a relevant academic background...But yes, they
did! It seems like she read my thoughts and written the paper (sic) as
if I did it myself, lol :-)"
And this: "Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better (sic). Just noticed a
few typos, but that’s okay."
The company offers discounts of 5 percent after ten orders; and 15
percent after 20 orders.
In August, President Obama announced his plan to tie federal financial
aid to colleges and universities that do well in a yet-to-be-announced
college rating system. As
CNSNews.com reported at the time, the rating system means the
government will define what a good college is. - See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/custom-writing-service-says-students-no-longer-have-face-burden-academic#sthash.dAvEF9OY.dpuf
A Dallas-based company that
writes research papers, essays and other classroom assignments -- so
students don't have to -- says it is doing so well that it has expanded its
staff from just a few writers to more than 100 in the past year.
The company bills itself as
the one "students trust to write professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free
essays that receive the highest grades for all levels of coursework...so
they no longer have to face the burden of academic coursework."
It says the writing is done
for an "affordable" fee; and it has foreign writers on staff for
non-American students.
In a news release announcing
the "custom writing service" for students in the United States, the company
includes the following testimonial:
"I enjoyed using the
service," one student is quoted as saying. "The paper was written excellent
(sic)...My professor was satisfied, and so am I."
Other testimonials on the
company's website read:
"I've sent the paper to
evaluation first 'cause I wasn't sure if they can find a writer with a
relevant academic background...But yes, they did! It seems like she read my
thoughts and written the paper (sic) as if I did it myself, lol :-)"
And this: "Cool essay.
Couldn’t been done better (sic). Just noticed a few typos, but that’s okay."
The company offers discounts
of 5 percent after ten orders; and 15 percent after 20 orders.
Continued in article
"The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students' papers tells
his story," by Ed Dante, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12, 2010
---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/
Jensen Comment
One such company in Dallas is
http://ownessays.com/
I did not find writers listing knowledge of accounting, but some advertise
expertise in finance and global finance.
I don't trust the promise of "no plagiarism"
although the plagiarism may be very clever.
Apparently a large part of the business is
writing customized college admissions essays.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Retraction Watch (cheating in research) ---
http://retractionwatch.com
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Authors Who Lie and Cheat (Mainly for Money but sometimes for religious or
political causes)
"A North Korean Gulag Survivor Admits He Lied In His Best-Selling Book,"
by Jack Kim and Sohee Kim, Reuters via Business Insider, January 18, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/a-north-korean-gulag-survivor-admits-he-lied-in-his-best-selling-book-2015-1
Ethnography ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography
Is this academic cheating or worse"
Conflict Over Sociologist's Narrative Puts Spotlight on Ethnography ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Conflict-Over-Sociologists/230883?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=6cf1ab9ba37949f6a7d0209ec6e4a715&elq=93ab1ebf84574eaf9e13c2052209b2f6&elqaid=8063&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=2557
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in academia ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
Criminologist to have four papers retracted following months of scrutiny
---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/11/19/criminologist-to-have-four-papers-retracted-following-months-of-scrutiny/
"‘Boy Who Came Back From Heaven’ actually didn’t; books recalled," by Ron
Charles, The Washington Post, January 16, 2015 ---
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/style-blog/wp/2015/01/15/boy-who-came-back-from-heaven-going-back-to-publisher/?hpid=z5
Tyndale House, a major Christian publisher, has
announced that it will stop selling “The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven,” by
Alex Malarkey and his father, Kevin Malarkey.
The best-selling book, first published in 2010,
purports to describe what Alex experienced while he lay in a coma after a
car accident when he was 6 years old. The coma lasted two months, and his
injuries left him paralyzed, but the subsequent spiritual memoir – with its
assuring description of “miracles, angels, and life beyond This World” –
became part of a popular genre of “heavenly tourism.”
Earlier this week, Alex recanted his
testimony about the afterlife. In an open letter to Christian bookstores
posted on the
Pulpit and Pen Web
site, Alex states flatly: “I did not die. I did not go to Heaven.”
Referring to the injuries that continue to make it
difficult for him to express himself, Alex writes, “Please forgive the
brevity, but because of my limitations I have to keep this short. … I said I
went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the
claims that I did, I had never read the Bible. People have profited from
lies, and continue to. They should read the Bible, which is enough. The
Bible is the only source of truth. Anything written by man cannot be
infallible.”
Thursday evening, Todd Starowitz, public relations
director of Tyndale House, told The Washington Post: “Tyndale has decided to
take the book and related ancillary products out of print.”
On Friday, Tyndale released this statement: “We are
saddened to learn that Alex Malarkey, co-author of ‘The Boy Who Came Back
from Heaven,’ is now saying that he made up the story of dying and going to
heaven. Given this information, we are taking the book out of print.”
But there is considerable disagreement about when
Alex first recanted his testimony and objected to the book, which has
reportedly sold more than 1 million copies.
Last April, Alex’s mother, Beth Malarkey, posted a
statement on
her own blog decrying the memoir and its
promotion: “It is both puzzling and painful to watch the book ‘The Boy Who
Came Back from Heaven’ not only continue to sell, but to continue, for the
most part, to not be questioned.” She goes on to say that the book is not
“Biblically sound” and that her son’s objections to it were ignored and
repressed. She also notes that Alex “has not received monies from the book
nor have a majority of his needs been funded by it.”
Continued in article
"The Retraction War: Scientists seek demigod status, journals want
blockbuster results, and retractions are on the rise: is science broken?" by
Jill Neimark, Aeon, 2014 ---
http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/are-retraction-wars-a-sign-that-science-is-broken/
We assuredly need tests for new knowledge versus new fictions.
"'The Atlantic' Revises Article on CUNY," Inside Higher Ed,
January 16, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/01/16/atlantic-revises-article-cuny
NYT: Naomi Wolf’s Publisher Cancels U.S. Release of ‘Outrages’ ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/21/books/naomi-wolf-outrages.html?cid=db&source=ams&sourceId=296279
Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt has canceled the publication of Naomi Wolf’s book
“Outrages” in the United States, months after
errors were uncovered during a radio interview.
In
“Outrages:
Sex, Censorship and the Criminalization of Love,”
Ms. Wolf examined how
Victorian laws criminalized same-sex relations. In May, during a radio
interview with the BBC host Matthew Sweet, she told him that she had found
evidence of “several dozen executions” of men accused of having sex with
other men. But Mr. Sweet pointed out that Ms. Wolf was misunderstanding the
legal term “death recorded,” saying it meant that the men had been pardoned.
“I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually
happened,” he told her.
. . .
Ms. Wolf confirmed the
parting but said in an email that “Outrages” would come out in the United
States “in due course” and that she was preparing it for paperback
publication in Britain.
Publishers generally
rely on authors to fact-check their work,
but instances like these — one of several this year in which high-profile
books like “Merchants of Truth,” by the former New York Times executive
editor Jill Abramson, and “Siege: Trump Under Fire,” by the journalist
Michael Wolff, have been criticized for inaccuracies —
have ignited a debate about whether publishers should
be held accountable for these errors.
Differences Between Students Who Cheat Versus Students Who Don't Cheat
"Study Examines The Psychology Behind Students Who Don't Cheat," Science
Daily, August 18, 2008 ---
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080817223646.htm
While many studies have examined cheating among
college students, new research looks at the issue from a different
perspective – identifying students who are least likely to cheat.
The study of students at one Ohio university found
that students who scored high on measures of courage, empathy and honesty
were less likely than others to report their cheating in the past – or
intending to cheat in the future.
Moreover, those students who reported less cheating
were also less likely to believe that their fellow students regularly
committed academic dishonesty.
People who don’t cheat “have a more positive view
of others,” said Sara Staats, co-author of the research and professor of
psychology at Ohio State University’s Newark campus.
“They don’t see as much difference between
themselves and others.”
In contrast, those who scored lower on courage,
empathy and honesty – and who are more likely to report that they have
cheated -- see other students as cheating much more often than they do,
rationalizing their own behavior, Staats said.
The issue is important because most recent studies
suggest cheating is common on college campuses. Typically, more than half –
and sometimes up to 80 percent – of college students report that they have
cheated.
Staats conducted the research with Julie Hupp,
assistant professor of psychology and Heidi Wallace, an undergraduate
psychology student, both at Ohio State-Newark.
They presented their results Aug. 16 and 17 in
Boston at two poster sessions at the annual meeting of the American
Psychological Association.
Staats said this continuing research project aimed
to find out more about the students who don’t cheat – a group that Staats
and her colleagues called “academic heroes.”
“Students who don’t cheat seem to be in the
minority, and have plenty of opportunities to see their peers cheat and
receive the rewards with little risk of punishment,” Staats said. “We see
avoiding cheating as a form of everyday heroism in an academic setting.”
The research presented at APA involved two separate
but related studies done among undergraduates at Ohio State’s Newark campus.
One study included 383 students and another 73 students.
The students completed measures that examined their
bravery, honesty and empathy. The researchers separated those who scored in
the top half of those measures and contrasted them with those in the bottom
half.
Those who scored in the top half – whom the
researchers called “academic heroes” – were less likely to have reported
cheating in the past 30 days and the last year compared to the non-heroes.
They also indicated they would be less likely to cheat in the next 30 days
in one of their classes.
The academic heroes also reported they would feel
more guilt if they cheated compared to non-heroes.
“The heroes didn’t rationalize cheating the way
others did, they didn’t come up with excuses and say it was OK because lots
of other students were doing it,” Staats said.
Staats said one reason to study cheating at
colleges and universities is to try to figure out ways to reduce academic
dishonesty. The results from this research suggest a good target audience
for anti-cheating messages.
When the researchers asked students if they
intended to cheat in the future, nearly half -- 47 percent -- said they did
not intend to cheat but nearly one in four -- 24 percent -- agreed or
strongly agreed that they would cheat.
The remaining 29 percent indicated that they were
uncertain whether or not they would cheat.
“These 29 percent are like undecided voters – they
would be an especially good focus for intervention,” Staats said. “Our
results suggest that interventions may have a real opportunity to influence
at least a quarter of the student population.”
Staats said more work needs to be done to identify
the best ways to prevent cheating. But this research, with its focus on
positive psychology, suggests one avenue, she said.
“We need to do more to recognize integrity among
our students, and find ways to tap into the bravery, honest and empathy that
was found in the academic heroes in our study,” she said.
Jensen Comment
I think cheating in school is much like accounting fraud in adulthood. The
psychological factors interact heavily with situational factors such as the
"tone at the top," particular pressures at the time, crowd psychology, and
opportunity. In particular there's something to the statement that "since others
were doing it, I also tried it."
Note in particular how many athletes, especially baseball players, succumbed
to use of illegal performance enhancing drugs because they were aware that other
top players were using such drugs.
There is also the circumstance of easy opportunity. I've previously mentioned
that one daydream I repeatedly had, when I was riding my horse through about
100,000 acres of woods north of Tallahassee, centered on what I would do if I
found suitcase full of cash hidden in those woods. This is analogous to having
fraternity files of former examinations given by a professors who tend to repeat
old questions and problems. Students who in most circumstances would not cheat
might succumb under particularly easy opportunities that give them somewhat of
an unfair advantage. Some might not even see looking at old examinations as
cheating. Alas I never found a suitcase full of money.
An accounting professor at Trinity University was disturbed to learn that one
student had purchased (on eBay) the examination test bank for the textbook she
was using in a course. Some students shared using that test bank including some
students who probably would not have cheated if the act had not become so darned
easy and convenient.
One of the negative externalities of the Internet is that students now have
more and more opportunities to cheat that did not exist when information at
their fingertips did not double every 12 hours on the Internet.
Make-or-Break Exams Bring Out the Best and Brightest Cheaters ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/make-or-break-exams-bring-out-the-best-and-brightest-cheaters-1530806771
BAGHDAD—The exam papers are stored in triple-lock safes, transported under
armed escort and distributed in envelopes with a special seal that can’t be
reclosed once opened.
But on inspecting the envelopes after an exam in recent years, Iraqi
education officials discovered small incisions made in the sides. A tiny
camera had been inserted to scan the questions inside. The breach resulted
in the cancellation of the results in several test-taking centers.
“For every measure we develop,” lamented Ban al-Sumaidae, an official on the
exams board, “there is a countermeasure.”
Some of the world’s most creative cheaters are showing up in Iraqi exam
halls this summer armed with gadgets, ruses and accomplices to pilfer
answers for a series of high-school tests that will help determine their
futures.
Most schemes involve variations on an earpiece that enables cheaters to get
answers to the questions during the test. One of the latest versions is a
tiny flesh-colored earpiece that is practically invisible. This week,
several students were caught wearing sneakers with a communication device
embedded in the soles. (How they operated the device through their feet was
unclear.)
Students buy questions ahead of time, and sell them on to others at an
increasingly steep discount as the exam nears. Sometimes questions are
posted on the internet for anyone to see.
Some students have bribed exam supervisors for help during the test, or to
get them to turn a blind eye to cheating. More bribes—even by parents—have
been offered afterward to ensure high scores. Raed al-Rawi, who works in the
office of a local education official, said he had been approached by the
mother of a pupil.
. . .
Female students have an advantage, because they can conceal an earpiece
under a head scarf, according to Ms. Sumaidae, the official on the exams
board.
Some students have even undergone surgery to have a microphone implanted
beneath their skin or deep inside their ears, according to Messrs. Lafta and
Qaisi. The latest anti-cheating weapon to discover such devices is a wand
the education officials said was invented by an Iraqi physics teacher. The
white plastic device with a blinking light at the end picks up signals from
hidden devices. It is swept over rows of students before every exam
Continued in article
"Does Income Inequality Promote Cheating?" Inside Higher Ed,
April 5, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/04/05/does-income-inequality-promote-cheating
Controversial AI expert admits to plagiarism, blames hectic schedule ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/10/14/controversial-ai-expert-admits-to-plagiarism-blames-hectic-schedule/
"Why We Take Risks — It's the Dopamine," Alice Park, Time Magazine,
December 30, 2008 ---
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1869106,00.html
As quoted by Jim Mahar on January 2, 2008 ---
http://financeprofessorblog.blogspot.com/
A new study by researchers at Vanderbilt University
in Nashville and Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City
suggests a biological explanation for why certain people tend to live life
on the edge — it involves the neurotransmitter dopamine, the brain's
feel-good chemical.
Dopamine is responsible for making us feel
satisfied after a filling meal, happy when our favorite football team wins
....It's also responsible for the high we feel when we do something
daring,...skydiving out of a plane. In the risk taker's brain, researchers
report in the Journal of Neuroscience, there appear to be fewer
dopamine-inhibiting receptors — meaning that daredevils' brains are more
saturated with the chemical, predisposing them to keep taking risks and
chasing the next high.....
The findings support Zald's theory that people who
take risks get an unusually big hit of dopamine each time they have a novel
experience, because their brains are not able to inhibit the
neurotransmitter adequately. That blast makes them feel good, so they keep
returning for the rush from similarly risky or new behaviors, just like the
addict seeking the next high...."It's a piece of the puzzle to understanding
why we like novelty, and why we get addicted to substances ... Dopamine is
an important piece of reward.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Be that as it may, some risk takers are merely trying to recover or at least
average out losses which, if successful, is more of a relief than a thrill. The
St. Petersburg Paradox may be more as a recovery strategy than a thrill ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox
Bernie Madoff probably got dopamine surges from his villas, Penthouses, and
thrills of scamming investors, but at some point he might've been speculating
recklessly in options derivatives in a panic to save his butt. The same might be
said for any gambling addict who first gets "doped up" on the edge, and then
bets more recklessly by betting the farm at miserable odds when "sobered up."
Apparently Bernie is now going to plead insanity. I think that's great
defense as long as the court insists on long-term confinement as a pauper in
Belleview rather than a posh psychiatric hospital ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellevue_Hospital
This may be a reason why some students, certainly not all, cheat for a better
grade. Just the thrill of getting away with breaking the rules may lead to a
dopamine surge just like a person who shoplifts an item that she/he neither
needs nor wants. In my small hometown in Iowa, the wife of a high school coach,
an other very dignified woman, was addicted to shop lifting items that she
really didn't need or want. Our coach made an arrangement with downtown
merchants to simply bill him for items that she thought she purloined without
payment. The merchants kept a sharp and silent watch on her whenever she entered
their stores.
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Plagiarism on Wikipedia
Hi Richard,
How could there not be some plagiarism on Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia
for that matter having thousands of module authors or, in the case of Wikipedia,
millions of anonymous authors?
A problem for hard copy encyclopedias is that they are commercial (seeking
profits) and printed on paper such that detected plagiarisms cannot be
eliminated in the books that are already shelved around the world. Wikipedia has
two advantages. Firstly, it's non-profit and secondly it's only online such that
detected plagiarisms can be, and are, eliminated immediately. Another advantage
is that in most instances of plagiarism online, the legal practice is generally
to first request removal before filing any lawsuits. Lawsuits are usually
filed when there are demonstrable money damages for breach of copyright,
especially continued breach of copyright. This most likely, in the case of
Wikipedia, is very hard to demonstrate to a sufficient degree in court to
justify the cost of an army of lawyers needed to take it to court.
The fact that YouTube and Wikipedia continue to survive indicates that
lawsuits have not yet destroyed these services. Of course YouTube, unlike
Wikipedia, is a for-profit site owned by Google. Wikipedia is non-profit. I
suspect that keeping porn and personal libel stuff out of these two sites is a
bigger problem than plagiarism.
There is a research site called Wikipedia Watch ---
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/
This site examines the phenomenon of Wikipedia. We
are interested in them because they have a massive, unearned influence on
what passes for reliable information. Search engines rank their pages near
the top. While Wikipedia itself does not run ads, they are the most-scraped
site on the web. Scrapers need content — any content will do — in order to
carry ads from Google and other advertisers. This entire effect is turning
Wikipedia into a generator of spam. It is primarily Google's fault, since
Wikipedia might find it difficult to address the issue of scraping even if
they wanted to. Google doesn't care; their ad money comes right off the top.
For example, it did not take long, using the Google
and Yahoo engines, to find 52 different domains that scraped Wikipedia's
page on rock band Lynyrd Skynyrd. Interestingly, Google listed more than
four times the number of duplicate scrapes than Yahoo. This could be related
to the fact that 83 percent of these scraped pages carry ads — almost always
ads from Google. Some of these scrapes are template-generated across
different domains, suggesting that they are created by programs. At that
point zombie PCs might be dispatched to click on the ads.
Jimmy Wales, the man behind Wikipedia, probably
approves of this practice. After he made a fortune in futures trading, he
started up Bomis.com in the mid-1990s. Bomis was one of the first sites to
scrape the ad-free Open Directory Project, and turn it into a huge mass of
paid links and ads, mixed together with porn.
Another problem is that most of the administrators
at Wikipedia prefer to exercise their police functions anonymously. The
process itself is open, but the identities of the administrators are usually
cloaked behind a username and a Gmail address. (Gmail does not show an
originating IP address in the email headers, which means that you cannot
geolocate the originator, or even know whether one administrator is really a
different person than another administrator.) If an admin has a political or
personal agenda, he can do a fair amount of damage with the special editing
tools available to him. The victim may not even find out that this is
happening until it's too late. From Wikipedia, the material is spread like a
virus by search engines and other scrapers, and the damage is amplified by
orders of magnitude. There is no recourse for the victim, and no one can be
held accountable. Once it's all over the web, no one has the power to put it
back into the bottle.
Studies suggest plagiarism at about 1-3% for Wikipedia modules but I don't
put much faith on this estimate because Wikipedia is such a dynamic and changing
database.
There is also an enormous denominator effect
due to the massive volume of sentences (billions and billions?) that are not
plagiarized such that dividing by such a number is almost like dividing by
infinity.
Here's an example on a Wikipedia plagiarism detection study ---
http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/psamples.html
. . .
Another reason my one percent figure is
conservative is that my average of 2.38 sentences per article undoubtedly
missed a lot of plagiarized content. If the entire Wikipedia article was
plagiarized, I should have caught it. But frequently a couple of paragraphs
only are plagiarized, and my sentences could have been from non-plagiarized
portions of the Wikipedia article. Finally, I assumed that the original
content was still online, and that Google indexed it, and that Google's
algorithm performed well enough to produce it.
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Plagiarism in Legal
Documents
Google Search Examples
Example 1 from the University of Michigan ---
http://www.mgoblue.com/compliance/about.html
... the University will look at such factors as
whether the violation is intentional, whether any advantage is gained
(e.g., recruiting, competitive or for the student-athlete involved),
whether a student-athlete's eligibility is affected and whether
violations are recurring.
Example 2 from Syracuse University ---
http://supolicies.syr.edu/ethics/athletic_comply.htm
... the University will look at such factors as
whether the violation is intentional, whether any advantage is gained
(e.g., recruiting, competitive, or for the student-athlete involved),
whether a student-athlete's eligibility is affected, and whether
violations are recurring.
It does not take long to find similar instances in the wordings at different
universities for codes of ethics, faculty handbooks, student handbooks, medical
policies, athletics policies, etc. If I were assigned the task of writing my
university's documents in this regard of course I would examine the related
documents of other universities. Since this would be a legal document not
written in my name I might even be tempted to "cookie cut" phrases because of
the commonplace nature of "cookie cutter" phrases in legal documents.
My point is that it's commonplace to plagiarize in legal documents.
I think such "plagiarism" is extremely common in the law profession in general.
An illustration can be found in the "cookie cutter" lawsuits where only the
names and places are changed. Law firms extensively plagiarize to a point where
it is probably no longer considered unethica
Combating
Plagiarism: Is the Internet Causing More Students to Copy --- http://library.cqpress.com/images/cqres/pdfs/color/cqr20030919C.pdf
This is a very comprehensive CQ
Researcher edition dated September 19, 2003
THE ISSUES
775 Has the Internet
increased the incidence of plagiarism among students?
Should teachers use
plagiarism-detection services?
Are news organizations
doing enough to guard against plagiarism and other types of journalistic
fraud?
BACKGROUND
782 Imitation Encouraged
Plagiarism had not always
been regarded as unethical.
784 Rise of Copyright
Attitudes about
plagiarism began to change after the printing press was invented.
785 'Fertile Ground'
Rising college
admissions in the mid-1800s led to more writing assignments--and more chances
to cheat.
786 Second Chances
Some journalists who were
caught plagiarizing recovered from their mistakes.
CURRENT SITUATION
787 Plagiarism and Politics
Sen. Joseph Biden,
D-Del., is among the politicians who got caught plagiarizing.
787 'Poisonous Atmosphere'
Some journalists say news
organizations overreacted following the Jayson Blair affair.
788 Action by Educators
U.S. schools have taken a
variety of steps to stop plagiarism.
OUTLOOK
790 Internet Blamed
Educators and journalists
alike say the Internet fosters plagiarism.
SIDEBARS AND GRAPHICS
776 College Students Consider
Plagiarism Wrong
Ninety percent view
copying as unethical.
777 How much Plagiarism?
Plagiarism is probably on
the rise, although it appears to have remained stable over the past 40 years.
779 Confronting Plagiarism Poses Risks
Students sometimes
challenge teachers who accuse them.
783 Chronology
Key events since 1790.
784 Rogue Reporter at The New York
Times
Jayson Blair didn't
fool everybody.
789 At Issue
Should educators use
commercial services to combat plagiarism?
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
792 For More Information
Organizations to contact.
793 Bibliography
Selected sources used.
794 The Next Step
Additional articles from
current periodicals.
With Special Focus on Suspected Cheating at Dartmouth and Duke
"Think Students in Your Class Might Be Cheating? Here’s What to Do," by
Beckie Supiano, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 17, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Think-Students-in-Your-Class/150091/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Cheating has made headlines again in recent weeks with investigations at
Dartmouth College and Duke University. The details of the two cases are
different, but both involve alleged violations by many students in a single
course, suddenly thrusting the instructors into the high-profile role of
guarding their institution’s academic rigor.
At Dartmouth, a religion professor noticed a
discrepancy between the number of students answering questions with clickers
and the number who appeared to be in the room in his "Sports, Ethics, and
Religion" course. After a bit of sleuthing, the professor, Randall Balmer,
determined that some students were using the clickers for other students to
make it appear that the absent students were showing up and completing
in-class work—a violation of the college’s Academic
Honor Principle. (See
timeline.)
So while he did not relish the duty, Mr. Balmer felt obliged to report the
incident. "If students are obligated to abide by the terms of the honor
code," he figured, "professors are as well."
At Duke, meanwhile, the investigation involves
assignments submitted by "a number of students" that were suspiciously
similar to the solutions available online or to the work of other students.
Each of the hundreds of students who took the course, in computer science,
last spring or who are enrolled in it now received an email saying
they might receive a lighter academic penalty if they came forward now and
confessed to cheating rather than be investigated. (The email was first
reported by the student newspaper, The
Chronicle.)
The university and the visiting professor who informed officials of the
incident both declined to comment because the investigation is still in
progress.
Cheating is widespread, experts say, and it could happen in any professor’s
class. So what should you do if it happens in yours? Here’s what the experts
say:
How common is cheating?
Surveys suggest that some students will try to cheat even when professors do
everything right, says Teddi Fishman, director of the International Center
for Academic Integrity. Researchers estimate that about 20 percent of
students won’t cheat, regardless of the environment they’re in. Another 20
percent will try to cheat even if professors take extra precautions. But,
Ms. Fishman says, "the great big middle you can influence."
Can cheating be stopped before it
starts?
To a point. Students tend to regard cheating as a "victimless crime," Ms.
Fishman says. Teaching them that cheating does matter and has real-world
consequences can make a difference, she argues. It helps, for instance, to
explain that if a college gets a reputation for graduating students without
the skills they’re supposed to have, it will cheapen everyone’s degree.
Professors can also reduce the chance students will cheat by conveying that
they care about their students, and by having them sign a statement saying
their work is their own before they take a test, Ms. Fishman says.
It also helps, she says, if professors monitor an examination from the back
of the room instead of from the front: "It’s completely simple and
low-tech." Low-tech solutions are good, Ms. Fishman says, because
"professors cannot out-tech their students."
Good course design that accounts for the technology students use also helps,
says Tricia Bertram Gallant, the center’s outreach coordinator. Still, she
says, the goal is not to make cheating impossible. Ideally, it’s something
students will choose not to do.
I think students might be cheating in my
class. What should I do?
Professors who suspect students of cheating might investigate on their own,
as Mr. Balmer did at Dartmouth, as long as they can do so without violating
students’ privacy, says James M. Lang, a professor of English and director
of the Center for Teaching Excellence at Assumption College. (He is also a
regular contributor to The
Chronicle of Higher Education’s Advice section.)
Jensen Comment
The best-known cheating incident took place in a political science course at
Harvard where 60% of the students were expelled from Harvard because of cheating
in a course where every student who did minimal work was assured of getting an
A. I suspect the students cheated because added effort in the course would not
improve their grades.
Bob Jensen's threads on students who cheat (including buying term papers,
dissertations, and paying surrogates to take examinations)---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who allow their students to cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Prevention of Onsite and Online Cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
Sokal Hoax Publishing Sting ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair
‘Sokal Squared’: Is Huge Publishing Hoax ‘Hilarious and Delightful’ or an
Ugly Example of Dishonesty and Bad Faith? ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Sokal-Squared-Is-Huge/244714?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=f24d1573471e4d8b818ead0a76b2858a&elq=b7f95353e47946fbb4ed16fd79876740&elqaid=20814&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9841
Reactions
to an elaborate academic-journal hoax, dubbed "Sokal Squared" by one
observer, came fast and furious on Wednesday. Some scholars applauded the
hoax for unmasking what they called academe’s leftist, victim-obsessed
ideological slant and low publishing standards. Others said it had proved
nothing beyond the bad faith and dishonesty of its authors.
Three scholars — Helen Pluckrose,
a self-described "exile from the humanities" who studies medieval religious
writings about women; James A. Lindsay, an author and mathematician; and
Peter Boghossian, an assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State
University — spent 10 months writing
20 hoax papers
that illustrate and parody what they call "grievance studies," and submitted
them to "the best journals in the relevant fields." Of the 20, seven papers
were accepted, four were published online, and three were in process when
the authors "had to take the project public prematurely and thus stop the
study, before it could be properly concluded." A skeptical Wall Street
Journal editorial writer, Jillian Kay Melchior, began raising
questions
about some of the papers
over the summer.
Beyond the
acceptances, the authors said, they also received four requests to
peer-review other papers "as a result of our own exemplary scholarship." And
one paper — about canine rape culture in dog parks in Portland, Ore. —
"gained special recognition for excellence from its journal, Gender,
Place, and Culture … as one of 12 leading pieces in feminist geography
as a part of the journal’s 25th anniversary celebration."
Not all readers accepted the
work as laudable scholarship. National Review took "Helen Wilson,"
the fictional author of the dog-park study, to task in June for her
approach. "The whole reasoning behind Wilson’s study,"
wrote
a staff writer, Katherine Timpf, "is the belief that researching rape
culture and sexuality among dogs in parks is a brilliant way to understand
more about rape culture and sexuality among humans. This is, of course,
idiotic. Why? Because humans are not dogs."
Another
published
paper, "Going In Through the Back Door: Challenging Straight Male
Homohysteria, Transhysteria, and Transphobia Through Receptive Penetrative
Sex Toy Use," appeared in Sexuality and Culture. It recommends that
men anally self-penetrate "to become less transphobic, more feminist, and
more concerned about the horrors of rape culture."
The trolling trio
wondered, they write, if a journal might even "publish a feminist rewrite of
a chapter from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf." Yup. "Our Struggle Is My
Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and
Choice Feminism" was accepted by the feminist social-work journal
Affilia.
Darts and Laurels
Some scholars
applauded the hoax.
"Is there any idea so outlandish
that it won’t be published in a Critical/PoMo/Identity/‘Theory’ journal?"
tweeted
the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker.
"Three intrepid academics,"
wrote
Yascha Mounk, an
author and lecturer on government at Harvard, "just perpetrated a giant
version of the Sokal Hoax, placing … fake papers in major academic journals.
Call it Sokal Squared. The result is hilarious and delightful. It also
showcases a serious problem with big parts of academia."
Continued in article
"Dissertation for Sale: A Cautionary Tale," by Manuel R. Torres,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Dissertation-for-Sale-A/132401/
"A THOUGHTFUL NEW BOOK ON THE MARKET," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog,
August 9, 2013 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-thoughtful-new-book-on-market.html
The Lawsuits are "Boundless"
"Free-Textbook Company Rewrites Its Content Following Publishers’ Lawsuit,"
by Jake New, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 8, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/free-textbook-company-rewrites-its-content-following-publishers-lawsuit/42809?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A free-textbook company
that was sued last year by three major textbook
publishers has now rewritten the content it was accused of stealing.
Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher
Education filed a joint complaint in March 2012 against the company, known
as Boundless. The publishers asserted that the way Boundless creates its
textbooks violates their copyrights. In a process called “alignment,”
students select the traditional text they need, and Boundless pulls together
open content to create free versions of the books.
The publishers say the resulting products too
closely mirror the original texts, specifically the way the new books are
organized. Matt Oppenheim, a lawyer representing the publishers, said
Boundless was simply stealing the substance of his clients’ textbooks.
“They were stripping out the entirety of a book’s
structure and organization, topic by topic, subtopic by subtopic, and using
it to create a skeleton that they then told the world was a version of a
publisher’s book,” he said.
The lawsuit, he said, would continue.
Ariel Diaz, chief executive of Boundless, said the
rewritten versions were just part of a continuing process of improving the
company’s products, and were not a response to the lawsuit. The company
stands by the original versions of its textbooks and its defense, he said.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Dozens of MBA Applicants (at Penn State and UCLA) Tossed Over Plagiarism,"
by Louis Lavelle, Bloomberg Business Week, February 07, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-07/dozens-of-mba-applicants-tossed-over-plagiarism
Jensen Comment
Think of this as good news that the title does not state "thousands."
But it's more likely tens of thousands when extrapolated to all MBA programs.
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Wikipedia Policy on Quotations
Hi Eileen,
You might want to read the FAQs at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Ten_things_you_may_not_know_about_Wikipedia
This includes the Following:
Everyone can use Wikipedia's work with a few conditions
Wikipedia has taken a cue from the
free software community (which includes projects like
GNU,
Linux and
Mozilla Firefox) and has done away with traditional copyright
restrictions on our content. Instead, we've adopted what is known as a "free
content license" (specifically, a choice between the
CC-BY-SA and the
GFDL): all text and composition created by our users is and will always
remain free for anyone to copy, modify, and redistribute. We only insist
that you credit the contributors and that you do not impose new restrictions
on the work or on any improvements you make to it. Many of the images,
videos, and other media on the site are also under free licenses, or in the
public domain. Just check a file's
description page to see its licensing terms.
Then if you really want to be confused read my threads on the DMCA ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright
Note that I am not a copyright lawyer, But in my humble opinion there's a
huge difference between reproducing parts of works by commercial authors
versus non-commercial authors. In the case of non-commercial authors like myself
copyright holders almost always contact these authors to cease and desist
without commencing frightful lawsuits. There are millions of quotations at my
Website and only twice did somebody ask me to remove quotations. One was a a guy
cleared of fraud charges who no longer wanted newspaper quotations on the
Web linking his name with allegations of fraud. The other was a woman who
thought my quotations of her work were too long. After I removed them, however,
she politely contacted me requesting that I put them back into my Web pages.
I do follow certain personal guidelines. I rarely quote an entire piece
without permission. Yeah there are times when I quote very short newspaper items
like editorial opinions in their entirety, but the WSJ never seems to mind.
There are some things that cannot be reproduced in part such as cartoons. I
generally avoid putting cartoons at my Website. Those that you find an my
Website were copied with permission. I'm not quite so fussy about personal email
messages where I do forward cartoons, but if I'm going to put them into a Web
server I become much more cautious.
As a rule copyright holders cannot prevent you from quoting their published
works as long as the quotations are short in length. One of the main reasons is
that authors cannot use copyright law to put their works above criticism.
Sometimes it's really not effective to criticize a work without quoting some
parts of that work.
Audio and video reproductions have their own complications. Generally the
DMCA allows 30 second reproductions without having to seek permission in every
instance. This allows radio and television shows to reproduce short blurbs
without having to seek permission in every instance. But the DMCA makes
exceptions if the particular 30 seconds is the only part of great value in the
entire piece such as a few seconds of video of a Dallas parade showing the
bullet passing through the head of President Kennedy.
Lastly writers like me should beware of becoming too complacent about getting
away with long quotations. It's a little like overstating deductions to
charities on a tax return. Just because you get away with such overstatements
annually for 40 years does not make it legal. Also just because copyright
holders do not complain about my lengthy quotations does not mean that I've not
set a bad example for others to follow.
On the other hand, I've also encountered others who become overly cautious
about copyright laws. I view them as drivers education teachers who never exceed
45 miles per hour on an Interstate highway. They set a bad example, especially
for their drivers education students, even if what they do is perfectly legal.
esides Users, Who Checks on Widipedia Modules?
Too Much of a Good Thing
"U. of Toronto Class Assignment Backfires in Clash on Wikipedia," by Nick
Santis, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 8, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-toronto-professors-class-assignment-backfires-in-clash-on-wikipedia/58225?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A University of Toronto professor’s assignment that
asked students to add content to Wikipedia backfired when a contingent of
the Web site’s volunteer editors began raising concerns about the raft of
new contributions, according to the
Canadian Press.
The professor, Steve Joordens, had asked the 1,900
students in his introductory-psychology course to add information to
relevant Wikipedia pages, in an effort to improve the site and to teach the
students about sharing information. But the new contributions alarmed a
group of Wikipedia’s editors, who said the additions came from individuals
who did not possess the relevant expertise.
Some community members raised concerns that the
contributions had been plagiarized, and others called the assignment an
unnecessary burden on the site’s editors. Mr. Joordens defended his
students, saying that only a small fraction of their contributions had been
flagged for problems, the news service reported.
A spokesman for the foundation that operates
Wikipedia told the news service that the professor had had some preliminary
discussions with the site’s leaders before carrying out the assignment,
which the spokesman described as “experimental.” He said the Wikipedia
community’s fast response is one of the factors that makes the site
attractive to educators.
The professor said he would limit the number of
students who take on such assignments in the future and make sure that
they’re familiar with the site’s editing practices.
Bob Jensen's threads on Wikipedia checking ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#WikipediaQuotations
"The Shadow Scholar: The man who writes your students' papers tells
his story," by Ed Dante, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12, 2010
---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Shadow-Scholar/125329/
November 15, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi David,
Thanks for this interesting link.
This cheat cannot be an expert on everything
without becoming a very good plagiarist, and even then he probably does not
have a clue about specialty topics that can be plagiarized. My guess is that
he's never heard of XBRL, FAS 138, IAS 9, FIN 48, or FAS 157. So as long as
you stick to tough and narrow topics, chances are he will refuse offers to
write on such technical topics.
Our worry is that when he or she retires from ghost
writing, this cheat will form a sizable company comprised of technical
experts that can write/plagiarize on many more specialized topics.
If fact it leads me to wonder how many students
today are bypassing this cheat and are simply cutting and pasting from some
of my documents at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Thanks,
Bob
"Custom Writing Service Says Students 'No Longer Have to Face the Burden
of Academic Coursework'," by Susan Jones, CNS News, January 20, 2014
---
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/custom-writing-service-says-students-no-longer-have-face-burden-academic#
A Dallas-based company that writes research papers, essays and other
classroom assignments -- so students don't have to -- says it is doing
so well that it has expanded its staff from just a few writers to more
than 100 in the past year.
The company bills itself as the one "students trust to write
professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the
highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to
face the burden of academic coursework."
It says the writing is done for an "affordable" fee; and it has foreign
writers on staff for non-American students.
In a news release announcing the "custom writing service" for students
in the United States, the company includes the following testimonial:
"I enjoyed using the service," one student is quoted as saying. "The
paper was written excellent (sic)...My professor was satisfied, and so
am I."
Other testimonials on the company's website read:
"I've sent the paper to evaluation first 'cause I wasn't sure if they
can find a writer with a relevant academic background...But yes, they
did! It seems like she read my thoughts and written the paper (sic) as
if I did it myself, lol :-)"
And this: "Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better (sic). Just noticed a
few typos, but that’s okay."
The company offers discounts of 5 percent after ten orders; and 15
percent after 20 orders.
In August, President Obama announced his plan to tie federal financial
aid to colleges and universities that do well in a yet-to-be-announced
college rating system. As
CNSNews.com reported at the time, the rating system means the
government will define what a good college is. - See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/custom-writing-service-says-students-no-longer-have-face-burden-academic#sthash.dAvEF9OY.dpuf
A Dallas-based company that writes research papers,
essays and other classroom assignments -- so students don't have to -- says
it is doing so well that it has expanded its staff from just a few writers
to more than 100 in the past year.
The company bills itself as the one "students trust
to write professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the
highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to face
the burden of academic coursework."
It says the writing is done for an "affordable"
fee; and it has foreign writers on staff for non-American students.
In a news release announcing the "custom writing
service" for students in the United States, the company includes the
following testimonial:
"I enjoyed using the service," one student is
quoted as saying. "The paper was written excellent (sic)...My professor was
satisfied, and so am I."
Other testimonials on the company's website read:
"I've sent the paper to evaluation first 'cause I
wasn't sure if they can find a writer with a relevant academic
background...But yes, they did! It seems like she read my thoughts and
written the paper (sic) as if I did it myself, lol :-)"
And this: "Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better
(sic). Just noticed a few typos, but that’s okay."
The company offers discounts of 5 percent after ten
orders; and 15 percent after 20 orders.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One such company in Dallas is
http://ownessays.com/
I did not find writers listing knowledge of accounting, but some advertise
expertise in finance and global finance.
I don't trust the promise of "no plagiarism" although the plagiarism may be
very clever.
Apparently a large part of the business is writing customized college
admissions essays.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"The Computer Stole My Homework -- and Sold It Through an Essay Mill,"
by Ben Terris, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2009 ---
Click Here
Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda
Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale.
And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same
scenario has played out many times before.
The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web
sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work
and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.
For the first time, however, those who find
unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal
retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making
its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider
liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site
is called RC2C Inc. and hosts at least nine sites that sell term papers.
Essay mills often provide their own written works.
Darn! It’s hard for us accounting professors to pad our resumes.
I could not find a single essay to purchase on accounting for derivative
financial instruments or variable interest entities.
"Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply," by Thomas Bartlett,
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Cheating-Goes-Global-as-Essay/32817/
The orders keep piling up. A philosophy
student needs a paper on Martin Heidegger. A nursing student needs a paper
on dying with dignity. An engineering student needs a paper on electric
cars.
Screen after screen, assignment after
assignment—hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come
from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community
colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others
request an entire dissertation.
This is what an essay mill looks like from
the inside. Over the past six months, with the help of current and former
essay-mill writers, The Chronicle looked closely at one company,
tracking its orders, examining its records, contacting its customers. The
company, known as Essay Writers, sells so-called custom essays, meaning that
its employees will write a paper to a student's specifications for a
per-page fee. These papers, unlike those plucked from online databases, are
invisible to plagiarism-detection software.
Everyone knows essay mills exist. What's
surprising is how sophisticated and international they've become, not to
mention profitable.
In a previous era, you might have found an
essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you'll
find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in
Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their
administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to
outsource their academic work.
And if the exponential surge in the number
of essay mills is any indication, the problem is only getting worse. But
who, exactly, is running these companies? And what do the students who use
their services have to say for themselves?
Go to Google and type "buy an essay."
Among the top results will be Best Essays, whose slogan is "Providing
Students with Original Papers since 1997." It's a professional-looking site
with all the bells and whistles: live chat, flashy graphics, stock photos of
satisfied students. Best Essays promises to deliver "quality custom written
papers" by writers with either a master's degree or a Ph.D. Prices range
from $19.99 to $42.99 per page, depending on deadline and difficulty.
To place an order, you describe your
assignment, the number of pages, and how quickly you need it. Then you enter
your credit-card number, and, a couple of days later, the paper shows up in
your in box. All you have to do is add your name to the top and turn it in.
Simple.
What's going on behind the scenes,
however, is another story.
The address listed on the site is in
Reston, Va. But it turns out that's the address of a company that allows
clients to rent "virtual office space" — in other words, to claim they're
somewhere they're not. A previous address used by Best Essays was a UPS
store in an upscale strip mall. And while the phone number for Best Essays
has a Virginia area code, that line is registered to a company that allows
customers to forward calls anywhere in the world over the Internet.
The same contact information appears on
multiple other essay-mill Web sites with names like Rush Essay, Superior
Papers, and Best Term Paper. All of these sites are operated by Universal
Research Inc., also known as Essay Writers. The "US/Canada Headquarters" for
the company, according to yet another Web site, is in Herndon, Va. An Essay
Writers representative told a reporter that the company's North American
headquarters was a seven-story building with an attached garage and valet
parking.
That was a lie. Drive to the address, and
you will find a perfectly ordinary suburban home with a neatly trimmed front
lawn and a two-car garage. The owner of the house is Victor Guevara and,
ever since he bought it in 2004, he has received lots of strange mail. For
instance, a calendar recently arrived titled "A Stroll Through Ukrainian
Cities," featuring photographs of notable buildings in Odessa and Yalta. Not
all of the missives, however, have been so benign. Once a police officer
came to the door bearing a complaint from a man in India who hadn't been
paid by Essay Writers. Mr. Guevara explained to the officer that he had no
idea what the man was talking about.
So why, of all the addresses in the United
States, was Mr. Guevara's chosen? He's not sure, but he has a theory. Before
he bought the house, a woman named Olga Mizyuk lived there for a short time.
The previous owner, a friend of Mr. Guevara's, let her stay rent free
because she was down on her luck and she promised to teach him Russian. Mr.
Guevara believes it's all somehow connected to Ms. Mizyuk.
That theory is not too far-fetched. The
state of Virginia listed Olga Mizyuk as the agent of Universal Research LLC
when it was formed in 2006, though that registration has since lapsed (it's
now incorporated in Virginia with a different agent). The company was
registered for a time in Nevada, but that is no longer valid either. The
managing member of the Nevada company, according to state records, was Yuriy
Mizyuk. Mr. Guevara remembers that Ms. Mizyuk spoke of a son named Yuriy.
Could that all be a coincidence?
Hiring in Manila
Call any of the company's several phone
numbers and you will always get an answer. Weekday or weekend, day or night.
The person on the other end will probably be a woman named Crystal or
Stephanie. She will speak stilted, heavily accented English, and she will
reveal nothing about who owns the company or where it is located. She will
be unfailingly polite and utterly unhelpful.
If pressed, Crystal or Stephanie will
direct callers to a manager named Raymond. But Raymond is almost always
either out of the office or otherwise engaged. When, after weeks of calls,
The Chronicle finally reached Raymond, he hung up the phone before answering
any questions.
But while the company's management may be
publicity shy, sources familiar with its operations were able to shed some
light. Essay Writers appears to have been originally based in Kiev, the
capital of Ukraine. While the company claims to have been in business since
1997, its Web sites have only been around since 2004. In 2007 it opened
offices in the Philippines, where it operates under the name Uniwork.
The company's customer-service center is
located on the 17th floor of the Burgundy Corporate Tower in the financial
district of Makati City, part of the Manila metropolitan area. It is from
there that operators take orders and answer questions from college students.
The company also has a suite on the 16th floor, where its marketing and
computer staff members promote and maintain its Web sites. This involves
making sure that when students search for custom essays, its sites are on
the first page of Google results. (They're doing a good job, too. Recently
two of the first three hits for "buy an essay" were Essay Writers sites.)
One of its employees, who describes herself as a senior
search-engine-optimization specialist at Uniwork, posted on her Twitter page
that the company is looking for copy writers, Web developers, and link
builders.
Some of the company's writers work in its
Makati City offices. Essay Writers claims to have more than 200 writers,
which may be true when freelancers are counted. A dozen or so, according to
a former writer, work in the office, where they are reportedly paid between
$1 and $3 a page — much less than its American writers, and a small fraction
of the $20 or $30 per page customers shell out. The company is currently
advertising for more writers, praising itself as "one of the most trusted
professional writing companies in the industry."
It's difficult to know for sure who runs
Essay Writers, but the name Yuriy Mizyuk comes up again and again. Mr.
Mizyuk is listed as the contact name on the domain registration for
essaywriters.net, the Web site where writers for the company log in to
receive their assignments. A lawsuit was filed in January against Mr. Mizyuk
and Universal Research by a debt-collection company. Repeated attempts to
reach him — via phone and e-mail — were unsuccessful. Customer-service
representatives profess not to have heard of Mr. Mizyuk.
Installed in its Makati City offices,
according to a source close to the company, are overhead cameras trained on
employees. These cameras reportedly send a video feed back to Kiev, allowing
the Ukrainians to keep an eye on their workers in the Philippines. This same
source says Mr. Mizyuk regularly visits the Philippines and describes him as
a smallish man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses. "He looks like
Harry Potter," the source says. "The worst kind of Harry Potter."
Writers for Hire
The writers for essay mills are anonymous
and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week,
hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to
$40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the
freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose.
Others have no college degree and limited English skills.
James Robbins is one of the good ones. Mr.
Robbins, now 30, started working for essay mills to help pay his way through
Lamar University, in Beaumont, Tex. He continued after graduation and, for a
time, ran his own company under the name Mr. Essay. What he's discovered,
after writing hundreds of academic papers, is that he has a knack for the
form: He's fast, and his papers consistently earn high marks. "I can knock
out 10 pages in an hour," he says. "Ten pages is nothing."
His most recent gig was for Essay Writers.
His clients have included students from top colleges like the University of
Pennsylvania, and he's written short freshman-comp papers along with longer,
more sophisticated fare. Like all freelancers for Essay Writers, Mr. Robbins
logs in to a password-protected Web site that gives him access to the
company's orders. If he finds an assignment that's to his liking, he clicks
the "Take Order" button. "I took one on Christological topics in the second
and third centuries," he remembers. "I didn't even know what that meant. I
had to look it up on Wikipedia."
Most essay mills claim that they're only
providing "model" papers and that students don't really turn in what they
buy. Mr. Robbins, who has a law degree and now attends nursing school, knows
that's not true. In some cases, he says, customers have forgotten to put
their names at the top of the papers he's written before turning them in.
Although he takes pride in the writing he's done over the years, he doesn't
have much respect for the students who use the service. "These are kids
whose parents pay for college," he says. "I'll take their money. It's not
like they're going to learn anything anyway."
That's pretty much how Charles Parmenter
sees it. He wrote for Essay Writers and another company before quitting
about a year ago. "If anybody wants to say this is unethical — yeah, OK, but
I'm not losing any sleep over it," he says. Though he was, he notes, nervous
that his wife would react badly when she found out what he was doing. As it
happens, she didn't mind.
Mr. Parmenter, who is 54, has worked as a
police officer and a lawyer over the course of a diverse career. He started
writing essays because he needed the money and he knew he could do it well.
He wrote papers for nursing and business students, along with a slew of
English-literature essays. His main problem, he says, is that the quality of
his papers was too high. "People would come back to me and say, 'It's a
great paper, but my professor will never believe it's me,'" says Mr.
Parmenter. "I had to dumb them down."
Eventually the low pay forced him to quit.
In his best months, he brought home around $1,000. Other months it was half
that. He estimates that he wrote several hundred essays, all of which he's
kept, though most he can barely remember. "You write so many of these things
they start running together," he says.
Both Mr. Parmenter and Mr. Robbins live in
the United States. But the writers for essay mills are increasingly
international. Most of the users who log into the Essay Writers Web site are
based in India, according to Alexa, a company that tracks Internet traffic.
A student in, say, Wisconsin usually has no idea that the paper he ordered
online is being written by someone in another country.
Like Nigeria. Paul Arhewe lives in Lagos,
that nation's largest city, and started writing for essay mills in 2005.
Back then he didn't have his own computer and had to do all of his research
and writing in Internet cafes. Now he works as an online editor for a
newspaper, but he still writes essays on the side. In the past three years,
he's written more than 200 papers for American and British students. In an
online chat, Mr. Arhewe insisted that the work he does is not unethical. "I
believe it is another way of learning for the smart and hardworking
students," he writes. Only lazy students, Mr. Arhewe says, turn in the
papers they purchase.
Mr. Arhewe started writing for Essay
Writers after another essay mill cheated him out of several hundred dollars.
That incident notwithstanding, he's generally happy with the work and
doesn't complain about the pay. He makes between $100 and $350 a month
writing essays — not exactly a fortune, but in a country like Nigeria, where
more than half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, it's not
too bad either.
Mr. Arhewe, who has a master's degree from
the University of Lagos, has written research proposals and dissertations in
fields like marketing, economics, psychology, and political science. While
his English isn't quite perfect, it's passable, and apparently good enough
for his clients. Says Mr. Arhewe: "I am enjoying doing what I like and
getting paid for it."
Write My Dissertation
Some customers of Essay Writers are
college freshmen who, if their typo-laden, grammatically challenged order
forms are any indication, struggle with even the most basic writing tasks.
But along with the usual suspects, there is no shortage of seniors paying
for theses and graduate students buying dissertations.
One customer, for example, identifies
himself as a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. He or she (there is no name on the order) is
interested in purchasing a 200-page dissertation. The student writes that
the dissertation must be "well-researched" and includes format requirements
and a general outline. Attached to the order is a one-page description of
Ph.D. requirements taken directly from MIT's Web site. The student also
suggests areas of emphasis like "static and dynamic stability of aircraft
controls."
The description is consistent with the
kind of research graduate students do, according to Barbara Lechner,
director of student services at the institute's department of aeronautics
and astronautics. In an initial interview, Ms. Lechner said she would bring
up the issue with others in the department. Several weeks later, Ms. Lechner
said she was told by higher-ups not to respond to The Chronicle's inquiries.
The head of the department, Ian A. Waitz,
says he doesn't believe it's possible, given the highly technical subject
matter, for a graduate student to pay someone else to research and write a
dissertation. "It seems like a bogus request," says Mr. Waitz, though he
wasn't sure why someone would fake such an order. However, like Ms. Lechner,
Mr. Waitz acknowledged that the topics in the request are consistent with
the department's graduate-level research.
Would-be aerospace engineers aren't the
only ones outsourcing their papers. A student at American University's law
school ordered a paper for a class called "The Law of Secrecy." She didn't
include her full name on the order, but she did identify one of her two
professors, Stephen I. Vladeck. Mr. Vladeck — who immediately knew the
identity of the student from the description of the paper — was surprised
and disappointed because he tries to help students who are having trouble
and because he had talked to her about her paper. Mr. Vladeck argues that a
law school "has a particular obligation not to tolerate this kind of stuff."
The student never actually turned in the paper and took an "incomplete" for
the course.
Essay Writers attempts to hide the
identities of its customers even from the writers who do the actual work.
But it's not always successful. Some students inadvertently include personal
information when they upload files to the Web site; others simply put their
names at the bottom of their orders.
Jessica Dirr is a graduate student in
communication at Northern Kentucky University and an Essay Writers customer.
She hired the company to work on her paper "Separated at Birth: Symbolic
Boasting and the Greek Twin." Ms. Dirr says she looked online for assistance
because the university's writing center wasn't much help and because she had
trouble with citation rules. She describes what Essay Writers did as mostly
proofreading. "They made some suggestions, and I took their advice," she
says. Unfortunately, Ms. Dirr says, the paper "wasn't up to the level my
professor was hoping for."
Mickey Tomar paid Essay Writers $100 to
research and write a paper on the parables of Jesus Christ for his New
Testament class. Mr. Tomar, a senior at James Madison University majoring in
philosophy and religion, defends the idea of paying someone else to do your
academic work, comparing it to companies that outsource labor. "Like most
people in college, you don't have time to do research on some of these
things," he says. "I was hoping to find a guy to do some good quality
writing."
Nicole Cohea paid $190 for a 10-page paper
on a Dove soap advertising campaign. Ms. Cohea, a senior communications
major at the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote in her order that she
wanted the company to "add on to what I have already written." She helpfully
included an outline for the paper and wondered whether the writer could "add
a catchy quote at the beginning."
When asked whether it was wrong, in
general, to pay someone else to write your essay, Ms. Cohea responded,
"Definitely." But she says she wasn't planning to turn in the paper as her
own; instead, she says, she was only going to use it to get ideas. She was
not happy with the paper Essay Writers provided. It seemed, she says, to
have been written by a non-native English speaker. "I could tell they were
Asian or something just by the grammar and stuff," she says.
James F. Kollie writes a sporadically
updated blog titled My Ph.D. Journey in which he chronicles the progress
he's making toward his doctorate from Walden University. He recently ordered
the literature-review portion of his dissertation, "The Political Economy of
Privatization in Post-War Developing Countries," from Essay Writers. In the
order, he explains that the review should focus on privatization efforts
that have failed.
Mr. Kollie acknowledged in an interview
that he had placed an order with Essay Writers, but he said it was not
related to his dissertation. Rather, he says, it was part of a separate
research project he's conducting into online writing services. When asked if
his university was aware of the project, he replied, "I don't have time for
this," and hung up the phone.
Policing Plagiarism
Some institutions, most notably Boston
University, have made efforts to shut down essay mills and expose their
customers. A handful of states, including Virginia, have laws on the books
making it a misdemeanor to sell college essays. But those laws are rarely,
if ever, enforced. And even if a case were brought, it would be extremely
difficult to prosecute essay-mill operators living abroad.
So what's a professor to do? Thomas
Lancaster, a lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University, in
England, wrote his dissertation on plagiarism. In addition, he and a
colleague wrote a paper on so-called contract-cheating Web sites that allow
writers to bid on students' projects. Their paper concludes that because
there is almost never any solid evidence of wrongdoing, catching and
disciplining students is the exception.
In his research, Mr. Lancaster has found
that students who use these services tend to be regular customers. And while
some may be stressed and desperate, many know exactly what they're doing.
"You will look and see that the student has put the assignment up within
hours of it being released to them," he says. "Which has to mean that they
were intending to cheat from the beginning."
What he recommends, and what he does
himself, is to sit down with students and question them about the paper or
project they've just turned in. If they respond with blank stares and
shrugged shoulders, there's a chance they haven't read, much less written,
their own paper.
Susan D. Blum suggests assigning papers
that can't easily be completed by others, like a personal reflection on that
day's lecture. Ms. Blum, an associate professor of anthropology at the
University of Notre Dame and author of the recently published book My Word!
Plagiarism and College Culture, also encourages professors to keep in touch
with students as they complete major projects, though she concedes that can
be tough in a large lecture class.
But Ms. Blum points out a more fundamental
issue. She thinks professors and administrators need to do a better job of
talking to students about what college is about and why studying — which may
seem like a meaningless obstacle on the path to a credential — actually
matters. "Why do they have to go through the process of researching?" she
says. "We need to convey that to them."
Mr. Tomar, the philosophy-and-religion
major who bought a paper for his New Testament class, still doesn't think
students should have to do their own research. But he has soured on essay
mills after the paper he received from Essay Writers did not meet his
expectations. He complained, and the company gave him a 30-percent refund.
As a result, he had an epiphany of sorts. Says Mr. Tomar: "I was like — you
know what? — I'm going to write this paper on my own."
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
This study is consistent with remarks made earlier by Linda Kidwell
regarding student cheating.
"Do Students Cheat More in Online Classes? Maybe not," by Marc Parry,
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 16, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Do-Students-Cheat-More-in/8073/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A new study contradicts the perception that
cheating is more widespread in online classes, finding that students in
virtual courses were less likely to cheat than their face-to-face peers.
You can’t make any sweeping generalizations based on the results, since the
study only looked at 225 students at Friends University, a private,
mid-sized, Christian-based institution in Wichita, Kansas.
But the study, “Point,
Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual
Classroom,” adds fresh data to the ongoing debate
about academic integrity online. The issue is on the minds of many in the
distance education world because the recently reauthorized Higher Education
Opportunity Act requires accreditors to monitor steps that colleges take to
verify that an enrolled student is the same person who does the course work.
For the new study, researchers surveyed undergraduate
students about seven types of academic misconduct. These included cheating
on tests, plagiarism, and aiding and abetting (letting a classmate copy a
paper, for example). In both traditional and online classes, aiding and
abetting was found to be the cheating method of choice.
Asked about the results, Donna Stuber-McEwen, an author of the study,
suggested that age may be one factor.
“Research has show that older students tend to cheat less frequently than
younger students,” said Stuber-McEwen, a psychology professor, told The
Chronicle. “And our sample tended to have a greater percentage of
nontraditional students in the online classes.”
"Cambridge Survey
Finds That 49% of Students Have Plagiarized,"
by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3,
2008 ---
Click Here
Half the students at the University of Cambridge
have plagiarized, according to results of a survey by
Varsity,
a student newspaper at the university.
The newspaper said its survey had attracted 1,014
respondents, of whom 49 percent said they had committed at least one act
defined by the university as plagiarism. The list of forbidden acts
included: handing in someone else’s essay; copying and pasting from the
Internet; copying or making up statistics, code, or research results;
handing in work that had been submitted previously; using someone else’s
ideas without acknowledgment; buying an essay; and having an essay edited by
Oxbridge Essays,
a company that provides online essay services. Five
percent of those who admitted having plagiarized said they had been caught.
Some students were surprised to find that what they
thought were innocuous academic acts had landed them in the plagiarist
category. “Of course I use other people’s ideas without acknowledging them,
but I didn’t think that this made me a plagiarist,” one student said.
But others admitted copying or buying work “when I
am late with an essay or finding it difficult.” Law students, the newspaper
said, broke the rules most often, with 62 percent admitting that they had
plagiarized. Four percent of students surveyed said they had written for
Oxbridge Essays.
Comments
Yes, and 100% of civil rights leaders named Martin
Luther King, Jr., have also plagiarized. And 100% of writers named Doris
Kearns Goodwin have plagiarized. And 100% of vice-presidential candidates
named Joe Biden have plagiarized. These students are in good company. Maybe
we should educate them rather than haul them before a firing squad, as too
many professors want to do.
— gl Nov 1, 08:22 PM #
I agree with gl, it seems a bit harsh to haul
anyone anywhere, much less before a firing squad, until we have delved into
the depth of the training students receive about the rigors of attribution.
(Hint: scandalously little)
The internet with all its advances did bomb us back
to the intellectual property stone age with the conspicuous absence of paper
trails for the materials one can find within a click or two of beginning
research.
The other part of the problem, and I am ready to be
placed before the firing squad for this comment, professors (especially at
the undergraduate level) do not put enough thinking into the construction of
their essay questions. And to make matters worse, they use the same old
tired questions year in decade out. So let’s look at our role in
perpetuating this obnoxious problem and criminal waste of time on both
sides.
Newsflash, profs! Life is short. Why spend your
precious discretionary time playing cops and robbers with your students?
— BC PROF Nov 1, 11:42 PM #
Using a service like Turnitin.com helps to reduce
plagiarism quite a bit because even if the students don’t have a high
likelihood of getting caught, they know that they are really taking a big
risk if they try to fool the system. If students know there’s a good chance
they’ll get caught, they will not engage in plagiarism. Some professors
would rather spend their leisure time with their families or doing their own
research rather than chasing down sources of plagiarism. Use the tools to
help you catch cheaters so you can have more time for your own life.
— MEH Nov 2, 02:16 PM #
Of course if I discover that a student has
committed plagiarism, I take the steps that are prescribed by the honor code
at my university. But I did not become a teacher to spend my time enforcing
such codes. If a student cheats and receives a grade that he doesn’t
deserve, he is the poorer for it. We have this idea that cheaters are
robbing someone else of something valuable, and therefore that we ought to
act to stop them or to punish them. It is not so difficult to see that
plagiarists are only cheating themselves. They pay the very high price of
not learning what they might have learned under their own lights, and to my
mind that is penalty enough.
— SK Nov 2, 02:49 PM #
MEH, the time you save with turnitin.com is lost
when you catch a cheater, because you yourself become a cheater if you don’t
report the honor violation (rather than handle it privately, which most
campuses frown upon). So assuming you’re as honest as you expect your
student to be, you’re sucked into the whole lengthy honors process, with
forms and hearings and meetings and eventually the wish that you had not
been so persnickety.
I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid
if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing
could have been already written. Or, as I do, require first drafts of nearly
completed works, a couple weeks before the real due date, with which you can
issue warnings framed in face-saving
look-what-you-forgot-you-cite-or-enclose-in-quotation-marks language. They
get the message you’re tough, especially if you threaten reporting an honors
violation if the supposed error is not corrected, and you spend even more
time with your own life.
— gl Nov 2, 03:04 PM #
gl
I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid
if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing
could have been already written.
right, I am sure that is feasible in history of
philosophy classes. Second Idea was much more reasonable.
— jon Nov 2, 08:54 PM #
The key is what the students perceive as cheating.
If using someone else’s ideas without acknowledging it is cheating, then we
are all cheaters. The kids come in to college 17 years old and dumb. They
sit in lectures, read books, talk to classmates and faculty, and hear all
kinds of new ideas. How can they ever acknowledge where all those ideas came
from? How can they even remember when the ideas were first planted and by
whom?
Similarly, good writing involves sharing ideas with
other students, revising and proofreading. That violates the honor code
standard of “doing your own work.” We create a catch-22 when we demand high
quality work but strictly prohibit some of the methods that are essential
for good learning. And even if we don’t “strictly” prohibit appropriate
collaboration, not all students know where the line is. Consequently, some
students will identify themselves as cheaters, even though the type of help
they get on their assignments is acceptable.
And in my field, it is pretty common for students
to forget to write down some detail of their source information, and at the
last minute have to fudge the works cited. Technically it is fabrication,
and the students know it. It would be embarrassing to publish a error-filled
works cited. But in the end it is too trivial to worry about.
All these kinds of cases drive up the number of
self-identified cheaters. It isn’t worth faculty worrying out.
— Shar Nov 3, 12:33 AM #
As others have noted, the extensive use of
plagiarism requires an educational solution. I commend to you an excellent
article by Eleanour Snow who describes (and links to) a number of
institution-wide web tutorials designed to teach students about plagiarism.
You can view the article at http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=306&action=article
(requires free subscription).
James L. Morrison Editor-in-Chief, Innovate
Putin did not write his own Ph.D. thesis, and there's some question as to
whether he even read it.
Putin’s plagiarism, fake Ukrainian degrees and other tales of world leaders
accused of academic fraud ---
https://theconversation.com/putins-plagiarism-fake-ukrainian-degrees-and-other-tales-of-world-leaders-accused-of-academic-fraud-112826
Also see
"Putin Accused of Plagiarizing Thesis," Moscow Times, March 27, 2006 ---
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/27/011.html
"Some Russian Leaders Start to Fight Plagiarism," Inside Higher Ed,
March 1, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/03/01/some-russian-leaders-start-fight-plagiarism
Rumors abound in Russia that many top leaders have
degrees that they didn't really earn, but some officials are starting to
tackle the issue of plagiarism.
Time reported that the deputy minister of
education and science reviewed 25 dissertations at random from the history
department at Moscow Pedagogical State University. With one exception, all
were found to be extensively plagiarized, with some having as much as 90
percent of the material copied.
Jensen Comment
What's interesting about this news item is that it was published in Moscow. This
would not have happened in the old Soviet Union
Martin Luther King Jr. has been accused of widespread plagiarism, including
parts of his doctoral thesis ---
http://www.martinlutherking.org/thebeast.html
Video: Joe
Biden Drops Out Of 1988 Presidential Race Apologizes For Plagiarism And Lying
About Grades ---
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUmFHU1dBEg
Joe Biden --- Beyond Plagiarism
If only Vice President Joe Biden had stuck to plagiarism. But he apparently
hasn’t learned. In 1987, he copied and used a large chunk of a speech given by
British labor leader Neil Kinnock, even though some of the facts (related to
family history) didn’t match his own. Since then, he’s gone from plagiarism to
smashmouth rhetorician. Last week, Biden was called out by former Bush advisor
Karl Rove because Biden repeatedly said he’d chastised President Bush in person.
And Biden came out of the ensuing discussion with a lot of mud on his face. On
April 6, 2009, Biden said: “I remember President Bush saying to me one time in
the Oval Office, 'Well, Joe, I'm a leader.' And I said: 'Mr. President, turn and
around look behind you. No one is following.’” Three days later, on April 9,
Rove said Biden’s conversation with Bush did not happen. Candida P. Wolff,
Bush’s White House liaison, concurred: “I don't ever remember Biden being in the
Oval. He was such a blowhard on all that stuff -- there wasn't a reason to bring
him in." Facts notwithstanding, Biden has been telling stories that make it
sound like he had unfettered access to Bush for some time. On HBO’s “Real Time
with Bill Maher” in April 2006, Biden said: “The president will say things to
me, and I'll literally turn to the president, say: 'Mr. President, how can you
say that, knowing you don't know the facts?' And he'll look at me and…say: 'My
instincts. …I have good instincts.' [To which I’ll say]: 'Mr. President, your
instincts aren't good enough.'"
A.W.R. Hawkins, Human Events,
April 14, 2009 ---
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?print=yes&id=31447
Other celebrity plagiarists ---
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/plagiarism.htm
Since I have such a huge number of documents
at my Website, I often wonder what kinds of grades I'm getting around the world
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
November 3, 2008 reply from Guest, Paul
[paul.guest@CRANFIELD.AC.UK]
Having taught accounting at Cambridge for several
years, I believe that these high plagiarism figures are of no relevance to
any accounting courses taught there.
I would guess that the high figures are likely due
to the unique college tutorial system at Cambridge University (along with
Oxford and a few others) where undergraduate students attend frequent
(usually biweekly) small group tutorials in addition to lectures. Students
are often required to write essays for these tutorials under very tight time
constraints. The high plagiarism figures are likely driven by undergraduates
trying to finish essays by these deadlines. The students don't benefit from
such cheating. Although the essays are marked they do not count towards a
final grade, and any under-prepared students are usually exposed as such in
the tutorials. [For accounting tutorials, essays are very rarely set, and
instead students are required to work through a previously unseen question.]
Paul Guest
Cranfield School of Management
Then in a second message Paul wrote the following:
I agree, cheating students won't learn much about
the assigned material if they cheat. However, under the Cambridge and Oxford
(tutorial & written assignment) system (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system , cheating
students are much more likely to be caught at an early stage when the
consequences are much less severe (since written assignments do not
contribute to final grades). The cheating can therefore be dealt with
informally and with a light touch by a tutor who is close to the student, so
lessons can be learned with no lasting damage. Especially important when
many cases of plagiarism appear to arise from ignorance.
Also, assignment writing for tutorials at Cambridge
is optional. Undergraduate students can choose not to produce written
assignments for tutorials (or simply not turn up to them). However, by not
participating they are foregoing the most important learning experience at
Cambridge. The tutorial and written assignment system is the fundamental
pedagogic difference between Cambridge and other universities and a key
reason why Cambridge has been so successful. It is worth £2000 per year for
each undergraduate student (previously paid by the government but not any
longer as of this year
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/oct/14/highereducation.universityfunding
). Students are very aware of this and very rarely
miss supervisions or fail to submit written assignments.
From my experience in teaching these supervisions
(I also taught economics and finance for which essays were assigned) I dont
believe that plagiarism is rampant. Instead I interpret the high figures
along the lines suggested by Dave Albrecht, that although 49% of students
have plagiarised at some point, each student has done it very rarely.
By the way, a huge thankyou from across the pond to
you and the other contributors to this list, and for the great material on
your website.
Paul Guest
"Our most original compositions are composed exclusively of expressions
derived from others."
When
Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism after the publication of her
autobiography,
The Story of My Life (public
library), Mark Twain sent her
a note of solidarity and support, assuring her that "substantially
all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a
million outside sources." Shortly thereafter, Alexander Graham
Bell – father of the telephone – wrote Annie Sullivan, Keller's
teacher, a
letter with a similar sentiment. Bell argued that it is "difficult
for us to trace the origin of our expressions" and "we are all of
us … unconscious plagiarists, especially in childhood" – a notion
neurologist Oliver Sacks has affirmed more than a century later with his
recent insights on
memory and plagiarism, and one the poet Kenneth Goldsmith has
institutionalized with his
class on "uncreative writing."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think in the case of students, most plagiarism investigations center around
verbatim or nearly-verbatim passages without attribution. Sometimes, as in the
case of dissertation research, focus may be placed upon suspected and non-cited
earlier ideas and possibly mathematical proofs that are sometimes relatively
easy to reformulate in slightly different ways.
The non-cited verbatim plagiarisms of other writers and composers of course
are much more difficult to justify on ethical or legal grounds. So are the
reformulated plagiarisms of ideas, although these are much more difficult to
detect and prosecute in court.
"Dissertation cheats: the dark, corrupt slice of the Internet," by
Zack Whittaker, zdnet, December 10, 2008 ---
http://blogs.zdnet.com/igeneration/?p=652&tag=rbxccnbzd1
I thank Scott Bonaker for pointing this link out to me.
The Internet is slowly becoming a rubbish tip for
junk, useless information, knitting patterns and videos of
blind Scottish men being hit in the nuts with a baseball.
Because nothing on the web really ever disappears,
we can see into the looking glass of the past.
Over the last few decades, we’ve accumulated a lot of content, and the
amount of “immoral” websites and services available; essay writing services
for university students who want to cheat, have increased. Take this made up
example:
Students can spend anything as little as a few
hours up to a few weeks for an average, normal essay part of their
undergraduate studies. Some will have more essays than others, but they’re
an important part of a qualification.
They show how the learner understands the knowledge they have acquired,
how to reference and cite sources, as well as a
discipline in writing formats. It’s an art, rather than a chore; maybe
that’s why so many Bachelor of Arts degree qualifications have essays - art
and arts.
But the other day, I received an email from
CheatHouse.com, a website which “specialises in essays and papers for
students”. They offer a variety of ways to plug into the database, but the
primary way is to pay for access, allowing you to read through and access
thousands of pre-written essays and dissertations.
From
their about page:
“To stimulate learning. Simply. We have gotten
a lot of critisism in the past, and I suspect this will continue in the
future, but we are trying to build a community, where students come
together.”
Considering the name of the damn website is “CheatHouse”,
are we supposed to fall for that? Now let’s face it; the chances of somebody
buying a unique essay to study it and not to plagiarise it, is
little-to-none. As a society, we are unfortunately not that moral.
It does, however, try to justify it on a specific
page buried within the mass of links, and dodging the “encouraging cheating”
question with another question; whilst creating a loophole to wiggle out of
the plagiarism question. Just because the person who wrote the essay cites
all the sources, references and acknowledges authors, doesn’t mean someone
else can hand it in as theirs. It just doesn’t work like that. A dictionary
definition won’t detract away from what appears to be a standard policy of a
university.
“So you didn’t write this essay?” … “No, but
all the sources are cited and it’s referenced.” … “Oh that’s OK then,
well done, you’ve got a first.”
Idiots.
Why pick out this website? Because not only do they
offer a slice of temptation cake to students, they also send out spam emails
to Hotmail addresses. I just wish I hadn’t deleted the email in the first
place. It’s not just them though; there are so many “services” out there
which promote and actively support this.
Google, back in June, began to blacklist
advertisements which promoted essay-writing services, which has certainly
cut the number of these immoral ads from the main Google search,
but for local search locales, it seems to have little effect.
Considering that a degree, or a masters or
doctorate qualification enables a person to go on to very specific,
specialised practices, I cannot see how the people who buy and use these
essays should be let through to graduate. They surely wouldn’t, except they
aren’t detected. The websites that provide these, especially this particular
website which spam’s people as well, should be absolutely ashamed of
themselves.
Putting it simply, it’s cheating a way into a
qualification, which could be used to gain a job position or academic
status. That, my friends, is fraud.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Plagiarism is generally thought of as being a literal or nearly-literal stealing
of parts of the writings of others. It can, however, also entail the stealing of
ideas without citation as to where those ideas were borrowed from in the
literature or other media. It is especially relevant in this era of Weblogs,
blogs, and YouTube where many ideas are stated that do not necessarily appear in
traditional printed versions such as journals and books.
Jensen Comment
Plagiarism is generally thought of as being a literal or nearly-literal stealing
of parts of the writings of others. It can, however, also entail the stealing of
ideas without citation as to where those ideas were borrowed from in the
literature or other media. It is especially relevant in this era of Weblogs,
blogs, and YouTube where many ideas are stated that do not necessarily appear in
traditional printed versions such as journals and books.
By way of illustration, suppose I was looking for an idea for an accounting
dissertation. I stumble upon this particular module obscurely buried at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/theory01.htm
How to play tricks on fair value accounting by "managing" the closing
price of key securities in the portfolio
Painting the Tape (also called Banging the Close)
This occurs when a portfolio manager holding a
security buys a few additional shares right at the close of business at an
inflated price. For example, if he held shares in XYZ Corp on the last day
of the reporting period (and it's selling at, say $50), he might put in
small orders at a higher price to inflate the the closing price (which is
what's reported). Do this for a couple dozen stocks in the portfolio, and
the reported performance goes up. Of course, it goes back down the next day,
but it looks good on the annual report.
Jason Zweig, "Pay Attention to That Window Behind the Curtain," The Wall
Street Journal, December 20, 2008 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122973369481523187.html?
The above module has great potential for dissertation study. A doctoral
student who does so, however, and fails to cite Jason Zweig for the idea is in
fact cheating even if not a single phrase is lifted from Zweig's article.
The problem with this non-literal text phrasing is that plagiarism search
engines often cannot detect the plagiarism of ideas.
Question
Have you considered asking your students to turn in two term papers
simultaneously, one of which is mostly plagiarized and one that is pledged
to be not plagiarized in any way with proper citations?
"Winning Hearts and Minds in War on
Plagiarism," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, April 7, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/07/plagiarism
That’s what Kate Hagopian, an instructor in the
first-year writing program at North Carolina State University, does. For one
assignment, she gives her students a short writing passage and then a prompt
for a standard student short essay. She asks her students to turn in two
versions. In one they are told that they must plagiarize. In the second,
they are told not to. The prior night, the students were given an online
tutorial on plagiarism and Hagopian said she has become skeptical that
having the students “parrot back what we’ve told them” accomplishes
anything. Her hope is that this unusual assignment might change that.
After the students turn in their two responses to
the essay prompt, Hagopian shares some with the class. Not surprisingly, the
students do know how to plagiarize — but were uncomfortable admitting as
much. Hagopian said that the assignment is always greeted with
“uncomfortable laughter” as the students must pretend that they never would
have thought of plagiarizing on their own. Given the right to do so, they
turn in essays with many direct quotes without attribution. Of course in
their essays that are supposed to be done without plagiarism, she still
finds problems — not so much with passages repeated verbatim, but with
paraphrasing or using syntax in ways that were so similar to the original
that they required attribution.
When she started giving the assignment, she sort of
hoped, Hagopian said, to see students turn in “nuanced tricky
demonstrations” of plagiarism, but she mostly gets garden variety copying.
But what she is doing is having detailed conversations with her students
about what is and isn’t plagiarism — and by turning everyone into a
plagiarist (at least temporarily), she makes the conversation something that
can take place openly.
“Students know I am listening,” she said. And by
having the conversation in this way — as opposed to reading the riot act —
she said she is demonstrating that all plagiarism is not the same, whether
in technique, motivation or level of sophistication. There is a difference
between “deliberate fraud” and “failed apprenticeship,” she said.
Hagopian’s approach was among many described at
various sessions last week at the
annual meeting of the Conference of College
Composition and Communication,
in New Orleans. Writing instructors — especially those
tasked with teaching freshmen — are very much on the front lines of the war
against plagiarism. As much as other faculty members, they resent plagiarism
by their students — and in fact several of the talks featured frank
discussion of how betrayed writing instructors feel when someone turns in
plagiarized work.
That anger does motivate some to use the software
that detects plagiarism as part of an effort to scare students and weed out
plagiarists, and there was some discussion along those lines. But by and
large, the instructors at the meeting said that they didn’t have any
confidence that these services were attacking the roots of the problem or
finding all of the plagiarism. Several people quipped that if the software
really detected all plagiarism, plenty of campuses would be unable to hold
classes, what with all of the sessions needed for academic integrity boards.
While there was a group therapy element to some of
the discussions, there was also a strong focus on trying new solutions.
Freshmen writing instructors after all don’t have the option available to
other faculty members of just blaming the problem on the failures of those
who teach first-year comp.
What to do? New books being displayed in the
exhibit hall included several trying to shift the plagiarism debate beyond a
matter of pure enforcement. Among them were
Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching
Writing in the Digital Age,
just published by the University of Michigan (and
profiled on
Inside Higher Ed), and
Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts,
Pedagogies, released in February by
Boynton/Cook.
Like Hagopian, many of those at the meeting said
that they are focused on trying to better understand their students, what
makes them plagiarize, and what might make them better understand academic
integrity. There wasn’t much talk of magic bullets, but lots of ideas about
ways to better see the issue from a student perspective — and to find ways
to use that perspective to promote integrity.
Continued in article
A Clever Way to Punish and Prevent Plagiarism
"Traffic School for Essay Thieves," by Paul D. Thacker, Inside Higher Ed,
November 29, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/11/29/plagiarism
Having grown weary of punishing students for
plagiarizing and advising other professors to fail them, too, Meg Files said
that she had an epiphany during a random chat with a colleague at Pima
Community College’s West Campus. The professor explained that he had
recently gone to traffic school after receiving a ticket and that the course
had actually improved his driving.
“So I thought, ‘Why can’t we have a parallel
program for plagiarism?’ ” said Files, who chairs Pima’s English/journalism
department.
Seizing on the idea, Files created a “traffic
school for plagiarism,” aimed at altering the campus’s focus on catching and
punishing students for turning in essays they didn’t write. Now students can
seek academic rehabilitation instead of punishment by participating in a
plagiarism program that contains five steps:
- Write a detailed, self-exam on “Why I
plagiarized.”
- Read case studies of plagiarism. (Files said
that many of the examples cover cases of professional journalists fired
from their jobs.)
- Write a paragraph defining plagiarism.
- Meet with a tutor to discuss proper citation
etiquette and complete a short worksheet on citations.
- Meet with a faculty committee to talk about
how to avoid plagiarism and lessons learned.
Files, who will be overseeing the program, said
that it is too early to tell whether it will be successful. Only a few
students have elected to sign up, and none have yet finished.
“My reaction is, good for them,” said Donald L.
McCabe, founding president of the
Center for Academic Integrity. McCabe, a professor
of management and global business at Rutgers University, called Pima’s
approach a good policy that cuts down the middle between two extremes:
excessively punishing students for literary piracy, or ignoring them. McCabe
said that his own research finds that plagiarism is slightly more common
today than in previous decades and that honor codes help curb the problem.
However, current policies at most educational
institution revolve around detection and punishment. A number of
universities now use online products such as
Turnitin.com
to scan essays for stolen text.
While catching students and then failing them for
copying does help to reduce plagiarism, McCabe said that it probably doesn’t
provide the best results and may just teach students to be more careful when
they cheat. “Now we are just teaching students how to avoid detection,” he
said.
Instructing students how to correctly reference
other work and instilling a sense of academic integrity in them is
difficult, McCabe said, but is the best way to dissuade students from
plagiarizing.
“I like the focus — the remedial aspect instead of
just playing gotcha,” said John P. Lesko, editor of
the new scholarly
journal, Plagiary. Lesko pointed out that some
students may not even know that plagiarism is a bad thing, and that copying
is considered normal in some countries.
He noted that Carolyn Matalene, now professor
emeritus of English language and literature at the University of South
Carolina, noticed in the 1980s that
students in China regularly pilfered lines from
published pieces. “She found that copying was actually encouraged so that
you would learn like the masters,” he said.
Files said that cultural differences in defining
plagiarism also drove her develop the new program. “In some cultures,
plagiarism isn’t bad,” she said. But she also found that the current
policies at her institution were not going far enough. In the past, Pima
tried to curb plagiarism by assigning original topics, which makes it more
difficult for students to purchase an essay, and by emphasizing the writing
process—outlining, drafting, revising—over delivering a finished product.
Finally, faculty have been encouraging students to be confident and proud of
their own writing. She calls these steps “prevention” and the new program a
“cure” once plagiarism is found.
“I think it’s a worthwhile effort, but the
motivation to plagiarize is huge,” said Colin Purrington, associate
professor of evolutionary biology at Swarthmore College. Purrington became
so concerned about the growing problem with plagiarism that he put up a
complete Web site to address the issue a couple of
years ago.
One of the resources he cites as a deterrent
against plagiarism is an
essay that a Swarthmore student wrote as a
disciplinary measure after getting caught. The essay reads: “Plagiarism is
undisputedly, a most egregious academic offense. Unfortunately, I found that
out the hard way. I cannot even begin to describe how unpleasant the
experience was for me.”
On his Web page, Purrington notes that the essay is
nicely written and urges instructors to hand it out to students to generate
discussion. But he also notes with some chagrin: “That person got caught
again some years later.”
Question
who were at least two famous world leaders who plagiarized doctoral theses?
Answer
Two that I know of off the top of my head are
Martin Luther King and
Vladimir Putin. Doubts are raised that Putin ever read his thesis that
plagiarized from a
U.S. textbook. Iran's President Ahmadinejad allegedly plagiarizes, although
I don't know if he plagiarized in his doctoral thesis ---
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2006/10/ahmadinejad_i_h.html
The
source Putin plagiarized is a well known textbook. Perhaps by translating it
into Russian he or his helpers thought it would not be detected.
Russian President Vladimir Putin plagiarized US textbook
Russian President Vladimir Putin plagiarized sections of
an American management textbook in writing an economics dissertation a decade
ago, The Washington Times newspaper reported. Putin, who wrote a 218-page paper
on planning in the natural resources sector, reportedly lifted numerous passages
directly from a management text published by two University of Pittsburgh
academics, the Times said late on Saturday, citing research by two scholars at
the respected Brookings Institution think tank in Washington. Putin, who
obtained a doctorate degree in economics in 1997 from the St. Petersburg Mining
Institute wrote his thesis on "The Strategic Planning of Regional Resources
Under the Formation of Market Relations." After reviewing the document,
Brookings researchers Clifford Gaddy and Igor Danchenko concluded that large
sections of Putin’s dissertation were copied almost word-for-word from the 1978
management text "Strategic Planning and Policy," by University of Pittsburgh
professors William King and David Cleland.
http://theunjustmedia.com/Unjustmedia%20Archive/March%202006/march%2027%202006.htm
Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional
Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore accused
of plagiarizing parts of her recently published chick-lit novel,
acknowledged yesterday that she had borrowed language from another writer's
books, but called the copying "unintentional and unconscious." The book,
"How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life," was recently published
by Little, Brown to wide publicity. On Sunday, The Harvard Crimson reported
that Ms. Viswanathan, who received $500,000 as part of a deal for "Opal" and
one other book, had seemingly plagiarized language from two novels by Megan
McCafferty, an author of popular young-adult books.
Dinitia Smith, "Harvard Novelist Says Copying Was Unintentional," The New
York Times, April 25, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/books/25book.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Her Publisher is Not Convinced
A day after Kaavya Viswanathan admitted copying parts
of her chick-lit novel, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,"
from another writer's works, the publisher of the two books she borrowed from
called her apology "troubling and disingenuous." On Monday, Ms. Viswanathan, in
an e-mail message, said that her copying from Megan McCafferty's "Sloppy Firsts"
and "Second Helpings," both young adult novels published by Crown, a division of
Random House, had been "unintentional and unconscious." But in a statement
issued today, Steve Ross, Crown's publisher, said that, "based on the scope and
character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of
youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act." He said that there
were more than 40 passages in Ms. Viswanathan's book "that contain identical
language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first
two books."
Dinitia Smith, Publisher Rejects Young Novelist's Apology," The New York
Times, April 26, 2006 ---
Click Here
April 27, 2006 reply from Linda Kidwell, University of Wyoming
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
Unlike the purchase/pooling debate or derivatives,
this one is something I know a fair bit about!
First, Harvard does not have an honor code, though
they debated one in the 1980s. Nor does Harvard belong to the Center for
Academic Integrity, despite the fact that most of the other Ivy Leagues, all
the seven sisters except Radcliffe, and over 390 universities (including a
few in Canada and Australia) do. That being said, the Harvard BUSINESS
School does have a code, voted in overwhelmingly by its own students several
years ago.
There is a tremendous variety in scope of honor
codes. Some address only academic issues while others have broader coverage.
I remember my senior year at Smith two fellow seniors were expelled during
their final semester for putting sugar in the gas tank of another student.
This was adjudicated under the honor code there. However other campuses
would handle such a thing through their students affairs or residence life
departments (or of course the police could be called in).
For those unfamiliar with honor codes, Melendez,
McCabe & Trevino, and my papers have used these criteria for an honor code:
1. unproctored exams
2. some kind of signed pledge that students will not cheat
3. a peer judiciary
4. reportage requirements, i.e., students should not tolerate violations
of academic integrity and have an obligation to report them
Any one or a combination of these criteria must be
in place for a true honor code. McCabe's research has shown that honor codes
cut cheating about in half.
The clearing house, if you will, for honor codes in
place in the U.S. is the Center for Academic Integrity, at
www.academicintegrity.org
Now back to Bob's question, pretending it took
place at a university with an honor code. Did this plagiarism take place in
the context of coursework? I believe the answer in this case is no.
Therefore it would depend on whether the honor code was written to encompass
activities outside of class. Some codes would capture this incident under
the general category of behavior that brings disrepute to the university
(all sorts of things, including well-known athletes that behave in a drunken
manner in public, debate teams that trash a hotel room, you name it). Others
would have no jurisdiction in this case because it did not take place in
class, nor did she do it as part of an organized university group or
function.
Honor codes are a wonderful thing if students are
socialized into accepting them early. They can really make cheating a major
social gaffe, such that many students who might cheat elsewhere wouldn't
take the risk. Perhaps this woman would not have committed this plagiarism
if she had been at a university with an honor code culture. I still remember
how unnerved I was (and perhaps how naive) when I was first a teaching
assistant at LSU. I couldn't believe all the precautions, including leaving
bags at the front, removing hats, spacing people apart, requiring photo
identification on their desks, pacing the rows, etc. I had never even been
proctored during an exam before, so it was really a culture shock!
I could go on and on, as this is a favorite topic
of mine, but I'll save more for another day. :-)
Linda Kidwell
March 3, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
SCHOLARLY JOURNAL ON PLAGIARISM
In January the University of Michigan Scholarly
Publishing Office launched a refereed online journal, PLAGIARY. The purpose
of the journal is "to bring together the various strands of scholarship
which already exist on the subject, and to create a forum for discussion
across disciplinary boundaries." Papers in the first issues include:
-- "The Google Library Project: Both Sides of the
Story"
-- "Copy This! A Historical Perspective On the Use
of the Photocopier in Art"
-- "A Million Little Pieces of Shame"
Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in Plagiarism,
Fabrication, and Falsification [ISSN 1559-3096] is available free of charge
as an Open Access journal on the Internet at
http://www.plagiary.org/
. For more information contact: John P. Lesko, Editor,
Department of English, Saginaw Valley State University, University Center,
MI 48710 USA; tel: 989-964-2067; fax: 989-790-7638; email:
jplesko@svsu.edu
"Technology and Plagiarism in the University: Brief Report of a Trial in
Detecting Cheating," Diane Johnson et al., AACE Journal 12(3),
281-299 --- http://www.aace.org/pubs/AACEJ/dispart.cfm?paperID=24
This article reports the results of a trial of
automated detection of term-paper plagiarism in a large, introductory
undergraduate class. The trial was premised on the observation that college
students exploit information technology extensively to cheat on papers and
assignments, but for the most part university faculty have employed few
technological techniques to detect cheating. Topics covered include the
decision to adopt electronic means for screening student papers, strategic
concerns regarding deterrence versus detection of cheating, the technology
employed to detect plagiarism, student outcomes, and the results of a survey
of student attitudes about the experience. The article advances the thesis
that easily-adopted techniques not only close a sophistication gap associated
with computerized cheating, but can place faculty in a stronger position than
they have ever enjoyed historically with regard to the deterrence and
detection of some classes of plagiarism.
"Stolen Words," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, January 25,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/01/25/mclemee
But the topic of plagiarism itself
keeps returning. One professor after another gets caught in
the act. The journalists and popular writers are just as
prolific with other people’s words. And as for the topic of
student plagiarism, forget it — who has time to keep up?
It was not that surprising, last fall,
to come across the call for papers for a new scholarly
journal called Plagiary: Cross-Disciplinary Studies in
Plagiarism, Fabrication, and Falsification. I made a
mental note to check its
Web site
again — and see that it began publishing this month.
One study is already available at
the site: an analysis of how the federal Office of Research
Integrity handled 19 cases of plagiarism involving research
supported by the U.S. Public Health Service. Another paper,
scheduled for publication shortly, will review media
coverage of the Google Library Project. Several other
articles are now working their way through peer review,
according to the journal’s founder, John P. Lesko, an
assistant professor of English at Saginaw Valley State
University, and will be published throughout the year in
open-source form. There will also be an annual print edition
of Plagiary. The entire project has the support of
the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of
Michigan.
In a telephone interview, Lesko
told me that research into plagiarism is central to his own
scholarship. His dissertation, titled “The Dynamics of
Derivative Writing,” was accepted by the University of
Edinburgh in 2000 — extracts from which appear at his Web
site
Famous Plagiarists, which he says
now gets between 5,000 and 6,000 visitors per month.
While the journal Plagiary
has a link to Famous Plagiarists, and vice versa, Lesko
insists that they are separate entities — the former
scholarly and professional, the latter his personal project.
And that distinction is a good thing, too. Famous
Plagiarists tends to hit a note of stridency such that, when
Lesko quotes Camille Paglia denouncing the
poststructuralists as “cunning hypocrites whose tortured
syntax and encrustations of jargon concealed the moral
culpability of their and their parents’ generations in Nazi
France,” she seems almost calm and even-tempered by
contrast.
“It seems that both Foucault and
Barthes’ contempt for the Author was expressed in some
rather plagiaristic utterances,” he writes, “a parroting of
the Nietschean ‘God is dead’ assertion.” That might strike
some people as confusing allusion with theft. But Lesko is
vehement about how the theorists have served as enablers for
the plagiarists, as well as the receivers of hot cargo.
“After all,” he writes, “a
plagiarist — so often with the help of collaborators and
sympathizers — steals the very livelihood of a text’s real
author, thus relegating that author to obscurity for as long
as the plagiarist’s name usurps a text, rather than the
author being recognized as the text’s originator. Plagiarism
of an author condemns that author to death as a text’s
rightfully acknowledged creator...” (The claim that Barthes
and Foucault were involved in diminishing the reputation of
Nietzsche has not, I believe, ever been made before.)
To a degree, his frustration
is understandable. In some quarters, it is common to recite
– as though it were an established truth, rather than an
extrapolation from one of Foucault’s essays – the idea that
plagiarism is a “historically constructed” category of
fairly recent vintage: something that came into being around
the 18th century, when a capitalistically organized
publishing industry found it necessary to foster the concept
of literary property.
A very interesting argument to be
sure — though not one that holds up under much scrutiny.
The term “plagiarism” in its
current sense is about two thousand years old. It was coined
by the Roman poet Martial, who complained that a rival was
biting his dope rhymes. (I translate freely.) Until he
applied the word in that context, plagiarius had
meant someone who kidnapped slaves. Clearly some notion of
literary property was already implicit in Martial’s figure
of speech, which dates to the first century A.D.
At around the same time, Jewish
scholars were putting together the text of that gigantic
colloquium known as the Talmud, which contains a passage
exhorting readers to be scrupulous about attributing their
sources. (And in keeping with that principle, let me
acknowledge pilfering from the erudition of Stuart P. Green,
a professor of law at Louisiana State University at Baton
Rouge, whose fascinating paper “Plagiarism, Norms, and the
Limits of Theft Law: Some Observations on the Use of
Criminal Sanctions in Enforcing Intellectual Property
Rights” appeared in the Hastings Law Review in 2002.)
In other words, notions of
plagiarism and of authorial integrity are very much older
than, say, the Romantic cult of the absolute originality of
the creative genius. (You know — that idea Coleridge ripped
off from Kant.)
At the same time, scholarship on
plagiarism should probably consist of something more than
making strong cases against perpetrators of intellectual
thievery. That has its place, of course. But how do you
understand it when artists and writers make plagiarism a
deliberate and unambiguous policy? I’m thinking of
Kathy Acker’s novels, for example.
Or the essayist and movie maker Guy Debord’s proclamation in
the 1960s: “Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it.”
(Which he, in turn, had copied from the avant-garde writer
Lautreamont, who had died almost a century earlier.)
Why, given the potential for
humiliation, do plagiarists run the risk? Are people doing
it more, now? Or is it, rather, now just a matter of more
people getting caught?
Given Lesko’s evident passion
on the topic of plagiarism as a moral transgression –
embodied most strikingly, perhaps, in his color-coded
War on Plagiarism Threat Level Analysis
– I had to wonder if the doors of [ital]Plagiary[ital]
would be open to scholars not sharing his perspective.
Was it worth the while of, say, a
Foucauldian to offer him a paper?
“It may be that I’m a bit more
conservative than some scholars,” he conceded. But he points
out that manuscripts submitted to Plagiary undergo a
double-blind review process. They are examined by three
reviewers – most of them, but not all, from the journal’s
editorial board.
There is no ideological or
theoretical litmus test, and he’s actively seeking
contributions from people you might not expect. “I’m willing
to consider articles from plagiarists,” he said.
That’s certainly throwing the door
wide open. You would probably want to vet their work pretty
carefully, though.
Cheating then versus now
What this means in evaluative practice is not only that
the opportunities to cheat (just to continue to use this word) are enormously
expanded. The nature of cheating itself changes accordingly — to the despair of
every teacher, beginning with those who teach freshman composition. The very
fact that “plagiarism” must be carefully defined there defers to the absence of
what the dean in (the movie) School Ties
refers to as a vacuum. (Could cheating even be punished — in his terms — if one
has to begin by defining it?) It also testifies to the near-impossibility of
judging a paper on SUV’s or gay marriage or God-knows-what that has been cobbled
together out of Internet sources whose fugitive presence, sentence by sentence,
is almost undetectable. Furthermore, to the student these sources may well be
almost unremarkable, with respect to his or her own words. What is this business
of one’s “own words” anyway? What if the very notion has been formed by CNN? How
not to visit its site (say) when time comes to write? Most students will be
unfamiliar with a theoretical orientation that questions the whole idea of
originality. But they will not be unaffected with some consequences, no less
than they are unaffected by, say, the phenomenon of sampling and remixing as it
takes place in popular culture, especially fashion or music. “Plagiarism”
has to contend with all sorts of notions of imitation, none of which possess any
moral valence. Therefore, plagiarism becomes — first, if not foremost — a matter
of interpretive judgment. Cheating, on the other hand, is not interpretive in
the same way (and, in the world of (the movie)
School Ties, not “interpretive” at all). No wonder, in a sense, that test
gradually has had to yield to text. It is almost as if the vacuum could not
hold. By the present time, the importance of determining grades (in part if not
whole) by means of papers acquires the character of a sort of revenge of popular
culture — ranging from cable television to rap music — upon academic culture.
Terry Caesar, "Cheating in a Time of Extenuating Circumstances," Inside
Higher Ed, July 8, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/07/08/caesar
Jensen Comment: The 1992 movie School Ties focuses on cheating
brought to light by an honor code that requires students to report seeing other
students cheat. It also focuses on education at a time when cheating was
more severely punished, usually by expulsion from school. In most colleges
today, first-time offenders who get caught are generally placed on some type of
probation. At the same time most schools have modified their honor codes
in this litigious society such that students are no longer required to report
observed cheating of other students. Many instructors view reporting of
cheating as becoming too much of a hassle in terms of time and trouble when the
student will not be severely punished in any case. This leads to greater
risk taking on the part of some students when it comes to cheating. They
are less likely to be detected and, if detected for the first time, the
punishments are negligible relative to the rewards. Such risk taking
continues on when they are tempted to cheat as executives in business/government
and the temptations to siphon off millions of dollars are great.
From T.H.E.
Newsletter on November 17, 2004
With the crunch of midterms, finding time to write
that history paper or analyze that Shakespeare poem may seem like an
impossible feat.
But students will want to think twice before running
to the Internet to download a paper in times of desperation, as UCLA renewed
its license this year for the commonly used online anti-plagiarism service,
Turnitin.com…
For the full story, visit: http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles.asp?id=30809
Ministers should learn that it is much more acceptable if attribution of
source material is given up front
Glenn Wagner was a successful mega-church pastor in
Charlotte, N.C., until one of his elders heard a sermon on the radio that was
identical to one he had heard from the pulpit. Mr. Wagner confessed that he had
been preaching other people's sermons off and on for two years, including some
he broadcast on Christian radio. He resigned from his ministry last fall. A
similar case occurred after members of the National City Christian Church in
Washington, D.C., found on the internet sermons that Alvin O'Neal, moderator of
the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and a celebrated preacher in that
denomination, had preached. Mr. O'Neal apologized for his actions and remains in
his ministry. A number of lesser-known ministers across the country have also
been caught stealing sermons. Sometimes it makes the newspapers, but other times
congregations or denominations handle the matter quietly.
Gene Edward Veith, "Word for word RELIGION: More and more pastors lift entire
sermons off the internet—but is the practice always wrong?" World Magazine,
April 22, 2005 ---
http://www.worldmag.com/subscriber/displayarticle.cfm?id=10576
Question
Where are your students going for help with term paper assignments?
Answer
One place might be the "Term Paper Research Guide" at http://www.findarticles.com/p/page?sb=articles_guide_termpaper&tb=art
"Hi-tech answer to student cheats," BBC News, June 30, 2004
--- http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tyne/wear/3852347.stm
New measures to help detect cheating students are being
demonstrated at a conference in Newcastle.
A survey of around 350 undergraduates found nearly 25%
had copied text from another source at least once.
A new service that can scan 4.5 billion web pages is
now online so that lecturers can check the originality of the work submitted
by students.
The software is being demonstrated at a meeting of
the Plagiarism Advisory Service at Northumbria University.
'Originality report'
Student Tom Lenham said of the statistics:
"That's a pretty modest interpretation of the situation at the moment.
"From my own experience and that of fellow
students, it's a lot higher than that because it is not drummed into our heads
from the start.
"Only more recently have we been told how to use
the internet for referencing."
The Plagiarism Advisory Service says cheating is not
a new phenomenon but the internet has led to concerns within the academic
community that the problem is set to increase dramatically.
The service manager Fiona Duggan said: "The
software has four databases that it checks students' work against and produces
an originality report which highlights where it has found matches.
"It demonstrates where the student has lifted
text from, and it also takes you to the source where the match was
found."
The software has been developed in the USA and the
Plagiarism Advisory Service hopes it will go some way to stamping out the
practice.
Ms Duggan said: "There are other things that can
be done, like the way you set assignments so each student has something
individual to put into the assignment so it is not so easy to copy."
Questions
Should a doctoral student be allowed to hire an editor to help write her
dissertation?
If the answer is yes, should this also apply to any student writing a course
project, take home exam, or term paper?
Answer
Forwarded by Aaron Konstam
"Academic Frauds," The Chronicle of Higher Education, November
3, 2003 --- http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/11/2003110301c.htm
Question (from "Honest John"): I'm a
troubled member of a dissertation committee at Private U, where I'm not a
regular faculty member (although I have a doctorate). "Bertha" is a
"mature" student in chronological terms only. The scope of her
dissertation research is ambiguous, and the quality of her proposal is
substandard. The committee chair just told me that Bertha is hiring an editor
to "assist" her in writing her dissertation. I'm outraged. I've
complained to the chair and the director of doctoral studies, but if Bertha is
allowed to continue having an "editor" to do her dissertation,
shouldn't I report the university to an accreditation agency? This is too big
a violation of integrity for me to walk away.
Answer: Ms. Mentor shares your outrage -- but first,
on behalf of Bertha, who has been betrayed by her advisers.
In past generations, the model of a modern
academician was a whiz-kid nerd, who zoomed through classes and degrees, never
left school, and scored his Ph.D. at 28 or so. (Nietzsche was a full professor
at 24.) Bertha is more typical today. She's had another life first.
Most likely she's been a mom and perhaps a
blue-collar worker -- so she knows about economics, time management, and child
development. Maybe she's been a musician, a technician, or a mogul -- and now
wants to mentor others, pass on what she's known. Ms. Mentor hears from many
Berthas.
Returning adult students are brave. "Phil"
found that young students called him "the old dude" and snorted when
he spoke in class. "Barbara" spent a semester feuding with three
frat boys after she told them to "stop clowning around. I'm paying good
money for this course." And "Millie's" sister couldn't
understand her thirst for knowledge: "Isn't your husband rich enough so
you can just stay home and enjoy yourself?"
Some tasks, Ms. Mentor admits, are easier for the
young -- pole-vaulting, for instance, and pregnancy. Writing a memoir is
easier when one is old. And no one under 35, she has come to suspect, should
give anyone advice about anything. But Bertha's problem is more about academic
skills than age.
Her dissertation plan may be too ambitious, and her
writing may be rusty -- but it's her committee's job to help her. All
dissertation writers have to learn to narrow and clarify their topics and pace
themselves. That is part of the intellectual discipline. Dissertation writers
learn that theirs needn't be the definitive word, just the completed one, for
a Ph.D. is the equivalent of a union card -- an entree to the profession.
But instead of teaching Bertha what she needs to
know, her committee (except for Honest John) seems willing to let her hire a
ghost writer.
Ms. Mentor wonders why. Do they see themselves as
judges and credential-granters, but not teachers? Ms. Mentor will concede that
not everyone is a writing genius: Academic jargon and clunky sentences do give
her twitching fits. But while not everyone has a flair, every academic must
write correct, clear, serviceable prose for memos, syllabuses, e-mail
messages, reports, grant proposals, articles, and books.
Being an academic means learning to be an academic
writer -- but Bertha's committee is unloading her onto a hired editor, at her
own expense. Instead of birthing her own dissertation, she's getting a
surrogate. Ms. Mentor feels the whole process is fraudulent and shameful.
What to do?
Ms.Mentor suggests that Honest John talk with Bertha
about what a dissertation truly involves. (He may include Ms. Mentor's column
on "Should You Aim to Be a Professor?") No one seems to have told
Bertha that it is an individual's search for a small corner of truth and that
it should teach her how to organize and write up her findings.
Moreover, Bertha may not know the facts of the job
market in her field. If she aims to be a professor but is a mediocre writer,
her chances of being hired and tenured -- especially if there's age
discrimination -- may be practically nil. There are better investments.
But if Bertha insists on keeping her editor, and her
committee and the director of doctoral studies all collude in allowing this
academic fraud to take place, what should Honest John do?
He should resign from the committee, Ms. Mentor
believes: Why spend his energies with dishonest people? He will have exhausted
"internal remedies" -- ways to complain within the university -- and
it is a melancholy truth that most bureaucracies prefer coverups to
confrontations. If there are no channels to go through, Honest John may as
well create his own -- by contacting the accrediting agencies, professional
organizations in the field, and anyone else who might be interested.
Continued in the article.
Why not hire Google to write all or parts of her
dissertation dissertation? (See below)
November 3, 2003 reply from David R. Fordham [fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
Bob, there are two very different questions being
addressed here.
The first deals with the revelation that “her
dissertation research is ambiguous, and the quality of her proposal is
substandard”.
The editing of a manuscript is a completely different
issue.
The ambiguity of the research and the flaws with the
proposal should be addressed far more forcefully than the editing issue!
Care should be used to ensure that the editor simply
edits (corrects grammar, tense, case, person, etc.), and isn’t responsible
for the creation of ideas. But if the editor is a professional editor who
understands the scope of his/her job, I don’t see why editing should be an
issue for anyone, unless the purpose of the dissertation exercise is to
evaluate the person’s mastery of the minutiae of the English language (in
which case the editor is indeed inappropriate).
Talk about picking your battles … I’d be a lot
more upset about ambiguous research than whether someone corrected her
sentence structure. I believe the whistle-blower needs to take a closer look
at his/her priorities. A flag needs to be raised, but about the more important
of the two issues.
David R. Fordham
PBGH Faculty Fellow
James Madison University
Bob Jensen's threads about assessment ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
It's About Time
"Settlement Reached in Essay-Mill Lawsuit." by Paige Chapman,
Chronicle of Higher Education, October 25, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/settlement-reached-in-essay-mill-lawsuit/27852?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Where is the line of ethical responsibility of using online services
to improve writing?
June 23, 2006 message from Elliot Kamlet
[ekamlet@STNY.RR.COM]
Is it just me or is there a lack of, at least,
shame.
http://www.thepaperexperts.com/aboutus.shtml
Elliot Kamlet
Binghamton University
June 23, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Elliot,
I suspect that paying to have your writing edited, revised, and
translated is as old as writing itself. Networking technology has simply
made it faster, easier, and in many instances cheaper. What is a
problem is that a student who writes very badly may never be discovered
in college if writing is required only for assignments outside the
classroom. This speaks in favor of essay examinations along the way.
There is certainly nothing illegal about an
editing service, and it would be tough to say outside editing is
unethical except for assignments that require or request that the
author's work must be entirely in his/her own words.
Of course this particular service in Canada may entail both editing
and translating (from Canadian into English) --- just kidding.
If such a service also adds new content, then the ethical issues are
very clear since the author might take credit for the new content where
credit is not due. The author also takes a chance that the new content
might be plagiarized.
I had a student some years ago that submitted a term paper that was
plagiarized entirely from three separate sources (that I found with a
Google search). In dealing with the student and his parents, I
discovered that he was not aware that his AIS paper was plagiarized. He
was a young CEO of one of his father's AIS companies. He (my student)
hired one of his employees to write the paper. The employee actually
plagiarized the work to be submitted in the name of my student.
The question in this case is what is worse --- plagiarizing from
published sources or hiring the writing of the term paper? In either
case, the rule infraction would get the student an F from me and a
report of the incident to the Academic Vice President of the University.
Interestingly, the student approached me about five years later and
asked if the time limit on his F grade had expired. He wanted to submit
a new paper. I told him that F grades do not expire even after
graduation.
Bob Jensen
June 23, 2006 reply from Ruth Bender
[r.bender@CRANFIELD.AC.UK]
And for $62.65 you can buy "Plagiarism and
Academic Integrity"
"Plagiarism is a constant concern in the
academic world particularly in areas that involve a lot of research or
term paper writing, such as English Literature. The Internet seems to be
making plagiarism easier as are companies that specialize in academic
research writing for hire. However, several experts believe that most
plagiarism takes place because students do not fully understand how to
perform proper scholarly research and integrate it into their own
material. In the end, plagiarism seems to stem more from a lack of
knowledge rather than a plot to undermine education."
Pages: 7
Bibliography: Content-Di source(s) listed
Filename: 22017 plagiarism and Academic
Integrity.doc
Price: US$62.65
Ruth Bender
Cranfield School of Management
UK
June 23, 2006 reply from Joseph Brady
[bradyj@LERNER.UDEL.EDU]
Years ago I too thought that dishonesty was
caused by a lack of knowledge. The cure: tell students the general rule
(don't take credit for the work of others) and how that rule applies in
your course (give specific examples of how students could trip up). I
work hard at the cognitive factor, going so far as to give a *quiz* on
our honesty rules, in the first week of classes.
Experience can be a cruel teacher. I now think
that most students are dishonest because it's easy to be dishonest and
easy to get away with dishonesty. The problem is not a cognitive one.
It's an ethical one, having a grounding in what is culturally acceptable
at an institution.
It's not a problem in just English 101.
Plagiarism is a serious issue in any course that involves
computer-generated files. It's easy in any MIS or AIS course to copy
someone else's application program and make some simple modifications to
avoid detection. Students learn this right away. Actually, they have
know this since high school or even earlier.
My primary concern as an educator is: are
students learning? Surely this is obvious: those who are copying, are
not learning. If only the small minority of students were at fault, I
would not worry so much. But I think the problem is worsening rapidly.
It's now possible to reach a tipping point: most of the class copying
most of the time, so that not much is learned by the end of the
semester. I actually had a section that came pretty close to that status
last semester.
Students will not police themselves, at least
not here, so I do not have a solution for the problem. It would be nice
to have a utility (like turnitin.com) that would answer the question:
"Was the contents of this Excel/Access/VB/etc file copied or imported
from some other file?" You can no longer get the answer to that question
reliably using Windows time stamping. One of my summer To-Do's is to
write that program in VB, but I'll have to learn a lot about Windows
file structures to do that, and I'll probably not have time to get to
it.
Joe Brady
University of Delaware
June 25, 2006 reply from Robert Holmes Glendale College
[rcholmes@GLENDALE.CC.CA.US]
It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has
reached the college level would not know that copying a paper from any
source (Internet, friend or ?) is cheating. When I hear the "I didn't think
it was wrong" defense I assume I am talking to a liar as well as a cheater.
June 25, 2006 reply from Henry Collier
[henrycollier@aapt.net.au]
I am more than a little vexed with this:
It is inconceivable to me that anyone who has
reached the college level would not know that copying a paper from any
source (Internet, friend or ?) is cheating. When I hear the "I didn't
think it was wrong" defense I assume I am talking to a liar as well as a
cheater.
There’s more than one cultural bias illustrated in
the quote. Not everyone, fortunately, is embedded in the narrow and biased
views of the writer.
Henry
June 26, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen
Throughout the world in modern times I think borrowing works without
proper citation is considered unethical. In some parts of the world such as
Germany there was (and possibly still is) an exception made for students
where the work of the student was viewed as the work of the professor. I'm
not certain about this exception in modern times, but some professors in the
past purportedly put their names on entire books written by students without
even acknowledging the students. Presumably these professors also kept the
book royalties with clear consciences. I think this practice was more common
in the physical sciences.
A exception which does still exist in modern times arises when a noted
professor, often a senior researcher from a highly prestigious university,
lends his/her name to a textbook to improve its marketing potential. I know
of one instance in an accounting textbook with four authors where one of the
authors wrote over 90% of the material and the other authors mostly lent
their names and affiliations. I know of other instances where a senior
professor from a huge program did very little of the writing of the textbook
but greatly increased the chances that his university would provide sales of
over 1,000 copies of the book each year. Such marketing ploys might be
viewed as deceptive, although can it be called plagiarism when the principal
author of possibly 100% of the writing encourages someone else to share in
the "authorship credit?"
Something similar happens for journal articles to improve their chances
for publication in a leading journal. There is also the even more common
happening where one author who writes poorly did the research and wrote a
very rough first draft. Then a highly skilled writer who does little or no
research anymore performs a great editing service and receives full credit
as a partner in the research. In this case the paper's editor may be getting
far more credit for the "research" than is deserving.
See how complicated the question of authorship ethics becomes.
Bob Jensen
June 26, 2006 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
>June 26, 2005 reply from Bob Jensen
>Throughout the world in modern times I think
borrowing works without proper citation is considered unethical.
Bob, while this might hold true for academic work,
it certainly does not seem to apply to the journalistic world, does it?
(Think: WV Coal Mine Disaster; Think: Hurricane Katrina at the New Orleans
Stadium; Think: any one of hundreds of other media screwups in the past few
months where so-called "news" media reported a story as though the reporter
were reporting first-hand facts when in reality the reporter was "copying"
from an unreliable (and false) source, -- all without proper citation.
And in some instances, a few journalists are so
unethical that they even go so far as to try to HIDE their sources and keep
them secret! Talk about lack of proper attribution! Some even claim a
constitutional right to do so! ;-)
And no, the citation of "a reliable source" is not
proper citation; if you think it is, just try getting one of those past ANY
reviewer for any decent journal! I can see it now: a bibliography containing
sixteen entries of "A reliable source", "ibid".
On another note, I have it "from a reliable source"
that in times past, (specifically the 16th century art world), it was not
considered wrong to borrow works from other people without attribution. (My
source here is the art curator at the Rubens House museum in Antwerp,
Belgium.) Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony Van Dyke, and most of the other great
"masters" of the art world back then ran studios to train young artists in
the guild craft. The master would sketch a scene, the young artist would
paint it, the master might touch up a little here and there, and ultimately
would sign it, giving the student no recognition or attribution whatsoever.
With the master's signature, the piece would sell handsomely, the master
would pay the student a cut, and keep the rest. This was a widely known, and
perfectly acceptable, practice of the day. There are dozens of Van Dykes,
Rembrandts, Rubens, and other great works which show very little evidence of
ever being touched by the person who signed the painting. Everyone of the
day actually knew it, but it was an acceptable practice as long as the
student was a student of the master. It was the master's name which sold the
painting. Marketing, marketing.
Of course, to be realistic, I tend to agree with
Robert Holmes. Most of the college students I encounter these days do know
perfectly well that what they are doing is wrong in most cases, but plead
ignorance and invoke the "cultural victim" mentality when caught. And when I
do have the occasional student from another culture, I make an extra effort
to clarify what is and is not acceptable. (I don't know what the culture is
in Ghana, for example, but when caught, my Ghana student admitted knowing
she had violated the honor code, in addition to violating the instructions
clearly printed on the assignment.)
But as Carol pointed out, the chase, the hunt, the
hiding, is all part of the game which some students see as being part of the
"essence" of preparing for the real world: college.
signed,
---
(um, you were expecting a real signature here?)
---
The gadfly from JMU An unnamed source...
June 26, 2006 reply from Bernadine and Peter Raiskums
[berna@GCI.NET]
In the doctoral program I am now pursuing on-line
through Capella, the learners are provided with access to mydropbox.com and
encouraged to submit their draft papers "to help with citation issues and
improper source referencing. After submission, mydropbox.com will generate a
plagiarism report within 24 hours ... for your personal use." I found the
report to be very interesting in that it picked up something that had been
published in a rather obscure journal which I had written myself last year!
Bernadine Raiskums, CPA, M.Ed. in Anchorage
The home page for mydropbox.com is at
http://www.mydropbox.com/
"High-Profile Plagiarism Prompts Soul-Searching in German Universities,"
by Paul Hockenos, Chronicle of Higher Education, February 25, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/High-Profile-Plagiarism/137515/?cid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Rarely do political scandal and academe collide so
publicly as they have now, in Europe. In February, Germany's education
minister stepped down after Heinrich Heine University, in Düsseldorf,
revoked her doctorate because her thesis lifted passages from other sources
without proper attribution.
Her departure came after scandals over plagiarized
work took down a German defense minister, the president of Hungary, and a
Romanian education minister. But it is the storied German university system,
not politics, that has suffered the real body blows, say education experts.
The front-page news has shaken higher education in
Germany, where, in addition to the two former federal ministers, several
other national and local political figures have been accused of academic
fraud. The incidents have left many wondering: Is there something rotten at
the heart of German academe, the esteemed heir of Humboldt and Hegel?
For two centuries, the German university as
envisioned by the 19th-century philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt has been the
model for research institutions in Europe, the United States, and beyond.
Humboldt's notions of academic freedom, the autonomy of the university, and
placing scientific pursuit at the heart of higher education continue to
carry weight today. But his legacy in Germany may be growing somewhat
tarnished.
"The reputation of German universities is
suffering, and it looks like it will suffer for some time to come," says
Wolfgang E.J. Weber, director of the Institute for European Cultural
History, in Augsburg, Germany, and author of a book on the history of the
European university.
As a result of the scandals, he says, his historian
colleagues from elsewhere in Europe no longer consider the German system to
be the gold standard. Noting that the allegations of academic fraud have
affected doctoral graduates in the humanities and liberal arts, Mr. Weber
worries that if financing for disciplines in those areas suffers as a
result, "the negative consequences could be long-term."
In Germany academic titles play a role in politics
far greater than they do in the United States. Doctoral and other titles,
sometimes as many as three or four, are prominently displayed on the
business cards, door plaques, and letterheads of politicians. Some call it
posturing—a modern-day "nobleman's title"—while others defend it as a
meaningful distinction based on merit.
"In the German context, the academic title means
more than just an expertise, say, in economics or law, that can be valuable
to policy making or another field," says Thomas Rommel, rector of the
European College of Liberal Arts of Bard, in Berlin, and author of a book
about plagiarism in general. "It connotes personal achievement, an element
of determination and grit to pursue a specialized topic for three years and
see it through."
Whether one is impressed by the degree or not, the
Ph.D. has become a facet of the German résumé that lures ambitious
politicians and professionals who have no intention of entering academe.
That has led to a proliferation of Ph.D.'s—roughly 25,000 a year awarded
since 2000, more per capita than any other country in the world, according
to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany. By comparison, American
universities award 50,000 doctorates a year, but in a country with a
population four times as large as Germany's.
Germany's output of Ph.D. recipients probably won't
slow down, but the plagiarism cases have shined a spotlight on academe's
time-honored methods for supervising and awarding doctorates, especially to
candidates who are not full-time academics.
"In theory," says Martin Spiewak, education editor
at the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit, "the professional with hands-on
experience in a given field, like a politician, can through a dissertation
bring something new into the world of scholarship that others can then
profit from. It could be a unique, constructive link between the
professional and the academic worlds."
Continued in article
"Yet Another Plagiarism Scandal in Germany," by Ana Dinescu, Inside
Higher Ed, March 8, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/university-venus/yet-another-plagiarism-scandal-germany
Jensen Comment
Centuries ago Oxford was a collection of colleges rather than a university. When
I lectured at Humboldt University in Berlin a few years ago, it was claimed that
the idea of a university as opposed to a collection of colleges was conceived at
Humboldt ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University
Prior to the 20th Century the works of students became the works of their
professors and were sometimes published without even giving credit to the
original authors. Of course times have changed, although they perhaps changed a
bit slower in Germany.
It was hard to sleep at night in my hotel because skyscrapers were being
built 24/7 with lots of noise, loud radios, and men yelling loudly in Russian.
Apparently Russian workers were imported to do a lot of the construction work. I
thought it was ironic that the Russians destroyed Berlin and then were called
back to rebuild it.
Market for Admissions Test Questions and Essay "Consulting"
This type of cheating raises all sorts of legal issues yet to be resolved
for students who might've thought what they did was perfectly legal
New Effort to Sell (successful) MBA Application Essays ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/10/02/new-effort-sell-mba-application-essays
More than 1,000 prospective MBA students who paid
$30 to use a now-defunct Web site to get a sneak peak at live questions from the
Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) before taking the exam may have their
scores canceled in coming weeks. For many, their B-school dreams may be
effectively over. On June 20, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District
of Virginia granted the test's publisher, the Graduate Management Admission
Council (GMAC), a $2.3 million judgment against the operator of the site,
Scoretop.com. GMAC has seized the site's domain name and shut down the site, and
is analyzing a hard drive containing payment information. GMAC said any students
found to have used the Scoretop site will have their test scores canceled, the
schools that received them will be notified, and the student will not be
permitted to take the test again. Since most top B-schools require the GMAT, the
students will have little chance of enrolling. "This is illegal," said Judy
Phair, GMAC's vice-president for communications. "We have a hard drive, and
we're going to be analyzing it. If you used the site and paid your $30 to cheat,
your scores will be canceled. They're in big trouble."
Louis Lavelle, "Shutting Down a GMAT Cheat Sheet: A court order against a
Web site that gave away test questions could land some B-school students in hot
water," Business Week, June 23, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2008/bs20080623_153722.htm
Jensen Comment
A university admissions office that refused to accept applications from the
"cheating" prospective MBA students would probably be sued by one or more
students. GMAC would probably be sued as well. But it's hard to sue a U.S.
District Court.
There are several moral issues here. From above, this is clearly cheating.
But in various parts of society exam questions and answers are made available
for study purposes. For example, preparation manuals for drivers license tests
usually contain all the questions that might be asked on the written test. It is
entirely possible that some MBA applicants fell for a scam that they believed
was entirely legitimate. Now their lives are being messed up.
I guess this is a test of the old saying that "Ignorance is no defense" in
the eyes of the law. Clearly from any standpoint, they were taking advantage of
other students who did not have the cheat sheets. But the cheat sheets were
apparently available to anybody in the world for a rather modest fee, albeit an
illegal fee. Every buyer did not know it was illegal.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Penn State Cracks Down on Plagiarism," by Allison Damast, Business
Week, February 3, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/feb2011/bs2011022_942724.htm?link_position=link1
"Turnitin Begins Crackdown on Plagiarism in Admissions Essays," by
Louis Lavelle, Business Week, January 20, 2010 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2010/01/turnitin_begins.html?link_position=link5
For a long time, b-school applicants have had it
good. Submit an MBA application to Harvard, and who’s going to know if you
send the same one to Wharton? And Columbia? And Yale? Turn in an essay with
a few well-chosen words lifted from an online source, or a friend’s essay,
and who’s the wiser? Well, those days are over my friends. O-V-E-R, over.
Turnitin.com, the web site that professors have
been using for years to check student research papers for plagiarism, is now
turning it’s attention to admissions essays, with Turnitin for Admissions.
The new service, which was announced in December, checks admissions essays
submitted by participating schools against a massive database that contains
billions of pages of web content as well as more than 100 million student
works previously submitted to Turnitin and millions of pages of proprietary
content, including journals and books. It’s capable, the company says, of
flagging instances of “plagiarism, recycled submissions, duplicate
responses, purchased documents, and other violations of academic standards.”
No b-schools have signed up for the service yet,
but it seems only a matter of time. The service was started by popular
demand from colleges and universities, and b-school admissions directors are
as vocal as any in their complaints about duplicate essays and similar
problems.
And they don’t even know the half of it. Back in
2007, in anticipation of the new service, Turnitin undertook a study of
every single undergraduate admissions essay submitted over the course of a
year in a large (unnamed) English-speaking country, all told, about 453,000
“personal statements” received by more than 300 institutions of higher
education. About 200,000 of them were found to include text that matched
sources in the Turnitin database.
In all, more than a million matches were found (5
for each of the 200,000 essay). Half the matches were from online sources,
with 29% coming from student documents (research papers, etc.) and 20%
coming from other admissions documents. Turnitin’s conclusion: that 36% of
the matches it found were suspected plagiarism. Here’s an excerpt from the
Turnitin report:
Personal statements attached to university
applications should be the work of that applicant and help the university
know more about the perspective applicant. It is safe to assume that more
that 70,000 applicants that applied though this system did so with
statements that may not have been their own work. The number of Internet
sites that matched personal statement/essay providing services leads one to
question the additional 100,000 applicants whose personal statement
contained a significant match (they may have borrowed or purchased all or
part of their personal statement). The list of internet sites where most of
this poaching went on includes Wikipedia, the BBC, the Guardian newspaper,
as well as numerous sites designed specifically to help students with their
essays, including Peterson’s Essayedge.com. A few of the sites belonged to
admissions consultants, including Accepted.com and EssayEdge.com, and few
others, if you can believe this, actually belong to schools themselves,
including online writing labs at Purdue University and Ohio State.
I really don’t know where to begin. If the Turnitin
study is at all representative of the current state of college admissions,
it seems safe to assume that more than a few current MBAs, and quite a few
MBA alumni who have gone on to bigger and better things, started out their
academic lives committing the cardinal sin of the academy, and a serious
breach of ethics. If they stammered through the essays on their own, without
the benefit of cutting and pasting, would they have been admitted?
Impossible to say. Did not getting caught encourage them to go on to bigger
and better lies? Again, nobody knows.
I’m willing to entertain any opposing viewpoint
that makes a modicum of sense, but I’m not sure there is one. Is duplicating
your admissions essay okay? Is plagiarizing someone else’s work in an essay
ever permissable?
Continued in article
"The Computer Stole My Homework -- and Sold It Through an Essay Mill,"
by Ben Terris, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2009 ---
Click Here
Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda
Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale.
And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same
scenario has played out many times before.
The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web
sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work
and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.
For the first time, however, those who find
unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal
retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making
its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider
liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site
is called RC2C Inc. and hosts at least nine sites that sell term papers.
Essay mills often provide their own written works.
"In Lawsuit, College Board Accuses Company of Circulating
Copyright-Protected SAT Questions," by Elizabeth R. Farrell,
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 25, 2008 ---
Click Here
A test-preparation company in Texas is being sued
by the College Board for what it calls "one of the largest cases of a
security breach in our company's history," according to Edna Johnson, a
senior vice president of the nonprofit group, which owns the SAT.
In a lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court
in Dallas, the College Board is seeking unspecified damages against the
company, Karen Dillard's College Prep LP, which it says illegally obtained
copies of SAT and PSAT tests before they were available to the public. The
lawsuit also accuses the company of violating copyright-protection laws by
circulating and selling materials that included test questions owned by the
College Board.
The lawsuit arose after a former employee of the
test-preparation company reported information to the College Board. Karen
Dillard, the owner of the company, said the employee was disgruntled but
would not elaborate on why.
Ms. Dillard did not deny that one of her employees
obtained a copy of the SAT that was administered in November 2006 before the
test was given. But Ms. Dillard said her company did not use any questions
from that test in preparatory materials it provided to clients.
The lawsuit states that the employee got the test
from his brother, the principal of a high school in Plano, Tex. The
principal has been put on paid leave while the Plano school district
investigates the matter, according to the Associated Press.
Copyright Confusion
In reference to the copyright allegations in the
lawsuit, Ms. Dillard said in an interview on Friday that she had believed
she was lawfully allowed to use materials she had purchased from the College
Board before 2005.
Part of the confusion may stem from a shift in the
College Board's policies regarding circulation of previous test materials.
Until 2005, the company would sell copies of previously given SAT's to
companies. After the SAT was revamped that year, the College Board no longer
sold those materials. At that time, the company also began to offer its own
online test-preparation course to students, which now costs $69.95.
"We believe part of the motivation of the College
Board in bringing this lawsuit," Ms. Dillard said, "is to drive
test-preparation companies like ours out of business so they can dominate
the industry with their own test-preparation materials, which are for sale."
Ms. Dillard said she also thinks that the College
Board is going to great efforts to publicize the lawsuit to make an example
out of her company. To support that point, she said that Justin Pope, a
higher-education reporter for the Associated Press, received a copy of the
lawsuit and contacted her for comment before it was filed.
When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Pope said he
could not confirm how or when he received the lawsuit, and could not comment
further about the matter.
The lawsuit is the culmination of a four-month
investigation by lawyers for the College Board. Two lawyers from the firm
Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP, along with a representative for
the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, visited Ms.
Dillard's office several months ago.
Ms. Dillard said that, at that time, her company
fully cooperated with all requests for information and interviews with
employees, and that she also provided personal financial records to the
lawyers.
Ms. Dillard also said that her company offered to
settle the matter for $300,000, but that lawyers for the College Board made
a counteroffer of $1.25-million, a sum her company could not afford.
Ms. Johnson, of the College Board, said she could
not comment on any offers made in settlement negotiations.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
I wonder if admissions officers are puzzled when two or more essay
submissions look suspiciously alike?
"B-Schools Take on Essay Consultants," by Rob Capriccioso, Inside Higher
Ed, February 6, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/02/07/bschool
“Vault is collecting successful admissions essays
for top MBA programs, including Wharton — and will pay $40 for each main
essay (main personal statement greater than 500 words), and $15 for each
minor essay (secondary essay answering a specific question less than 500
words) that we accept for our admissions essay section.”
That message, recently sent out from a top company
that helps students get into business schools, is enough to irk even the
most experienced admissions officers at some the nation’s leading business
schools.
“Some of our admissions counselors have gotten
outraged,” says Thomas R. Caleel, director of MBA admissions at the Wharton
School at the University of Pennsylvania. “We want students to be giving
their real stories, not some ‘polished’ or even ‘over-polished’ versions of
themselves.”
“Essays have to be meaningful per person,” he adds.
“It might be helpful to see some successful essays, but in my mind, it might
also be limiting. Someone might read one [of the consultant-produced essays]
and think that their essays have to read the same way, in order to get in.”
Those sentiments are being expressed by an
increasing number of business school officials who say that students
shouldn’t have to pay exorbitant amounts of money to make themselves appear
different than who they really are. While some officials plan to go on the
offensive against firms that they find particularly egregious, others want
to work more closely with consultants. Still others say that there is little
they can do to prevent the phenomenon.
Deans at seven of the top American business schools
are expected to address such issues at an upcoming gathering, according to a
Monday report in The Boston Globe. In an effort to “remove the possibility
of outside interference,” Derrick Bolton, director of admissions at the
Stanford Graduate School of Business, told the paper that deans are
considering making students complete their essays under supervision,
providing different essays to students in the same applicant pool, and
conducting more interviews and follow-up with references.
While the proliferation of admissions consultants
of various sorts has frustrated officials in undergraduate admissions as
well, especially at elite institutions, the steps being considered by
business schools could amount to a much more aggressive stance against the
application-consulting industry.
“Part of getting the best candidates is for them to
be themselves during the admissions process,” says Caleel. “We really want
to get to know the real person who is applying.” Wharton’s business school
dean, Patrick Harker, is expected to be part of the group that will meet to
discuss consultant issues.
While Vault officials could not be reached for
comment on Monday, Alex Brown, a senior admissions counselor at ClearAdmit,
in Philadelphia, says that not all consulting firms function the same way.
“Some businesses are bad,” he says, “but the bulk of us, that’s not the way
we operate.”
Continued in article
This service
from Google Answers was disturbing until Google shut
it down
Students can now pay to have their homework
answered by experts.
Some claim using the Net to do homework
shows that today's kids are resourceful. But a rise in content cribbed straight
from online sources, like Google Answers, has teachers on alert.
"Thin Line Splits Cheating, Smarts," vy Dustin Goot, Wired News,
September 10, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54963,00.html
Most teachers wouldn't
be surprised to hear that students have bribed friends or siblings to do their
homework in exchange for a few bucks.
What might surprise
them is that Google Answers sometimes
takes school kids up on the offer.
Staffed by a cadre of
500-plus freelance researchers, the service takes people's questions -- for
example, a calculus problem or a term paper topic -- and provides answers and
links to information. Google charges a listing fee of 50 cents and, if someone
comes up with a satisfactory response, the user pays that researcher a
previously entered bid (minimum: $2).
Although Google
Answers has a policy encouraging students to use the service as a study aid
rather than a substitution for original work, several cases show that students
often ignore this advice.
One student
in Quebec, dismayed by a response that offered only background research for a
paper on religion, pleads, "Make it into an essay, not just links and
quotes. I need this asap PLEASE!!! 2500 words is the minimum."
While researchers are
scrupulous enough not to churn out a completed term paper -- despite the
Quebec student's $55 bid -- other potential homework questions, such as math
or science problems, can be harder to identify. In some cases researchers
acknowledge that a question looks like homework -- but they still provide the
answer.
The dilemma faced by
Google Answers researchers highlights a broader issue that vexes many
educators around the country. Namely, where do you draw the line between
appropriate and inappropriate uses of the Internet and how do you stamp out
clear abuses such as cutting and pasting entire paragraphs into an essay?
The question first
entered many educators' consciousness following a Kansas
cheating scandal earlier in the year that made national headlines. At
Piper High School, near Kansas City, a biology teacher failed 28 of 118
students for plagiarism on an assignment that consisted of collecting and
gathering information about local leaves.
However, many
students (and their parents) contended that there was nothing improper about
the leaf descriptions they submitted, which had been lifted straight from the
Internet. Others claimed it was unclear where proper citation was required.
Tamara Ballou, who is
helping implement an honor code at her Falls Church, Virginia, high
school, said that it is not uncommon for teachers and students to disagree
on what constitutes academic dishonesty.
"We took a long
time to define cheating," she said, noting that many kids felt it was
acceptable to copy homework from each other or off the Internet if the
assignment was perceived as "busy work."
"A lot of kids
don't even know what (plagiarism) is," agreed Kevin Huelsman. "They
say, 'Yeah, I did the work; I brought it over (from the Internet).'"
Continued at http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54963,00.html
The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI)
Faculty are reluctant to take action against
suspected cheaters. In a 1999 survey of over 1,000 faculty on 21 campuses,
one-third of those who were aware of student cheating in their course in the
last two years, did nothing to address it. Students
suggest that cheating is higher in courses where it is well known that faculty
members are likely to ignore cheating.
Quoted from the research of Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and
first president of CAI) --- See below
Academic honor codes effectively reduce cheating.
Surveys conducted in 1990, 1995, and 1999, involving over 12,000 students on 48
different campuses, demonstrate the impact of honor codes and student
involvement in the control of academic dishonesty. Serious test cheating on
campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2 lower than the level on
campuses that do not have honor codes. The level of serious cheating on written
assignments is 1/4 to 1/3 lower.
Quoted from the research of Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and
first president of CAI) --- See below
The Center for Academic Integrity (CAI) --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/
The Center for Academic Integrity is
affiliated with the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Clemson University. We gratefully acknowledge their financial and programmatic
assistance, as well as funding from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
and the John Templeton Foundation.
CAI is a consortium of
over 225 institutions who share with peers and colleagues the Center’s
collective experience, expertise, and creative energy.
Benefits of membership include:
-
Gathering and sharing information
about academic integrity;
-
An annual conference and faculty
institute; periodic mailings; a newsletter; an electronic listserv; a
website with both public and member-only access; and presentations at the
conference of other associations as well as on the campuses of member
institutions;
-
Encouraging and supporting
research on factors that impact academic integrity;
-
Identifying and describing
fundamental vales of academic integrity and the sustaining practices that
support those values on a variety of college and university campuses;
-
Helping faculty members in
different disciplines develop pedagogies that encourage adherence to these
fundamental values;
-
Showcasing successful approaches
to academic integrity from school around the country – policies,
enforcement procedures, sanctions, research, curricular materials, and
education/prevention programs; and,
-
Providing individual consultation
on ways to promote an honest climate of learning.
Research --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/cai_research.asp
Research projects conducted by Donald
L. McCabe of Rutgers University (founder and first president of CAI), have had
disturbing, provocative, and challenging results, among them the following:
-
On most campuses, over 75% of
students admit to some cheating. In a 1999 survey of 2,100 students on 21
campuses across the country, about one-third of the participating students
admitted to serious test cheating and half admitted to one or more
instances of serious cheating on written assignments.
-
Academic honor codes effectively
reduce cheating. Surveys conducted in 1990, 1995, and 1999, involving over
12,000 students on 48 different campuses, demonstrate the impact of honor
codes and student involvement in the control of academic dishonesty.
Serious test cheating on campuses with honor codes is typically 1/3 to 1/2
lower than the level on campuses that do not have honor codes. The level
of serious cheating on written assignments is 1/4 to 1/3 lower.
-
Internet plagiarism is a growing
concern on all campuses as students struggle to understand what
constitutes acceptable use of the Internet. In the absence of clear
direction from faculty, most students have concluded that 'cut &
paste' plagiarism - using a sentence or two (or more) from different
sources on the Internet and weaving this information together into a paper
without appropriate citation - is not a serious issue. While 10% of
students admitted to engaging in such behavior in 1999, this rose to 41%
in a 2001 survey with the majority of students (68%) suggesting this was
not a serious issue.
-
Faculty are reluctant to take
action against suspected cheaters. In a 1999 survey of over 1,000 faculty
on 21 campuses, one-third of those who were aware of student cheating in
their course in the last two years, did nothing to address it. Students
suggest that cheating is higher in courses where it is well known that
faculty members are likely to ignore cheating.
-
Longitudinal comparisons show
significant increases in serious test/examination cheating and unpermitted
student collaboration. For example, the number of students self-reporting
instances of unpermitted collaboration at nine medium to large state
universities increased from 11% in a 1963 survey to 49% in 1993. This
trend seems to be continuing: between 1990 and 1995, instances of
unpermitted collaboration at 31 small to medium schools increased from 30%
to 38%.
-
A study of almost 4,500 students
at 25 schools, conducted in 2000/2001, suggests cheating is also a
significant problem in high school - 74% of the respondents admitted to
one or more instances of serious test cheating and 72% admitted to serious
cheating on written assignments. Over half of the students admitted they
have engaged in some level of plagiarism on written assignments using the
Internet.
Read about the honor codes of many colleges and universities --- http://www.academicintegrity.org/samp_honor_codes.asp
Racial Divide: Are their differences in cheating by race?
"University community reacts to diversity statistics from Committee:
Various minority organizations, administrators discuss racial issues,
discrepancies based on recently released statistics about cases reported,
brought to trial," by Cameron Feller, Cavalier Daily, April 14, 2009 ---
http://www.cavalierdaily.com/news/2009/apr/14/university-community-reacts-to-diversity-statistic/
The 2008-09 Honor Committee released statistics
last week about the demographics of cases reviewed during its term. Although
the data dealt specifically with cases reported, accused and brought to
trial, the information also lends itself to several discussions about some
students’ concerns pertaining to the University’s honor system and
diversity.
Reporting
One of the most obvious areas of interest within
the statistics were the numbers that dealt specifically with reporting.
According to the statistics, a total of 64 cases were brought before the
past Committee. Of these cases, 27 reports were brought against white
students, 21 against black students, 11 against Asian and/or Asian-American
students, four against Latinos and four against students of unknown race.
“When I saw [the statistics], I was a little bit
surprised at the disproportionate number of minority students reported
compared to [white] students,” said Vice Chair for Investigations Mary
Siegel, a third-year College student.
“Looking at these numbers, there are almost as many
[black] students reported as [white] students, which is not at all
proportional [to the actual number of students enrolled at the University],”
Siegel said.
These concerns with respect to reporting extend
beyond just Committee members, however.
“In terms of data collection, I can’t help but be
startled by the discrepancy,” African-American Affairs Dean Maurice Apprey
said.
Another alleged discrepancy is the ratio of cases
brought against males to those brought against females. The statistics show
that 48 males were reported of committing an honor offense, whereas only 18
females were reported.
Some members of the University attribute such
statistical discrepancies to spotlighting, which is when certain minorities
— such as blacks, athletes and Asians — are reported at a much higher rate
than white students for reasons like standing out in the room more, as well
as some reporters’ inherent biases.
“From a psychology point of view, sometimes you are
going to look at what’s different in the room,” said Black Student Alliance
President-elect Lauren Boswell, a third-year Architecture student.
Siegel said she hopes to help explore the reasons
behind allegedly biased reporting by speaking to reporters more frequently
than the current system allows.
“I think the first place we have to start is
reporters and ask them why they suspected this person of an the Committee
offense,” Siegel said. “If there seems to be a pattern, then the Committee
can try and correct that pattern.”
Currently reporters of an alleged honor offense are
involved in the first interview during the investigations process and then
during a rebuttal, but are removed from the investigations process, Siegel
said. Removing the reporter from the process ensures that his or her bias
does not play a part in investigations, Siegel added, but does not ensure
that there are not any biased motivations behind the initial report.
Accusations and Trials
After students are reported of having committed an
alleged honor offense, the case is taken up by the Investigative Panel,
which is comprised of three rotating Committee members, and examined to see
if an honor offense occurred. If the panel believes an offense occurred, the
student is formally accused and is brought to trial.
According to the statistics excluding last
weekend’s trials, 35 students were formally accused of committing an honor
offense by the I-Panel, 13 of whom were black. Twelve white students were
accused and 10 Asian and/or Asian-American students also were brought to
trial. A total of 29 trials, including last weekend’s trials, occurred
during the past Committee’s term. Of the 11 white students brought to trial,
six were found not guilty, whereas 14 of the 19 black students brought to
trial were found not guilty. A total of 32 males, meanwhile, were brought to
trial, nine of whom were found guilty. Comparatively, four of the 11 female
students brought to trial were found guilty.
After looking at the statistics, several Committee
members said they believe that any bias present in the beginning of the
honor trial process is lost during the process.
“Once a case comes into the system ... these
students are being found guilty at the same rate” regardless of race,
2007-08 Committee Chair Jess Huang said.
Fourth-year College student Carlos Oronce, co-chair
of the Minority Rights Coalition, disagreed, however.
“I challenge the notion that students of different
color are on par with white students” after trials, Oronce said, noting that
though Committee members have told him a “balance” eventually exists, his
own data analysis yields different conclusions. He explained that his
conclusions are based on a study done six years ago; the Committee has yet
to do a similar study since.
“You’ll see that there’s something like a 6 percent
difference in guilt rate between [white] students and black students,”
Oronce said. “Six percent comes off to me as a huge difference.”
Oronce added that he believes that a more formal
study needs to be done to accurately see and analyze the alleged
disparities. Siegel also said she believes the Committee “needs to look at
ways to correct these imbalances” regardless of whether the imbalances come
into play during the actual investigation and trial process.
Representation, Recruitment and Retention
Several members of the University community also
have expressed concern about representation within the actual Committee
itself in regards to diversity.
“I think if you look at the Committee and support
officer pools, they are admittedly not very diverse,” said Committee Chair
David Truetzel, a third-year Commerce student. La Alianza Chair Carolina
Ferrerosa, a fourth-year College student, agreed, noting that one of her
organization’s major concerns is increasing diversity within the Committee.
“We would like to see more of a push” to get more
minority representatives on the Committee, and make sure that “the Committee
is realistic when it looks in the mirror,” Ferrerosa said.
Members and non-members alike hope that by
increasing minority representation within the Committee, other diversity
issues can be addressed, like increasing outreach and personal relationships
between minority contracted independent organizations and the Committee.
Vice Chair for Education Rob Atkinson, a third-year
College student, said he already has had several meetings aimed at improving
education efforts with some of these groups. He added that he feels it is
important to create a personal relationship between these groups and the
Committee before more formal relationships can be developed.
“We want to take into account the concerns or views
of the different communities when we reach out to those communities,”
Atkinson said. Reaching out to these groups, Truetzel added, will help
ensure that all students feel like the system belongs to them, no matter
their race or gender.
“When you lack diversity ... you don’t have
diversity of thought, diversity of ideas,” Truetzel said.
Apprey, meanwhile, agreed that increasing minority
representation on the Committee could lead to “healthy conversation, healthy
debates” and could help promote “further cultural competence” and
understanding.
To help increase representation, the Committee has
taken steps to improve recruitment and students attracted to joining the
Committee. BSA President-elect Boswell noted that the Committee has made an
effort to help promote recruitment among the black student community,
holding two honor education classes during both the fall and spring
semesters this academic year that encouraged members of the black community
to join the Committee.
Boswell said that first-year students in the black
community often are approached by a lot of different programs focused on
black students their first semester to create “a sense of family and place
here” at the University. It is therefore sometimes difficult, however, to
attract first-year students that are minorities within the Committee and
other organizations during their first semesters, Boswell said. By holding
an education class during the spring, Boswell said, the Committee “got
outstanding turnout for minorities.”
The Committee and BSA also held a study hall that
discussed both the Committee and UJC. Although Boswell said she thought it
was a success, she hopes in the future that it will become more “casual” so
that students will feel comfortable enough to have personal conversations.
Despite these efforts, there are still many things
the Committee can do to encourage minorities to participate in the honor
system, Boswell said. Even though the Committee attends The Source, the
black community’s activities fair, Boswell said she does not know if it is
“the most effective way” to help recruitment.
Oronce said consistent outreach efforts to these
different communities, rather than just right before elections or the
beginning of the year, could prove helpful for recruitment or maintaining
relationships.
In addition to issues of recruitment and
representation, Oronce said that many minority students end up quitting the
Committee because they feel uncomfortable and marginalized. Boswell added
that officer pool meetings can be isolating as students generally sit with
their friends. Though she said this might be found in any organization, she
also noted that it is imperative that the Committee makes sure every
minority student feels comfortable and included if they wish to maintain
diversity.
“This past year, there has been a move towards
getting a group that is more representative,” Huang said.
Oronce also said he believes that “this year is
definitely a lot better than last year” in terms of representation within
both the Committee and the support officer pool, but that there is still
room for improvement.
“Once we fix our problems internally, we will be in
a better place to discuss” some of these other issues of diversity and the
Committee, Siegel added.
FAC and DAB
The Committee’s educational outreach efforts are
not limited to students. Within the Committee, the Faculty Advisory
Committee and the Diversity Advisory Board were created to help address
issues with faculty members and diversity organizations. The FAC chair meets
with faculty members once a month to discuss faculty concerns and teach
aspects of honor, while the DAB works with Honor to increase Honor relevancy
and understanding with diverse groups.
Continued in article
"B-School Admissions Cheating Scandal Ratted Out In China,"
By Christina Larson, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 24, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-24/b-school-admissions-cheating-scandal-ratted-out-in-china
In China it’s common to get spam
messages on your mobile phone—including advertisements promising to boost
your graduate-school admissions test scores and secure placement in MBA
programs. Reporters at CCTV decided to take one spammer up on the “academic”
offer in January–and then uncovered one of the largest organized
test-cheating rings yet discovered involving a Chinese B-school.
Stories about corruption in higher
education in China are depressingly common. Last fall, a high-ranking
admissions officer at Beijing’s prestigious Renmin
University – often called the Harvard of China – was apprehended at an
airport trying to flee the country with a fake passport. State media soon
reported that he had been accused of trading admissions spots for
bribes, sometimes as much as
1 million yuan (about $165,000). In 2012, another
professor at Renmin University, Cao Tingbing,
leapt to his death from a high-rise building amid
unconfirmed rumors of another admissions corruption scandal.
China’s graduate schools are not
immune to admissions irregularities. Recently CCTV reporters followed spam
messages to uncover a big one, as revealed in a
broadcast last week. When an under-cover reporter
first visited the so-called Zhihengzhi Training Center in Beijing, he saw
files describing plans for test-takers to wear wireless earpieces through
which they would hear test answers dictated. Graduate school admissions
tests are administered at pre-arranged times in examination rooms monitored
by a university.
Because communication devices, such as
mobile phones and laptops, are not allowed in testing rooms, such a scam
could only work with the cooperation of one or more universities. CCTV
reporters discovered that Harbin Polytechnic University, which runs a
graduate MBA program, was cooperating with Zhihengzhi Training Center.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Cheating Issues Somewhat Unique to Distance Education
Chronicle of Higher Education:
Faculty
members
are drastically underreporting
academic-integrity violations ---
https://chroniclevitae.com/news/2280-why-we-don-t-report-all-of-the-cheating-we-detect?cid=VTEVPMSED1
. . .
If you’ve taught in higher
education, you no doubt have discovered plagiarism on a written assignment
or cheating on an exam. It’s also likely that your college or university
requires you to report every one of those incidents — or maybe on your
campus, that’s a request rather than a mandate.
Regardless, faculty
members
are drastically underreporting
academic-integrity violations. Most of us just deal with these situations on
our own, or perhaps by mentioning it to colleagues. At some level, we all
realize that underreporting makes the problem seem less severe than it is
and reduces an institution’s incentive to adopt stronger measures that would
promote academic integrity.
I have heard many
instructors say they are reluctant to report students who are first-time
offenders. But of course, if nobody is reporting first-time
offenders, then the institution can never identify repeat offenders.
A
centralized reporting system is
a prerequisite for the development of a culture of honest academic work.
Decentralized policies on cheating tend to result in
inconsistent standards,
applied unfairly and without any oversight or training. Colleges and
universities, then, have good reasons to adopt a centralized system for
reporting and tracking academic misconduct.
But what are the incentives
for faculty members to get on board with a centralized system? Clearly we
want to support students and ensure the integrity of their work.
Unfortunately, it’s not enough to simply expect us to comply with a
centralized mandate, because there are a lot of good reasons why we
wouldn’t.
Among the disincentives
that make it more difficult for instructors to report misconduct at the
institutional level:
·
We are
anxious about the reporting process
because it’s often
difficult and time-consuming
to prepare the appropriate evidence and document the cheating. Once you
consider all the time, paperwork, and bureaucracy involved, it’s a tempting
shortcut to handle a case on your own.
·
Some faculty members
have little confidence that the process will treat students fairly.
·
Others worry that a
centralized adjudication system would take authority out of faculty members’
hands. Those of us in favor of robust sanctions for a student’s cheating
fear that the administration would not support our decision, while those of
us who prefer light sanctions worry that the institution will impose greater
penalties than we think a particular undergraduate may deserve.
·
And what about when
students claim they are falsely accused? Such cases can cause a lot of
complications for the faculty member who reported the misconduct —
especially if you happen to be untenured and/or contingent. Besides hours of
campus meetings and hearings, you might be on the receiving end of a
lawsuit, and very few academics carry professional liability insurance.
The procedures for
reporting a cheating incident are highly variable across academe. At one end
of the spectrum is a simple web form that requires minimal documentation,
and can be filled out in a few minutes. At the other end is a lengthy paper
form that may take an instructor an hour or more to complete. Then there’s
the documentation required to substantiate the misconduct — in a plagiarism
case, that might be a comparative analysis of source material versus the
student’s assignment.
In short, at some
institutions, reporting a single incident involves a lot of faculty
labor.
How institutions handle the
cases that do get reported varies as well. In some places, a first offense
merely gets recorded, and the only consequences come at the full discretion
of the faculty member. At other institutions, every report results in an
investigation, with a panel convened (typically including professors and
students) to decide how the matter should be handled. Again, if every
reported incident commits a faculty member to lots of paperwork and
meetings, then clearly that will make it harder to ensure every incident
gets reported.
Our academic culture
generally rewards students who cheat. So what are we to do?
If faculty members
are going to be expected to report every incident of misconduct, then we
need a simple and easy mechanism of reporting, and
access to clear procedures
that are demonstrably fair to all parties involved. We also need the
academic freedom to determine how grades are assigned in our own courses,
and that includes how grades are assigned when academic misconduct takes
place.
As instructors, it’s our
job to create a classroom environment that supports student learning, and
that means acknowledging the high frequency of cheating as we design our
courses. Academic misconduct emerges out of an adversarial atmosphere, in
which students feel compelled to circumvent the rules to boost their grades.
While we cannot
unilaterally change the extrinsic pressures for high grades (such as
admissions criteria of professional schools), we should recognize that many
courses are designed to exacerbate the rewards for cheating as well as the
perceived need for it. Students are more likely to cheat when they feel
cornered and don’t have other options, and when an exam or a written
assignment constitutes a large fraction of the total grade, then the
perceived reward might trump the low risk of getting caught and reported.
Fortunately, it turns
out that some highly effective teaching methods are also
less conducive to
cheating:
·
Create scaffolded
writing assignments — that is, break down a big project into smaller,
sequential steps. That way, you not only reduce the probability and rewards
of plagiarism, you also teach more effectively.
·
De-emphasize a big,
high-stakes exam in favor of more frequent, lower-stakes forms of
evaluation. That reduces students’ focus on memorization and cramming,
provides more frequent learning opportunities, and lessens the anxiety that
a single grade on a big test will "ruin" their course grade.
All students —
including the ones who never cheat — benefit from those kinds of
course-design changes. Instead of investing heavily in vigilance, you can
spend your time on teaching and
provide more structure
so that students with all levels of investment in the course have an
opportunity to learn.
I suspect another reason a
lot of us don’t report academic misconduct is that we are focused on student
success: We want to spend our time on learning, not legerdemain. However, if
we help our campuses in their efforts to detect more of the students who are
engaged in skulduggery throughout their academic careers, that can
contribute to a healthier academic climate for all.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Teachers should take steps in advance to gather evidence of cheating. For
example, students should be filmed while taking examinations. It will help
prevent cheating if students know they are being filmed. Other steps should be
taken by reordering of questions on different colored exam booklets and having
adjacent students taking different colored exams.
In large examination rooms more than one proctor should sit in the back to
provide multiple witnesses.
Woman pleads guilty to charges that she paid someone to take online
courses for her son, and to transfer the credits to Georgetown University, where
he was a student.---
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/california-woman-charged-and-agrees-plead-guilty-college-admissions-case
BOSTON – A
California woman will plead guilty to charges filed today alleging that she
paid $9,000 to have an individual take online classes for her son, in order
to earn credits to facilitate his graduation from Georgetown University.
Karen Littlefair,
57, of Newport Beach, Calif., will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy
to commit wire fraud. A plea hearing has not yet been scheduled by the
Court. According to the terms of the plea agreement, the government will
recommend a sentence of four months in prison, one year of supervised
release, a fine of $9,500 and restitution.
According to the
charging documents, Littlefair agreed with William “Rick” Singer and others
to pay approximately $9,000 to have an employee of Singer’s for-profit
college counseling business, The Edge College & Career Network (“The Key”),
take online classes in place of Littlefair’s son and submit those
fraudulently earned credits to Georgetown to facilitate his graduation. The
Key employee allegedly completed four classes for Littlefair’s son at
Georgetown and elsewhere, and in exchange, Littlefair paid Singer’s company
approximately $9,000. Littlefair’s son graduated from Georgetown, using the
credits earned by the Key employee, in May 2018.
Singer previously
pleaded guilty and is cooperating with the government’s investigation.
Case
information, including the status of each defendant, charging documents and
plea agreements are available here:
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/investigations-college-admissions-and-testing-bribery-scheme.
The charge of
conspiracy to commit wire fraud carries a sentence of up to 20 years in
prison, up to three years of supervised release and a fine of up to
$250,000. Sentences are imposed by a federal district court judge based upon
the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
United States
Attorney Andrew E. Lelling; Joseph R. Bonavolonta, Special Agent in Charge
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Boston Field Division; and Kristina
O’Connell, Special Agent in Charge of the Internal Revenue Service’s
Criminal Investigations in Boston, made the announcement today. Assistant
U.S. Attorneys Eric S. Rosen, Justin D. O’Connell, Leslie A. Wright and
Kristen A. Kearney of Lelling’s Securities and Financial Fraud Unit are
prosecuting the cases.
The details
contained in the court documents are allegations and the remaining
defendants are presumed not guilty unless and until proven guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt in a court of law.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It's not clear what what the punishments will be for those who took the classes
for money. This problem is not unique to distance education. When my daughter
was at the University of Texas she learned that some students with fake IDs were
taking large lecture courses on campus for money. The problem with distance
education is that it becomes easier to hire out course taking. For example,
there's a case where the wife of a football player took her husband's online
courses so he could concentrate more on preparation for a NFL career. It may
well be that he was too dumb to take the courses as well.
Ohio State Accuses 85 Students
of Cheating on Online Tests ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/ohio-state-u-accuses-85-students-of-cheating-on-online-tests/112000?elqTrackId=592e2bcfef3742f0a01015fb1aa9fc87&elq=657ef66861154a85908c76c54666a981&elqaid=9366&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3288
Claims of Cheating in Online Courses at Iowa
---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/05/23/claims-cheating-online-courses-iowa?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=3bae57df2e-DNU20160523&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-3bae57df2e-197565045
Respondus and other online tools for
monitoring and exam cheating monitoring ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
Bob Jensen's threads on online cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#OnlineCheating
Ideas for Teaching Online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas
Also see the helpers for teaching in general at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
In a previous edition of Tidbits, I provided a summary of resources for
learning how and being inspired to teach online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas
I forgot to (and have since added) helpers for assessment (e.g. testing)
online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
Also see the helpers for assessment in general at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Also I forgot to add some special considerations for detection and prevention
of online cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
Also see helpers for detection and prevention of cheating in general at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
November 1, 2012 Respondus message from Richard Campbell
Is the student taking your class the same one who is taking your exams??
Keep an eye on
www.respondus.com
Software for online examinations and quizzes ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#Examinations
AICPA: How to identify and prevent contract cheating in courses ---
https://www.journalofaccountancy.com/newsletters/extra-credit/contract-cheating.html?utm_source=mnl:extracredit&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=12Feb2019
Ohio State Accuses 85 Students
of Cheating on Online Tests ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/ohio-state-u-accuses-85-students-of-cheating-on-online-tests/112000?elqTrackId=592e2bcfef3742f0a01015fb1aa9fc87&elq=657ef66861154a85908c76c54666a981&elqaid=9366&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3288
Claims of Cheating in Online Courses at Iowa
---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/05/23/claims-cheating-online-courses-iowa?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=3bae57df2e-DNU20160523&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-3bae57df2e-197565045
Respondus and other online tools for
monitoring and exam cheating monitoring ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
Jensen Comment
Security video proctoring can sometimes be more preventative than onsite
proctoring. For example, if there is an onsite proctor students can see when the
proctor is distracted and cheat during the distraction such as pass answers or
use a cell phone when the proctor is looking elsewhere. If they are being
watched continuously by a proctoring camera they cannot be certain if and when
their cheating will be detected if they are cheating in a way that can be
detected by reviewing a video much like stores use videos to detect shoplifting.
Of course not all forms of cheating can be detected by a camera.
If the facial images on camera are quite good this will also help detect when
an unauthorized student is taking an exam.
"Online Classes See Cheating Go High-Tech," by Jeffrey R. Young,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Online-Courses-Can-Offer-Easy/132093/?sid=wb&utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Easy A's may be even easier to score these days,
with the growing popularity of online courses. Tech-savvy students are
finding ways to cheat that let them ace online courses with minimal effort,
in ways that are difficult to detect.
Take Bob Smith, a student at a public university in
the United States. This past semester, he spent just 25 to 30 minutes each
week on an online science course, the time it took him to take the weekly
test. He never read the online materials for the course and never cracked
open a textbook. He learned almost nothing. He got an A.
His secret was to cheat, and he's proud of the
method he came up with—though he asked that his real name and college not be
used, because he doesn't want to get caught. It involved four friends and a
shared Google Doc, an online word-processing file that all five of them
could read and add to at the same time during the test.
More on his method in a minute. You've probably
already heard of plenty of clever ways students cheat, and this might simply
add one more to the list. But the issue of online cheating may rise in
prominence, as more and more institutions embrace online courses, and as
reformers try new systems of educational badges, certifying skills and
abilities learned online. The promise of such systems is that education can
be delivered cheaply and conveniently online. Yet as access improves, so
will the number of people gaming the system, unless courses are designed
carefully.
This prediction has not escaped many of those
leading new online efforts, or researchers who specialize in testing. As
students find new ways to cheat, course designers are anticipating them and
devising new ways to catch folks like Mr. Smith.
In the case of that student, the professor in the
course had tried to prevent cheating by using a testing system that pulled
questions at random from a bank of possibilities. The online tests could be
taken anywhere and were open-book, but students had only a short window each
week in which to take them, which was not long enough for most people to
look up the answers on the fly. As the students proceeded, they were told
whether each answer was right or wrong.
Mr. Smith figured out that the actual number of
possible questions in the test bank was pretty small. If he and his friends
got together to take the test jointly, they could paste the questions they
saw into the shared Google Doc, along with the right or wrong answers. The
schemers would go through the test quickly, one at a time, logging their
work as they went. The first student often did poorly, since he had never
seen the material before, though he would search an online version of the
textbook on Google Books for relevant keywords to make informed guesses. The
next student did significantly better, thanks to the cheat sheet, and
subsequent test-takers upped their scores even further. They took turns
going first. Students in the course were allowed to take each test twice,
with the two results averaged into a final score.
"So the grades are bouncing back and forth, but
we're all guaranteed an A in the end," Mr. Smith told me. "We're playing the
system, and we're playing the system pretty well."
He is a first-generation college student who says
he works hard, and honestly, in the rest of his courses, which are held
in-person rather than online. But he is juggling a job and classes, and he
wanted to find a way to add an easy A to his transcript each semester.
Although the syllabus clearly forbids academic
dishonesty, Mr. Smith argues that the university has put so little into the
security of the course that it can't be very serious about whether the
online students are learning anything. Hundreds of students took the course
with him, and he never communicated with the professor directly. It all felt
sterile, impersonal, he told me. "If they didn't think students would do
this, then they didn't think it through."
A professor familiar with the course, who also
asked not to be named, said that it is not unique in this regard, and that
other students probably cheat in online introductory courses as well. To
them, the courses are just hoops to jump through to get a credential, and
the students are happy to pay the tuition, learn little, and add an A.
"This is the gamification of education, and
students are winning," the professor told me.
Of course, plenty of students cheat in introductory
courses taught the old-fashioned way as well. John Sener, a consultant who
has long worked in online learning, says the incident involving Mr. Smith
sounds similar to students' sharing of old tests or bringing in cheat
sheets. "There is no shortage of weak assessments," he says.
He cautions against dismissing online courses based
on inevitable examples of poor class design: "If there are weaknesses in the
system, students will find them and try to game it."
In some cases, the answer is simply designing tests
that aren't multiple-choice. But even when professors assign papers,
students can use the Internet to order custom-written assignments. Take the
example of
the Shadow Scholar, who described in a
Chronicle article how he made more than $60,000 a year writing term
papers for students around the country.
Part of the answer may be fighting technology with
more technology, designing new ways to catch cheaters.
Countering the
Cheaters
When John Fontaine first heard about the Shadow
Scholar, who was helping students cheat on assignments, he grew angry. Mr.
Fontaine works for Blackboard, and his job is to think up new services and
products for the education-software company. His official title is senior
director of technology evangelism.
"I was offended," he says. "I thought, I'm going to
get that guy." So he started a research project to do just that.
Blackboard's learning-management software features
a service that checks papers for signs of plagiarism, and thousands of
professors around the country use it to scan papers when they are turned in.
Mr. Fontaine began to wonder whether authors write
in unique ways that amount to a kind of fingerprint. If so, he might be able
to spot which papers were written by the Shadow Scholar or other
writers-for-hire, even if they didn't plagiarize other work directly.
"People tend to use the same words over and over
again, and people have the same vocabulary," he says. "I've been working on
classifiers that take documents and score them and build what I call a
document fingerprint." The system could establish a document fingerprint for
each student when they turn in their first assignments, and notice if future
papers differ in style in suspicious ways.
Mr. Fontaine's work is simply research at this
point, he emphasizes, and he has not used any actual student papers
submitted to the company's system. He would have to get permission from
professors and students before doing that kind of live test.
In fact, he's not sure whether the idea will ever
work well enough to add it as a Blackboard feature.
Mr. Fontaine is not the only one doing such
research. Scholars at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they are
looking for new ways to verify the identity of students online as well.
Anant Agarwal is head of MIT's Open Learning
Enterprise, which coordinates the university's MITx project to offer free
courses online and give students a chance to earn certificates. It's a
leading force in the movement to offer free courses online.
One challenge leaders face is verifying that online
students are who they say they are.
A method under consideration at MIT would analyze
each user's typing style to help verify identity, Mr. Agarwal told me in a
recent interview. Such electronic fingerprinting
could be combined with face-recognition software to ensure accuracy, he
says. Since most laptops now have Webcams built in, future online students
might have to smile for the camera to sign on.
Some colleges already require identity-verification
techniques that seem out of a movie. They're using products such as the
Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree
view around students, and Kryterion's Webassessor, which lets human proctors
watch students remotely on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.
Research
Challenge
Researchers who study testing are also working on
the problem of cheating. Last month more than 100 such researchers met at
the University of Kansas at the
Conference on
Statistical Detection of Potential Test Fraud.
One message from the event's organizers was that
groups that offer standardized tests, companies developing anticheating
software, and researchers need to join forces and share their work.
"Historically this kind of research has been a bit of a black box," says
Neal Kingston, an associate professor of education at the university and
director of its Center for Educational Testing Evaluation. "It's important
that the research community improve perhaps as quickly as the cheating
community is improving."
Continued in article
Question
Why do colleges have to identify each of their online students without the same
requirement imposed on onsite students?
My daughter took chemistry in a class of 600 students. They never carded her for
exams at the University of Texas?
How can you tell if an onsite or online student has not outsourced taking an
entire course with a fake ID? (see Comment 1 below)
I know of an outsourcing case like this from years ago when I was an
undergraduate student, because I got the initial offer to take the course for
$500.
Fake IDs are easy to fabricate today on a computer. Just change the name and
student number on your own ID or change the picture and put the fake ID in
laminated plastic.
Online there's a simple way to authenticate honesty online. One way is to
have a respected person sign an attestation form. In 19th Century England the
Village Vicar signed off on submissions of correspondence course takers. There
are also a lot of
Sylvan Centers throughout the U.S. that will administer examinations.
To comply with the newly reauthorized
Higher Education Act, colleges have to verify the
identity of each of their online students.
Several tools can help them do that, including the
Securexam Remote Proctor, which scans fingerprints and captures a 360-degree
view around students, and Kryterion’s Webassessor, which lets human proctors
watch students on Web cameras and listen to their keystrokes.
Now colleges have a new option to show the
government that they’ll catch cheating in distance education. Acxiom
Corporation and Moodlerooms announced this month that they have integrated
the former’s identity-verification system, called FactCheck-X, into the
latter’s free, open-source course-management system, known as Moodle.
“The need to know that the student taking a test
online is in fact the actual one enrolled in the class continues to be a
concern for all distance-education programs,” Martin Knott, chief executive
of Moodlerooms, said in a
written statement.
FactCheck-X, which authenticates many
online-banking transactions, requires test takers to answer detailed,
personal “challenge” questions. The information comes from a variety of
databases, and the company uses it to ask for old addresses, for example, or
previous employers.
The new tool requires no hardware and operates
within the Moodle environment. Colleges themselves control how frequently
students are asked to verify their identities, Acxiom says, and because
institutions don’t have to release information about students, the system
fully complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Comments
Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers
(and took two online courses for him)
The wife of a star University of South Florida
linebacker says she wrote his academic papers and took two online classes for
him. The accusations against Ben Moffitt, who had been promoted by the
university to the news media as a family man, were made in e-mail messages to
The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr. Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt
called the accusations “hearsay,” and a university spokesman said the matter was
a “domestic issue.” If it is found that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud,
the newspaper reported, the university could be subject to an NCAA
investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog, January 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at
Jensen Comment
If Florida investigates this and discovers it was true, I wonder if Moffitt's
diploma will be revoked. Somehow I doubt it.
When Parents Unethically Help Their Children ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/09/09/unjustified-authorship-spikes-paper-by-daughter-of-south-korea-official/
Ideas for online testing and other types of assessment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
Also see the helpers for assessment in general at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Far From Honorable," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed,
October 25, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/25/online-students-might-feel-less-accountable-honor-codes
Much of the urgency around creating a “sense of
community” in online courses springs from a desire to keep online students
from dropping out. But a recent paper suggests that strengthening a sense of
social belonging among online students might help universities fight another
problem: cheating.
In a series of experiments, researchers at Ohio
University found that students in fully online psychology courses who signed
an honor code promising not to cheat broke that pledge at a significantly
higher rate than did students in a “blended” course that took place
primarily in a classroom.
“The more distant students are, the more
disconnected they feel, and the more likely it is that they’ll rationalize
cheating,” Frank M. LoSchiavo, one of the authors, conjectured in an
interview with Inside Higher Ed.
While acknowledging the limitations inherent to a
study with such a narrow sample, and the fact that motivations are
particularly hard to pin down when it comes to cheating, LoSchiavo and Mark
A. Shatz, both psychology professors at Ohio University's Zanesville campus,
said their findings may indicate that meeting face-to-face with peers and
professors confers a stronger sense of accountability among students. “Honor
codes,” LoSchiavo said, “are more effective when there are [strong] social
connections.”
Honor codes are not, of course, the only method of
deterring cheating in online courses. The proliferation of online programs
has given rise to a
cottage industry of
remote proctoring technology, including one product that takes periodic
fingerprint readings while monitoring a student’s test-taking environment
with a 360-degree camera. (A 2010 survey by the Campus Computing Project
suggests that a minority of institutions authenticate the identities of
online students as a rule.)
But LoSchiavo said that he and Shatz were more
interested in finding out whether honor codes held any sway online. If so,
then online instructors might add pledges to their arsenal of anti-cheating
tools, LoSchiavo said. If not, it provides yet an intriguing contribution to
the discussion about student engagement and “perceived social distance” in
the online environment.
They experimented with the effectiveness of honor
codes in three introductory psychology courses at Ohio University. The first
course had 40 students and was completely online. These students, like those
in subsequent trials, were a mix of traditional-age and adult students,
mostly from regional campuses in the Ohio University system. There was no
honor code. Over the course of the term, the students took 14
multiple-choice quizzes with no proctoring of any kind. At the end of the
term, 73 percent of the students admitted to cheating on at least one of
them.
The second trial involved another fully online
introductory course in the same subject. LoSchiavo and Shatz divided the
class evenly into two groups of 42 students, and imposed an honor code --
posted online with the other course materials -- to one group but not the
other. The students “digitally signed the code during the first week of the
term, prior to completing any assignments.” The definition of cheating was
the same as in the first trial: no notes, no textbooks, no Internet, no
family or friends. There was no significant difference in the self-reported
cheating between the two groups.
In a third trial, the professors repeated the
experiment with 165 undergraduates in a “blended” course, where only 20
percent of the course was administered online and 80 percent in a
traditional classroom setting. Again, they split the students into two
groups: one in which they were asked to sign an honor code, and another in
which they were not.
This time, when LoSchiavo and Shatz surveyed the
students at the end of the term, there was a significant difference:
Students who promised not to cheat were about 25 percent less likely to
cheat than were those who made no such promise. Among the students who had
not signed the code, 82 percent admitted to cheating.
LoSchiavo concedes that this study offers no
definitive answers on the question of whether students are more likely to
cheat in fully online courses. Cheating is more often than not a crime of
opportunity, and containing integrity violations probably has much more to
do with designing a system that limits the opportunities to cheat and gives
relatively little weight to those assignments for which cheating is hardest
to police.
“The bottom line is that if there are
opportunities, students will cheat,” he said. “And the more opportunities
they have, the more cheating there will be, and it is incumbent upon
professors to put in a system that, when it’s important, cheating will be
contained.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think universities like Trinity University that expanded their honor codes to
include student courts are generally happy with the operations of those honor
codes. However, Trinity has only full time students and no distance education
courses.
One thing that I hated giving up was grading control. For most of my teaching
career I gave F grades to students who seriously cheated in my courses. Under
the revised Trinity Honor Code, instructors can no longer control the granting
of F grades for cheating.
When I was a student at Stanford the Honor Code included a pledge to report
cheating of other students. I think most universities have watered down this
aspect of their honor codes because, in this greatly increased era of
litigation, student whistle blowers can be sued big time. Universities may
continue to encourage such whistle blowing, but they no longer make students
sign pledges that on their honor they will be whistleblowers if they do not want
to bear the risk of litigation by students they report.
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm
"Typing Analysis Software Keeps Online Students Honest," by Tanya
Roscorla, Converge Magazine, May 12, 2010 ---
http://www.convergemag.com/classtech/Typing-Analysis-Software-Keeps-Online-Students-Honest.html
During his senior year, Shaun Sims took online
classes at the University of Texas at Austin to supplement his regular
courses. Some of his friends took online classes too, but they turned in
assignments that other people completed for them.
That's when Sims decided to do something to cut
back on cheating online. In 2009, he and computer science Ph.D student
Andrew Mills launched a startup company called Digital Proctor. By analyzing
each online participant's unique typing pattern, their software
authenticates the student's work.
“We verify that students who sign up are the same
students actually completing the coursework,” Sims said. "We make sure
students are who they say they are.”
Two customers are currently using the software in
pilot programs, including Midland College in Texas.
With the reauthorization of the Higher Education
Opportunity Act in 2008, colleges and universities must now meet 50 new
accountability requirements, one of which is making sure that the students
who sign up for online courses are the ones who are participating in it.
They have three options: use secure logins and passcodes; give proctored
examinations; or find new technologies that could verify students' identity.
Midland College already has the first two options,
but wants to be proactive in maintaining the integrity of their online
classes, said Dale Beikirch, dean of distance learning and continuing
education. So the college decided to enter a pilot with Digital Proctor.
“The day is coming when this secure login and
password is not going to be enough to authenticate students," Beikirch said,
"and that’s what’s sort of driving all of this is the need for schools to be
able to ensure that the person enrolled in a course is the one taking the
test.”
Continued in article
Cheating Issues Somewhat Unique to Distance Education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#OnlineCheating
Question
What's the value of watching somebody send you an email message?
Answer
There may be some security and subtle communication advantages, but there's a
huge cost-benefit consideration. Is it worth valuable bandwidth costs to
transmit all that video of talking heads and hands? I certainly hope that most
of us do not jump into this technology "head" (get it?) first.
One huge possible benefits might be in distance
education. If a student in sending back test answers via email, it could add a
lot to the integrity of the testing process to watch the student over this new
video and audio channel from Google.
"Google juices up Gmail with video channel," MIT's Technology Review,
November 11, 2008 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/wire/21665/?nlid=1507&a=f
Google Inc. is introducing new tools that will
convert its free e-mail service into a video and audio channel for people
who want to see and hear each other while they communicate.
Activating the features, introduced Tuesday, will
require a free piece of software as well as a Webcam, which are becoming
more commonplace as computer manufacturers embed video equipment into
laptops.
Once the additional software is installed, Gmail
users will be given the option to see and hear each other without leaving
the e-mail application.
The video feature will work only if all the
participants have Gmail accounts. It's supposed to be compatible with
computers running the Windows operating system or Apple Inc.'s Mac
computers.
Google, the Internet's search leader, has been
adding more bells and whistles to Gmail as part of its effort to gain ground
on the longtime leaders in free e-mail, Yahoo Inc. and Microsoft Corp.
Video chatting has long been available through the
instant messaging services offered by Yahoo and Microsoft, but the feature
isn't available in their free e-mail applications.
Although Mountain View, Calif.-based Google has
been making strides since it began welcoming all comers to Gmail early last
year, it remains a distant third with nearly 113 million worldwide users
through September -- a 34 percent increase from the previous year, according
to comScore Inc.
Microsoft's e-mail services boasted 283 million
worldwide users, up 13 percent from the previous year, while Yahoo was a
close second at 274 million, an 8 percent gain, comScore said.
Ideas for online testing and other types of assessment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
Also see the helpers for assessment in general at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Special considerations for detection and prevention of online cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
Also see helpers for detection and prevention of cheating in general at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
July
30, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]
NEW BOOK OF ONLINE
EDUCATION CASE STUDIES
ELEMENTS OF QUALITY
ONLINE EDUCATION: INTO THE MAINSTREAM, edited by John Bourne and Janet C.
Moore, is the fifth and latest volume in the annual Sloan-C series of case
studies on quality education online. Essays cover topics in the following
areas: student satisfaction and student success, learning effectiveness,
blended environments, and assessment. To order a copy of the book go to http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/volume5.asp.
You can download a free 28-page summary of the book from http://www.sloan-c.org/publications/books/vol5summary.pdf.
The Sloan Consortium
(Sloan-C) is a consortium of institutions and organizations committed "to
help learning organizations continually improve quality, scale, and breadth of
their online programs according to their own distinctive missions, so that
education will become a part of everyday life, accessible and affordable for
anyone, anywhere, at any time, in a wide variety of disciplines." Sloan-C
is funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. For more information, see http://www.sloan-c.org/.
COMBATING CHEATING IN
ONLINE STUDENT ASSESSMENT
In "Cheating in
Online Student Assessment: Beyond Plagiarism" (ONLINE JOURNAL OF DISTANCE
LEARNING ADMINISTRATION, vol. VII, no. II, Summer
2004) Neil C. Rowe
identifies "three of the most serious problems involving cheating in
online assessment that have not been sufficiently considered previously"
and suggests countermeasures to combat them. The problems Rowe discusses are:
-- Getting assessment
answers in advance
It is hard to ensure
that all students will take an online test simultaneously, enabling students
to supply questions and answers to those who take the test later.
-- Unfair retaking of
assessments
While course
management system servers can be configured to prevent taking a test multiple
times, there can be ways to work around prevention measures.
-- Unauthorized help
during the assessment
It may not be
possible to confirm the identity of the person actually taking the online
test.
You can read the
entire article, including Rowe's suggestions to counteract the problems, at http://www.westga.edu/%7Edistance/ojdla/summer72/rowe72.html.
The Online Journal of
Distance Learning Administration is a free, peer-reviewed quarterly published
by the Distance and Distributed Education Center, The State University of West
Georgia, 1600 Maple Street, Carrollton, GA 30118 USA; Web: http://www.westga.edu/~distance/jmain11.html.
SOCIAL INTERACTION IN
ONLINE LEARNING
Among the reasons
Rowe cites (in the aforementioned paper) for cheating on online tests is that
"students often have less commitment to the integrity of
distance-learning programs than traditional programs." This lack of
commitment may be the result of the isolation inherent in distance education.
In "Online Learning: Social Interaction and the Creation of a Sense of
Community" (EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY & SOCIETY, vol. 7, no. 3, July
2004, pp. 73-81), Joanne M. McInnerney and Tim S. Roberts, Central Queensland
University, argue that an online learner's feeling a sense of isolation can
affect the outcome of his or her learning experience. The authors recommend
three protocols to aid social interaction and alleviate isolation among online
learners:
1. The use of
synchronous communication
"Chat-rooms and
other such forums are an excellent way for students to socialize, to assist
each other with study, or to learn as part of collaborative teams."
2. The introduction
of a forming stage
"Discussion on
almost any topics (the latest movies, sporting results,
etc.) can be utilized
by the educator as a prelude to the building of trust and community that is
essential to any successful online experience."
3. The adherence to
effective communication guidelines "Foremost among these guidelines is
the need for unambiguous instructions and communications from the educator to
the students involved in the course. To this end instructions regarding both
course requirements and communication protocols should be placed on the course
web site."
The complete article
is online at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/7_3/8.html.
Educational
Technology & Society [ISSN 1436-4522] is a peer-reviewed quarterly online
journal published by the International Forum of Educational Technology &
Society and the IEEE Computer Society Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF).
It is available in HTML and PDF formats at no cost at http://ifets.ieee.org/periodical/.
The International
Forum of Educational Technology & Society (IFETS) is a subgroup of the
IEEE Learning Technology Task Force (LTTF). IFETS encourages discussions on
the issues affecting the educational system developer (including AI) and
education communities. For more information, link to http://ifets.ieee.org/.
......................................................................
ONLINE COURSES: COSTS
AND CAPS
Two articles in the
July/August 2005 issue of SYLLABUS address the often-asked questions on
delivering online instruction: "How much will it cost?" and
"How many students can we have in a class?"
In "Online
Course Development: What Does It Cost?" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12,
July/August 2004, pp. 27-30) Judith V. Boettcher looks at where the costs of
online course development have shifted in the past ten years. While the costs
of course development are still significant, estimating them is not an exact
science. Boettcher, however, does provide some rules of thumb that program
planners can use to get more accurate estimates. The article is available
online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9676.
In "Online
Course Caps: A Survey" (SYLLABUS, vol. 17, no. 12, July/August 2004, pp.
43-4) Boris Vilic reports on a survey of 101 institutions to determine their
average course cap for online courses. The survey also tried to determine what
influences differences in setting caps: Does the delivery method used make a
difference? Are there differences if the course is taught by full-time faculty
or by adjuncts? Or if given by experienced versus inexperienced providers? Or
by the level (undergraduate or graduate) of the course? The article is
available online at http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=9679.
Syllabus [ISSN
1089-5914] is published monthly by 101communications, LLC, 9121 Oakdale
Avenue, Suite 101, Chatsworth, CA 91311 USA; tel: 650-941-1765; fax:
650-941-1785; email: info@syllabus.com; Web: http://www.syllabus.com/.
Annual subscriptions are free to individuals who work in colleges,
universities, and high schools in the U.S.; go to http://subscribe.101com.com/syllabus/
for more information.
Bob
Jensen's threads on distance education in general are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/0000start.htm
Bob
Jensen's threads on the dark side of distance education are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm
Cheating Scandals
Texas A&M students busted in
massive cheating scandal blame their school ---
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=16534
Over 70 West Point Cadets
Accused of Cheating on Calculus Exam ---
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/12/over-70-west-point-cadets-accused-of-cheating-on-calculus-exam/
Berkeley cheating
allegations spike nearly 400 percent with online classes ---
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=16437
Huge Cheating
Scandals at the University of Virginia, Harvard, Ohio, Duke, Cambridge, and Other Universities
When it happens multiple times, plagiarism is "hardly an accident"
"(University of Virginia Graduate Business) Darden PhD Student Accused of
Plagiarism," by Louis Lavelle, Bloomberg Businessweek, July 18, 2013
---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-07-16/darden-phd-student-accused-of-plagiarism
Some years back there was a much more widespread cheating scandal by over 100
students at the University of Virginia ---
"Plagiarist Booted; Others Wait," by Katie
Dean ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#UVA
One student has
been expelled, and more than 100 cases of plagiarism remain to be resolved
at the University of Virginia after a physics professor used a computer
program to catch students who turned in duplicate papers, or portions of
papers that appeared to have been copied.
The school's
student-run Honor Committee spent the summer investigating a fraction of the
cases, and will continue to do so through the fall semester.
The committee's
work has been slow over the summer break since many students are away.
Thomas Hall, chairman of the committee, said he hopes to complete the
remaining investigations by the end of October, and finish the trials by the
end of the fall semester
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
West Point to End Policy of
Leniency for Cadets After Covid-19 Pandemic Cheating Scandal ---
https://www.wsj.com/articles/west-point-to-end-policy-of-leniency-for-cadets-after-covid-19-pandemic-cheating-scandal-11618581602?mod=djm_dailydiscvrtst
Dozens at academy were punished in worst honor code breach in at least four
decades but avoided expulsion
WEST POINT, N.Y.—Cadets at the U.S. Military
Academy are constantly reminded about the importance of integrity.
The students must memorize an honor code, warning
them to “not lie, cheat, steal, or tolerate those who do.” The words are
inscribed in marble at the Honor Plaza, in an area of the campus where
hundreds, perhaps thousands, of future U.S. Army officers walk by every day.
Now, Covid-19 has put that code to the test.
The
U.S. Military Academy at West Point this month concluded investigations into
its largest cheating scandal in at least four decades. It punished dozens of
cadets found to be dishonest on an exam while studying remotely during
the Covid-19 pandemic,
though those avoiding expulsion won’t have a permanent blemish on their
records.
A final summary report of their transgressions, including a decision to end
a policy that for years has protected wayward cadets from being kicked out,
is being reported for the first time by The Wall Street Journal.
The policy, known as the “willful admission process,” can protect a cadet
who admits to wrongdoing from being thrown out. It was put in place in 2015
to increase self-reporting without fear of removal and to encourage cadets
to confront peers about honor violations without having them kicked out of
school.
The policy, however, didn’t achieve the desired intent, said Lt. Gen. Darryl
A. Williams, superintendent of the academy, in an interview. “It’s clear to
me, it has to go.”
The policy change, which will go into effect soon, will be hailed by some
alumni of the elite institution who believe the willful-admission
process was too forgiving.
“Back in my day, there was just a zero tolerance,” said Jon Williams, a 1991
graduate of West Point and no relation to the superintendent. “If you were
caught cheating there was no question about it, you were going home. You
have to have character. That’s one of the things that distinguishes us from
other institutions.”
Yet some cadets and even some current academy administrators liked that it
gave a second chance to the remorseful and that one mistake didn’t
automatically end a military career.
“West Point is a development institution,” said senior Evan Walker, who
holds a cadet leadership position. “Some people providing feedback don’t get
it.”
Military academies are among the numerous educational entities around the
country that have dealt with cheating scandals during the Covid-19 pandemic
after millions of students were
moved to remote learning,
out of the watchful eyes of instructors.
The U.S. Air Force Academy has said it suspects that 249 cadets cheated
during last year’s spring semester, with a majority confessing and placed on
six-month probation. The U.S. Naval Academy is in the adjudication phase for
cases involving cheating on a sophomore-level physics final exam during the
fall, an official said, declining to provide more information.
West Point is the oldest of the U.S. military academies, with a storied
history that dates to the Revolutionary War. It sits on high ground and
above a narrow “S” curve in the Hudson River, which allowed the Continental
Army to command river traffic, keeping the British from taking control. Its
distinguished alumni include Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ulysses S.
Grant. Lloyd J. Austin III, the current defense secretary, is also a
graduate.Continued
in article
Jensen Comment
A school that loses it's integrity with respect to cheating detection and
punishment soon loses its reputation and opens the floodgates to more cheating.
It's a sad day when professors no longer detect and enforce cheating rules.
"Click for Me if I'm Not There" sounds like it could be a title of a country
song
"Dartmouth Accuses 64 Students of Cheating in Popular Course," by Andy
Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 8, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/dartmouth-accuses-64-students-of-cheating-in-popular-course/91857?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Dartmouth College has accused 64 students of
cheating in a “Sports, Ethics, and Religion” course taught last fall, the Valley
News
reports. Randall
Balmer, chairman of the religion department, discovered in October that
absent students in his class were passing their clickers to classmates who
were present to answer in-class questions on their behalf.
Mr. Balmer told the newspaper that most of the
students involved had been suspended for a semester. In the fall he counted
43 students who handed off their clickers in the roughly 275-person class,
but that number does not include the students who facilitated the cheating.
Think Students in Your Class Might Be Cheating? Here’s What to Do
The popular class was initially designed to help
the college’s athletes, many of whom struggled with freshman-year
coursework.
Diana Lawrence, a spokeswoman for the college, said
it would not offer more-detailed comment on the proceedings until the
appeals process ends this month.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It would be interesting to know the grading distribution in this course. My
hypothesis is that students are more apt to skip class and cheat in a course
where they are assured of an A grade with very little effort. This is what
happened when over 120 students cheated in a political science course assignment
at Harvard University. All students in that course were assured of getting A
grades such that there's less incentive to work hard in the course. In Harvard's
case over half the cheaters were expelled from the University. It appears that
Dartmouth College will be a little less harsh.
Cheating Scandal in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University
In the biggest cheating scandal ever at Duke University’s business school, 34
students are facing penalties for collaborating on exam answers,
The News & Observer of Raleigh reported. Nine
students face expulsion, while others face a range of penalties, including
one-year suspensions from the MBA program.
Inside Higher Ed, April 30, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/04/30/qt
The ABC News account on May 1, 2007 is at
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=3105733
The course involved is "Government 1310: Introduction to Congress." So why is
does cheating in this course come as a surprise?
Cheat (think plagiarism) on
Your Homework? In This Harvard Class, Just Say You’re Sorry ---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Cheat-on-Your-Homework-In/247902?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=296279
A student’s programming
code just won’t run. It’s getting late, and the assignment is due in just a
few hours. There are a million other things to do. The specter of a failing
grade looms large. And lifting part of a classmate’s work before clicking
submit seems like an easy shortcut.
Taking such a step — and
getting caught — could result in a disciplinary hearing and a harsh
sanction, but not necessarily in Harvard University’s wildly popular
introductory computer-science course. Professor David J. Malan has
incorporated a “regret clause” into his syllabus: If first-time offenders
come forward and admit what they did within 72 hours, an instructor will
give
a failing grade on the assignment
— but will not refer the
case for disciplinary action.
Six years in, the clause —
used by a tiny minority of students — has not pushed down the percentage of
students in the class referred to the university’s honor council, according
to a paper Malan released recently. But he has learned some valuable lessons
about why students cheat, and he believes conversations with regretful
students may lead them to develop healthier work habits, like reaching out
for help or attending office hours. He recommends that other instructors,
even outside computer science, adopt the initiative for that reason.
“Acts of academic
dishonesty were a symptom of larger concerns or pressures in their life,”
Malan said of some cases. The conversations, he said, “made it much more
real, and much more difficult, because now you are on the front lines,
discussing these things with students.” Sometimes, in the conversations, the
student cries.
The paper,
released in December, offered
a comprehensive set of statistics on the policy’s use and wider effects for
the first time. Hundreds of students enroll in Malan’s course — CS50 — each
fall, and the number of students who invoke the regret clause annually
peaked in 2015 at 26, or about 3 percent of that fall’s 750-person class.
This past semester, just 8 of 781 students did so.
. . .
In 2012, after
125 students were suspected of cheating
on a Harvard
take-home exam, Blum
wrote
that students at highly selective universities have a sense of “inevitable
achievement” and perhaps feel “entitled to succeed.” She said recently that
such an atmosphere at selective institutions could make statements like the
“regret clause” more challenging to carry out, though she said that this
outlook is far from universal and that she had grown more sympathetic to
students since then.
Over all, Blum said, the
Harvard “regret clause” merits wider consideration: “They really are trying
to get to the bottom of what’s motivating the behavior. Is it that students
really need some mental-health counseling, or do they need to improve their
academic skills? That seems to me humane.”
Jensen Comment
The article above does not
reveal the grading expectations of Professor Malan's course and what the reward
might be for successful cheating. In a computer science course with coding I
suspect much of the cheating is collaboration where students work jointly with
somebody when they were supposed to work individually on coding projects. I
suspect plagiarism on term papers is more apt to be a problem in humanities
(think history) and social science (think economics) courses. If a course term
paper is an enormous component of the final grade (say 50%) students are less
apt to self-report their cheating if they get an F on the term paper after self
reporting the cheating (as is the case in David Malan's course featured in the
above article). In David Malan's above course I would guess that self-reporting
cheaters were punished with F grades have a much smaller component of the final
grade.
This article overlooks some
important points. Firstly, it overlooks the fact that Harvard has just about the
highest grade inflation in the USA. With 4.00 being the highest possible gpa,
one study puts Harvard in third place (with a 3.64 average graduation gpa)
behind Number 1 grade inflator Brown University and Number 2 Stanford University
---
https://ripplematch.com/journal/article/the-top-20-universities-with-the-highest-average-gpas-84ef5edf/
Scroll down to the graphs
In the 2012 cheating scandal
cited above, over 60 students out of 125 were expelled from Harvard for
cheating. What the article does not tell you is that the students were not
cheating for an A grade. Every student was assured in
that political science course of getting an A grade for the course if a
student turned in the course assignments irrespective of the quality of the work
turned in. Students were not cheating for a top grade.
Most were cheating because when assured of a top grade
without putting in much of any effort some viewed putting in any effort as a
waste of of their valuable time since quality of work was not important ---
Scroll down this page for details
Undergraduate student Ted
Kennedy was kicked out of Harvard for hiring somebody to take his final exams.
Self-reporting here would have resulted in an F grade for each course. And
future Senator Kennedy would not only implicate himself by self-reporting
of cheatin --- the person who took money to take the exams would also be
implicated. Ratting on partners in crime can get you hurt.
And besides self-reporting of
cheating is not good training to become a politician.
Suppose three students in
Professor Malan's course cheat by collaboration. If one has self-reports the
cheating what happens to the other two students who did not self report?
2012 Harvard Cheating Scandal ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal
"Cheating Scandal at Harvard," Inside Higher Ed, August 31,
2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/08/31/cheating-scandal-harvard
Harvard University is investigating about 125 students
-- nearly 2 percent of all undergraduates -- who are suspected of cheating
on a take-home final during the spring semester,
The Boston Globe reported Thursday. The
students will appear before the college’s disciplinary board over the coming
weeks, seem to have copied each other’s work, the dean of undergraduate
education said. Those found guilty could face up to a one-year suspension.
The dean would not comment on whether students who had already graduated
would have their degrees revoked but he did tell the Globe, “this
is something we take really, really seriously.” Harvard administrators said
they are considering new ways to educate students about cheating and
academic ethics. While the university has no honor code, the Globe
noted, its official handbook says students should “assume that collaboration
in the completion of assignments is prohibited unless explicitly permitted
by the instructor.”
"The Typo That Unfurled Harvard’s Cheating Scandal," Chronicle of
Higher Education, September 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/the-typo-that-unfurled-harvards-cheating-scandal?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
"Facing Cheating Inquiry, Harvard Basketball Co-Captains Withdraw," Inside
Higher Ed, September 12, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/09/12/facing-cheating-inquiry-harvard-basketball-co-captains-
Jensen Comment
The main issue is whether students plagiarized work of other students.
Ironically the course involved is "Government 1310: Introduction to
Congress." So why is does cheating in this course come as a surprise?
"Harvard Students in Cheating Scandal Say Collaboration Was Accepted,"
by Richard Perez-Pena, The New York Times, August 31, 2012 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/01/education/students-of-harvard-cheating-scandal-say-group-work-was-accepted.html?_r=1
¶. . .
In years past, the course, Introduction to
Congress, had a reputation as one of the easiest at Harvard College. Some of
the 279 students who took it in the spring semester said that the teacher,
Matthew B. Platt, an assistant professor of government, told them at the
outset that he gave high grades and that neither attending his lectures nor
the discussion sessions with graduate teaching fellows was mandatory.
¶ “He said, ‘I gave out 120 A’s last year, and I’ll
give out 120 more,’ ” one accused student said.
¶ But evaluations posted online by students after
finals — before the cheating charges were made — in Harvard’s Q Guide were
filled with seething assessments, and made clear that the class was no
longer easy. Many students, who posted anonymously, described Dr. Platt as a
great lecturer, but the guide included far more comments like “I felt that
many of the exam questions were designed to trick you rather than test your
understanding of the material,” “the exams are absolutely absurd and don’t
match the material covered in the lecture at all,” “went from being easy
last year to just being plain old confusing,” and “this was perhaps the
worst class I have ever taken.”
¶ Harvard University revealed on Wednesday that
nearly half of the undergraduates in the spring class were under
investigation for suspected cheating, for working together or for
plagiarizing on a take-home final exam. Jay Harris, the dean of
undergraduate education, called the episode “unprecedented in its scope and
magnitude.”
¶ The university would not name the class, but it
was identified by students facing cheating allegations. They were granted
anonymity because they said they feared that open criticism could influence
the outcome of their disciplinary cases.
¶ “They’re threatening people’s futures,” said a
student who graduated in May. “Having my degree revoked now would mean I
lose my job.”
¶ The students said they do not doubt that some
people in the class did things that were obviously prohibited, like working
together in writing test answers. But they said that some of the conduct now
being condemned was taken for granted in the course, on previous tests and
in previous years.
¶ Dr. Platt and his teaching assistants did not
respond to messages requesting comment that were left on Friday. In response
to calls to Mr. Harris and Michael D. Smith, the dean and chief academic
officer of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university released a
statement saying that the university’s administrative board still must meet
with each accused student and that it has not reached any conclusions.
¶ “We expect to learn more about the way the course
was organized and how work was approached in class and on the take-home
final,” the statement said. “That is the type of information that the
process is designed to bring forward, and we will review all of the facts as
they arise.”
¶ The class met three times a week, and each
student in the class was assigned to one of 10 discussion sections, each of
which held weekly sessions with graduate teaching fellows. The course grade
was based entirely on four take-home tests, which students had several days
to complete and which were graded by the teaching fellows.
¶ Students complained that teaching fellows varied
widely in how tough they were in grading, how helpful they were, and which
terms and references to sources they expected to see in answers. As a
result, they said, students routinely shared notes from Dr. Pratt’s
lectures, notes from discussion sessions, and reading materials, which they
believed was allowed.
¶ “I was just someone who shared notes, and now I’m
implicated in this,” said a senior who faces a cheating allegation.
“Everyone in this class had shared notes. You’d expect similar answers.”
¶ Instructions on the final exam said, “students
may not discuss the exam with others.” Students said that consulting with
the fellows on exams was commonplace, that the fellows generally did not
turn students away, and that the fellows did not always understand the
questions, either.
¶ One student recalled going to a teaching fellow
while working on the final exam and finding a crowd of others there, asking
about a test question that hinged on an unfamiliar term. The student said
the fellow defined the term for them.
¶ An accused sophomore said that in working on
exams, “everybody went to the T.F.’s and begged for help. Some of the T.F.’s
really laid it out for you, as explicit as you need, so of course the
answers were the same.”
¶ He said that he also discussed test questions
with other students, which he acknowledged was prohibited, but he maintained
that the practice was widespread and accepted.
¶
"Dozens of students withdraw in Harvard cheating scandal." Reuters,
February 1, 2013 ---
http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USBRE9101AF20130201
As many as 60 students have been forced to withdraw
from Harvard University after cheating on a final exam last year in what has
become the largest academic scandal to hit the Ivy League school in recent
memory.
Michael Smith, Harvard's Dean of the Faculty of
Arts and Sciences, sent an email on Friday saying that more than half of the
students who faced the school's Administrative Board have been suspended for
a time.
Roughly 125 undergraduates were involved in the
scandal, which came to light at the end of the spring semester after a
professor noticed similarities on a take-home exam that showed students
worked together, even though they were instructed to work alone.
The school's student newspaper, The Harvard
Crimson, has reported that the government class, Introduction to Congress,
had 279 students enrolled.
"Somewhat more than half of the Administrative
Board cases this past fall required a student to withdraw from the College
for a period of time," Smith wrote. "Of the remaining cases, roughly half
the students received disciplinary probation, while the balance ended in no
disciplinary action."
The cases were resolved during the fall semester,
which ended in December, Smith said. Suspensions depend on the student, but
traditionally last two semesters and as much as four semesters.
In the last few months, the university has also
worked to be clearer about the academic integrity it expects from students.
"While all the fall cases are complete, our work on
academic integrity is far from done," Smith added.
"Half of students in Harvard cheating scandal required to withdraw from
the college," by Katherin Landergan, Boston.com, February 1, 2013 ---
http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/harvard/2013/02/half_of_students_in_harvard_cheating_scandal_required_to_withdraw_from_the_college.html
In an apparent disclosure about the Harvard
cheating scandal, a top university official said Friday that more than half
of the Harvard students investigated by a college board have been ordered to
withdraw from the school.
In an e-mail to the Harvard community, Dean of the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith wrote that more than half of
the students who were brought before the university's Administration Board
this fall were required to withdraw from for a period of time.
Of the remaining cases, approximately half the
students received disciplinary probation, while the rest of the cases were
dismissed.
Smith's e-mail does not explicitly address the
cheating scandal that implicated about 125 Harvard students. But a Harvard
official confirmed Friday that the cases in the email solely referred to one
course.
In August, Harvard disclosed the cheating scandal
in a Spring 2012 class. It was widely reported to be "Government 1310:
Introduction to Congress."
“Consistent with the Faculty’s rules and our
obligations to our students, we do not report individual outcomes of
Administrative Board cases, but only report aggregate statistics,” the
e-mail said. "In that tradition, the College reports that somewhat more than
half of the Administrative Board cases this past fall required a student to
withdraw from the College for a period of time. Of the remaining cases,
roughly half the students received disciplinary probation, while the balance
ended in no disciplinary action.''
Smith wrote that the first set of cases were
decided in late September, and the remainder were resolved in December.
The e-mail said that "The time span of the
resolutions in this set had an undesirable interaction with our established
schedule for tuition refunds. To create a greater amount of financial equity
for all students who ultimately withdrew sometime in this period, we are
treating, for the purpose of calculating tuition refunds, all these students
as having received a requirement to withdraw on September 30, 2012."
In a statement released when the cheating scandal
became public, Harvard president Drew Faust said that the allegations, “if
proven, represent totally unacceptable behavior that betrays the trust upon
which intellectual inquiry at Harvard depends. . . . There is work to be
done to ensure that every student at Harvard understands and embraces the
values that are fundamental to its community of scholars.”
As Harvard students returned to classes for the
current semester, professsors included explicit instructions about
collaboration on the class syllabus.
On campus Friday afternoon, students reacted to the
news.
Michael Constant, 19, said he thinks the college
wanted to make a statement with its decision. But when over half of the
students in a class cheat, not punishing them is the same as condoning the
behavior.
“I think it’s fair,” Constant said of the board’s
disciplinary action. “They made the choice to cheat.”
Georgina Parfitt, 22, said the punishment for these
students was too harsh, and that many students in the class could have been
confused about the policy.
Parfitt said she does not know what the college is
trying to achieve by forcing students to leave.
Continued in article
Jensen Question
The question is why cheat at Harvard since almost everybody who tries in a
Harvard course receives an A. We're left with the feeling that those 125 or so
students who cheated just did not want to try?
The investigation revealed that 91 percent of
Harvard's students graduated cum laude.
Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley, "Just
Say 'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check: The notion of a decline
in standards draws crusaders and skeptics," Chronicle of Higher Education,
September 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
When Ted Kennedy cheated at Harvard --
-
http://content.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1919041,00.html
A lifetime of hard, and often selfish, living also took its toll on
Kennedy. In 1951, as a freshman at Harvard who was more interested in
football than his studies, Kennedy arranged for a friend to take his spring
Spanish exam. He was caught cheating and was subsequently expelled from the
school for two years, during which time he served as a military police
officer in Paris at the arrangement of his father. Years later, while he was
a law student at the University of Virginia, Kennedy was arrested for
reckless driving after a chase with police.
"Duke MBAs Fail Ethics: Test Thirty-four Fuqua School of
Business students are accused of violating the school's honor
code by cheating on an exam," by Alison Damast,
Business Week, April 30, 2007 ---
Click Here
Cheating on the Rise
Business-school leaders have reason
to be concerned. Fifty-six percent of graduate business
students admitted to cheating one or more times in the past
academic year, compared to 47% of nonbusiness students,
according to a study published in September in the journal
of the Academy of Management Learning & Education
(see BusinessWeek.com, 10/24/06,
"A Crooked Path Through B-School").
Donald McCabe, the lead author of the
study and a professor of management and global business at
Rutgers Business School, says the
large number of students implicated in the Duke case is
above average. "It's certainly not the biggest, but it's one
of the bigger ones," he says of academic scandals involving
all kinds of students.
One of the larger cases in the past
five years was a cheating scandal in a physics class at the
University of Virginia in 2002. The school eventually
dismissed 45 students and revoked three graduates' degrees.
In 2005, Harvard Business School rejected 119 applicants
accused of hacking the school's admissions Web site (see
BusinessWeek.com, 3/9/05,
"An Ethics Lesson for MBA Wannabes").
The Duke occurrence came to light
in mid-March, when the professor for the class noticed some
unusual consistencies among students' answers on the final
exam and as well as on assignments given during the course.
Stiff Penalties
The students were brought before
the school's Judicial Board and are facing a range of wide
range of punitive measures, including expulsion. The board
is made up of three faculty members, three students, and one
nonvoting faculty chair who only votes in case of a tie.
Thirty-eight students were
initially investigated, only four of whom were found not
guilty of violating the honor code. (Of the 38 students, 37
were accused of cheating and one of lying.) Of the remaining
34 students, 9 will be expelled, 15 will be suspended for
one year and receive an F in the class, and the remaining 9
will receive an F in the course. The penalties for the
students will not go into effect until June 1, after which
students will have 15 days to file an appeal. The school did
not release the names of the students involved or name the
professor.
Gavan Fitzsimons, a
professor who is chair of the Fuqua Honor
Committee, said in a written summary of the
board hearings that the board spent several
weeks "deliberating at length" the
circumstances of the case. "It is my utmost
hope that all of the individuals found
guilty of violating our Honor Code will
learn how precious a gift honor and
integrity is," he wrote. "I know from my
interactions with many of them that they
will forever be changed by this experience."
Academic Pressures
The faculty and
student body at Duke were informed of the
committee's decision on the afternoon of
Apr. 27, and the news spread throughout the
campus and on Internet chat groups. Charles
Scrase, Fuqua's student body president, was
surprised by the charges: "The classmates I
work with on a day-to-day basis are ethical,
outstanding individuals," he says. "We're
shocked that [cheating] could've occurred to
this degree."
Sonit Handa, a
first-year Fuqua student, suggests the
students involved in this case might have
been tempted to cheat because they wanted to
ensure they did well in the class: "Duke is
a hectic MBA business school, and employers
want good grades, so there's a lot of
pressure to do well."
The pressure, of
course, is not confined to Duke. Many
schools have policies that encourage an open
dialogue on business ethics. Students at the
Thunderbird School of Global Management
sign a Professional
Oath of Honor similar to doctors'
Hippocratic Oath, while
Penn State created
an honor committee of students and faculty
last year to help foster academic integrity
on campus.
Codes Not
Foolproof
One of the more
recent examples is the new graduate honor
court at the University of North Carolina's
Kenan-Flagler Business School.
In January, the
business school established a student-run
honor court, a body devoted to investigating
student violations of the honor code.
Between 30 and 40 students, from the
school's five MBA programs, are involved
with the court, according to Dawn Morrow, a
second-year MBA student who serves as the
student attorney general for the court.
Before this,
student honor code violations were dealt
with through the graduate honor court
system, which handled cases from other
graduate programs. Morrow says that students
have been eager to get involved with the
honor court because they want to ensure that
the school's values are upheld inside and
outside the classroom. Rutgers' McCabe
estimates that 50 to 100 colleges and
universities have honor codes.
Schools with
extensive honor codes, such as Duke, tend to
have less cheating in general, McCabe says.
Still, he says, it's not a foolproof
measure. Business-school students are more
competitive than other students, and some
use cheating as a way to ensure they get
ahead: "It's kind of like a businessperson
who has the opportunity to embezzle money in
the dark of night," says McCabe. "Sure it's
more tempting, but we still expect them to
be honest."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
There are two broad types of student honor codes. The toughest one is where each
student signs an oath to report the cheating of any other student. This is a
rough code that, in my opinion, must be backed by a college commitment to back
the whistle blowing student if litigation ensues in the very litigious society
of the United States (where 80% of the world's lawyers reside.)
The second kind is a softer version where students are not honor bound to
report cheating by run their own honor courts to dole out punishment
recommendations for cheating reported by others, usually their instructors. This
may actually result in harsher punishments than instructors would normally dole
out. For example, professors often think an F grade is sufficient punishment.
Honor courts may recommend more severe punishments such as in the Duke scandal
noted above.
One problem with honor courts is that they are more of a hassle for
instructors having to take the time to report details of the infraction to the
court and then appear before the court as witnesses. An even more controversial
problem is that the inherent right of an instructor to assign a course grade
punishment for cheating is taken out of the hands of the instructor and passed
on to the honor court. Instructors generally do not like to lose their authority
and responsibility for assigning grades.
Update on May 22, 2008
Duke University Invites Back Business Students Who Cheated
"Fuqua Puts Scandal Behind It: A year after being rocked by a cheating
scandal, Duke's business school plans to welcome back students who were
suspended," by Alison Damast, Business Week, May 22, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/may2008/bs20080522_585217.htm
"Both Sides of Kenan-Flagler:
MBAs run around like frantic idiots but are courted by huge
companies as rock stars. It is no surprise that this combination
of frenzy and entitlement leads to cheating," by Danvers Fleury,
Business Week, June 24, 2007
---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2007/bs20070624_280134.htm?link_position=link2
I used to think poorly of
Duke MBAs. As a UNC recruit, one of my fondest memories was Welcome Weekend,
where all admitted students are invited to meet each other and figure out
whether Kenan-Flagler is right for them. While attending, I wanted to see
how advanced I was at the fine art of diagnosing who would be ill enough to
choose Fuqua over Kenan-Flagler.
My first suspected victim
used to be an engineer, had a GMAT of 770, and got into seven different
schools. When asked about his interest in North Carolina, he said, "Oh the
weather. It’s so nice," and then proceeded to sweat, nervously tic, and
stare intently at me, playing the crack addict to my crack. Clearly he
suffered from Fuquash: the inability to relate to humans.
Others were afflicted with
Fuquardation, or arrogance and entitlement falling just short of Whartonitis.
This could be diagnosed by simply asking them, "What do you do for a
living?" Infected parties came just short of an elaborate PowerPoint
presentation-style pitch followed by a monopolization of group conversation
revolving around their pet horse and its food likes and dislikes.
Now, it turns out that these
people did not go to Kenan-Flagler, but they also haven’t been among the
numerous upstanding and well-balanced people I’ve met from Fuqua. Concern
has been voiced over Duke MBA ethics; I heartily disagree. According to a
recent survey, 56% of MBAs cheat, yet somehow Fuqua is the only MBA program
that can catch them and then admit to it! To me, that seems more like an
accomplishment and less like a scandal, and I hope you don’t fault them for
it in your search.
At business school you learn
to look at both sides of complicated situations, and accordingly in this
post I’d like to share my positive and negative thoughts on the MBA as a
whole, and the Kenan-Flagler experience in particular.
The MBA: Invaluable
My ability to manage time
and stress has skyrocketed, and overall I think through problems in a
broader and more insightful fashion. A lot of my gut instincts on management
and decision-making have been reinforced, while compelling evidence has been
provided through 360-degree feedback and interactive course work that other
habits need to go.
As for the career benefits,
I’ve seen English teachers turn into financiers in 12 weeks. The MBA is
worth every penny to career-switchers and adds incredible value to folks who
don’t have strong business backgrounds. Just as important, the size of my
professional network quadrupled overnight and continues to grow daily.
The MBA: Dinosaur
MBA programs give you
credibility, new skills, and a great network, but there are plenty of ways
they could go about it better.
Most classes in most
programs revolve around lecture and case studies; this is not going to
continue to fly for the MTV generation. I fully understand how teachers feel
that asking questions and discussing a shared case is interactive, but they
clearly haven’t grown up in the highly immersive multimedia world that most
echo boomers come from. Integrating real-time simulation into the classroom
as well as experimenting with group participation could favorably affect
learning.
Furthermore, the core
economic principles that most programs teach come from a microeconomic and
macroeconomic world where people are rational, systems are closed, and
equilibrium is always reached. Considering how irrational people are and how
open and dynamic our economy is, I can’t help but think we’re getting led
astray, and books like The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker go a long way
to confirming this fear.
Finally, I think programs
create overload for overload’s sake while at the same time coddling
students. MBAs run around like frantic idiots but are courted by huge
companies as rock stars. It is no surprise that this combination of frenzy
and entitlement leads to cheating. I think a less insular environment that
is more integrated with the real world and local community would help
students stay focused and balanced, making them less likely to make poor
decisions.
Continued in article
"Are B-Schools Hiding the Cheaters?" by Alison Damast,
Business Week, June 20, 2007
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2007/bs20070620_937949.htm
Want to know
where business students are cheating? Many schools have
honor codes, but it's not easy to find out when they're
broken.
With the controversy
surrounding the cheating scandal at Duke
University's
Fuqua School of Business,
a prospective business school student might
be inclined to take a closer look at just
how often cheating occurs at some top
B-schools. But if you're of that mind, be
prepared to encounter some roadblocks along
the way.
This was what happened
when BusinessWeek conducted an
e-mail survey of our
top 25 ranked
graduate business schools in an effort to
quantify how widespread cheating is among
B-school students. It turned out to be a
tougher task than we expected. We learned
that business schools are reluctant to
release data about cheating and, in some
cases, refuse even to discuss it.
Back in May—shortly after Duke announced it
was disciplining 34 students for ethical
violations involving a test and classwork—we
asked each of the top 25 how many students
had been sanctioned for cheating or other
ethical violations over the past 10 years.
We requested a breakdown by school year,
type of violation committed, and punishment
handed down, if any. We also asked the
school if they had an honor code and, if so,
what their process was for dealing with
students who violated it.
Handful of Cases Only
Out of the 25 business
schools, only three—the
University of Virginia,
Duke, and the
University of Chicago—were
able to provide us with specific data about
ethical violations among their B-school
students. Fifteen schools provided us with
information about their policy for dealing
with ethics violations, but did not provide
specific figures on cheating. And seven
schools declined to provide any information
(see BusinessWeek.com, 6/21/07,
"Schools' Responses on Cheating Stats").
From the limited amount of information
provided by the schools, there was no
indication that cheating cases resulting in
school disciplinary action were numerous at
top B-schools. Chicago, for instance, said
that it only had 25 disciplinary hearings
over the past 13 years. All 25 resulted in
sanctions, although only 11 were related to
academic issues or misconduct. That's an
average of less than one academic sanction
per year during that period.
Schools such as
New York University
and Indiana
University's
Kelly School of Business
said they just have a
"handful" of cases each year, but declined
to get more specific on the figures. And
Virginia has had just a small number of
cases in the past seven years that resulted
in expulsions, according to online records
kept by the school's honor committee.
Playing With Cheaters
Still, the unwillingness of a large number
of top schools to provide data on cheating
is bad news for a business school student
who wants to get an accurate picture of how
his classmates might conduct themselves
while in school, said David Callahan, author
of The Cheating Culture: Why More
Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead.
"It seems to me like it is a piece of
information you would want to know about the
business school you are going to," Callahan
said. "If you are an honest student, it puts
you at a disadvantage to be in an
environment with cheating because you're
going to be working harder and losing out to
people who are not playing by the rules."
Administrators at business schools offered a
wide variety of reasons they were unable to
disclose data on cheating; some said they
simply didn't keep track of it, while others
said they could not disclose it because of
federal privacy laws. A handful said simply
that cheating rarely, if ever, happens at
their school.
Continued in article
D-Schools Are Also Cheating
The Southern Illinois University dental school, which
is affiliated with the Edwardsville campus, is withholding grades of all
first-year students, because of questions raised about the academic merit and
integrity of the students. A university spokesman declined to provide details,
citing the need to preserve confidentiality and the presumption of innocence,
but said that all 52 first-year students would be interviewed as part of the
inquiry. Ann Boyle, dean of the dental school, issued a statement: “This matter
raises questions about the integrity and ethical behavior of Year I students and
is, therefore, under investigation. We will follow our processes as outlined in
our Student Progress Document to resolve the situation as quickly as we can.”
KMOV-TV quoted students at the dental school,
anonymously, as saying that the investigation concerned students who had tried
to memorize and share information from old exams that instructors let them see,
so the students did not consider the practice to be cheating. The Southern
Illinois incident follows two other scandals this year involving
professional school cheating: one at Duke
University’s business school and one at Indiana University’s dental school.
Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/27/qt
Dental School Alleged Cheating at Loma Linda University, New York
University, and UCLA
The American Dental Association is investigating
allegations of possible cheating by students at four dental schools on an exam
that leads to licensure for dentists, the
Los Angeles Times reported. The probe
involves students at Loma Linda University, New York University, the University
of California at Los Angeles and the University of Southern California.
Inside Higher Ed, November 14, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/11/14/qt
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Plagiarism News
An investigative committee is pushing for the
dismissal of Don Heinrich Tolzmann, who teaches history and works as a librarian
at the University of Cincinnati,
The Enquirer reported. A panel there found
duplications between Tolzmann’s book The German-American Experience and a text
written in 1962. Tolzmann strongly denies wrongdoing, which was first alleged in
an
H-Net review. At Ohio University, which has been
dealing with charges of plagiarized master’s theses, the institution announced
that graduates accused of plagiarism would face hearings to determine the status
of their degrees, the
Associated Press reported.
Inside Higher Ed, August 25, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/24/qt
Question
Will these engineering graduates take down their diplomas and return them to
Ohio University?
Ohio University has sent letters to more than 50
people who earned master’s degrees with material believed to be plagiarized,
asking them to return their degrees, rewrite their theses, or demand a hearing,
The Athens News reported. In May the university
found
“rampant and flagrant plagiarism” among some graduate
students in its mechanical engineering department.
Inside Higher Ed, July 19, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/19/qt
A Professor's Lawsuit Against Ohio University
Jay Gunasekera, a professor who supervised the work of
some of the 37 Ohio University master’s graduates found to have plagiarized
parts of their theses, is suing the university for defamation, saying that his
role has been distorted, the
Associated Press
reported. University officials — who
have released detailed reports on the alleged
plagiarism — told the AP that they would contest the suit.
Inside Higher Ed, August 14, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/08/14/qt
Question
What happens when professors who let students cheat get caught themselves?
"‘Distinguished’ No Longer," by Elia Powers, Inside Higher Ed,
February 22, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/22/ohio
Fallout continues from a plagiarism saga at Ohio
University that has clouded the reputation of the university’s engineering
college. Earlier this month, Roderick J. McDavis, Ohio’s president, for the
first time in the institution’s history rescinded the title of
“distinguished professor,” a high academic honor that had been given to
engineering professor Jay S. Gunasekera years earlier for his research,
teaching and service.
Gunasekera is
at the center of the controversy, the subject of charges
that he both plagiarized a graduate student’s work in a
published book, and failed to adequately monitor graduate
students who went on to copy others’ material in theses they
submitted under his watch.
What
began in 2005 as a former engineering graduate student’s
effort to show dishonesty among
his colleagues has ballooned into a university-wide
investigation. A
review by two university officials
found “rampant and flagrant plagiarism” by graduate students
in the mechanical engineering department, as well as a
“failure to monitor” those students.
Gunasekera
didn’t respond to messages for comment Thursday. He is suing
the university for defamation and has said the report
misstates his role.
Several other committees have looked into the work of
students, many of whom Gunasekera advised. Already, Ohio has
revoked the master’s degree of a
former mechanical engineering student whose thesis it
determined contained unoriginal work.
Gunasekera
was chair of the department at the time the allegations
surfaced. He was removed from that position, and also had a
named professorship taken away. This year, he’s on
assignment and not teaching or advising students.
In November,
a panel of fellow “distinguished professors” who looked at
Gunasekera’s work and that of some of his students, voted to
recommend that the university remove “distinguished” from
his title.
“It’s
supposed to be an honor for people whose records have
brought acclaim to the university and to themselves,” said
Steven Grimes, a distinguished professor of physics and
astronomy, who chaired the committee and voted to rescind
the title. “He clearly had done that, but obviously now it
doesn’t look like he’s helping the reputation of the
university.”
McDavis, himself the
subject of much faculty criticism
for his leadership of the university, followed the group’s
recommendation.
David
Drabold, a distinguished professor of physics, who voted in
favor of removing the title, said he was surprised that the
decision took as long as it did. “I think the case was
fairly clear,” Drabold said, adding that he was swayed by
the examples of unoriginal work from theses that were
approved by Gunasekera.
Those who
have heard Gunasekera’s defense to the plagiarism charges
say the professor argues that as an international professor
(he taught in Australia and Sri Lanka) he didn’t understand
the prevailing American citation standards.
Drabold said
he can understand how that could have been the case
initially — Gunasekera joined the Ohio faculty in 1983. He
even said the professor made an attempt in the preface of
the book in question to credit the graduate student whose
material he used.
But, as
Drabold and others on the distinguished faculty committee
note, his defense wouldn’t explain why he allowed his
graduate students to routinely copy others for years after
he started at Ohio.
Said Gar
Rothwell, a distinguished professor of environmental and
plant biology: “There are standards of scholarship that we
all have to follow. They aren’t secret.”
Greg Kremer,
chair of the mechanical engineering department and an
associate professor, said while he didn’t feel comfortable
commenting on what Gunasekera’s future at Ohio should be, he
offered that “the level of proof and the level of
seriousness it takes to remove a distinguished professor
title is very, very significantly different than anything
that would result in the de-tenuring process.”
Kremer said
the department is waiting for the university-wide
investigation of student theses to finish before it decides
whether to take action.
Several of
the distinguished professors interviewed referred to
Gunasekera as affable and successful in parts of his
professional life — saying he brought in significant
external funding for engineering and technology projects.
“This is a
decent man who has been through a lot of unpleasantness,”
Drabold said. “This was an active, productive person. He was
trying to be a good citizen and was simply doing too much.”
Grimes
agrees that Gunasekera likely didn’t have bad intentions,
and that “it’s not at all obvious to me that what he did
rises to the level of firing.” Yet he said that he’d still
“seriously consider” voting for de-tenure.
An earlier November 26,
2001 segment called "Cheating Scandal at U. of
Virginia," --- http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/11/26/national/main319035.shtml
Eight University of
Virginia students have left school for plagiarism, and a student committee is
preparing to investigate 72 more alleged honor code violations in what has
become the school's biggest cheating scandal in memory.
Since May, 148
students have been accused of copying term papers in Professor Lou
Bloomfield's introductory physics course. Bloomfield referred the students to
the university honor committee after a homemade computer program detected
numerous duplicated phrases in his students' work during the past five
semesters.
"That was a real
shock," said Thomas Hall, chairman of the honor committee, whose staff
has been under enormous pressure to finish its investigation before graduation
this May. "The largest number of accusations I'd seen from any one
professor was maybe five."
Sixty Minutes aired
an update with Mike Wallace on November 10, 2002 --- http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml
At the time I am writing this early in the morning on November 11, CBS has not
yet posted the update version at its Website.
Here are some of the
highlights I noted while watching Mike Wallace's update last night
Question:
How many students have been expelled from the University of Virginia over the
approximate period of one year and how many are still awaiting a decision on
whether or not they will be expelled due to Honor Code violations at the
University of Virginia?
Answer:
The number is now up to 40 students expelled with 120 others still awaiting a
decision as to their fate. I might note that this is after the scandal
made national headlines almost a year ago when eight students were expelled.
Question:
What is the most absurd claim made by a UVA student interviewed on campus by
Mike Wallace?
Answer:
That faculty investigations of honor code violations are violations of trust
that students have in faculty when students sign the honor code.
Students are led to believe that faculty will not snoop into cheating even if
there is evidence of such cheating.
Question:
What is the most innovative way students are cheating in examinations using
water bottles?
Answer:
How to Cheat With Crib Notes (Video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpQZDJ2fGnI
Other Videos on How to
Cheat
How to Cheat During Exams ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH2KZTyp3_A&feature=related
(But students in the front row are out of luck.)
Skirting: How to Cheat on Exams ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slL9WkjZt-g
(There's hope for the front row too. But if you have a male instructor, your
chances of getting caught are greater.)
How to cheat in an exam with just a pen and paper ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fr0e8DqQ-E&feature=related
How to Cheat
at School ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcmHVSZr32o
Question:
What is an earlier CBS 48 Hours show in which the School Board of a high
school overturned the grades of a biology teacher who failed students for
cheating by downloading their main project papers from the Internet?
Answer:
Plagiarism Controversy Engulfs Kansas School --- http://www.edweek.org/ew/newstory.cfm?slug=29piper.h21
It all started with
a 10th grade biology project about leaves. But the dust-up over the handling
of a student-plagiarism incident in the normally tranquil Kansas City, Kan.,
suburb of Piper doesn't appear likely to subside any time soon.
So far, the teacher
at the center of the controversy, Christine Pelton, has resigned. Another
teacher resigned last month in support, and several others are contemplating
whether they want to stay with the 1,300-student district. The latest
casualty is Michael Adams, the principal at the 450- student Piper High
School, who announced last month that he would resign at the end of the
school year. He cited "personal and professional" reasons, but
added in an interview: "You can read between the lines."
In addition, the
district attorney has filed civil charges against the district's
seven-member school board, accusing the members of violating the Kansas
open-meetings law last December when they reduced the penalties for the 28
students accused of plagiarism. And three board members now face a recall
drive.
"All of us
have gotten tons of hate mail, from all over the country," said Leigh
Vader, the Piper school board's vice president. "People are telling us
we're idiots and stupid. ... Moving on—I think that's the goal of
everyone."
But that may be
difficult. The dispute, which has drawn national attention, will return to
the national spotlight in May, when the CBS newsmagazine "48
Hours" is expected to air an investigative report on the Piper
plagiarism case.
"For a lot of
people," said David Lungren, the president of the Piper Teachers
Association, "the feeling is we can debate the decision to death or
figure out what we need to do to move on. If we can all agree that this did
not work out well for us, what could we figure out to prevent this from
occurring again?"
Question:
What is the major conclusion drawn by commentators of on all of these CBS shows
about cheating?
Answer:
That a rapidly-growing proportion students no longer consider cheating a bad
thing to do as long as you don't get caught. And their parents do not
consider cheating a bad thing and will even go to school officials and even
court to defend against punishments for cheating.
"Cambridge Survey
Finds That 49% of Students Have Plagiarized,"
by Lawrence Biemiller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3,
2008 ---
Click Here
Half the students at the University of Cambridge
have plagiarized, according to results of a survey by
Varsity,
a student newspaper at the university.
The newspaper said its survey had attracted 1,014
respondents, of whom 49 percent said they had committed at least one act
defined by the university as plagiarism. The list of forbidden acts
included: handing in someone else’s essay; copying and pasting from the
Internet; copying or making up statistics, code, or research results;
handing in work that had been submitted previously; using someone else’s
ideas without acknowledgment; buying an essay; and having an essay edited by
Oxbridge Essays,
a company that provides online essay services. Five
percent of those who admitted having plagiarized said they had been caught.
Some students were surprised to find that what they
thought were innocuous academic acts had landed them in the plagiarist
category. “Of course I use other people’s ideas without acknowledging them,
but I didn’t think that this made me a plagiarist,” one student said.
But others admitted copying or buying work “when I
am late with an essay or finding it difficult.” Law students, the newspaper
said, broke the rules most often, with 62 percent admitting that they had
plagiarized. Four percent of students surveyed said they had written for
Oxbridge Essays.
Comments
Yes, and 100% of civil rights leaders named Martin
Luther King, Jr., have also plagiarized. And 100% of writers named Doris
Kearns Goodwin have plagiarized. And 100% of vice-presidential candidates
named Joe Biden have plagiarized. These students are in good company. Maybe
we should educate them rather than haul them before a firing squad, as too
many professors want to do.
— gl Nov 1, 08:22 PM #
I agree with gl, it seems a bit harsh to haul
anyone anywhere, much less before a firing squad, until we have delved into
the depth of the training students receive about the rigors of attribution.
(Hint: scandalously little)
The internet with all its advances did bomb us back
to the intellectual property stone age with the conspicuous absence of paper
trails for the materials one can find within a click or two of beginning
research.
The other part of the problem, and I am ready to be
placed before the firing squad for this comment, professors (especially at
the undergraduate level) do not put enough thinking into the construction of
their essay questions. And to make matters worse, they use the same old
tired questions year in decade out. So let’s look at our role in
perpetuating this obnoxious problem and criminal waste of time on both
sides.
Newsflash, profs! Life is short. Why spend your
precious discretionary time playing cops and robbers with your students?
— BC PROF Nov 1, 11:42 PM #
Using a service like Turnitin.com helps to reduce
plagiarism quite a bit because even if the students don’t have a high
likelihood of getting caught, they know that they are really taking a big
risk if they try to fool the system. If students know there’s a good chance
they’ll get caught, they will not engage in plagiarism. Some professors
would rather spend their leisure time with their families or doing their own
research rather than chasing down sources of plagiarism. Use the tools to
help you catch cheaters so you can have more time for your own life.
— MEH Nov 2, 02:16 PM #
Of course if I discover that a student has
committed plagiarism, I take the steps that are prescribed by the honor code
at my university. But I did not become a teacher to spend my time enforcing
such codes. If a student cheats and receives a grade that he doesn’t
deserve, he is the poorer for it. We have this idea that cheaters are
robbing someone else of something valuable, and therefore that we ought to
act to stop them or to punish them. It is not so difficult to see that
plagiarists are only cheating themselves. They pay the very high price of
not learning what they might have learned under their own lights, and to my
mind that is penalty enough.
— SK Nov 2, 02:49 PM #
MEH, the time you save with turnitin.com is lost
when you catch a cheater, because you yourself become a cheater if you don’t
report the honor violation (rather than handle it privately, which most
campuses frown upon). So assuming you’re as honest as you expect your
student to be, you’re sucked into the whole lengthy honors process, with
forms and hearings and meetings and eventually the wish that you had not
been so persnickety.
I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid
if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing
could have been already written. Or, as I do, require first drafts of nearly
completed works, a couple weeks before the real due date, with which you can
issue warnings framed in face-saving
look-what-you-forgot-you-cite-or-enclose-in-quotation-marks language. They
get the message you’re tough, especially if you threaten reporting an honors
violation if the supposed error is not corrected, and you spend even more
time with your own life.
— gl Nov 2, 03:04 PM #
gl
I think the plagiarism situation is easy to avoid
if you assign paper topics based on very recent events about which nothing
could have been already written.
right, I am sure that is feasible in history of
philosophy classes. Second Idea was much more reasonable.
— jon Nov 2, 08:54 PM #
The key is what the students perceive as cheating.
If using someone else’s ideas without acknowledging it is cheating, then we
are all cheaters. The kids come in to college 17 years old and dumb. They
sit in lectures, read books, talk to classmates and faculty, and hear all
kinds of new ideas. How can they ever acknowledge where all those ideas came
from? How can they even remember when the ideas were first planted and by
whom?
Similarly, good writing involves sharing ideas with
other students, revising and proofreading. That violates the honor code
standard of “doing your own work.” We create a catch-22 when we demand high
quality work but strictly prohibit some of the methods that are essential
for good learning. And even if we don’t “strictly” prohibit appropriate
collaboration, not all students know where the line is. Consequently, some
students will identify themselves as cheaters, even though the type of help
they get on their assignments is acceptable.
And in my field, it is pretty common for students
to forget to write down some detail of their source information, and at the
last minute have to fudge the works cited. Technically it is fabrication,
and the students know it. It would be embarrassing to publish a error-filled
works cited. But in the end it is too trivial to worry about.
All these kinds of cases drive up the number of
self-identified cheaters. It isn’t worth faculty worrying out.
— Shar Nov 3, 12:33 AM #
As others have noted, the extensive use of
plagiarism requires an educational solution. I commend to you an excellent
article by Eleanour Snow who describes (and links to) a number of
institution-wide web tutorials designed to teach students about plagiarism.
You can view the article at http://innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=306&action=article
(requires free subscription).
James L. Morrison Editor-in-Chief, Innovate
Jensen Comment
There's serious doubt that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesis.
It's not clear that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesis
Large parts of an economics thesis written by President
Vladimir Putin in the mid-1990s were lifted straight out of a U.S. management
textbook published 20 years earlier, The Washington Times reported Saturday,
citing researchers at the Brookings Institution. It was unclear, however,
whether Putin had even read the thesis, which might have been intended to
impress the Western investors who were flooding into St. Petersburg in the
mid-1990s, the report said. Putin oversaw the city's foreign economic relations
at the time.
"Putin Accused of Plagiarizing Thesis," Moscow Times, March 27, 2006 ---
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/27/011.html
Jensen Comment
What's interesting about this news item is that it was published in Moscow. This
would not have happened in the old Soviet Union.
Martin Luther King Jr. has been accused of widespread plagiarism, including
parts of his doctoral thesis ---
http://www.martinlutherking.org/thebeast.html
Other celebrity plagiarists ---
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/plagiarism.htm
Since I have such a huge number of documents
at my Website, I often wonder what kinds of grades I'm getting around the world
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/threads.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
November 3, 2008 reply from Guest, Paul
[paul.guest@CRANFIELD.AC.UK]
Having taught accounting at Cambridge for several
years, I believe that these high plagiarism figures are of no relevance to
any accounting courses taught there.
I would guess that the high figures are likely due
to the unique college tutorial system at Cambridge University (along with
Oxford and a few others) where undergraduate students attend frequent
(usually biweekly) small group tutorials in addition to lectures. Students
are often required to write essays for these tutorials under very tight time
constraints. The high plagiarism figures are likely driven by undergraduates
trying to finish essays by these deadlines. The students don't benefit from
such cheating. Although the essays are marked they do not count towards a
final grade, and any under-prepared students are usually exposed as such in
the tutorials. [For accounting tutorials, essays are very rarely set, and
instead students are required to work through a previously unseen question.]
Paul Guest
Cranfield School of Management
Then in a second message Paul wrote the following:
I agree, cheating students won't learn much about
the assigned material if they cheat. However, under the Cambridge and Oxford
(tutorial & written assignment) system (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutorial_system , cheating
students are much more likely to be caught at an early stage when the
consequences are much less severe (since written assignments do not
contribute to final grades). The cheating can therefore be dealt with
informally and with a light touch by a tutor who is close to the student, so
lessons can be learned with no lasting damage. Especially important when
many cases of plagiarism appear to arise from ignorance.
Also, assignment writing for tutorials at Cambridge
is optional. Undergraduate students can choose not to produce written
assignments for tutorials (or simply not turn up to them). However, by not
participating they are foregoing the most important learning experience at
Cambridge. The tutorial and written assignment system is the fundamental
pedagogic difference between Cambridge and other universities and a key
reason why Cambridge has been so successful. It is worth £2000 per year for
each undergraduate student (previously paid by the government but not any
longer as of this year
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2005/oct/14/highereducation.universityfunding
). Students are very aware of this and very rarely
miss supervisions or fail to submit written assignments.
From my experience in teaching these supervisions
(I also taught economics and finance for which essays were assigned) I dont
believe that plagiarism is rampant. Instead I interpret the high figures
along the lines suggested by Dave Albrecht, that although 49% of students
have plagiarised at some point, each student has done it very rarely.
By the way, a huge thankyou from across the pond to
you and the other contributors to this list, and for the great material on
your website.
Paul Guest
Some cheating scandals may not be scandals
Question
In the Central Florida University cheating scandal was it student cheating
or instructor laziness?
Watch the video?
This article below blames the Central Florida University management
instructor (Richard Quinn) for being lazy in using test questions that the
publisher allowed students to download for study and review. Perhaps it was not
the scandal as grave as we were led to believe. It certainly appears the media
over-reacted on this one.
Also see
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/17/cheating
In the article below you have to scroll down past the LSU physics professor
discussion to see the discussion on the Richard Quinn video that's now off
the air.
But no, I found the video at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbzJTTDO9f4
It may not stay there long!
"Video Killed the Faculty Star," by Jack Stripling, Inside Higher
Ed, November 18. 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/11/18/videos
Question:
What are the most popular sites for term papers?
Answer
1: SchoolSucks.com --- http://www.schoolsucks.com/
Note that this site purportedly has a minimum of 250,000 hits per day
according to the November 10, 2002 Sixty Minutes show.
Need a
Paper
Welcome
back to School Sucks!! Ya ready?
Time to get out those dusty notebooks, the whoopie cushions, the notes you
got from the kid who took the same classes last year and get your asses back
to school!
We're ready.
We got a new site for you. A chat
room so you can talk homework with students from all over the world. Message
boards, games
and polls.
If you sign
up, you can send instant messages.
We're giving a $250 high
school scholarship this semester. But you have to prove that you're not
an A student to participate!
Let us know what you think and keep spreading the word:
School Sucks!
Answer
2 --- Termpapers R Us --- http://www.termpapersrus.com/
Do you
need help and need it fast? Then you have found THE BEST SITE on the entire
Internet. Our guarantee to you... is that you will find what you need
on this site and you will find it fast.... if it isn’t in our database of
more than 25,000 sample term papers, essays, and research studies, then we
will write one for you just as fast as you need it.
Try a
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essays, and research studies... if you can't find something on your topic...
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Answer
3 (Some others mentioned on the May 12 Sixty Minutes show)
CheatHouse.com --- http://www.cheathouse.com/
(Free papers)
PaperWizards.com --- http://www.paperwizards.com/
Question:
The bottom-line question posed to the two young spokesmen for the School Sucks
service on the Web was Mike Wallace's question: Who besides students
downloads papers from School Sucks?
Answer:
Professors wanting to pad their resumes and annual performance
reports.
Bob
Jensen's conclusion: Listening to the above revelation that some
professors are using the same cheat sites as students will not not exactly help
convince students that this is a wrong thing to do in education and in
society. But then again, students and their professors get even more
cynical about cheating morality as they watch leaders in corporate governance,
auditing firms, churches, charities, and government being accused daily of
massive frauds and influence peddling.
Hi Dan,
Now let's wait a minute on the "Wait a minute"
If your entire future rides on getting an A in a course, you might be
tempted to crib for competitive advantage. Or you may be a geek who just
takes clever cheating up as a challenge.
As Rchard Sansing pointed out, if you print on the back
of the label of a water bottle and paste it back on the bottle, your can read it
easily in magnified print from the other side of the bottle. It is not
necessary to reverse the printing. However, if you want to use a mirror up
a pant leg or skirt, you may need to reverse the printing.
It is pretty easy to get small print. Simply
try Font Size 8 in MS Word.
As far reading backwards is concerned, dyslexics have an
advantage if the print is not reversed.
I am told that MW Word “has a somewhat hidden backward
printing feature.”
--- http://www.euronet.nl/users/mvdk/wordprocessors.html
I’ve not been able to find it, but I’m certain that if anybody could find
it, it would be my students.
Here's another way
How to Cheat With Crib Notes (Video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpQZDJ2fGnI
Other Videos on How to Cheat
How to Cheat During Exams ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dH2KZTyp3_A&feature=related
(But students in the front row are out of luck.)
Skirting: How to Cheat on Exams ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slL9WkjZt-g
(There's hope for the front row too. But if you have a male instructor, your
chances of getting caught are greater.)
How to cheat in an exam with just a pen and paper ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fr0e8DqQ-E&feature=related
How to Cheat at
School ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcmHVSZr32o
Actually a somewhat better approach would be to type
whatever you want, paste in whatever graphs and tables you want, capture the
screen, then reduce the size to whatever it takes to fit inside the water
bottle, and then create a mirror image in your graphics or MS Word software. However,
you may want to wear a special kind of spectacles for magnification.
You can read the following in the Help file of MW Word:
Create a mirror image of an object
- Click the AutoShape,
picture,
WordArt,
or clip
art you want to duplicate.
- Click Copy
and then click Paste
- On the Drawing
toolbar, click Draw, point to Rotate
or Flip, and then click Flip Horizontal
or Flip Vertical.
- Drag and position the
duplicate object so that it mirrors the original object.
Note You may need to override the Snap-To-Grid
option to position the object precisely. To do this, press ALT as you drag the
object.
Bob Jensen
-----Original Message-----
From: Dan Stone [mailto:dstone@UKY.EDU]
Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2002, 5:04 A.M.
Subject: Wait a minute....
Now help me out here friends....
I've been bothered since I first
heard about this...
If I write on a water bottle in
tiny print and then read through the water, the print will be bigger but it
will be BACKWARDS. A middle of the
night experiment confirms this. Would
it really be that helpful to have a tiny print, written-backwards cheat
sheet?????? I doubt it.
My point is that the media may
be "over the top" in reporting some of the evidence on the cheating
problem in today's University. Yes
I believe there is a cheating scandal, but to paraphrase from Charlotte's Web,
"people believe anything that they read."
Let's not make this mistake.
Best,
Dan Stone
Univ. of Kentucky
How to Cheat With Crib Notes (Video) ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpQZDJ2fGnI
Look Before and After You Make an Accounting Term Paper
Assignment
I did not expect there to be too many accounting term papers at
the term paper mills. This turns out to be naive. For example, there
are over 200 papers on some very interesting accountancy topics at http://www.termpapersrus.com/
Include the following in your search:
SchoolSucks.com --- http://www.schoolsucks.com/
Termpapers R Us --- http://www.termpapersrus.com/
CheatHouse.com --- http://www.cheathouse.com/
(Free papers)
PaperWizards.com --- http://www.paperwizards.com/
Moral of Story --- Check out what the
term papers have available on the topic you assign to your class.
Possible Assignment: Have
students critique a term paper mill product.
The Web puts answers to most questions
-- not to mention ready-made term papers -- at students' fingertips. One
educator says it's time to assign work that truly makes kids think.
"Got Cheaters? Ask New
Questions," by Dustin Goot, Wired News, September 10, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,54996,00.html
Jamie McKenzie has
spent his whole career trying to get schools "to ask better
questions." But now that he preaches better questions as an antidote for
rampant Internet plagiarism, a lot more teachers are listening.
In the professional
development seminars he gives, McKenzie said, 60 to 80 percent of teachers
cite cases of plagiarism in their classrooms. A more formal study, conducted
by a professor at Rutgers University, found that more than half of high school
kids "have engaged in some level of plagiarism on written assignments
using the Internet."
According to
McKenzie, however, students aren't solely to blame for this trend. Many
assignments teachers give, he said, are conducive to cheating. "It is
reckless and irresponsible to continue requiring topical 'go find out about'
research projects in this new electronic context," McKenzie wrote in a
1998 article in "From Now On," an online educational journal he
edits.
Instead, teachers
must distinguish between trivial research and meaningful research, which asks
kids to "analyze, interpret, infer or synthesize" material they have
read.
Patti Tjomsland said
that in Washington's Mark Morris High School, where she serves as a media
specialist, the standard book report of the old days does not even exist
anymore. Instead, teachers favor compare-and-contrast essays or personal
opinion pieces asking students what they would do in a certain situation.
Content for these kinds of essays, Tjomsland explained, is not readily
available online.
McKenzie hopes that
more schools will follow Mark Morris High's example. "A lot of concern
(about plagiarism) is translated into more careful scrutiny," he said.
"I would like to see the concern translated into better
assignments."
March 29, 2002 message from Glen L. Gray [vcact00f@CSUN.EDU]
Information Week had
an interesting article that says that teens are developing bad
"work" habits that may cause them problems at work--e.g.,
plagiarism.
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20020307S0005
Glen L. Gray,
PhD, CPA
Department of Accounting and Information Systems
California State University, Northridge 18111 Nordhoff Street
Northridge, CA 91330-8372 818.677.3948
glen.gray@csun.edu
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f
A Message on January 17, 2002 from Ceil Pillsbury
[ceil@UWM.EDU]
Last month I posted a
message regarding six accounting majors who had cheated in my class. Thank you
for the responses with ideas about teaching ethics. It turned out that six
other accounting majors had cheated in a different class and my original
concern grew so much that I decided to take at look at the literature on
academic misconduct (Thank you to Bob Jensen his usual helpful links).
Essentially, the
research says that the problem is far more widespread than professors want to
acknowledge (and business students are among the worse cheaters). BUT the
literature also indicates that academic misconduct can be significantly
reduced by raising student awareness of the issues through class discussion,
signed honor codes, and having students know that real enforcement with
significant penalties is occurring. Given Enron, and the significant fallout
which is going to occur, I think it is very easy to tie the need for academic
integrity into the need for professional integrity.
Along these lines I
am attaching three documents I have prepared which I will be using in my class
from now on. I have had several students review these documents with positive
feedback. I would also appreciate any feedback you have.
My plan is to lecture
about ethics and then to have students read the letter on the need for
academic and professional integrity. After that there is an ethics worksheet
for the students to complete and an honor code for them to sign.
I sense that I do not
speak for myself alone when I say that my classes have become so packed with
trying to cram in the ever burgeoning standards that I haven't paid nearly
enough attention to ethics in the last few years. If anyone shares that
concern and finds the attached materials may be of help please feel free to
make any use of them desired.
I also now have an
easy to use cheating software program from the University of Virginia that was
used to catch 122 Physics students plagiarizing. It is available free of
charge at
http://www.plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu
Regards,
Ceil
Ceil's documents are also available at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/cheating/
The 100 Cheating Scandals at the University
of Virginia ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Virginia
Foreign Countries That Cheat
Plagiarism ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism
Plagiarism Law and Legal Definition ---
http://definitions.uslegal.com/p/plagiarism/
The Best Plagiarism Video Ever Made ---
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/international_law/2010/06/friday-fun-the-best-plagiarism-video-ever-made.html
There is no such thing as international copyright law ---
http://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2005/11/21/international-incidents/
"Yale U. Complains That Chinese University Press Plagiarized Free Course
Materials," by Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 7,
2011 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-u-complains-that-chinese-university-press-plagiarized-free-course-materials/31609?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's links to Yale's open sharing are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
"Chinese Publisher Apologizes to Yale for Plagiarizing Free Course
Lectures," by Jeff Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 17,
2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/yale-u-complains-that-chinese-university-press-plagiarized-free-course-materials/31609
A university press in China appears to be selling
transcripts of Yale University’s free online courses in a new volume,
sparking complaints from Yale officials. Under the terms of the course
giveaway, called Open
Yale Courses, others cannot profit from the material.
Shaanxi Normal University Press recently published
the compilation of five Yale open courses, according to a post today on a
Yale Alumni Magazine blog. The book
reportedly lifted largely from Chinese subtitles translated by a nonprofit
group called YYeT, though that group insists it was not involved in the
publication, whose author is listed as Wu Han.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on open sharing videos and course materials ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Fake Modiglianis began to emerge in the 1920s, soon after his death. Now he
is one of the world's most faked artists. There are even fake fakes ---
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/05/worlds-most-faked-artists-amedeo-modigliani-picasso
"Yale Professor at Peking U. Assails Widespread Plagiarism in China,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 21, 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3678/yale-professor-at-peking-u-assails-widespread-plagiarism-in-china
A Yale University professor has written a stern
letter expressing concern about widespread plagiarism by students he taught
at Peking University this fall.
“The fact that I have encountered this much
plagiarism … tells me something about the behavior of other professors and
administrators here,” Stephen Stearns, a professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology, wrote to his students. “They must tolerate a lot of
it, and when they detect it, they cover it up without serious punishment,
probably because they do not want to lose face. If they did punish it, it
would not be this frequent.”
Plagiarism and other forms of academic corruption
have been
common in Chinese higher education for years, even
as the authorities try to raise academic standards.
Mr. Stearns went on to attack the lack of
protection for intellectual-property rights in China, even citing the
pirating of his own textbook by Peking University itself, a premier Chinese
institution that is often called Beida. “Disturbingly, plagiarism fits into
a larger pattern of behavior in China,” he wrote. “China ignores
international intellectual-property rights. Beida sees nothing wrong in
copying my textbook, for example, in complete violation of international
copyright agreements, causing me to lose income, stealing from me quite
directly.”
Chinese translations of the strongly worded letter,
titled “To My Students in Beijing, Fall 2007,” quickly spread around the
Chinese-language Internet. It was also published on
New Threads, a Chinese Web site that reports cases
of plagiarism in China. (The English original follows the Chinese
translation.)
Continued in article
But they know enough about U.S. culture to sue
Hopefully Duke made all of its MBA students sign that they understood the honor
code
"Cheating Across Cultures," by Elizabeth Redden, Inside Higher Ed, May
24, 2007 ---
http://insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/24/cheating
Not
surprisingly, some of the students are contesting their
sentences. This week, a Durham lawyer who’s filed appeals on
behalf of 16 of the students
cried foul to the Associated Press,
arguing that all nine of the expelled
students were from Asian countries, and that the students in
question failed to fully understand the honor code and the
judicial proceedings.
Excuses,
excuses? Maybe; maybe not. Regardless, the complaints serve
to spotlight some of the particular challenges inherent in
addressing issues of academic integrity involving
international students, many of whom come to American
colleges with different conceptions of cheating. As the
number of international students has increased in recent
years — and the number of academic misconduct incidents
involving international students has risen accordingly —
educators have increasingly embraced the need to address
academic integrity concerns proactively, recognizing in
their actions the various cultural influences that can help
cause one to cheat.
“These
issues come up in unusual ways. It doesn’t mean there isn’t
cheating in China [for instance]. There is,” says Sidney L.
Greenblatt, senior assistant director of advising and
counseling at Syracuse University and an expert on China
(he’s currently writing an essay for a collection on
cultural aspects of academic integrity, and has co-authored
a publication on “U.S.
Classroom Culture” highlighting
these issues). “People present false credentials to the
American embassy and corruption in the system is about what
it is here.”
Continued in article
"Yale Professor at Peking U. Assails Widespread Plagiarism in China,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 21, 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3678/yale-professor-at-peking-u-assails-widespread-plagiarism-in-china
A Yale University professor has written a stern
letter expressing concern about widespread plagiarism by students he taught
at Peking University this fall.
“The fact that I have encountered this much
plagiarism … tells me something about the behavior of other professors and
administrators here,” Stephen Stearns, a professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology, wrote to his students. “They must tolerate a lot of
it, and when they detect it, they cover it up without serious punishment,
probably because they do not want to lose face. If they did punish it, it
would not be this frequent.”
Plagiarism and other forms of academic corruption
have been
common in Chinese higher education for years, even
as the authorities try to raise academic standards.
Mr. Stearns went on to attack the lack of
protection for intellectual-property rights in China, even citing the
pirating of his own textbook by Peking University itself, a premier Chinese
institution that is often called Beida. “Disturbingly, plagiarism fits into
a larger pattern of behavior in China,” he wrote. “China ignores
international intellectual-property rights. Beida sees nothing wrong in
copying my textbook, for example, in complete violation of international
copyright agreements, causing me to lose income, stealing from me quite
directly.”
Chinese translations of the strongly worded letter,
titled “To My Students in Beijing, Fall 2007,” quickly spread around the
Chinese-language Internet. It was also published on
New Threads, a Chinese Web site that reports cases
of plagiarism in China. (The English original follows the Chinese
translation.)
Continued in article
Spotted: a new trend called plagio-riffing
Students are growing lazier about the whole process of
copying, not even bothering to change fonts in a cut-and-paste excerpt or
otherwise disguise their tracks. When asked why he inserted an entire page
printed in Black Forest Gothic in a paper written in Courier, a student in
freshman composition expressed surprise: “If you start changing things, that’s
cheating, right?” The path of least resistance continues, often refreshingly
low-tech. A Psychology 200 instructor reported a student handing in a Xerox of
an article with the author’s name whited out and her own inserted. “I did the
best I could,” confessed the student. “I didn’t have my laptop with me, and I
was in a hurry.” . . . Spotted: a new trend
called plagio-riffing, where students get together and mix and match five or
more papers into one by sampling and lifting choice paragraphs to the beat of
George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” (plagiarized from “He’s So Fine”).
David Galef, "Report from the Academic Committee on Plagiarism," Inside Higher
Ed, June 10, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2005/06/10/galef
Blackboard and the company that owns
Turnitin, the popular plagiarism-detection service, have settled their patent
dispute, agreeing not to sue one another,
Washington Business Journal reported.
Blackboard announced in July that it was
adding a plagiarism-detection feature to its course
management system.
Inside Higher Ed, August 24, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/24/qt
Comparison of Plagiarism Detection Tools ---
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/SER07017B.pdf
"Plagiarism Detection: Is Technology the Answer?" at the 2007 EDUCAUSE
Southeast Regional Conference, Liz Johnson, Board of Regents of the University
System of Georgia, provided a chart comparing seven plagiarism detection tools:
Turnitin, MyDropBox, PAIRwise, EVE2, WCopyFind, CopyCatch, and GLATT.
August 24, 2007 message from Ed Scribner
[escribne@nmsu.edu]
Bob,
The New Mexico State University Library is hosting
a new website on plagiarism issues. The site, available at
http://lib.nmsu.edu/plagiarism , contains both
faculty and student resources.
Ed
New Kinds of
Cheating
Question
What's the latest innovation in cheating?
Hint
Students are using YouTube in a very clever way.
"Students Show How to Cheat via YouTube," Chronicle of Higher Education,
July 11, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3160&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Academic cheating and dishonesty have long been a
problem. But with YouTube students have discovered a new avenue for actually
promoting such fraud. Liz Losh, a rhetorician at the University of
California at Irvine, notes that there’s now a genre of videos that combine
cheating advice with a “do-it-yourself aesthetic.” She flagged one of them
Wednesday on her blog. It shows a student using a scanner and photo-editing
software to make a cheat sheet on a Coke bottle.
GroupMe ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GroupMe
Ohio State Accuses 83 of Cheating Via GroupMe ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/11/13/ohio-state-accuses-83-cheating-groupme?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=c5ce232171-DNU20171113&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-c5ce232171-197565045&mc_cid=c5ce232171&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Ohio State University
has accused 83 students in its Fischer College of Business of cheating. The
students are said to have used the messaging app GroupMe -- used for large
group chats -- to facilitate “unauthorized collaboration on graded
assignments,” according to the university statement given to
The Columbus Dispatch.
“Students are welcome to
use social media tools like GroupMe to communicate with classmates but must
remember that the rules are the same for online and in-person interactions,”
OSU spokesman Ben Johnson told the Dispatch. “Students should not
share anything online that is prohibited by the rules for the course.”
The
exact way that students collaborated, and what exactly they were sharing on
GroupMe, is not clear
Bob Jensen's threads on new kinds of cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#NewKindOfCheating
Retraction Watch (cheating in research) ---
http://retractionwatch.com
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Real-Time Automated Essay Writing?" by Geoffrey Pullum, Chronicle
of Higher Education, February 25, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/02/25/real-time-automated-essay-writing/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
When I first tried EssayTyper, for just a moment it
chilled my blood. Of course, it’s just a little joke; but I hope students
everywhere will be sophisticated enough to see that, because a person who
was unusually naive, lazy, and ignorant just might mistake it for a computer
program that will enable you to type out custom-designed essays on selected
academic topics, even topics you know nothing about, even if you can’t type.
The EssayTyper home
page presents a box saying:
Oh, no! It’s finals week and I have to finish
my American Civil War
essay immediately.
You can type in a replacement for “American Civil
War”; whatever you please: “praseodymium” or “eagles” or “Cole Porter” or
“phonetics” or “Chronicle of Higher Education” or “lingua franca”—anything
you could imagine someone being expected to write an essay on.
If then you click on the pencil icon on the right
hand side, you get what appears to be a word-processor page with a centered
header providing a fashionably absurd postmodernist title for your essay:
“The Fluidity of Praseodymium: Gender Norms & Racial Bias in the Study of
the Modern ‘Praseodymium,’” or maybe “Truly Eagles? The Modern Eagles: a
Normative Critique.”
All you have to do after that is type. Type
anything. Rattle your fingers around on the keyboard like a child
pretending to type. Have your kitten walk on the keys. Tap the space bar. It
doesn’t matter. Text will appear, bit by bit: coherent, sensible text saying
true things about your chosen subject. Not very imaginative, but undeniably
accurate and probably worthy of a B grade.
Now, we already know that the
humor-detection module in our species is not innate,
so there is a real chance of my being disappointed in
our students: There may be some who think EssayTyper is more than a joke. I
continue to hope otherwise, partly because humor sensitivity is generally
stronger in the young, and partly because I simply don’t want to live in a
world where this tool might be used to create essays that might be turned in
for me to grade.
EssayTyper is actually (to give the game away
completely) a front end to Wikipedia. When you type your subject in on the
underlined part of the initial box, it simply looks those words up using the
Wikipedia search function. If there is no Wikipedia page with that title, it
warns you that it can’t help. But if there is one, it goes to it and starts
blurting out the text of the article, chunk by chunk. The more you rattle
the keys, the more it puts on your screen.
EssayTyper is less intriguing than
Eliza,
an ingenious piece of programming that was originally
intended to demonstrate shallow-level simulation of human conversation but
ended up unexpectedly demonstrating human gullibility. EssayTyper is a cute
little piece of recreational programming fun, but underlying it is nothing
more than an automated Wikipedia copier.
So even for students who think they can get away
with turning in unmodified Wikipedia articles as term papers, EssayTyper
would be an unneeded middleman. Screen-scooping selected text directly from
Wikipedia itself would be quicker.
But as I said, when I first saw it working, for a
minute or so I was scared. It isn’t real, and it doesn’t pretend to be, but
what if it were? What if, five or 10 years from now, sophisticated
programming permits generation of highly plausible text on arbitrary
subjects that has been skillfully rearranged from its various online
sources, with random words replaced sensibly by synonyms, so that
plagiarism-detecting algorithms report nothing untoward? What if machines
can one day write convincing original term papers that have not gone through
even one human brain before being dumped to the printer?
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism and other forms of cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Controversial AI expert admits to plagiarism, blames hectic schedule ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/10/14/controversial-ai-expert-admits-to-plagiarism-blames-hectic-schedule/
"Real-Time Automated Essay Writing?" by Geoffrey Pullum, Chronicle
of Higher Education, February 25, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2014/02/25/real-time-automated-essay-writing/?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
When I first tried EssayTyper, for just a moment it
chilled my blood. Of course, it’s just a little joke; but I hope students
everywhere will be sophisticated enough to see that, because a person who
was unusually naive, lazy, and ignorant just might mistake it for a computer
program that will enable you to type out custom-designed essays on selected
academic topics, even topics you know nothing about, even if you can’t type.
The EssayTyper home
page presents a box saying:
Oh, no! It’s finals week and I have to finish
my American Civil War
essay immediately.
You can type in a replacement for “American Civil
War”; whatever you please: “praseodymium” or “eagles” or “Cole Porter” or
“phonetics” or “Chronicle of Higher Education” or “lingua franca”—anything
you could imagine someone being expected to write an essay on.
If then you click on the pencil icon on the right
hand side, you get what appears to be a word-processor page with a centered
header providing a fashionably absurd postmodernist title for your essay:
“The Fluidity of Praseodymium: Gender Norms & Racial Bias in the Study of
the Modern ‘Praseodymium,’” or maybe “Truly Eagles? The Modern Eagles: a
Normative Critique.”
All you have to do after that is type. Type
anything. Rattle your fingers around on the keyboard like a child
pretending to type. Have your kitten walk on the keys. Tap the space bar. It
doesn’t matter. Text will appear, bit by bit: coherent, sensible text saying
true things about your chosen subject. Not very imaginative, but undeniably
accurate and probably worthy of a B grade.
Now, we already know that the
humor-detection module in our species is not innate,
so there is a real chance of my being disappointed in
our students: There may be some who think EssayTyper is more than a joke. I
continue to hope otherwise, partly because humor sensitivity is generally
stronger in the young, and partly because I simply don’t want to live in a
world where this tool might be used to create essays that might be turned in
for me to grade.
EssayTyper is actually (to give the game away
completely) a front end to Wikipedia. When you type your subject in on the
underlined part of the initial box, it simply looks those words up using the
Wikipedia search function. If there is no Wikipedia page with that title, it
warns you that it can’t help. But if there is one, it goes to it and starts
blurting out the text of the article, chunk by chunk. The more you rattle
the keys, the more it puts on your screen.
EssayTyper is less intriguing than
Eliza,
an ingenious piece of programming that was originally
intended to demonstrate shallow-level simulation of human conversation but
ended up unexpectedly demonstrating human gullibility. EssayTyper is a cute
little piece of recreational programming fun, but underlying it is nothing
more than an automated Wikipedia copier.
So even for students who think they can get away
with turning in unmodified Wikipedia articles as term papers, EssayTyper
would be an unneeded middleman. Screen-scooping selected text directly from
Wikipedia itself would be quicker.
But as I said, when I first saw it working, for a
minute or so I was scared. It isn’t real, and it doesn’t pretend to be, but
what if it were? What if, five or 10 years from now, sophisticated
programming permits generation of highly plausible text on arbitrary
subjects that has been skillfully rearranged from its various online
sources, with random words replaced sensibly by synonyms, so that
plagiarism-detecting algorithms report nothing untoward? What if machines
can one day write convincing original term papers that have not gone through
even one human brain before being dumped to the printer?
"Custom Writing Service Says Students 'No Longer Have to Face the Burden
of Academic Coursework'," by Susan Jones, CNS News, January 20, 2014
---
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/custom-writing-service-says-students-no-longer-have-face-burden-academic#
A Dallas-based company that writes research papers, essays and other
classroom assignments -- so students don't have to -- says it is doing
so well that it has expanded its staff from just a few writers to more
than 100 in the past year.
The company bills itself as the one "students trust to write
professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the
highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to
face the burden of academic coursework."
It says the writing is done for an "affordable" fee; and it has foreign
writers on staff for non-American students.
In a news release announcing the "custom writing service" for students
in the United States, the company includes the following testimonial:
"I enjoyed using the service," one student is quoted as saying. "The
paper was written excellent (sic)...My professor was satisfied, and so
am I."
Other testimonials on the company's website read:
"I've sent the paper to evaluation first 'cause I wasn't sure if they
can find a writer with a relevant academic background...But yes, they
did! It seems like she read my thoughts and written the paper (sic) as
if I did it myself, lol :-)"
And this: "Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better (sic). Just noticed a
few typos, but that’s okay."
The company offers discounts of 5 percent after ten orders; and 15
percent after 20 orders.
In August, President Obama announced his plan to tie federal financial
aid to colleges and universities that do well in a yet-to-be-announced
college rating system. As
CNSNews.com reported at the time, the rating system means the
government will define what a good college is. - See more at: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/susan-jones/custom-writing-service-says-students-no-longer-have-face-burden-academic#sthash.dAvEF9OY.dpuf
A Dallas-based company that writes research papers,
essays and other classroom assignments -- so students don't have to -- says
it is doing so well that it has expanded its staff from just a few writers
to more than 100 in the past year.
The company bills itself as the one "students trust
to write professional, in-depth and plagiarism-free essays that receive the
highest grades for all levels of coursework...so they no longer have to face
the burden of academic coursework."
It says the writing is done for an "affordable"
fee; and it has foreign writers on staff for non-American students.
In a news release announcing the "custom writing
service" for students in the United States, the company includes the
following testimonial:
"I enjoyed using the service," one student is
quoted as saying. "The paper was written excellent (sic)...My professor was
satisfied, and so am I."
Other testimonials on the company's website read:
"I've sent the paper to evaluation first 'cause I
wasn't sure if they can find a writer with a relevant academic
background...But yes, they did! It seems like she read my thoughts and
written the paper (sic) as if I did it myself, lol :-)"
And this: "Cool essay. Couldn’t been done better
(sic). Just noticed a few typos, but that’s okay."
The company offers discounts of 5 percent after ten
orders; and 15 percent after 20 orders.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
One such company in Dallas is
http://ownessays.com/
I did not find writers listing knowledge of accounting, but some advertise
expertise in finance and global finance.
I don't trust the promise of "no plagiarism" although the plagiarism may be
very clever.
Apparently a large part of the business is writing customized college
admissions essays.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism and other forms of cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Honor Code ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honor_code
Are colleges placing less confidence in their honor codes?
"The Proctor Is In," by Allie Grasgreen, Inside Higher Ed,
February 25, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/25/economics-department-proctor-exams-adherence-honor-code-wanes
Only 100 or so colleges maintain honor codes, which
are thought to bolster integrity and trust among professors and students by
involving the latter in the creation and enforcement of academic standards.
When a campus culture values open and frequent discussion about when and why
cheating is socially unacceptable, the thinking goes (and some research
shows), students are less likely to flout the rules – and more likely to
report their peers who do.
Except when they aren’t. Most traditional honor
codes allow for unproctored exams, where the professor leaves the room and
students are expected to report any cheating they observe. (Some even let
students take the exam wherever they choose.) But the system is not working
out so well at Middlebury College, where faculty members in economics will
proctor their exams this spring semester.
The decision follows a not-exactly-glowing
review of the state of Middlebury’s honor code,
which found that peer reporting across the board “is largely nonexistent.”
The Middlebury Campus lamented the shift
in
an editorial, calling it “a shameful reminder of a
broken system” and questioning why no students or professors are protesting
the decision or pressing the importance of the honor code.
“The honor code is a part of the Middlebury brand.
We love to point to the honor code as a demonstration of our integrity and
the type of community we come from,” the editorial board wrote. “What, then,
does it say about our future selves if we cannot expect integrity from our
community members now?”
Shirley M. Collado, dean of the college, declined
to comment on whether cheating is particularly rampant in economics, but
said via email that, on infrequent occasions, other departments have opted
out of unproctored exams. “While some students report cases of academic
dishonesty,” Collado said, “we don't believe that students are taking action
on all cases of academic dishonesty of which they are aware.”
The economics department will work with the student
government’s Honor Code Committee to gather information and “see what
approach will work best for the broader Middlebury community and to
encourage an environment of academic integrity,” Collado said.
“Middlebury’s Honor Code is not facing a moment of
crisis, nor is it functioning with optimal effectiveness,” the review says.
(A committee conducts the review every four years.) “Student ownership and
responsibility for the Honor Code – a critical tenet of its founding – is
severely waning.”
The Middlebury Campus writers posit that
because their peers had nothing to do with the honor code’s creation, and
“almost never hear about it after first-year orientation,” it makes sense
that students are not invested in the code.
Teddi Fishman, director of Clemson University’s
International Center for Academic Integrity, said the editorial is spot on.
“This writer understands academic integrity better
than some administrators do,” she said. It’s not surprising that students
wouldn’t adhere to an honor code they had no say in, especially one that’s
rarely discussed, she said. “Just having an honor code doesn’t do anything –
it has to be part of the culture.” (Similarly, a culture of academic
integrity does not necessarily require a code.)
Fishman praised the economics department’s
willingness to recognize that the code isn’t working, but said the campus
should work to “revitalize” the honor code in the meantime, to launch
conversations and get students caring about it again.
Jensen Comment
Honor codes that require students to report when other students cheat became
policies in colleges before there was such an over abundance of lawyers and our
extreme USA culture of litigation. Now when Student A reports that Student X
cheated, Student A may get slapped with a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Even if
colleges pledge to back Student A in litigation, the hassle of litigation itself
may motivate Student A to keep his or her mouth shut.
By the way, Harvard University is a leader in many areas of academe, but
Harvard does not have an honor code. Maybe administrators are tuned into the
Harvard Law School. Recall that Harvard somewhat recently expelled neary 70
students for cheating in a political science course where they were assured of
receiving an A grade no matter what the quality of the work. Apparently when an
A grade is assured, some students don't want to do any work.
"Harvard considers instituting honor code," Boston Globe, April
7, 2013 ---
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/04/06/harvard-considers-adopting-honor-code-for-first-time/IE6AXsmybsdgToNcPDuywN/story.html
Stanford University has an honor code, at least it did when I was a student
on the "Farm"|
"Stanford finds cheating — especially among computer science students — on
the rise," by Lisa M. Krieger, San Jose Mercury News, February 7,
2010 ---
http://www.mercurynews.com/bay-area-news/ci_14351156?nclick_check=1
Online Courses Create Added Honor Code Problems
"Far From Honorable," by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed,
October 25, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/10/25/online-students-might-feel-less-accountable-honor-codes
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism and other forms of cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
New tools to prevent high tech cheating
http://online.qmags.com/TJL0813?sessionID=4CB36C8DBEEC3C846A1D7E17F&cid=2399838&eid=18342#pg1&mode1
See the article beginning on Page 213
"Apparently Mathew Martoma Was Expelled From Harvard Law For Falsifying
Documentd," by Nate Raymond, Joseph Ax, and Emily Flitter, Reuters
via Business Insider, January 9, 2014 ---
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/09/us-sac-martoma-harvard-idUSBREA081C720140109#ixzz2pzwsZOPX
"First Trial of Crowdsourced Grading for Computer Science Homework: The
latest online crowdsourcing tool allows students to grade their classmates’
homework and receive credit for the effort they put in ," MIT's
Technology Review, September 4, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519001/first-trial-of-crowdsourced-grading-for-computer-science-homework/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130904
The new tool is called CrowdGrader and it is available at
http://www.crowdgrader.org/.
Jensen Comment
I remember that in K-12 school students traded papers and checked answers. Now
we're coming full circle in distance education in the 21st Century. But there's
a huge difference between grading answers for work done in a classroom versus
work done remotely by distance education students. For example, an algebra or
calculus problem solved in class has controls on cheating when each student is
observed by other students and a teacher. Remotely, what is to prevent a student
from having Wolfram Alpha solve an algebra or calculus problem? ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
When distance education small in size (say less than 30 students) there are
alternatives for cheating controls on examinations ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
But when a MOOC or SMOC has over 10,000 students I have difficulty imagining
how cheating can be controlled unless students are required to take examinations
under observation of a trusted person like the village vicar or a K-12 teacher
who is being paid to observe a student taking a MOOC or SMOC examination. Having
many such vicars or teachers attest to the integrity of the examination is both
expensive and not aperfect solution. But it sounds much better to me than having
remote students grading each other without being able to observe the examination
process.
The CrowdGrader software sounds like a great idea when students are willing
to help each other. I don't buy into this tool for assigning transcript grades.
Bob Jensen's threads on OKIs, MOOCs, and SMOCs are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
"Dissertation for Sale: A Cautionary Tale," by Manuel R. Torres,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 24, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Dissertation-for-Sale-A/132401/
Book Review of The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College
Kids Cheat by Dave Tomar (Bloomsbury, 251 pages, $25)
"A Man for All Semesters: An exposé reveals how the Internet has turned
collegiate cheating into big business," by Charles Dameron, The Wall
Street Journal, September 20, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443816804578004570701056956.html?mod=djemEditorialPage_t&mg=reno64-wsj
'If you knew how I work!" Balzac wrote to a friend
in 1832 as he finished up another volume of what would become the "Comédie
humaine." "I am a galley slave to pen and ink, a true dealer in ideas." Dave
Tomar is no stranger to the feeling of tortured subjugation to the written
word, though whether one could justly call him a "dealer in ideas" is
another matter—"counterfeiter" is more like it.
In "The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping
College Kids Cheat," Mr. Tomar, a 32-year-old Rutgers graduate, describes
how, for the better part of a decade, he labored as a writer-for-hire
catering to incompetent and lazy students. It didn't matter if the task at
hand was a reflection on Nietzsche, a piece on Piaget's theory of genetic
epistemology, or a 150-page paper on public-sector investment in China and
India. Mr. Tomar, with not a small amount of help from Wikipedia, was a man
for all semesters.
The most amusing and disturbing tidbits of "The
Shadow Scholar" are excerpted communiqués from Mr. Tomar's clients that show
just how badly these arrested young minds required his assistance. "Let me
know what will the paper going to be about," one college student instructs
Mr. Tomar. "Also dont write about, abortion, euthanasia, clothing or death
penalty, yhose were not allowed by my teacher."
Mr. Tomar worked for only a few cents a word, but
he kept busy enough to earn $66,000 in 2010. (Not bad, especially
considering that the average pay for a non-tenure-track lecturer at Harvard
last year—an institution with its own student-plagiarism scandal at the
moment—was just under $57,000.) He was a freelancer for several of the
"hundreds and possibly thousands" of online paper mills in the United
States, services with names like rushessay.com and college-paper.org that
produce custom essays for their student clients. Lest you think that this
sleazy racket is a fringe, underground phenomenon, Mr. Tomar is here to
declare otherwise: "It's mainstream. It's popular culture. It's taxable
income. It's googleable."
"The Shadow Scholar" is a follow-up to a 2010 essay
of the same name that Mr. Tomar wrote, under the pseudonym Ed Dante, for the
Chronicle of Higher Education. The original essay was concise, hard-hitting
and topical, revealing the dirty details of a business that educators try
studiously to ignore. By contrast, Mr. Tomar's book is frequently
self-indulgent and meandering, as much a memoir of the author's post-college
search for purpose as a whistleblowing manifesto. Clichés and mixed
metaphors abound: "I'm tumbling into a well of bad memories the way that a
motorcycle backfiring in the distance might take a guy back to 'Nam," he
tells us in an eight-page account of a phone call to the Rutgers Parking and
Transportation Department.
For those willing to wade through it, however, "The
Shadow Scholar" is a fascinating exposé of the remarkably robust industry of
academic ghostwriting. Assuming that Mr. Tomar's story is at least roughly
faithful to the truth, his testimony amounts to a harrowing indictment of
the modern American university's current shortcomings as a meritocratic,
credentializing institution, much less a home for mental and moral growth.
Mr. Tomar didn't just aid and abet casual cheating.
Rather, he claims, he was engaged in a process of systemic intellectual
fraud that students took advantage of all the way up the academic ziggurat:
fabricating "personal statements" for unqualified college applicants;
crafting term papers for undergraduates and "cockpit parents" who diligently
directed their children's plagiarism; sweating over doctoral dissertations
with only one page of instructions to go on; even, in one extraordinary
case, doing the writing for an entire Ph.D. program in cognitive and
behavioral psychology on someone else's behalf.
Mr. Tomar's dispatches from the dark side certainly
do nothing to dispel the impression that, even as tuition hikes at many
colleges outpace inflation, American colleges and universities may be
delivering a product of declining value. Former Emory University president
William Chace, in a recent essay on the normalization of cheating in the
academy, wrote of a "suspicion that students are studying less, reading
less, and learning less all the time." The numbers back this up. Economists
Philip Babcock and Mindy Marks reported in 2010 that the number of hours
that full-time college students spent on their studies dropped by a third
between 1961 and 2003, to 27 hours per week from 40.
Having largely abandoned the mission of molding
student character, many American universities and colleges today find
themselves challenged to uphold the most minimal standards of technical
training and assessment. Sociologists Josipa Roksa and Richard Arum, in
their 2011 book "Academically Adrift," found that, of a nationally
representative sample of thousands of college students, over a third
demonstrated "no significant progress on tests of critical thinking, complex
reasoning and writing" after four years in college. Unable or unwilling to
do the work, many students find it far easier to hand it off to a
subcontractor.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Dave Tomar is now a student in the Yale Law school. He hopes that his extensive
experience in cheating will make him a successful lawyer.
Of Course a Professor Who Does Not Check for Plagiarism Would Not Detect
Horrific Plagiariasm
The other day, a student came into the writing center with an essay that she had
"written" for her final project. I was a page into it when I understood that it
had been horrendously plagiarized, and that I was being used as a preliminary
screening service to see if the blatant theft would pass her professor's eye
unnoticed. Of course, I knew it would. The professor wasn't particularly
perceptive about such things ...
"Successful Plagiarism 101," by Brooks Winchell, Chronicle of
Higher Education, April 11, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Successful-Plagiarism-101/138413/
The other day, a student came into the writing
center with an essay that she had "written" for her final project. I was a
page into it when I understood that it had been horrendously plagiarized,
and that I was being used as a preliminary screening service to see if the
blatant theft would pass her professor's eye unnoticed.
Of course, I knew it would. The professor wasn't
particularly perceptive about such things, and, frankly, almost every
research paper that I had seen for his course had been plagiarized to one
degree or another. He taught in the business school and knew a great deal
about managing people and businesses but practically nothing about writing
or the proper use of sources.
Perhaps he didn't really care. He once asked me to
"look over" a manuscript and "check it for grammar." When I found serious
structural and content inconsistencies, I felt obligated to inform him. But
he self-published the manuscript anyway in its original, unadulterated
format.
Still, the professor's student was in front of me
with her beautifully articulated copy-and-pasted essay that had undoubtedly
originated from some poor doctoral student's dissertation and contained
words like "adjudicated" and "prevaricates." I had been tutoring her for
weeks at the writing center. I would have loved to believe that the essay
was her own work, and that she had made astonishing progress in her writing,
due mostly to my own impeccable instruction. However, I had to admit that
the leap was, in fact, impossible given the condition of her previous week's
work—a narrative essay that had been filled with confused articles, mixed
prepositions, sentence fragments, and nonparallel structures, among other
problems.
So I had a dilemma. As an educator, I knew there
was no earthly way this student could produce a genuine five-page research
essay (by tomorrow) with her current skill set. But as a fellow human, I
also felt sorry that she had been passed along and never adequately prepared
for college-level writing, never shown how to read, how to summarize, or how
to select quotes.
What was my responsibility here as her tutor?
Clearly, the only reasonable thing to do was to give her a lesson on
plagiarism and sternly explain how she might be a better plagiarist in the
future.
To start with, I told her, her theme seemed curious
to me because it dealt with the inner workings of "lean manufacturing" as it
applied to the mass production of bioelectronics. I warned her that the
complexity of her topic choice might raise an astute professor's brow. More
than one student plagiarist has been apprehended trying to pass off as his
own work a Marxist reading of Willy Loman, or a metrical analysis of Yeats's
"Among School Children," when the student should have been describing Loman
as a pathetic loser or comparing Yeats to a jelly doughnut.
Worse, she had plagiarized a source that was well
beyond her syntactical command. It was obvious from word choice and sentence
construction that the essay had been written by someone with a profound
understanding of the Efficiency Movement of the early 20th century. A
professor attuned to plagiarism, I told her, would immediately pick up on
obscure words and phrases as signs of plagiarism, and would retrieve the
evidence from the Web.
A properly plagiarized essay, however, would
contain no obscure Latinate terminology. Every word would be three syllables
or less. The sentences would be basic, with maybe a few of the compound
variety, but no complex ones under any circumstances, and absolutely no
idioms. Not only did her use of obscure language make the offense more
glaring, but it also made reworking the paper a near impossibility as no
contemporary thesaurus would be helpful in suggesting alternate wording for
technical phrases.
The student agreed and promised to avoid any
syntactically complicated sources in future plagiarisms. However, that was
only the tip of her problem, as I went on to inform her, because even if she
had chosen a source with a somewhat basic paragraph and sentence structure,
she would still need to rearrange the lexicon to make it mirror her own
vernacular so that the professor wouldn't be alarmed by the disparity
between her speech and her writing style.
For that reason, certain portions of the essay
needed to be altered regardless of their grammatical correctness. In fact, I
advised her, a grammatical inconsistency would go a long way toward boosting
her credibility as an "original author" and dispel any hints of plagiarism.
I suggested that she misspell every few words or remove an occasional
article, out of principle.
In addition, the quotations must not be seamlessly
integrated into the research. To give the essay more authenticity, I
suggested she remove the introduction to every third quote, and neglect
explanations altogether so that the quotes would stand out like little
quarantined strangers in her essay. Better yet, she could replace every
fifth quote with a line from Disney's Fantasia, or at the very
least, with a text message so as to create the impression of authorial
distraction or perhaps technological interlude. Maybe she could insert a "2"
for "too," a "B" for "be," or an emoticon or an LOL in place of a genuine
emotional response.
Still, no matter how she reworded it, an entirely
plagiarized essay would always appear as a unified whole and, thus, raise
suspicion in an alert professor due to its very consistency. The professor
would ask: "Where are the essay's digressions? Where are its disconnected
paragraphs?"
And so I told her that to be truly thorough in her
plagiarism, she actually needed to copy from a variety of sources so that
the inconsistency in voice would appear genuine to the academic reader. In
addition, since structuring such a sophisticated act of plagiarism would be
a near impossibility for the student, the inevitable mixed bag that resulted
would undoubtedly replicate with accuracy a struggling student's writing.
Continued in article
"Plagiarism, Profanity, Fraud, and Design,"
by Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/crosstalk-plagiarism-profanity-fraud-and-design/34119?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Creative Computers Replacing Writers and Composers
And the frightening thing about this is that what might be "cheating"
becomes possible with zero chance of being caught for plagiarism of things
stories and songs written by Hal.
"30 Clients Using Computer-Generated Stories Instead of Writers," by Jason
Boog, Media Bistro, February 17, 2012 ---
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/forbes-among-30-clients-using-computer-generated-stories-instead-of-writers_b47243
Forbes has joined
a group of 30 clients using Narrative Science
software to write computer-generated stories.
Here’s more about the program,
used in
one corner of Forbes‘ website: “Narrative
Science has developed a technology solution that creates rich narrative
content from data. Narratives are seamlessly created from structured data
sources and can be fully customized to fit a customer’s voice, style and
tone. Stories are created in multiple formats, including long form stories,
headlines, Tweets and industry reports with graphical visualizations.”
The New York Times revealed last year that
trade publisher
Hanley Wood and sports journalism site
The Big Ten Network also use the tool. In all, 30
clients use the software–but Narrative Science did not disclose the complete
client list.
What do you think?
The
Narrative Science technology could potentially
impact many corners of the writing trade. The company has a long list of
stories they can computerize: sports stories, financial reports, real estate
analyses, local community content, polling & elections, advertising campaign
summaries sales & operations reports and market research.
Here’s an excerpt from
a Forbes earnings preview story about Barnes & Noble, written
by the computer program:
While company shares have dropped 17.2% over
the last three months to close at $13.72 on February 15, 2012,
Barnes & Noble (BKS)
is hoping it can break the slide with solid third quarter results when
it releases its earnings on Tuesday, February 21, 2012.
What to Expect: The Wall Street consensus is
$1.01 per share, up 1% from a year ago when Barnes & Noble reported
earnings of $1 per share.
The consensus estimate is down from three
months ago when it was $1.42, but is unchanged over the past month.
Analysts are projecting a loss of $1.09 per share for the fiscal year.
The company originated with two electrical
engineering and computer science professors at Northwestern University.
Here’s more about the company:
“[It began with] a software program that automatically generates sports
stories using commonly available information such as box scores and
play-by-plays. The program was the result of a collaboration between
McCormick and Medill School of Journalism.
To create the software, Hammond
and Birnbaum and students working in McCormick’s
Intelligent
Information Lab created algorithms that use
statistics from a game to write text that captures the overall dynamic of
the game and highlights the key plays and players. Along with the text is an
appropriate headline and a photo of what the program deems as the most
important player in the game.”
Many of you probably never even heard of the popular "I've Got a Secret" ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I%27ve_Got_a_Secret
More of you have probably read about artificial intelligence expert Ray Kurzweil
(an expert on computer music composition)
---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, 17 Years Old, Appears on “I’ve Got a Secret” (1965) ---
Click Here
http://www.openculture.com/2012/02/futurist_ray_kurzweil_17_years_old_appears_on_ive_got_a_secret_1965.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+OpenCulture+%28Open+Culture%29
"Plagiarism, Profanity, Fraud, and Design,"
by Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/crosstalk-plagiarism-profanity-fraud-and-design/34119?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Plagiarism: A study of 24 million college papers by
Turnitin, which makes plagiarism-detection software, finds that
college students are
most likely to lift copy from Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and
Slideshare. The study counted all
suspiciously similar language and did not consider whether students
cited the sources they lifted from. Via the Scholarly Kitchen, where
Phil Davis
noted some of the study’s limitations.
Profanity: A Web site
promoting Oberlin College co-created by its social media
coordinator,
Why the F*** Should I Choose Oberlin?,
drew varied reactions and plenty of attention
last week. The site, which notes it is not officially affiliated
with Oberlin, collects profanity-laced quotes about why Oberlin is
great. Georgy Cohen
interviews the co-creator, Ma’ayan
Plaut, who says she has “tacit and unofficial approval” from her
boss. On Higher Ed Marketing, Andrew Careaga says his inner
15-year-old thought the site is brilliant, but his 51-year-old
“shook his jaded head.”
Fraud:
Educause offers advice on how colleges can
respond to a Dear Colleague letter from
the U.S. Department of Education that asks colleges to limit
student-aid fraud in online programs.
Design: Keith Hampson argues that good
design will play an increasingly important role
in the college student experience as college
move online. “Somehow, though, digital higher education—both its
software and content—has managed to remain untouched by good design.
Design is not even on the agenda,” he says.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education
controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"The Sources of Plagiarism," Inside Higher Ed, April 29, 2011
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/29/qt#258386
A new study by Turnitin, the plagiarism detection
service, has found that term paper mills account only for a small minority
(15 percent) of the apparent sources of the copying. One-third of such
material comes from social networks and another one-fourth from "legitimate"
educational sources.
"Plagiarism Goes Social," by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher
Education, April 28, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/plagiarism-appears-to-be-going-social/31142?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
The Web is going social. And now it seems that plagiarism might be
heading that way, too.
A new
study found that social and user-generated Web sites are the most
popular sources for student copying. Academic sites come in second, while
paper mills and cheat sites are third.
A report on the findings was released today by iParadigms, creator of
Turnitin, a popular plagiarism-detection service that takes uploaded student
papers and checks them against various databases to pinpoint unoriginal
content. For its study, the company analyzed 40 million papers submitted by
high school and college students over a 10-month period.
“It shows that plagiarism in sourcing work is going the way that
everything else in the world is going,” says Chris Harrick, vice president
of marketing at Turnitin. “People are relying more on their peers than on
experts.”
But the findings come with a big caveat: Turnitin detects “matched
content,” not necessarily plagiarism. In other words, the software will flag
material from a paper mill, but it will also flag legitimate stuff that is
properly cited and attributed. The company leaves it up to individual
professors to determine plagiarism. So there’s no way to know exactly how
much of the copying highlighted in this study, outside of the material that
matches content from shady sites, is actually cheating.
Continued in article
It' Snot Nice to Cheat
"Illinois Candidate Caught Cheating on the CPA Exam," by Adrienne
Gonzalez, Going Concern, June 28, 2011 ---
http://goingconcern.com/2011/06/illinois-cpa-exam-candidate-caught-cheating-on-the-cpa-exam/
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"High-Tech Cheating Abounds, and Professors Bear Some Blame," by
Jeffrey Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/High-Tech-Cheating-on-Homew/64857/
Cheated in Online Tests?
"Medical Students, Accused of Cheating, Face Possible Expulsion,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/medical-students-accused-of-cheating-face-possible-expulsion/31516
The State
University of New York Upstate
Medical University is investigating
allegations that some fourth-year
students cheated in a
medical-literature course, reports
The
Post-Standard, in Syracuse. The
students, who are scheduled to
graduate in May, could be expelled,
or face lesser punishment, if the
charges are true, said the dean,
Steven Scheinman. One student told
school officials that some students
in the course had collaborated in
taking online tests, which is not
permitted.
"Academic Cheating in the Age of Google: In high school and college,
cheating is an epidemic. To contain it, the author proposes a few simple rules,
including an end to the take-home test," by
Michael Hartnett. Business Week, January 13, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jan2011/bs2011015_632563.htm?link_position=link3
The students are in their seats, and the test has
begun.
And so has the cheating.
BlackBerrys and iPhones need just a couple of taps
of the keypad to offer the right answers. It doesn't matter whether the
subject is math, social studies, science, English, or a foreign language.
Information is available at your fingertips, just as advertised.
Indeed, we have to face a simple fact about
students today: As technology has evolved to provide a vast wealth of
information at any time, anywhere, cheating has never been easier.
In the good old days, cheating was a simple affair
and as a result not too difficult to track down, like the time a girl with
limited English skills in one of my high school English classes handed in a
terrifically written, sophisticated short story. She copied, word for word,
Shirley Jackson's story "Charles," except for changing the title character's
name. I guess she thought I wouldn't have a chance hunting down the story
once she cleverly renamed her story "Bob." Alas, catching a cheater is not
so easy any more.
Smartphone Photos
A few years ago, students would write the answers
on the inside labels of water bottles they brought into tests. Today we have
students photographing the tests from their phones in an earlier period of
the day, so that students in subsequent periods could know the questions
before they walk into the classroom.
Now catching the cheaters requires a level of
vigilance and research better suited for the corridors of the National
Security Agency than the cluttered desk of a humble teacher.
Today, students wouldn't have to rely merely on
CliffNotes to provide them with handy, if highly unoriginal, commentaries on
Hamlet. They have other choices, including study guides from SparkNotes,
PinkMonkey, ClassicNotes, and BookRags, as well as a seemingly endless
supply of articles online from both paid and unpaid sources. Just Google
"Hamlet Essay," and you'll receive a listing of 1,460,000 results, the first
page of which is teeming with free essays.
Sure, you can track down some of the cheaters by
typing in an excerpt of their essays on the very same Google search engine
to discover the source. And such websites as Turnitin.com, which checks
student papers against a massive archive of published and unpublished work
for signs of plagiarism, can also be useful. But the available materials are
so vast, and the opportunities for students to create hybrid papers so easy,
that students are now one step ahead, especially since underground networks
of materials are constantly cropping up, concealed from the peering eyes of
teachers.
Fonts of Duplicity
Of course, even in this technological age, some
students are so lazy they won't even bother to match the font and the type
size for one section of an assignment to another, as they indiscriminately
cut and paste material from assorted websites. A Spanish teacher I know once
told me of a student who handed in an essay she clearly plagiarized from a
website. Unfortunately, the girl could not explain why her essay was written
in the Catalan language as opposed to Spanish.
Yet, we can't count on incompetence. Many students
are so wily and crafty that they've learned to mask their cheating to
impressive levels. Some can find answers on handheld devices while looking
you straight in the eye or appearing to be in deep, philosophical
contemplation; others plagiarize from a dizzying array of sources and cover
their trail with vigilance worthy of a CIA operative.
Continued in article
54% of Accounting Students Admit to Cheating
SmartPros, August 31, 2007 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x58970.xml
MBAs most likely (among graduate students) to cheat and make their own
rules ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#MBAs
Jensen Comment
I became discouraged with take home exam when one of my students paid to
outsource taking of the examination to an agent. If the agent had not
plagiarized it would've been impossible to catch his boss (the enrolled
student). Most of my take home examinations, however, were only a small portion
of the grade and the heavily-weighted final examination was not a take-home
examination. I think all courses, including online courses, should have a
monitored final examination. There are ways of dealing with this in distance
education courses ---
Bob Jensen's thread on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Ideas for Teaching Online ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Ideas
Also see the helpers for teaching in general at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm
"To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery," by Trip Gabriel,
The New York Times, July 5, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/education/06cheat.html?hp
Thank you David Albrecht for the heads up.
The frontier in the battle to defeat student
cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central
Florida.
No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could
disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice
outside.
The 228 computers that students use are recessed
into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say,
a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test
later — is easy to spot.
Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with
the date and must be turned in later.
When a proctor sees something suspicious, he
records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead
camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for
evidence.
Taylor Ellis, the associate dean who runs the
testing center within the business school at Central Florida, the nation’s
third-largest campus by enrollment, said that cheating had dropped
significantly, to 14 suspected incidents out of 64,000 exams administered
during the spring semester.
“I will never stop it completely, but I’ll find out
about it,” Mr. Ellis said.
As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has
gone high-tech — not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the
Internet and sharing of homework online like music files — educators have
responded with their own efforts to crack down.
This summer, as incoming freshmen fill out forms to
select roommates and courses, some colleges — Duke and Bowdoin among them —
are also requiring them to complete online tutorials about plagiarism before
they can enroll.
Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to
submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five
percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to
the Campus Computing Survey.
The best-known service, Turnitin.com, is engaged in
an endless cat-and-mouse game with technologically savvy students who try to
outsmart it. “The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis,” the
company warned last month in a blog post titled “Can Students ‘Trick’
Turnitin?”
The extent of student cheating, difficult to
measure precisely, appears widespread at colleges. In surveys of 14,000
undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted
to cheating on assignments and exams.
The figure declined somewhat from 65 percent
earlier in the decade, but the researcher who conducted the surveys, Donald
L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers, doubts there is less of it.
Instead, he suspects students no longer regard certain acts as cheating at
all, for instance, cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the
Internet.
Andrew Daines, who graduated in May from Cornell,
where he served on a board in the College of Arts and Sciences that hears
cheating cases, said Internet plagiarism was so common that professors told
him they had replaced written assignments with tests and in-class writing.
Mr. Daines, a philosophy major, contributed to
pages that Cornell added last month to its student Web site to bring
attention to academic integrity. They include a link to a voluntary tutorial
on avoiding plagiarism and a strongly worded admonition that “other
generations may not have had as many temptations to cheat or plagiarize as
yours,” and urging students to view this as a character test.
Mr. Daines said he was especially disturbed by an
epidemic of students’ copying homework. “The term ‘collaborative work’ has
been taken to this unbelievable extreme where it means, because of the ease
of e-mailing, one person looking at someone else who’s done the assignment,”
he said.
At M.I.T., David E. Pritchard, a physics professor,
was able to accurately measure homework copying with software he had
developed for another purpose — to allow students to complete sets of
physics problems online. Some answered the questions so fast, “at first I
thought we had some geniuses here at M.I.T.,” Dr. Pritchard said. Then he
realized they were completing problems in less time than it took to read
them and were copying the answers — mostly, it turned out, from e-mail from
friends who had already done the assignment.
About 20 percent copied one-third or more of their
homework, according to a study Dr. Pritchard and colleagues published this
year. Students who copy homework find answers at sites like Course Hero,
which is a kind of Napster of homework sharing, where students from more
than 3,500 institutions upload papers, class notes and past exams.
Another site, Cramster, specializes in solutions to
textbook questions in science and engineering. It boasts answers from 77
physics textbooks — but not Dr. Pritchard’s popular “Mastering Physics,” an
online tutorial, because his publisher, Pearson, searches the Web for
solutions and requests they be taken down to protect its copyright.
“You can use technology as well for detecting as
for committing” cheating, Dr. Pritchard said.
The most popular anti-cheating technology,
Turnitin.com, says it is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges.
Students submit written assignments to be compared with billions of archived
Web pages and millions of other student papers, before they are sent to
instructors. The company says that schools using the service for several
years experience a decline in plagiarism.
Cheaters trying to outfox Turnitin have tried many
tricks, some described in blogs and videos. One is to replace every “e” in
plagiarized text with a foreign letter that looks like it, such as a
Cyrillic “e,” meant to fool Turnitin’s scanners. Another is to use the
Macros tool in Microsoft Word to hide copied text. Turnitin says neither
scheme works.
Some educators have rejected the service and other
anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are
guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.
Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded
several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor
code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn
Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com
give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”
For similar reasons, some students at the
University of Central Florida objected to the business school’s testing
center with its eye-in-the-sky video in its early days, Dr. Ellis said.
But recently during final exams after a summer
semester, almost no students voiced such concerns. Rose Calixte, a senior,
was told during an exam to turn her cap backward, a rule meant to prevent
students from writing notes under the brim. Ms. Calixte disapproved of the
fashion statement but didn’t knock the reason: “This is college. There is
the possibility for people to cheat.”
A first-year M.B.A. student, Ashley Haumann, said
that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, “everyone
cheated” in her accounting class of 300 by comparing answers during quizzes.
She preferred the highly monitored testing center because it “encourages you
to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?’ ”
For educators uncomfortable in the role of
anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an
elegantly simple technological fix.
That was the finding of a study published by the
National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed
selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize
two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that
plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)
The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas
S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.
“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of
adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of
guilt,” Dr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating
students rather than by frightening them.”
Only a handful of colleges currently require
students to complete such a tutorial, which typically illustrates how to
cite a source or even someone else’s ideas, followed by a quiz.
The tutorial that Bowdoin uses was developed with
its neighbor colleges Bates and Colby several years ago. Part of the reason
it is required for enrollment, said Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology
professor whose specialty is cognitive development, is that Internet-age
students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online
without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.
As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its
most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones
or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on
his arm. He had blended them into his body art.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
The Dog Swallowed My Homework and Pooped Out the Answers
On November 26, 2009 I was spammed by a so-called Mike
Watson providing a link to a site where students can supposedly submit their
assignments for “help” from experts ---
http://www.pupilhelp.com/
The site also offers live chats with a paying student
regarding a homework assignment.
Pupilhelp
was born in the month of July 2006. Pupilhelp was started with a vision to help
students with their assignments and homework at an affordable price. More than
ten thousand students have benefited from the services of pupilhelp. The service
at pupilhelp is available for students all over the world. We at pupilhelp
believe in having the best among the best in the tutor team. Tutors are
recruited after a laborious process which tests their skills, knowledge on the
subject and willingness to work anytime, anywhere. Every tutor in pupilhelp
holds a master's degree or a doctorate degree in their respective subject. The
feed backs from our students have always been motivating and inspiring. We would
like to continue providing quality work at an affordable price which has always
been our unique feature. We would like to extend our thanks to students who have
supported us and we request you to continue your support. We hope that many more
students across the globe will use our service.
Pupilhelp
provides e-mail based Homework/Assignment Help to students from grade 12 to
Ph.D. level. Our primary objective is to help you in improving your grades and
to achieve academic excellence. With our help you can quickly and easily get
your assignment done by one of over 300 experts. Our service is focused on, time
delivery, superior quality, creativity, and originality for every service we
provide.
The discipline categories include “Accounting.”
My hunch is that the so-called assignment “counselors” are
probably sitting on top of hundreds of solutions manuals for major and even
minor textbooks. Text phrases from end-of-chapter assignments are probably
linked to answers in solutions manuals.
In any case, it is advised that instructors do not rely
heavily on end-of-chapter assignments for grading purposes. Perhaps students can
learn a great deal from counselors at this site, but for me the site does not
pass the smell test even though it claims to have a supposed "no plagiarism"
policy. I wonder how closely the recommended solutions follow the copyrighted
solutions in textbook manuals supposedly available only to course instructors.
Of course many of these solutions manuals are for sale at used book sites and
even on eBay and Craigslist.
November 27, 2009 message from David Albrecht
[albrecht@PROFALBRECHT.COM]
I received 52 e-mails from him on Thursday. That it
took 52 to deliver the message made me think it was a bogus site.
I think most HW real person solutions differ from
the solutions manual only in terms of layout, as there's only one way the
answer can be.
I can't ever remember a publishers SM that provided
explanation that would benefit students. Presumably instructors don't need
the explanation, so it isn't provided. I recall the last time I taught
Advanced Accounting, and used a certain textbook with its HW problems. I had
to seek help to get some of those solutions explained to me. If
pupilhelp.com provides explanations, then it might be a service worth paying
for.
Given the publisher sites nowhave algorithmic HW,
I'm confident that pupilhelp.com has seen a decline in business. Of course,
with the economy it undoubtedly has a decline in revenues just like everyone
else. That could explain the spam-like broadcast advertising.
Jensen Comment
I think David is correct. I would warn students not to send credit card numbers
to this outfit.
How should teaching change when assuming some students in class, but not
all students, have access to prior semester course notes?
One way teachers should adjust their teaching is to be aware that student
notes from prior terms are selectively available to current students in a class.
To some extent this has always been true for students in fraternities and
sororities that kept files on course notes and examinations. But now this is
increasingly a problem for teachers trying to keep courses fair for all enrolled
students whether or not they have access to notes and examinations from prior
terms of a course.
This is now an increasing problem since students may be able to buy course
notes, textbook solutions manuals, and publisher test banks online. For exampel,
course notes may now be purchased from
https://studysoup.com/
I find zero results thus far for smaller colleges and universities, but
the mega universities are covered such as the University of Texas, but to date
UT only has 30 courses with notes for sale. Hence, this site is not yet such a
big deal, but it could grow quickly.
At the moment free files for selected students on a particular campus are more
of a problem such as fraternity files. Think of how this can affect student
performance grading. Many instructors use the Socratic Method in a way where
classroom performances of students can affect grades. If the instructor pretty
much teaches the Socratic Method course the same way each semester students
having access to course notes from prior semesters can take competitive
advantage over students in the class who did not see course notes of prior
semester.
This is especially problematic when teaching cases like Harvard Business School
cases. Harvard's instructors pretty much limit the use of a case to one semester
or take great pains to disguise cases used in prior semesters.
In addition, instructors should probably assume that some students in a class
have purchased and possibly shared textbook end-of-chapter solutions manuals and
test banks that are now frequently available from eBay and other online vendors.
Teaching a course each semester on automatic pilot with the same course content
can be a disaster in terms of fairness to all students in a class.
Question
If you are using some commercial test bank for examinations in your course, can
students down load them here?
http://www.e-junkie.com/
At a minimum, perhaps you should conduct a search in the same manner as
Professor Krause?
Note that when I enter "Spiceland" at
http://www.e-junkie.com/
there are zero hits.
Instructors must be more creative in their searches.
February 16, 2010 message from Paul Krause
[Paul@PAULKRAUSE.COM]
In a recent
discussion someone mentioned they use questions from an author's test bank.
A student has told me of the very readily available answer manuals and test
banks, and walked me through a real transaction. The example he used was
Spiceland's Financial Accounting text. Both manuals were available for
purchase, and payment was quite easy through PayPal.
Maybe I'm
naive, but I was not aware of the ease of obtaining this material.
The site is
http://www.e-junkie.com/shop/product/335909.php which
I got to by typing into a Google search "Financial Accounting Spiceland
answer manual". The test bank procedure was essentially the same, I typed in
"financial accounting spiceland test bank" and got
http://www.e-junkie.com/shop/product/337857.php
The answer
manual was an exact copy of what instructors can download or get on a CD.
I tried
"Financial accounting horngren" and got a reply "either the listing or the
payment method has been removed"
For a listing of all products at this site and to see
if your text is available there, try
http://www.e-junkie.com/shop/ I'm sure there are
other sites also, I didn't bother to go any deeper.
So what? We
must assume that all answers and all test questions are available to any
computer literate accounting major (that is all accounting majors). If we
feel test banks are a good study guide for students, if they review all
questions in a test bank, then I suppose it is OK. However, if we want to
maintain integrity of tests, forget about using test banks.
Paul Krause
Chico, CA, USA
Paul@PaulKrause.com
February 17, 2010 reply from Glen Gray [glen.gray@CSUN.EDU]
Here is the flip side—I periodically teach the
capstone course for the management department. The book I use was published
by Houghton Mifflin. Sometime in the recent past, Cengage acquired Houghton
Mifflin. When I asked Cegage for the test bank (which is an instructor
resource listed in the book), first I was told there wasn’t one. Then I was
told, if there was one, it must have “fell into a crack” during the
acquisition. I told my students that if I couldn’t get the test bank I would
have to make up my own exam from scratch. That put fear into my students, so
several of them said they could get a copy of the test bank for me!
Ultimately, after much complaining by me, Cengage looked into the crack and
found the CD, so I didn’t have to rely on my students to provide the test
bank.
Glen L. Gray, PhD, CPA Dept. of Accounting &
Information Systems College of Business & Economics California State
University, Northridge 18111 Nordhoff ST Northridge, CA 91330-8372
818.677.3948
http://www.csun.edu/~vcact00f
February 17, 2010 reply from Paul Krause
[Paul@PAULKRAUSE.COM]
I just went out there to check the links, and lo
and behold the prices have increased dramatically for Spiceland. My student
paid $15 at PayPal for an instant download.
I see the prices now are $29 for the Solutions
Manual and $41 for the Test Bank. The market works! Wait until mid-terms
come around to see how much the Test Bank goes for then.
Paul
February 17, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Paul,
Lest we make an assumption that the buyers are all students, I think that
your posting on the AECM inspired a boat load of instructors to order the
Spiceland test bank, e.g., the instructors who adopted Kieso might want to
confuse their students who all bought the Kieso test bank for courses
requiring the Kieso textbook.
In other words, we can attribute much of the increase in test bank demand
to you Paul.
Bob Jensen
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
Darn! It’s hard for us accounting professors to pad our resumes.
I could not find a single essay to purchase on accounting for derivative
financial instruments or variable interest entities.
"Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply," by Thomas Bartlett,
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Cheating-Goes-Global-as-Essay/32817/
The orders keep piling up. A philosophy
student needs a paper on Martin Heidegger. A nursing student needs a paper
on dying with dignity. An engineering student needs a paper on electric
cars.
Screen after screen, assignment after
assignment—hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come
from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community
colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others
request an entire dissertation.
This is what an essay mill looks like from
the inside. Over the past six months, with the help of current and former
essay-mill writers, The Chronicle looked closely at one company,
tracking its orders, examining its records, contacting its customers. The
company, known as Essay Writers, sells so-called custom essays, meaning that
its employees will write a paper to a student's specifications for a
per-page fee. These papers, unlike those plucked from online databases, are
invisible to plagiarism-detection software.
Everyone knows essay mills exist. What's
surprising is how sophisticated and international they've become, not to
mention profitable.
In a previous era, you might have found an
essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you'll
find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in
Manila or Mumbai. Just as many American companies are outsourcing their
administrative tasks, many American students are perfectly willing to
outsource their academic work.
And if the exponential surge in the number
of essay mills is any indication, the problem is only getting worse. But
who, exactly, is running these companies? And what do the students who use
their services have to say for themselves?
Go to Google and type "buy an essay."
Among the top results will be Best Essays, whose slogan is "Providing
Students with Original Papers since 1997." It's a professional-looking site
with all the bells and whistles: live chat, flashy graphics, stock photos of
satisfied students. Best Essays promises to deliver "quality custom written
papers" by writers with either a master's degree or a Ph.D. Prices range
from $19.99 to $42.99 per page, depending on deadline and difficulty.
To place an order, you describe your
assignment, the number of pages, and how quickly you need it. Then you enter
your credit-card number, and, a couple of days later, the paper shows up in
your in box. All you have to do is add your name to the top and turn it in.
Simple.
What's going on behind the scenes,
however, is another story.
The address listed on the site is in
Reston, Va. But it turns out that's the address of a company that allows
clients to rent "virtual office space" — in other words, to claim they're
somewhere they're not. A previous address used by Best Essays was a UPS
store in an upscale strip mall. And while the phone number for Best Essays
has a Virginia area code, that line is registered to a company that allows
customers to forward calls anywhere in the world over the Internet.
The same contact information appears on
multiple other essay-mill Web sites with names like Rush Essay, Superior
Papers, and Best Term Paper. All of these sites are operated by Universal
Research Inc., also known as Essay Writers. The "US/Canada Headquarters" for
the company, according to yet another Web site, is in Herndon, Va. An Essay
Writers representative told a reporter that the company's North American
headquarters was a seven-story building with an attached garage and valet
parking.
That was a lie. Drive to the address, and
you will find a perfectly ordinary suburban home with a neatly trimmed front
lawn and a two-car garage. The owner of the house is Victor Guevara and,
ever since he bought it in 2004, he has received lots of strange mail. For
instance, a calendar recently arrived titled "A Stroll Through Ukrainian
Cities," featuring photographs of notable buildings in Odessa and Yalta. Not
all of the missives, however, have been so benign. Once a police officer
came to the door bearing a complaint from a man in India who hadn't been
paid by Essay Writers. Mr. Guevara explained to the officer that he had no
idea what the man was talking about.
So why, of all the addresses in the United
States, was Mr. Guevara's chosen? He's not sure, but he has a theory. Before
he bought the house, a woman named Olga Mizyuk lived there for a short time.
The previous owner, a friend of Mr. Guevara's, let her stay rent free
because she was down on her luck and she promised to teach him Russian. Mr.
Guevara believes it's all somehow connected to Ms. Mizyuk.
That theory is not too far-fetched. The
state of Virginia listed Olga Mizyuk as the agent of Universal Research LLC
when it was formed in 2006, though that registration has since lapsed (it's
now incorporated in Virginia with a different agent). The company was
registered for a time in Nevada, but that is no longer valid either. The
managing member of the Nevada company, according to state records, was Yuriy
Mizyuk. Mr. Guevara remembers that Ms. Mizyuk spoke of a son named Yuriy.
Could that all be a coincidence?
Hiring in Manila
Call any of the company's several phone
numbers and you will always get an answer. Weekday or weekend, day or night.
The person on the other end will probably be a woman named Crystal or
Stephanie. She will speak stilted, heavily accented English, and she will
reveal nothing about who owns the company or where it is located. She will
be unfailingly polite and utterly unhelpful.
If pressed, Crystal or Stephanie will
direct callers to a manager named Raymond. But Raymond is almost always
either out of the office or otherwise engaged. When, after weeks of calls,
The Chronicle finally reached Raymond, he hung up the phone before answering
any questions.
But while the company's management may be
publicity shy, sources familiar with its operations were able to shed some
light. Essay Writers appears to have been originally based in Kiev, the
capital of Ukraine. While the company claims to have been in business since
1997, its Web sites have only been around since 2004. In 2007 it opened
offices in the Philippines, where it operates under the name Uniwork.
The company's customer-service center is
located on the 17th floor of the Burgundy Corporate Tower in the financial
district of Makati City, part of the Manila metropolitan area. It is from
there that operators take orders and answer questions from college students.
The company also has a suite on the 16th floor, where its marketing and
computer staff members promote and maintain its Web sites. This involves
making sure that when students search for custom essays, its sites are on
the first page of Google results. (They're doing a good job, too. Recently
two of the first three hits for "buy an essay" were Essay Writers sites.)
One of its employees, who describes herself as a senior
search-engine-optimization specialist at Uniwork, posted on her Twitter page
that the company is looking for copy writers, Web developers, and link
builders.
Some of the company's writers work in its
Makati City offices. Essay Writers claims to have more than 200 writers,
which may be true when freelancers are counted. A dozen or so, according to
a former writer, work in the office, where they are reportedly paid between
$1 and $3 a page — much less than its American writers, and a small fraction
of the $20 or $30 per page customers shell out. The company is currently
advertising for more writers, praising itself as "one of the most trusted
professional writing companies in the industry."
It's difficult to know for sure who runs
Essay Writers, but the name Yuriy Mizyuk comes up again and again. Mr.
Mizyuk is listed as the contact name on the domain registration for
essaywriters.net, the Web site where writers for the company log in to
receive their assignments. A lawsuit was filed in January against Mr. Mizyuk
and Universal Research by a debt-collection company. Repeated attempts to
reach him — via phone and e-mail — were unsuccessful. Customer-service
representatives profess not to have heard of Mr. Mizyuk.
Installed in its Makati City offices,
according to a source close to the company, are overhead cameras trained on
employees. These cameras reportedly send a video feed back to Kiev, allowing
the Ukrainians to keep an eye on their workers in the Philippines. This same
source says Mr. Mizyuk regularly visits the Philippines and describes him as
a smallish man with thinning hair and dark-rimmed glasses. "He looks like
Harry Potter," the source says. "The worst kind of Harry Potter."
Writers for Hire
The writers for essay mills are anonymous
and often poorly paid. Some of them crank out 10 or more essays a week,
hundreds over the course of a year. They earn anywhere from a few dollars to
$40 per page, depending on the company and the subject. Some of the
freelancers have graduate degrees and can write smooth, A-level prose.
Others have no college degree and limited English skills.
James Robbins is one of the good ones. Mr.
Robbins, now 30, started working for essay mills to help pay his way through
Lamar University, in Beaumont, Tex. He continued after graduation and, for a
time, ran his own company under the name Mr. Essay. What he's discovered,
after writing hundreds of academic papers, is that he has a knack for the
form: He's fast, and his papers consistently earn high marks. "I can knock
out 10 pages in an hour," he says. "Ten pages is nothing."
His most recent gig was for Essay Writers.
His clients have included students from top colleges like the University of
Pennsylvania, and he's written short freshman-comp papers along with longer,
more sophisticated fare. Like all freelancers for Essay Writers, Mr. Robbins
logs in to a password-protected Web site that gives him access to the
company's orders. If he finds an assignment that's to his liking, he clicks
the "Take Order" button. "I took one on Christological topics in the second
and third centuries," he remembers. "I didn't even know what that meant. I
had to look it up on Wikipedia."
Most essay mills claim that they're only
providing "model" papers and that students don't really turn in what they
buy. Mr. Robbins, who has a law degree and now attends nursing school, knows
that's not true. In some cases, he says, customers have forgotten to put
their names at the top of the papers he's written before turning them in.
Although he takes pride in the writing he's done over the years, he doesn't
have much respect for the students who use the service. "These are kids
whose parents pay for college," he says. "I'll take their money. It's not
like they're going to learn anything anyway."
That's pretty much how Charles Parmenter
sees it. He wrote for Essay Writers and another company before quitting
about a year ago. "If anybody wants to say this is unethical — yeah, OK, but
I'm not losing any sleep over it," he says. Though he was, he notes, nervous
that his wife would react badly when she found out what he was doing. As it
happens, she didn't mind.
Mr. Parmenter, who is 54, has worked as a
police officer and a lawyer over the course of a diverse career. He started
writing essays because he needed the money and he knew he could do it well.
He wrote papers for nursing and business students, along with a slew of
English-literature essays. His main problem, he says, is that the quality of
his papers was too high. "People would come back to me and say, 'It's a
great paper, but my professor will never believe it's me,'" says Mr.
Parmenter. "I had to dumb them down."
Eventually the low pay forced him to quit.
In his best months, he brought home around $1,000. Other months it was half
that. He estimates that he wrote several hundred essays, all of which he's
kept, though most he can barely remember. "You write so many of these things
they start running together," he says.
Both Mr. Parmenter and Mr. Robbins live in
the United States. But the writers for essay mills are increasingly
international. Most of the users who log into the Essay Writers Web site are
based in India, according to Alexa, a company that tracks Internet traffic.
A student in, say, Wisconsin usually has no idea that the paper he ordered
online is being written by someone in another country.
Like Nigeria. Paul Arhewe lives in Lagos,
that nation's largest city, and started writing for essay mills in 2005.
Back then he didn't have his own computer and had to do all of his research
and writing in Internet cafes. Now he works as an online editor for a
newspaper, but he still writes essays on the side. In the past three years,
he's written more than 200 papers for American and British students. In an
online chat, Mr. Arhewe insisted that the work he does is not unethical. "I
believe it is another way of learning for the smart and hardworking
students," he writes. Only lazy students, Mr. Arhewe says, turn in the
papers they purchase.
Mr. Arhewe started writing for Essay
Writers after another essay mill cheated him out of several hundred dollars.
That incident notwithstanding, he's generally happy with the work and
doesn't complain about the pay. He makes between $100 and $350 a month
writing essays — not exactly a fortune, but in a country like Nigeria, where
more than half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, it's not
too bad either.
Mr. Arhewe, who has a master's degree from
the University of Lagos, has written research proposals and dissertations in
fields like marketing, economics, psychology, and political science. While
his English isn't quite perfect, it's passable, and apparently good enough
for his clients. Says Mr. Arhewe: "I am enjoying doing what I like and
getting paid for it."
Write My Dissertation
Some customers of Essay Writers are
college freshmen who, if their typo-laden, grammatically challenged order
forms are any indication, struggle with even the most basic writing tasks.
But along with the usual suspects, there is no shortage of seniors paying
for theses and graduate students buying dissertations.
One customer, for example, identifies
himself as a Ph.D. student in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. He or she (there is no name on the order) is
interested in purchasing a 200-page dissertation. The student writes that
the dissertation must be "well-researched" and includes format requirements
and a general outline. Attached to the order is a one-page description of
Ph.D. requirements taken directly from MIT's Web site. The student also
suggests areas of emphasis like "static and dynamic stability of aircraft
controls."
The description is consistent with the
kind of research graduate students do, according to Barbara Lechner,
director of student services at the institute's department of aeronautics
and astronautics. In an initial interview, Ms. Lechner said she would bring
up the issue with others in the department. Several weeks later, Ms. Lechner
said she was told by higher-ups not to respond to The Chronicle's inquiries.
The head of the department, Ian A. Waitz,
says he doesn't believe it's possible, given the highly technical subject
matter, for a graduate student to pay someone else to research and write a
dissertation. "It seems like a bogus request," says Mr. Waitz, though he
wasn't sure why someone would fake such an order. However, like Ms. Lechner,
Mr. Waitz acknowledged that the topics in the request are consistent with
the department's graduate-level research.
Would-be aerospace engineers aren't the
only ones outsourcing their papers. A student at American University's law
school ordered a paper for a class called "The Law of Secrecy." She didn't
include her full name on the order, but she did identify one of her two
professors, Stephen I. Vladeck. Mr. Vladeck — who immediately knew the
identity of the student from the description of the paper — was surprised
and disappointed because he tries to help students who are having trouble
and because he had talked to her about her paper. Mr. Vladeck argues that a
law school "has a particular obligation not to tolerate this kind of stuff."
The student never actually turned in the paper and took an "incomplete" for
the course.
Essay Writers attempts to hide the
identities of its customers even from the writers who do the actual work.
But it's not always successful. Some students inadvertently include personal
information when they upload files to the Web site; others simply put their
names at the bottom of their orders.
Jessica Dirr is a graduate student in
communication at Northern Kentucky University and an Essay Writers customer.
She hired the company to work on her paper "Separated at Birth: Symbolic
Boasting and the Greek Twin." Ms. Dirr says she looked online for assistance
because the university's writing center wasn't much help and because she had
trouble with citation rules. She describes what Essay Writers did as mostly
proofreading. "They made some suggestions, and I took their advice," she
says. Unfortunately, Ms. Dirr says, the paper "wasn't up to the level my
professor was hoping for."
Mickey Tomar paid Essay Writers $100 to
research and write a paper on the parables of Jesus Christ for his New
Testament class. Mr. Tomar, a senior at James Madison University majoring in
philosophy and religion, defends the idea of paying someone else to do your
academic work, comparing it to companies that outsource labor. "Like most
people in college, you don't have time to do research on some of these
things," he says. "I was hoping to find a guy to do some good quality
writing."
Nicole Cohea paid $190 for a 10-page paper
on a Dove soap advertising campaign. Ms. Cohea, a senior communications
major at the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote in her order that she
wanted the company to "add on to what I have already written." She helpfully
included an outline for the paper and wondered whether the writer could "add
a catchy quote at the beginning."
When asked whether it was wrong, in
general, to pay someone else to write your essay, Ms. Cohea responded,
"Definitely." But she says she wasn't planning to turn in the paper as her
own; instead, she says, she was only going to use it to get ideas. She was
not happy with the paper Essay Writers provided. It seemed, she says, to
have been written by a non-native English speaker. "I could tell they were
Asian or something just by the grammar and stuff," she says.
James F. Kollie writes a sporadically
updated blog titled My Ph.D. Journey in which he chronicles the progress
he's making toward his doctorate from Walden University. He recently ordered
the literature-review portion of his dissertation, "The Political Economy of
Privatization in Post-War Developing Countries," from Essay Writers. In the
order, he explains that the review should focus on privatization efforts
that have failed.
Mr. Kollie acknowledged in an interview
that he had placed an order with Essay Writers, but he said it was not
related to his dissertation. Rather, he says, it was part of a separate
research project he's conducting into online writing services. When asked if
his university was aware of the project, he replied, "I don't have time for
this," and hung up the phone.
Policing Plagiarism
Some institutions, most notably Boston
University, have made efforts to shut down essay mills and expose their
customers. A handful of states, including Virginia, have laws on the books
making it a misdemeanor to sell college essays. But those laws are rarely,
if ever, enforced. And even if a case were brought, it would be extremely
difficult to prosecute essay-mill operators living abroad.
So what's a professor to do? Thomas
Lancaster, a lecturer in computing at Birmingham City University, in
England, wrote his dissertation on plagiarism. In addition, he and a
colleague wrote a paper on so-called contract-cheating Web sites that allow
writers to bid on students' projects. Their paper concludes that because
there is almost never any solid evidence of wrongdoing, catching and
disciplining students is the exception.
In his research, Mr. Lancaster has found
that students who use these services tend to be regular customers. And while
some may be stressed and desperate, many know exactly what they're doing.
"You will look and see that the student has put the assignment up within
hours of it being released to them," he says. "Which has to mean that they
were intending to cheat from the beginning."
What he recommends, and what he does
himself, is to sit down with students and question them about the paper or
project they've just turned in. If they respond with blank stares and
shrugged shoulders, there's a chance they haven't read, much less written,
their own paper.
Susan D. Blum suggests assigning papers
that can't easily be completed by others, like a personal reflection on that
day's lecture. Ms. Blum, an associate professor of anthropology at the
University of Notre Dame and author of the recently published book My Word!
Plagiarism and College Culture, also encourages professors to keep in touch
with students as they complete major projects, though she concedes that can
be tough in a large lecture class.
But Ms. Blum points out a more fundamental
issue. She thinks professors and administrators need to do a better job of
talking to students about what college is about and why studying — which may
seem like a meaningless obstacle on the path to a credential — actually
matters. "Why do they have to go through the process of researching?" she
says. "We need to convey that to them."
Mr. Tomar, the philosophy-and-religion
major who bought a paper for his New Testament class, still doesn't think
students should have to do their own research. But he has soured on essay
mills after the paper he received from Essay Writers did not meet his
expectations. He complained, and the company gave him a 30-percent refund.
As a result, he had an epiphany of sorts. Says Mr. Tomar: "I was like — you
know what? — I'm going to write this paper on my own."
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on diploma mills are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudReporting.htm#DiplomaMill
February 16, 2010 message from Scott Bonacker
[lister@BONACKERS.COM]
Caveat Emptor, Law Students Seeking Outlines
The title of this post isn’t
designed to demonstrate any sort of proficiency in Latin but to alert law
students to the dangers of relying on outlines received from other students.
The risks posed by using passed-down outlines have been threatening law
students for almost as long as there have been law schools, but digital
technology coupled with the internet has multiplied the risk by orders of
magnitude. Ten or fifteen years ago, students could get their hands on
outlines for courses taught in the law school they were attending. In almost
every instance the outline was from a previous semester offering of the
course, taught by the same professor presently teaching the course.
Now, students at any law school can obtain outlines for just about any
course taught at any law school. Recently, my attention was drawn to
Outline Depot, which claims to be “the most
comprehensive source of law school outlines anywhere.” (emphasis in the
original). Perhaps it is, and I’ve not researched that point. Students earn
the right to download outlines by accumulating credits, which can be
obtained by uploading outlines or by purchasing the credits.
The point to which students are desperate to get their hands on outlines is
apparent from what one finds on the site. There are all sorts of red flags
and warning bells.
http://mauledagain.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html#2661520804417965026
This is
primarily about law schools, and is a blog by a tax law professor no less,
but if there is one there surely is another. Outlines are useful, but in my
case mainly when I make one from material I am reading.
Scott Bonacker
CPA
Springfield, MO
Cheating in the Age of Texting
"Should Definitions of Cheating Change in the Age of Texting?" Chronicle
of Higher Education, June 25, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3850&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Over at The Chronicle’s Brainstorm blogs,
Mark Bauerlein
raised some interesting questions this week about
students’ views of cheating.
Mr. Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory
University, points to a new survey showing that about half of students have
used their cellphones or other technology to cheat, and that many students
do not consider their behavior to be cheating.
He suggests that they may have a point. “Don’t we
see here a prime example not of the decay of personal integrity but instead
the healthy spread of ‘participatory culture’?” Mr. Bauerlein wrote. “In the
digital age, intelligence is a collective thing, the individual now not a
repository of knowledge but a dynamic component of it. We have entered a new
realm, and if the definition of knowledge has changed, then so must the
definition of cheating. Right?”
Bob Jensen votes not to change the definition of cheating in the age of
texting!
Question
Have you looked for your examinations and tests at the latest test sharing
sites?
"Students Share Exams Online: Web sites that allow
the sharing of course notes and old exams are increasing. But some professors
aren't happy," by Dan Macsai, Business Week, November 23, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/nov2008/bs20081123_091062.htm?link_position=link4
Photos. Music. Irrelevant video clips. For years,
college students have shared them all on the Internet. Now, they're using
the same medium to swap notes, tests, and quizzes—a trend that has caught
the wary eye of profs whose materials are being uploaded and school
officials who worry about cheating.
In recent years, several Web sites have emerged
that encourage students to submit their schoolwork for mass consumption.
They collect old exams (PostYourTest.com,
Exams101.com), class notes (NoteCentric.com),
study guides (HowIGotAnA.com)
and all of the above (CourseHero.com).
Some of the largest sites claim thousands of users around the world and say
they're making money.
High-Tech "Test Files" Students from an earlier
generation will recognize the note-sharing sites as a high-tech twist on an
old college practice. Fraternities and sororities have long maintained "test
files," where younger members study from older members' course work.
Non-Greeks, of course, have criticized the practice, saying it gives the
frat and sorority members an unfair advantage.
Indeed, Demir Oral, a Web designer living in San
Diego, says he launched the Post Your Test site to level the playing field.
"This kind of service should be available to anyone, at any time," he says.
Oral supports his site using Google ads, which
generate "a decent amount" of revenue, he says. But he's forecasting growth:
Since July, the site's member count has more than doubled, to 1,000, and it
currently hosts between 600 and 700 exams. A few weeks ago, Oral received
his first international submission, from Sultan Qaboos University in Oman.
"People are starting to realize the uniqueness of our database," he says.
"It's a very exciting time."
Backlash from Teachers and Students Not everyone is
buying into the hype, though. Because professors don't know when their exams
are being posted, they could unwittingly re-use a question students have
seen online, says Jim Posakony, a biology professor and former chairman of
the academic senate at the University of California at San Diego, where
teachers have organized to keep their exams off Post Your Test.
Having easy access to quizzes and notes could also
reward laziness, says Nichole Mikko-Causby, a senior at the University of
Georgia. "The whole trend seems to be more about getting the grade than
improving critical thinking skills," she says, noting that she's visited
Course Hero but never used it. "It kind of cheapens my degree."
Kasuni Kotelawala, a sophomore at University of
California, San Diego, is far more satisfied. Because her biology professor
hadn't spent much time discussing the most recent class midterm exam—let
alone distributing a practice test—Kotelawala wasn't sure how to study. But
after reviewing one of her professor's past exams on Post Your Test, she
says she knew what to expect. "It definitely helped," she says.
Copyright Issues But was it legal? Like novels and
artwork, exams are intellectual property, meaning they're owned by the
universities or the professors who wrote them, and they're protected under
copyright laws. Publishing them without permission is treading on "legal
thin ice," says Bob Clarida, a copyright lawyer at Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman,
in New York.
Faculty members at UCSD raised this concern last
August, after representatives from Post Your Test visited campus. To promote
the site, the reps had offered Starbucks gift cards in exchange for student
exams, a gimmick that left some professors "very unhappy," says Posakony.
With Posakony's help, roughly 150 professors
organized. They told Oral to take their old exams off Post Your Test and to
reject future submissions bearing their names. He wasn't thrilled, but he
obliged. "We always follow the Digital Millennium Copyright Act," Oral says,
referencing the law that protects online service providers, like Post Your
Test and YouTube, as long as they honor requests to take down unlawful
uploads.
Continued in article
How would you deal with the following add on Craig's List where University
X is a well known university.
The person who placed this add shows signs of becoming a great banker.
"I Will Pay Someone $$$ To Take My Finance Final
Exam (at University X)"
The "Unknown Professor" (I know the name and location of this professor) who
maintains the Financial Rounds Blog provides an April 30, 2009 mean
solution to this unethical add ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
Hacking into a professor's computer to change grades of 300 students
Two students at California State University at
Northridge have been charged by state authorities with illegally hacking
into a professor’s computer account to change their grades and the grades of
nearly 300 students, the
Los Angeles Times reported. The students told
authorities that they thought the professor was unfair.
Inside Higher Ed, July 26, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/26/qt
July 28, 2006 Update
Two students each face up to a year in jail for a prank
that involved hacking into a professor's computer, giving grades to other
students and sending pizza, magazine subscriptions and CDs to the professor's
home. Chen, 20, and Jennifer Ngan, 19, face misdemeanor charges of illegally
accessing computers. The pair, both students of California State University,
Northridge, are scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 21.
"Students Face 1 Year in Jail for Hacking," PhysOrg, July 28, 2006 ---
http://physorg.com/news73239464.html
Honesty may be the best policy, but it's important to
remember that apparently, by elimination, dishonesty is the second-best policy.
George Carlin as quoted by Mark Shapiro at
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-11-25-06.htm
This type of cheating raises all sorts of legal issues yet to be resolved
for students who might've thought what they did was perfectly legal
More than 1,000 prospective MBA students who paid
$30 to use a now-defunct Web site to get a sneak peak at live questions from the
Graduate Management Admissions Test (GMAT) before taking the exam may have their
scores canceled in coming weeks. For many, their B-school dreams may be
effectively over. On June 20, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District
of Virginia granted the test's publisher, the Graduate Management Admission
Council (GMAC), a $2.3 million judgment against the operator of the site,
Scoretop.com. GMAC has seized the site's domain name and shut down the site, and
is analyzing a hard drive containing payment information. GMAC said any students
found to have used the Scoretop site will have their test scores canceled, the
schools that received them will be notified, and the student will not be
permitted to take the test again. Since most top B-schools require the GMAT, the
students will have little chance of enrolling. "This is illegal," said Judy
Phair, GMAC's vice-president for communications. "We have a hard drive, and
we're going to be analyzing it. If you used the site and paid your $30 to cheat,
your scores will be canceled. They're in big trouble."
Louis Lavelle, "Shutting Down a GMAT Cheat Sheet: A court order against a
Web site that gave away test questions could land some B-school students in hot
water," Business Week, June 23, 2008 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/jun2008/bs20080623_153722.htm
Jensen Comment
A university admissions office that refused to accept applications from the
"cheating" prospective MBA students would probably be sued by one or more
students. GMAC would probably be sued as well. But it's hard to sue a U.S.
District Court.
There are several moral issues here. From above, this is clearly cheating.
But in various parts of society exam questions and answers are made available
for study purposes. For example, preparation manuals for drivers license tests
usually contain all the questions that might be asked on the written test. It is
entirely possible that some MBA applicants fell for a scam that they believed
was entirely legitimate. Now their lives are being messed up.
I guess this is a test of the old saying that "Ignorance is no defense" in
the eyes of the law. Clearly from any standpoint, they were taking advantage of
other students who did not have the cheat sheets. But the cheat sheets were
apparently available to anybody in the world for a rather modest fee, albeit an
illegal fee. Every buyer did not know it was illegal.
Question
What should you ban when students are taking examinations? Baseball caps? iPods?
Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious -
students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning
cell phones, realizing students could text message the answers. Nick d'Ambrosia,
17, holds up his iPod inside a classroom at Mountain View High School in
Meridian, Idaho Friday, April 13, 2007. In Idaho, Mountain View High School
recently enacted a ban on iPods, Zunes and other digital media players. Some
students were downloading formulas and other cheats onto the players, although
none were ever caught.
Rebecca Boone, PhysOrg, April 27, 2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news96865353.html
Smartpen: The Beautiful and
the Ugly
The following invention offers students new opportunities, some for the good and
some for the bad
"Computing on Paper: Livescribe's
smartpen turns a sheet of paper into a computer," by Erica Naone, MIT's
Technology Review, December 13, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19892/?nlid=749&a=f
A new
smartpen could change the way people practice mobile computing by bringing
processing power to traditional pen and paper. Made by
Livescribe,
of Oakland, CA, the smartpen is designed to digitize
the words and drawings that a user puts down on paper and bring them to
life.
So long as the user
writes on paper printed with a special pattern, the smartpen transforms what
is written into interactive text. For example, the pen has a recording
function, called paper replay, that can record sound and connect it to what
the user writes while the sounds are being recorded. Later, the user can tap
the pen over what she wrote and replay the associated sounds. "We're
starting to make the whole world of printable surfaces accessible and
functional," says Livescribe CEO Jim Marggraff.
The smartpen, he
says, will enable "paper-based multimedia," such as interactive business
cards. Marggraff's business card, for example, allows contacts to e-mail him
by writing him a note on its surface with a smartpen. Users can also access
the pen's power by writing commands on any surface printed with the pattern.
For example, if a smartpen user wants to know the definition of a word, she
can write, "define," followed by the word. The pen, using data stored in its
memory, will recognize the word the user writes and display its definition
on a small screen on the side of the pen. The same type of procedure can be
used to translate words or solve math problems.
"I wanted to make
the pen itself interactive and give you feedback, so that as you're writing
on paper, the pen could interpret what you're doing and then tell you
something about it," says Marggraff. "That opens up a whole new way of
interacting with paper, because effectively, the pen and the paper become a
computer."
The pen's
features depend on its ability to track its position on the paper at all
times. This is largely made possible, Marggraff explains, by the paper. The
paper that the pen uses is printed with microdots according to a process
developed by the Swedish company
Anoto.
The pattern provides gridded location information on a
very small scale. The pen knows its position by taking a picture of what's
beneath the pen tip and processing it based on the algorithms used to
produce the patterns of microdots. Paper replay, for example, then works
because the pen associates particular points of an audio track with
particular locations on a particular page. "If you printed the whole pattern
out, it would cover Europe and Asia in square miles," Marggraff says. "So
when your pen goes down in Southern Italy in a tiny corner, it knows exactly
where you are." This means that a user can permanently link audio
information to particular locations in a notebook, with no worry about
losing the link when she turns the page. Because of the size of the pattern
and the possibilities for extending it even further, Marggraff says, he's
not worried that it will run out.
Pads of the paper
with the special pattern will be sold by Livescribe. Users will also be able
to print the pattern on regular, blank sheets of paper using certain
high-quality printers.
Marggraff
says that the dot-positioning
technology,
which he read about in a magazine, was partly what inspired his endeavors in
paper-based computing. Before the Livescribe smartpen, he worked on the
Fly Pentop
Computer, a product for children developed from
earlier applications of the technology.
In addition to the
microdot pattern, the Livescribe smartpen makes use of other technologies,
including a 3-D audio recording system. This technology, Marggraff says, is
designed to make the pen's paper-replay function more useful in less than
ideal recording conditions. If a student using the smartpen gets stuck in
the back of a lecture hall, for example, most recordings would risk being
too low-quality to be useful. The pen, however, uses two microphones to
record the sound the way the user would have heard it originally: the two
microphones help the listener sort different sounds, much as information
from two ears helps people identify the source of a sound.
Rodney Brooks, director of the computer-science
and artificial-intelligence laboratory at MIT, who has been an advisor to
the product, says that connecting writing and computation in the smartpen is
"a real step forward." While Brooks notes that it's unfortunate that a user
must have special paper in addition to a special pen, he is still very
enthusiastic about the technology. "If a magic wand could be waved and you
didn't require [special paper], that would be wonderful, but these are
pretty big steps even without that," he says.
Other
companies have previously made products using the dot-positioning
technology.
Logitech, for example, licensed the microdot
pattern from Anoto to build a digital pen called io. Mark Anderson, director
of business development at Logitech, says that the io employs the dot
technology to allow users to take notes and view them as typewritten text on
a PC, and other similar applications. However, at this time, Anderson says
that the io does not have multimedia functions.
Beyond the
capabilities that the Livescribe smartpen already has, the company is
releasing tools that developers can use to build their own applications for
the pen. Marggraff hopes that the pen will become a new computing platform
for consumers, replacing some existing mobile products.
Brooks says that he
can imagine the pen taking on that role. "People do change their platforms,"
he says.
The smartpen is planned for release
in January, when more product details will be available.
Jensen Comment
Smartpen's audio recorder is good for students to record parts of lectures for
replay later when trying to better understand.
Smartpen's audio recorder is bad when student makes portions of lectures
available online without permission.
Smartpen is good in when the student is
writing and wants a word defined in order to improve the documents.
Smartpen is bad when the student writes "define" in an exam when the definition
is an integral part of the examining question.
Since the smartpen does not work on any
writing surface, the main worry for examinations is when students use smartpen
paper for scratch pads while taking examinations.
Army knew of cheating on tests for eight years
For eight years, the Army has known that its largest
online testing program - which verifies that soldiers have learned certain
military skills and helps them amass promotion points - has been the subject of
widespread cheating. In 1999, testing officials first noticed that soldiers were
turning in many tests over a short period, something that would have been almost
impossible without having obtained the answers ahead of time. A survey by the
testing office showed that 5 percent of the exams were probably the subject of
cheating. At the time, soldiers were filing roughly 200,000 exams per year. But
it wasn't until June of this year, when an Army computer contractor complained
about a website providing free copies of completed exams, that the Army
acknowledged that it had a problem.
"Army knew of cheating on tests for eight years: Hundreds of thousands of exam
copies used, Globe probe finds," Boston Globe, December 16, 2007 ---
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/12/16/army_knew_of_cheating_on_tests_for_eight_years/
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"The Infinite Mind" program on Cheating
Email message on November 15, 2006 from Reams,
Richard [rreams@trinity.edu]
I heard the program Monday night on KSTX,
and some of you may find it interesting, especially the first 30 minutes or
so that focuses on academic cheating. Here’s the link:
http://www.lcmedia.com/mind452.htm
RR
---------------------------------------------------
Richard Reams, Ph.D.
Assistant Director
Counseling Services
Trinity University
One Trinity Place
San Antonio, Texas 78212-7200
215 Coates University Center
www.trinity.edu/counseling
**************************
In this hour, we explore
Cheating. Four out of five high school students say they've cheated. More
than half of medical school students say the same thing. Even The New York
Times has cribbed from somebody else's paper. Is everybody doing it? Guests
include Dr. Howard Gardner, professor in Cognition and Education at the
Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of a large-scale
research study called the GoodWork Project; renowned primate researcher Dr.
Frans de Waal, professor of psychology at Emory University; Dr. Helen
Fisher, research professor in the department of anthropology at Rutgers
University and author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating,
Marriage, and Why We Stray; and country music group BR5-49, who perform the
Hank Williams classic, "Your Cheatin' Heart."
Host Dr. Fred Goodwin begins
with an essay in which he explores some of the reasons why attitudes toward
cheating seem to be more permissive than ever. He mentions "moral
relativism" in elite education; a media culture that end up making
celebrities of high-profile cheaters like Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass;
and the construction of elaborate laws and rules to codify and enforce moral
behavior, which sends the implicit message, "if it's legal, it's ethical."
Cheating among students is
rampant. Four out of five high school students admit to having cheated at
some point. Why is it so common? And why don't more students speak out? To
begin today, we hear from Mary Weed Ervin. She is now a freshman at Duke
University, but when she was a senior in high school in Virginia, she caught
her classmates cheating and did something about it, despite the
consequences.
After catching students in
her AP Biology class cheating, she told the teacher. Her classmates treated
her as if she were the bad guy. She felt even her friends would not stand up
for her, since they continued to hang out with the kids who cheated and
others who outright shunned her. She was insulted by some kids and, after
one party, she was even worried she might be attacked. As a result, she
stopped doing normal senior activities, and she felt very alone. At the end
of the year, though, she was awarded "Senior of the Year" by her peers, so
she knows a lot of her classmates must have supported what she did, even
though they never said so.
Then the Infinite Mind's
Devorah Klahr reports on cheating in schools. Remember when cheating meant
looking over your friend's shoulder? Well, not anymore. Today, many students
use technology to cheat. In addition to buying term papers off the Internet,
they use cell phones, text messaging, and digital computers, sometimes in
elaborate schemes to outwit teachers. "I’m just using my technology to my
advantage pretty much," says one high school cheater. "They gave me all the
tools to do it and I’m just using it to help myself. Because my parents
expect me to have good grades."
To catch these cheaters,
teachers are realizing they, too, have to become more tech savvy. Lou
Bloomfield, a professor at The University of Virginia, created "copyfind," a
computer program to catch cheaters. And many schools use an even larger
search engine called turnitin.com, which scans term papers against a large
database, ensuring that writing is original and not plagiarized. At the
University of Pennsylvania, Michele Goldfarb directs the office of student
conduct. She investigates suspicious looking papers. She remembers a term
paper that was especially obvious. "The faculty member thought the paper was
unusually sophisticated for the student," Goldfarb says, "… use of words
like, 'the pock marked landscape' and 'the steep sided hollows.'
Undergraduates do not talk that way, do not write that way.”
Educators seem to agree that
teaching integrity is the only way to stop cheating. Nobody's going to win
this technology arms race. Elizabeth Kiss is a professor of political
science at Duke University and a board member of the Center for Academic
Integrity. At the beginning of the semester, she tells her students to look
up at the ceiling and think about the trustworthiness of the architect who
designed the structure and the builders who built it. "So I get them to
think about the ways we depend every day on the honesty of other people. And
when people aren't trustworthy, others get hurt."
Next, Dr. Goodwin interviews
the distinguished developmental psychologist and neuropsychologist Dr.
Howard Gardner. He's a professor in Cognition and Education at the Harvard
Graduate School of Education and co-director of a large-scale research study
called the GoodWork Project. Perhaps best known for his theory of multiple
intelligences, he's the author of eighteen books and hundreds of articles.
Most recently, he co-authored the book Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics
Meet. A new book, Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at
Work will be out in February, 2004.
For The GoodWork Project,
Dr. Gardner has been interviewing people working in different fields --
science, journalism, and theater -- about good work, which he defines as
excellent and ethical. Everyone he spoke to knows the difference between
what is ethical and what is not, but the disturbing thing is how many people
said they cannot afford to do the right or honest thing if they want to get
ahead in their careers. He says there is a tension between the people they
want to be and the people they think they need to be to succeed.
He says that scientists --
geneticists, in particular -- had the easiest time doing good work, since
everyone wanted the same thing from them, and there was plenty of money and
support for their work. Many said they felt their only limitation was their
own abilities. Journalists, on the other hand, were in a very different
situation. They felt pulled in many directions -- to work faster, to cut
corners, to be more sensational ("if it bleeds, it leads") -- and, as a
result, it was difficult to do good work. As an example, Dr. Gardner
discusses the Jayson Blair case at The New York Times. Blair was caught
fabricating elements in stories, submitting receipts for trips he never
took, and, ultimately, plagiarizing. But, even before these things were
discovered, he had numerous corrections in his stories. Dr. Gardner says the
problem was that he was not chastised, but promoted. He did not have any
kind of deep mentoring -- in which someone conveys the larger purpose of the
work, explains why it is important not to cut corners, and provides regular
support.
In contemporary society,
particularly with the Internet, there are many ways to get around doing your
own work. He says being ethical requires a good, old-fashioned conscience --
even though we might be able to get away with cheating, we need to be able
to stop ourselves because we knows it's wrong and because we would not want
to live in a world where everyone cheated. In such a world, we would not be
able to trust anyone or anything.
To contact Dr.
Gardner, please write to: Dr. Howard Gardner, Harvard Graduate School of
Education, 201 Larsen Hall, 14 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138. Or visit
www.pz.harvard.edu/Research/GoodWork.htm
To order Good Work: When
Excellence and Ethics Meet, click here.
Believe it or not, cheating
- and feeling cheated - is not unique to humans. Even monkeys want to be
treated fairly. Dr. Goodwin interviews primate researcher Dr. Frans de Waal,
a professor of psychology at Emory University and the author of many books,
including The Ape and the Sushi Master and, his latest, My Family Album:
Thirty Years of Primate Photography.
Dr. de Waal discusses two
different kinds of cheating found in primates. The first, deception, is
generally seen only in the great apes, who are our closest relatives and
capable of the highest levels of cognition. He says that in one chimp
colony, in which lower ranking males were not allowed to court females, he
saw one openly inviting a female to mate (which he does by showing her an
erection). At that moment, the alpha male rounded the corner, and the
lower-ranking male covered his penis with his hands -- hiding the evidence
of his wrongdoing. Dr. de Waal has also seen a chimp try to disguise his
nervousness in front of a rival. Chimps show nervosity by baring their
teeth, and this chimp used his fingers to press his lips together over his
teeth. This kind of behavior requires that the animal be aware of how others
perceive him or her. Chimps end up distrusting other chimps who often
deceive -- they develop methods for detecting cheaters. All this requires
high-level thinking.
Dr. de Waal then discusses
the other kind of cheating -- being shortchanged. He describes a recent
study he and a student, Sarah Brosnan, conducted with capuchin monkeys. They
set up a bartering system with the monkeys, in which they would give the
monkeys pebbles, and then the monkeys would exchange the pebbles for
cucumber pieces. Alone, a monkey would do this over and over again, until
the cucumber was gone. They then put two monkeys next to each other, and, in
exchange for the pebbles, they gave one of them a cucumber slice and the
other a grape, which is much better. The monkey getting the cucumber seemed
to have a very strong emotional reaction. He threw the pebbles out of the
cage, wouldn't accept the cucumber, and basically refused to participate in
the experiment. Dr. de Waal says this illustrates that monkeys have a sense
of fairness. In cooperative societies (whether monkeys or humans),
individuals need to make sure that they are not doing more work than others
for the same reward, or the same work for less reward. He says economists
have studied this in humans, since the reactions can seem irrational -- for
example, a person who was perfectly happy making $40,000 a year may get very
upset and quit her job if she realizes a co-worker doing the same job is
making $80,000. He believes his work with the monkeys may give us clues to
the evolution of the emotions behind this sort of reaction.
To contact Dr. de
Waal, please write to: Dr. Frans de Waal, C. H. Candler Professor of Primate
Behavior, Department of Psychology, 325 Psychology Building, Emory
University, 532 N. Kilgo Circle, Atlanta, GA 30322. Or visit
http://www.emory.edu/LIVING_LINKS/
To order My Family Album:
Thirty Years of Primate Photography, click here.
Next, we turn our attention
to a different kind of cheating -- adultery. In a special performance just
for The Infinite Mind, the country music group BR5-49 performs what may be
the ultimate anthem for spurned lovers -- Hank Williams' "Your Cheatin'
Heart."
To find out more about
BR5-49 or order a CD, please visit http://www.br549.com/.
It's hard to get an accurate
picture of how common adultery is -- surveys estimate it occurs in anywhere
from 15 to 80% of all marriages. Why do so many people do it? And has
technology redefined cheating? Dr. Goodwin speaks with Dr. Helen Fisher, a
research professor in the department of anthropology at Rutgers University.
She's the author of Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage,
and Why We Stray. Her new book Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of
Romantic Love will be out in early 2004. Dr. Fisher has joined us previously
for shows on Romance and Sexual Attraction.
Dr. Fisher says that she has
studied societies all over the world, and, in all of them, people cheat.
Because it seems to be so universal, she believes there must have been some
kind of evolutionary payoff. Looking back to our ancestors, she guesses that
since, in Darwinian terms, children are the way we spread our lineage to
future generations, a man who cheated might have doubled the number of his
genes getting passed on while a woman who cheated might have either received
more resources for her babies or increased the genetic variety of her
offspring. While none of this was conscious, of course, it would result in
the genes for this kind of behavior being passed on. Dr. Fisher says that
monogamy is not a common reproductive strategy in animals -- it only occurs
in species where both parents are needed to rear the young. But even among
birds, in which most species form pair bonds, there is "cheating." DNA
testing shows 10% of birds' offspring are not biologically related to the
supposed father.
Dr. Fisher then discusses
what she believes are three different circuits in the brain -- one for the
sexual drive, one for romantic love, and one for attachment. She think these
developed to serve different functions. The sex drive evolved so that we
would go after anything at all; romantic love evolved to focus our mating
energy on one person, and therefore be more efficient; and attachment
evolved so that we could tolerate the individual we are with, at least long
enough to raise one child. These systems often interact (i.e. at the start
of a relationship, we generally feel both sexual attraction and romantic
love), but they don't always interact, and that's where adultery comes in.
We can feel attachment for one person while we feel romantic love for
another. This does not mean, however, that we are destined to cheat. Dr.
Fisher says the part of the brain that makes us human is the prefrontal
cortex -- where we make decisions.
In response to a caller,
Jon, who is involved in a very serious email relationship with a married
woman, Dr. Goodwin and Dr. Fisher talk about how technology is allowing
people today to be more secretive about their affairs (hence all the
services advertising they'll catch your cheating spouse). Another caller,
Sheila, says that she thinks that any email relationship (like Jon's) or
serious office friendship that takes time and energy away from a spouse is
cheating. She asks what the costs are to a marriage, even with this kind of
cheating, which is not sexual. Dr. Fisher says the costs are enormous --
instead of building a relationship, you're undermining it. Ultimately, all
three people will get hurt. And although a spouse who is cheated on may get
over the betrayal, he or she will never forget it. She concludes by saying
she thinks forming an attachment to another person is the most ornate and
worthwhile single thing that the human animal can do.
To contact Dr. Fisher,
please write to: Dr. Helen Fisher, Department of Anthropology, Ruth Adams
Building, 131 George Street, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey,
New Brunswick, NJ 08901-1414. Or visit
http://anthro.rutgers.edu
To order Anatomy of Love: A
Natural History of Mating, Marriage, and Why We Stray, click here.
Finally, commentator John
Hockenberry wonders, just what defines cheating these days? He says, "In the
landscape of American culture, you can find cheating all over the map.
Cheating is that place between triumph and immorality, between out of the
box thinking and exploitation of the unsuspecting. The cheat-free similarly
inhabit a murky place between naïve stupidity and sainthood."
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Cheating On Ethics Test at Columbia University
Cheating is not unheard of on university campuses. But
cheating on an open-book, take-home exam in a pass-fail course seems odd, and
all the more so in a course about ethics. Yet Columbia’s Graduate School of
Journalism is looking into whether students may have cheated on the final exam
in just such a course, “Critical Issues in Journalism.” According to the
school’s Web site, the course “explores the social role of journalism and the
journalist from legal, historical, ethical, and economic perspectives,” with a
focus on ethics.
Karen W. Arenson, "Cheating on an Ethics Test? It’s ‘Topic A’ at Columbia,"
The New York Times, December 1, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/01/nyregion/01columbia.html
And educators are blaming everybody but the cheaters for cheating
"Malaise," by Peter Berger, The Irascible Professor, November 25, 2006
---
http://irascibleprofessor.com/comments-11-25-06.htm
Thirty-seven summers ago Jimmy Carter spoke to the
nation about our "crisis of spirit." His address became known as his
"malaise" speech, even though he never actually used that word. Webster
defines malaise as an "indefinite lack of health" or "vague sense of mental
or moral ill-being." In order to grapple with problems like the energy
crisis and unemployment, President Carter called on us to examine our
outlook and our priorities.
Public schools have been staggering through their
own crisis for more than a generation. Part of the blame rests directly on
culprits we can see at school: bankrupt education theories and assorted
follies like self-esteem, whole language, and enfeebled classroom
discipline. The roots of the problem also extend to our homes and civic
institutions and appear as children from single-parent families, drug use,
and crime.
These are all issues we should address, but we're
also suffering from an underlying malaise of unsound priorities and
entitlement that's less visible but just as destructive to American
education. Here are a few symptoms of our ill-being.
There's nothing new about classroom troublemakers.
They've been disrupting other people’s education since before chalk was
invented, but today we don't call them troublemakers. Instead, we obfuscate
and invent syndromes for what they do. We say they're "behaviorally
challenged." We turn their conduct into ailments like "oppositional defiance
disorder." According to the psychologist who coined this syndrome, when kids
with ODD have tantrums and refuse to do what they're told, they aren't
"using coercion or manipulation to get what they want." They're just the
victims of their own "inflexibility" and "poor frustration tolerance."
ODD isn't alone in the pantheon of euphemistic,
exculpatory conditions. Horn-blasting, tailgating, and obscene gestures are
no longer just unsafe, obnoxious driving. They’re not even "road rage"
anymore. They're evidence of "intermittent explosive disorder." Remember
that the next time some driver cuts you off and treats you to a one-fingered
salute.
IED also causes "temper outbursts," "throwing or
breaking objects and even spousal abuse," although "not everyone who does
those things is afflicted." How do you tell the difference? Apparently, IED
outbursts are characterized by "threats or aggressive actions and property
damage" that are "way out of proportion to the situation," as opposed
presumably to threats, aggressive actions, and property damage that aren't
way out of proportion to the situation.
According to researchers, a recently administered
questionnaire determined that IED afflicts sixteen million Americans.
Fortunately for the rest of us who have to endure IED tantrums and assaults,
they aren't "bad behavior." They're "biology."
Critics frequently charge that too many high school
graduates aren't prepared for college. The new bad news is that too many
college graduates aren't prepared for life. Universities are responding with
"life after college" programs. These "transition courses" in what officials
term "real life" skills teach college students everything from "managing
their credit cards" and "paying taxes" to "making a plate of pasta" and
"choosing a bottle of Chardonnay."
We're not talking about second-rate institutions.
Alfred University's cooking program includes lessons in "boiling water."
Across the continent Caltech awards three credits for its kitchen survival
course. Sympathetic experts explain that today's college seniors "lack
practical skills because they spent their teens more preoccupied than
previous generations with racking up the grades, SAT scores, and activities
needed to get into top colleges."
That’s ridiculous. My 1960s high school peers and I
lived and died by our permanent records. Claiming that college admissions
suddenly became competitive is like arguing that today's youth need extra
self-esteem because they live under a nuclear threat, a popular
rationalization that conveniently ignores the fact that little kids like me
spent the 1950s hiding under our desks.
According to the Los Angeles Times, "preparing
meals" ranks high among parents' and students' "major concerns." This begs
two questions: Why aren't the concerned parents teaching these skills, and
is learning how to boil water and pay your bills really what universities
are for?
While they may be lost in the kitchen, students are
proving themselves adept in other endeavors. Aided by cell phones and the
Internet, cheating is on the rise at public schools and colleges. In a
Rutgers survey, ninety-seven percent of students polled admitted to cheating
in high school. Even allowing for the notorious inaccuracy of student polls,
the figure is alarming.
Still more alarming, cheating has its champions
among education reformers. One enlightened Northwestern University professor
blames schools when students copy answers, purchase term papers, and steal
exams. He's outraged that students can't copy each other's work during
tests. He endorses plagiarism and objects when a student "receives no
credit" for a paper just because it "was written by somebody else." "No
wonder", he fumes, that students "feel compelled to lie" and put their own
names on work they've "found."
He encourages "honest copying" where students get
credit for copying other people's work as long as they put the real author's
name on it. The professor maintains that allowing this species of larceny
would "reinforce the correct behaviors." Instead of being "punished," the
copier should be "rewarded" for "knowing where to seek the information." In
short, we need to "recognize cheating for the good that it brings."
He's not the only advocate of cheating out there.
The Educational Testing Service's "teaching and learning" vice president
puts the blame for cheating on tests squarely on the tests themselves and
the schools that give them. She holds that it’s "small wonder" that students
"attempt to affect the outcomes" by cheating. She argues that until we allow
kids to "assist each other" during tests, we're "inviting a culture of
cheating."
Let's review. Psychologists are declaring
obnoxious, antisocial behavior a disease. Colleges are teaching adults to
boil water. And educators are blaming
everybody but the cheaters for cheating.
Sounds like a malaise to me.
Peter Berger
Recent Examples of Cheating from "Cheating: Everybody's Doing
It," by Gay Jervey, Readers Digest, March 2006, pp. 123-124:
- Nine business students at the University of Mayland caught receiving
text-messaged answers on their cell phones during an accounting examination.
- A Texas teen criminally charged for selling stolen test answers ---
allegedly swiped via a keystroke-decoding device affixed to a teacher's
computer --- to follow students.
- Seven Kansas State University students in one class accused of
plagiarizing papers off the Internet.
- A Kansas State University student hacked into a professor's online
gradebook and changed the grades on two examinations that he did not even
take.
- 70 percent of students at 60 colleges admitted to some cheating within
the previous year (Gallop reported 65%).
Question
Is homework credit sometimes dysfunctional to learning?
If the instructor allows face-to-face study groups, extra-help tutorials,
and chat rooms, what is so terrible about this Facebook study group?
Answer
Apparently its the fact that ten percent course credit was given for homework
that was discussed in the study group. It seems unfair, however, to single out
this one student running the Facebook study group. If the students were
"cheating" by sharing tips on homework, they were probably also doing it
face-to-face. All students who violate the code of conduct should be sanctioned
or forgiven based on the honor code of the institution.
Ryerson U. Student Faces
Expulsion for Running a Facebook Study Group
A student at Ryerson
University, in Toronto, is facing expulsion for running a Facebook study group,
the
Toronto Star reports. Chris Avenir, a
first-year engineering student, is facing expulsion from the school on 147
counts of academic charges — one for himself, and one for every student who used
the Facebook group “Dungeons/Mastering Chemistry Solutions” to get homework
help. University officials say that running such a group is in violation of the
school’s academic policy, which says no student can undertake activity to gain
academic advantage. Students argue, however, that the group was analogous to any
in-person study group. Of course, this wouldn’t be the first
Facebook-related expulsion hearing. The
expulsion hearing is scheduled for Tuesday.
Hurley Goodall,
Chronicle of Higher Education, March 7, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=2801&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
My approach was to assign homework for no credit and then administer online
quizzes. Students were assigned different partners each week who attested to
observing no cheating while an assigned "partner" took the online quiz. You can
read the following at ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/acct5342.htm
Most every week beginning in
Week 2, you will be required to take an online quiz for a chapter from the
online textbook by Murthy and Groomer. This book is not in the bookstore.
Students should immediately obtain a password and print the first three
chapters of the book entitled
Accounting Information Systems: A Database Approach. You can purchase a
password at
http://www.cybertext.com/forms/accountform.shtml
You will then be able to access the book and the online quizzes at any time
using the book list at
http://www.cybertext.com/
Each week students are to take an online quiz in the presence of an assigned
student partner who then signs the attest form at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/acct5342/attest.htm
The online quizzes are relatively easy if you take notes while reading the
assigned chapter. You may use your notes for each quiz. However, you may
not view a copy of the entire chapter will taking a quiz.
In trading simulations students cheat just like real-world traders
At the end of the semester, the number of students
in a simulated trading room who were caught in misconduct or misusing
information for insider trading was significantly higher than at the
beginning. The students said, "You taught us how to do it," Buono recalled.
"For those of us who've spent our careers teaching this, it's been a
disappointing time," said Buono, who has taught at the Waltham, Mass.,
college for 27 years. "Some of the most renowned names in the corporate
world are now jokes at cocktail parties. And they were led by graduates of
our business programs. "That made a lot of us sit up and rethink the
approach of what we're doing."
"Business Profs Rethinking Ethics Classes," SmartPros, June 19, 2006
---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x53572.xml
Question
What's the newest outsourcing trend in student cheating?
This could not possibly happen in the United States (Ha! Ha!)
Answer
In a unique twist to outsourcing from Britain to
India, students in British universities have been paying computer professionals
in India to complete their course assignments for a fee. The newly recognised
trend, operating mainly through the Internet, has been dubbed as "contract
plagiarism" by British academics who have tracked such malpractices. It is more
in vogue among students enrolled in IT courses in British universities.
"British students outsourcing assignments to India," The Times of India,
June 14, 2006 ---
Click Here
Another Question
If students are outsourcing their assignments, where are they spending their
time?
University of Chicago Cocktail Parties for Educational
Purposes: Don't get drunk or hit on the women
On Friday afternoon at the
University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business,
students are streaming towards their weekly dinner with deans and fellow
classmates -- all 500 of them. This is just one of the GSB's many social events
throughout the year. They include corporate-sponsored cocktail hours, formal
dinners, mock receptions, and theme parties. While these gatherings may sound
like fun, they also serve a weighty purpose -- getting students a good job. In
fact, for those outside B-school, the experience may sound like a little too
much fun. After all, this is school, not a vacation. But there's a lot to be
learned from the socializing. It's an opportunity to network and scope out your
B-school buddies — and competitors." Careers are a focal point of student
socializing and networking," says Stacey Kole, deputy dean of Chicago's
full-time MBA program.
"The Art of the Schmooze," Business Week, June 12, 2006 ---
Click Here
"Legalized 'Cheating': Text-messaging answers. Googling during exams. In the
Internet age, some schools have a new approach to cheating: Make it legal," by
Ellen Gamerman, The Wall Street Journal, January 21, 2006; Page P1 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113779787647552415.html?mod=todays_us_pursuits
Twas a situation every middle-schooler dreads.
Bonnie Pitzer was cruising through a vocabulary test until she hit the word
"desolated" -- and drew a blank. But instead of panicking, she quietly
searched the Internet for the definition.
At most schools, looking up test answers online
would be considered cheating. But at Mill Creek Middle School in Kent,
Wash., some teachers now encourage such tactics. "We can do basically
anything on our computers," says the 13-year-old, who took home an A on the
test.
In a wireless age where kids can access the
Internet's vast store of information from their cellphones and PDAs, schools
have been wrestling with how to stem the tide of high-tech cheating. Now,
some educators say they have the answer: Change the rules and make it legal.
In doing so, they're permitting all kinds of behavior that had been
considered off-limits just a few years ago.
The move, which includes some of the country's top
institutions, reflects a broader debate about what skills are necessary in
today's world -- and how schools should teach them. The real-world strengths
of intelligent surfing and analysis, some educators argue, are now just as
important as rote memorization.
The old rules still reign in most places, but an
increasing number of schools are adjusting them. This includes not only
letting kids use the Internet during tests, but in the most extreme cases,
allowing them to text message notes or beam each other definitions on
vocabulary drills. Schools say they in no way consider this cheating because
they're explicitly changing the rules to allow it.
In Ohio, students at Cincinnati Country Day can
take their laptops into some tests and search online Cliffs Notes. At Ensign
Intermediate School in Newport Beach, Calif., seventh-graders are looking at
each other's hand-held computers to get answers on their science drills. And
in San Diego, high-schoolers can roam free on the Internet during English
exams.
The same logic is being applied even when laptops
aren't in the classroom. In Philadelphia, school officials are considering
letting kids retake tests, even if it gives them an opportunity to go home
and Google topics they saw on the first test. "What we've got to teach kids
are the tools to access that information," says Gregory Thornton, the school
district's chief academic officer. " 'Cheating' is not the word anymore."
The changes -- and the debate they're prompting --
are not unlike the upheaval caused when calculators became available in the
early 1970s. Back then, teachers grappled with letting kids use the new
machines or requiring long lines of division by hand. Though initially
banned, calculators were eventually embraced in classrooms and, since 1994,
have even been allowed in the SAT.
Of course, open-book exams have long been a fixture
at some schools. But access to the Internet provides a far vaster trove of
information than simply having a textbook nearby. And the degree of
collaboration that technology is allowing flies in the face of some deeply
entrenched teaching methods.
Grabbing test answers off the Internet is a
"crutch," says Charles Alexander, academic dean at the elite Groton School
in Massachusetts. In the college world, where admissions officers keep
profiles of secondary schools and consider applicants based on the rigor of
their training, there are differing opinions. "This is the way the world
works," says Harvard Director of Admissions Marlyn McGrath Lewis, adding
that whether a student was allowed to search the Internet for help on a
high-school English exam wouldn't affect his or her application.
Though it might not ultimately factor into a
student's acceptance at University of Pennsylvania, Lee Stetson, dean of
undergraduate admissions there, has a different take. "The definition of
what's cheating has been changing, and fudging seems to be the way of the
world now," he says. "It's not an encouraging sign."
At High Tech High International, a charter school
in San Diego, kids in Ross Roemer's 10th-grade humanities class are allowed
to scan the Internet during some tests; earlier this week, they looked up
what scholars had written about Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray"
while they were writing their essay exams.
Mr. Roemer says students' essays are better
informed when they can compare their ideas with what others have written.
But he acknowledges that traditionally an approach like this would be
against the rules. "You'd have to rip up their test and call their parents,"
he says. But at this school, which is funded partly by the Bill and Melinda
Gates Foundation, he says there's no sense fighting technology: "You can't
ignore it. You have to embrace it."
When the Kent School District in Washington decided
last year to create a technology "school within a school" at Mill Creek
Middle, where there'd be a 1-to-1 ratio of kids to computers, parents
quickly began pushing to get their kids accepted. Now, teachers say letting
kids look up answers online helps show they can find and analyze information
then synthesize it into a cohesive argument.
In Bonnie Pitzer's case, teacher Becky Keene says
using the Internet helped the seventh-grader, but in the end, she aced the
test because she demonstrated she could also use the word in a sentence. "I
want the kids to be able to apply the meaning, not to be able to memorize
it," says Ms. Keene.
Continued in article
The
techniques vary: Camera phones can be used to create high-tech cheat sheets,
letting students call up photos of key notes they took back in the dorm. A
student also could surreptitiously send a photo of his answers to a friend
sitting in the same classroom during an exam.
Marlon A. Walker (see below)
"High-Tech Cribbing: Camera
Phones Boost Cheating," by Marlon A Walker, The Wall Street Journal,
September 10, 2004, Page B1 --- http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB109477285622714263,00.html?mod=gadgets%5Flead%5Fstory%5Fcol
Diann Baecker thought it was odd that a
student in one of her language classes had left his cellphone flipped open
during a test -- until she started grading the exams.
The assistant professor at Virginia
State University in Petersburg noticed that the student, and his neighbor, had
used identical language to answer an essay question. She deduced that one
student must have taken a picture of his neighbor's essay with his
camera-equipped phone and then copied the answer onto his own test using the
image on the phone's screen.
These days, Prof. Baecker tells
students to put their phones under their desks, along with their books and
backpacks. "The picture phone is the new thing" for cheating, she
says. "Technology just makes it a lot easier. They're not leaning over
their neighbor's shoulders anymore."
A small but growing number of students
are using camera phones to cheat, according to students and educators across
the country. The techniques vary: Camera
phones can be used to create high-tech cheat sheets, letting students call up
photos of key notes they took back in the dorm. A
student also could surreptitiously send a photo of his answers to a friend
sitting in the same classroom during an exam.
Continued in the article.
Forwarded by Helen Terry
Check this out.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/10/19/cellphonejammers.ap/index.html
partial quote: In four Monterrey churches, Israeli-made cell phone jammers the
size of paperbacks have been tucked unobtrusively among paintings of the
Madonna and statues of the saints. The jarring polychromatic din of ringing
cell phones is increasingly being thwarted -- from religious sanctuaries to
India's parliament to Tokyo theaters and commuter trains -- by devices
originally developed to help security forces avert eavesdropping and thwart
phone-triggered bombings. In Italy, universities started using the blockers
after discovering that cell phone-savvy teenagers were cheating on exams by
sending text messages or taking pictures of tests.
Use of a cell phone for purposes of cheating during an examination would seem
to be an obvious problem. It just never dawned on me until I witnessed it
in a men's room on December 15, 2001. It was the beginning day of final
examinations. I did not have my final examinations scheduled until the
following week. However, I listened in while a student quite obviously was
asking questions on a cell phone and then waiting for answers.
Leaving books and crib notes in a bathroom or hallway is a common
problem. The cell phone idea, however, just had never dawned on me.
This could be a particular problem on makeup exams. How often have you
made a student leave books and notes in your office and then put the student
alone in a room to take a test? Have you ever thought about that tiny cell
phone that might be in a pocket?
I suspect the next best thing is having a buddy with books and a computer
hidden in one of the stalls such that it is not necessary to make a phone call
to the buddy.
Reply from Rohan Chambers [rchambers@CYBERVALE.COM]
How about this.....
Some students use cell phones as calculators,
and.....during the examination they send text messages to each other!
Rohan Chambers
Lecturer in Auditing and Finance School of Business Administration
University of Technology, Jamaica
Reply from Andrew Priest [a.priest@ECU.EDU.AU]
Hi
We ban cell (mobile) phones from exam rooms and an
invigilator goes with student to the men's/women's room so as to minimise this
risk. However, I have often noticed some invigilator waiting outside the
toilet facility rather than discreetly inside.
Regards,
Andrew
Reply from Christine Kloezeman [ckloezem@GLENDALE.CC.CA.US]
I too bought 52 hand
held calculators from Pic and Save for the use in all my classes. Last
semester I found a student using her palmtop that had all the notes. I have a
container that keeps them in the division office so others can use them. The
bathroom trick has been very well used this semester so I told them for the
final they had to take care of business. I like the comment about when they
leave the room they have finished the test.
I do this to be fair
to those 60% that will not cheat. I have even been thanked by the students
because they felt studied hard and it wasn't fair to have student get good
grades without learning.
I like the idea of
re-developing an honor code. Many times we need to revisit these areas with
the students.
I wish there was a
site we could develop that would keep the instructors on top of the current
cheating techniques. It's like having teenagers. You can save a lot of
problems by being aware of the things they are trying to pull. Anybody know of
a site like that. I know I will visit it before each test.
Hi Christine,
I have updated a site concerning how
students plagiarize at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
I am also trying to build up the above
site for cheating on examinations. I hope others will send me great ideas on how
to cheat.
Bob Jensen rjensen@trinity.edu
Reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU]
What bothers me about
all this is the lengths to which we all go to prevent cheating. It is, as a
faculty member here described it, another "1% solution" in that for
the very few who would really cheat, we spend huge amounts of our time, and
restrict those who wouldn't cheat anyway. I used to have someone accompany
people to the rest room, but we frequently have so few proctors that I cannot
spare anyone, and began to feel silly about it, so now I do random checks. I
had never thought of the cell phone thing. I do know that the graphing
calculators provide ample opportunity to cheat, so we have resorted to buying,
as a department, 400 cheap calculators, which we pass out for each exam, then
collect. That restricts that avenue.
We used to check ID,
have not recently. So yesterday (yes, Saturday) while grading I found a
"fake" exam. Really irritated me that someone would waste our time
that way, and I plan to investigate further after we have grades in, with
little hope of success.
We give case exams in
managerial, which are harder to cheat on. And we do allow a page of
handwritten (no photocopies or printed) notes. I always question how far I am
willing to go to prevent cheating, and where I just say, if you are that
clever, go ahead, you'll get your "reward" someday.
Reply from Patricia Doherty [pdoherty@BU.EDU]
What bothers me about
all this is the lengths to which we all go to prevent cheating. It is, as a
faculty member here described it, another "1% solution" in that for
the very few who would really cheat, we spend huge amounts of our time, and
restrict those who wouldn't cheat anyway. I used to have someone accompany
people to the rest room, but we frequently have so few proctors that I cannot
spare anyone, and began to feel silly about it, so now I do random checks. I
had never thought of the cell phone thing. I do know that the graphing
calculators provide ample opportunity to cheat, so we have resorted to buying,
as a department, 400 cheap calculators, which we pass out for each exam, then
collect. That restricts that avenue.
We used to check ID,
have not recently. So yesterday (yes, Saturday) while grading I found a
"fake" exam. Really irritated me that someone would waste our time
that way, and I plan to investigate further after we have grades in, with
little hope of success.
We give case exams in
managerial, which are harder to cheat on. And we do allow a page of
handwritten (no photocopies or printed) notes. I always question how far I am
willing to go to prevent cheating, and where I just say, if you are that
clever, go ahead, you'll get your "reward" someday.
For the final exam, I was assigned two class rooms
across the hall from each other. I went from one classroom to the other,
trying to be random in my timing. I was later told that one gal in the class
room would slide her foot (no stocking) out of her loafer and flip open the
textbook as soon as I left the room. She was able to turn the pages of the
book with her toes. Oh, she did write answers on her exam the old-fashioned
way--pencil held firmly in hand. But what she did with her feet was
remarkable.
No one was willing to take the effort to testify
about her actions when I suggested running her academic dishonesty through the
system. so I had to let it pass without prosecution.
Dave Albrecht
David,
At the end of the course, you should have sent her the following message:
This little piggy went to market,
This little piggy stayed home,
This little piggy turned the notebook pages,
This little piggy cried F,F,F all the way home.
Bob
I teach only graduate students. And I give exams only
to the MBA introductory accounting students. For MAcc students I grade based
solely on written case reports and class participation.
This year I decided to switch to open book exams for
the MBA students. They can refer to the textbook, their laptop (for lecture
notes), and to a calculator. They can also leave the room to use the rest room
facilities without limitation. I tell them only that they can't talk to their
class mates or use a cell phone to call for outside help (a la Regis Philbin).
I use a combination of multiple choice and short
problems on the exam - about 40% the latter. However, most of the questions
require careful analysis and not just rote memory. Overall, I found that the
test scores and final grades this year were virtually the same as last year.
The students perceived that I made the exams harder this year in order to
compensate for the open book nature. I don't think that is really the case
although I do create entirely new questions every year.
I recognize that most of the messages about this
point (if not all of them) probably relate to undergraduate students so my
experience may not be relevant. But I decided early in my short to date
teaching career that a cheater hurts mainly him/herself and all the policing
in the world is not likely to catch the most creative practitioners.
Communicating a sense of trust seems to have worked well for me.
Denny Beresford
University of Georgia
Message from Rohan Chambers [rchambers@CYBERVALE.COM]
I would recommend the following to limit cheating
during examinations, particluary for large groups e.g. 40 - 300 ( Here in
:Jamaica, at the country's two leading Universities we may have up to 300
students doing the same final exam!) :
1. Employ invigilators (proctors) with a student to invigilator ratio of about
25 to 1.
2. Designate specific restrooms and have them checked both prior to and after
the exam (even before and after each student's : visit). Have a proctor
accompany students to the door of the restroom.
3. Have ancilliary items handy i.e drinking water, cups, napkins and aspirins
( especially for those who suddenly develop an : "headache" during
the exams).
4. Have all cellphones turned off and left in school bags or left outside of
the exam room.
5. Lend the students University calculators.
6. Have students remove all headgear.
7. Ban all digital watches!
8. Do not allow any pre-written notes into the exam room :
Currently, we do all except 3, 5 & 7 in our
School.
Reply from Jim Richards Down Under
Hi Rohan,
I have been following the thread on cheating with interest. It is good to hear
that it does not just happen at my University.
My comment concerns number 8. A number of others have
suggested that allowing students to take one page of handwritten notes into an
exam is good as it requires them to do some revision and make choices about
what they will fit on the one page.
Several colleagues have tried this but it caused a
headache for the invigilators as students first tried to use photocopy
reductions before we specifically added that it must be handwritten. That of
course means that they now write in very small handwriting to get the maximum
amount allowed on the page.
It also means that the academic who specifies such a
requirement must attend the exam and do the check. The invigilators do not do
it. It has to be done while the students are doing the exam so you need help
from colleagues unless you want to spend all of the exam time checking the
sheets, particularly if they all sit the exam in the same room at the same
time.
Cheers.
Jim Richards
Murdoch University
South Street MURDOCH 6150 AUSTRALIA
Reply from John Rodi
The unfortunate part is that this is a poor use of
scare resources. I believe that cheating is a matter of ethics and if you
cheat you don’t have ethics. Ethics are taught at an early age and the
mechanism for justifying the behavior develops at the same time. I am reminded
of the student who was blatantly cheating in during one of my final exams. He
had simply opened his textbook on the desk and was looking for answers.
Several students pointed this out to me and I told them that I was aware of
what was happening. They didn’t understand what I why I wasn’t stopping
the student.
At the end of the exam I told the student that he was
getting an F for a grade on the final exam since I had observed him cheating
during the entire examination. He replied with remorse—right. Wrong. He said
to me, “If you knew I was cheating why didn’t you stop me so that I wouldn’t
have had to waste all this time!” I was advised that he may have had a case
had he protested, because I could have been accused of providing him with an
opportunity to cheat. I wish that I had made up this story.
John Rodi
El Camino College
Watch Out for Wrist Devices
This is getting ridiculous. In addition to banning cell phones during
examinations, should we ban wrist watches?
Karen Waldron reminded me of Fossil's PDA --- http://www.edgereview.com/ataglance.cfm?Category=handheld&ID=337
Students can store crib notes and read them from a wrist watch.
And don't forget that there are cell phones that can be worn on the wrist
just like a watch --- http://www.thestandard.com/article/display/0,1151,19264,00.html
"U-Md. Says Students Use Phones to Cheat Text Messaging Delivers Test
Answers," by Amy Argetsinger, The Washington Post, January 25, 2003
--- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A40227-2003Jan24.html
The University of Maryland is investigating 12
students for allegedly using their cell phones to dial up all the right
answers during fall exams.
The students are accused of using the "text
messaging" functions on their phones or pagers to receive silent messages
from friends who had access to answer keys for the tests, campus officials
said yesterday.
It is the latest wrinkle in the continuing struggle
between technology and academic integrity. Though quick to jump on the Web and
embrace the laptop, schools across the country have been confronted with the
problem of students using those very tools to plagiarize essays from the
Internet. At Maryland, as at many other colleges, faculty members were stunned
a few years ago to discover that some students were using the same high-end
calculators required for many advanced math tests to retrieve stored
information during exams.
But the use of cell phones "was a new one for
us," said John Zacker, the university's director of student discipline.
The accusations prompted university administrators to
send a memo to faculty members yesterday advising them to monitor the use of
cell phones and other electronic devices during exams.
The incident also highlights an apparent generation
gap in technology savvy on campus. While students by and large expressed no
surprise that cell phones could be used for illicit purposes, Zacker said it
simply had not occurred to most faculty.
Zacker said the accused students are suspected of
exploiting a common practice at College Park, in which professors post answer
keys outside their offices after giving an exam so that students can
immediately calculate how they did.
Some professors, he said, have gotten in the habit of
posting the keys while students are still taking the exam, assured that
students would not be able to see the answers until they had turned in their
tests and left the proctored classroom.
It is unclear exactly how the accused students may
have cheated, Zacker said. But preliminary investigations suggest that they
may have arranged to have friends outside the classroom consult the keys and
call in the answers.
In some cases, professors had posted answer keys on
their Web sites, and officials believe that students may have used cell phones
equipped with Web browsers to look up the answers themselves, while still in
the exam room.
The memo, from Provost William W. Destler, also
advised faculty not to post answer keys until well after an exam is completed.
Zacker would not say which professors or departments
had reported the recent accusations or whether all 12 cases came from the same
course.
The University of Maryland has worked to bolster a
culture of academic integrity in recent years, including the institution of a
new honor pledge that students are urged to sign on their work. The
student-run Honor Council will rule on the cases in coming weeks. First-time
offenders at Maryland generally receive a failing grade for the course with a
marker on their transcripts indicating that cheating was involved, but
additional offenses can merit suspension or expulsion.
Donald L. McCabe, a professor at Rutgers University
who has studied academic dishonesty, said he had heard of other instances of
students across the country using a cell phone to cheat.
Though technology has made it easier for students to
cheat -- and possibly harder for professors to detect it -- McCabe does not
believe that it has tempted more students to cheat. However, he said it may
have increased "the frequency with which cheaters cheat."
"Ten years ago, you'd hear about students using
hand signals or tapping with pencils on their desk," he said.
"Things like this are displacing that. You don't have more cheaters, just
more ways to cheat."
From Yahoo Picks of the Week on August 26, 2002
Pirated Sites --- http://www.pirated-sites.com/
Ever find yourself on a web site that looks virtually
indistinguishable from another? This site showcases such online indiscretions,
making "side-by-side comparisons of web sites that are suspected of
borrowing, copying or stealing copyright-protected content, design or code
without permission." Many web designers have taken unfathomable liberties
with their online filching -- some companies even do it twice. Pirated Sites
uses a cool pop-up window script that makes it easy to compare web sites large
and small. If you think you've run across a site that has been hit by
web-style biters, don't hesitate to submit the URLs of the pirate and the
victim. And if the moral isn't clear, we'll repeat it: Do Not
Plagiarism Alternatives
In a trend that should delight amoral entrepreneurs everywhere, sales of
online term papers are picking up as the school year approaches.
"Where Cheaters Often Prosper,: by Joanna Glasner, Wired News,
August 26, 2002 --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54571,00.html
The history of the
Internet is filled with stories about companies that tried to make a positive
change in the world and ended up failing miserably.
And then there are
online term-paper sites. Despite inspiring nothing but scorn from educators,
purveyors of collegiate prose are finding life on the dark side of online
commerce quite lucrative.
"They're the
only ones besides casinos or porn really making money on the Internet,"
said Kenny Sahr, founder of SchoolSucks.com,
a free homework site that makes money posting ads for fee-charging term paper
providers. If his advertising customers are any indication, Sahr said, online
term-paper mills are weathering the dot-com bust remarkably well.
With the new school
year about to begin, research paper companies are gearing up for peak season.
It appears academicians' attempts to eradicate these hotbeds of plagiarism
have done little to stifle their growth.
SchoolSucks is no
exception. Although the 6-year-old site hasn't made him rich, Sahr says it
does provide enough money "to pay for my habits" and doesn't require
full-time work. He runs the site with a staff of two, each working out of
their homes and periodically holding meetings on a beach in Tel Aviv, where
the operation is based.
Sahr attributes the
site's longevity largely to the fact that it gets its material for free,
mostly through submissions from students. This keeps the cost of running the
business quite low.
SchoolSucks draws
about 10,000 unique visitors on a typical day and has been growing steadily,
Sahr said.
Meanwhile, traffic to
competing sites isn't slowing either.
"I don't think
we've had a year so far where we haven't grown," said Jared Silvermintz,
college student and co-founder of Genius
Papers. The site, which Silvermintz started as a junior in high school six
years ago, charges $20 for a one-year subscription to a soon-to-be-upgraded
database that he says will contain more than 40,000 papers
Conatinued at http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,54571,00.html
Message from Curtis Brown on April 26, 2002
I saw an interesting idea on one web site ( http://www.plagiarism.com/
). They offer a product that takes a student essay, replaces every fifth word
with a blank, and then asks the student to fill in the blanks. Depending on how
many they get right and how long it takes them, the program calculates a
"Plagiarism Probability Score." They want $300 for this, but it would
take only a few minutes to write a program that would delete every fifth word,
and it might be an interesting way to get a sense for the likelihood that a
paper was plagiarized if you couldn't find the source. I don't know that it
would be any more effective than simply asking the student to explain key
passages in the paper, though.
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
Hi Ceil,
I am back from Iowa and am finally catching up on a mountain of email.
The ethics video vignettes that I used to use were from the IMA. I cannot
find links to these older videos, but you might look into http://www.imanet.org/Content/About_IMA/EthicsCenter/ResourcesandArticles/resources2.htm
I cannot seem to locate the IMA videos in my mountain of videotapes at the
moment, but I do recall that those particular IMA vignettes were quite good.
The latest FASB video called "Financially Correct" might be useful
in the area of ethics, especially in light of the Enron scandal --- http://accounting.rutgers.edu/raw/fasb/news/fc_video.pdf
You might also download the AICPA video that plays on a computer with some
surprisingly sophisticated technology --- http://www.aicpa.org/stream/indrulewebcast/index.html#
Hope this helps.
Bob
-----Original Message----- From: Ceil Pillsbury [mailto:ceil@uwm.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, December 19, 2001 3:30 PM To: 'Jensen, Robert '; 'AECM@LISTSERV.LOYOLA.EDU
' Subject: RE: Cheating at the University of Minnesota
I am sorry to say that I have had first hand
experience this semester with cheating. I had six students in one class all
make copies of homework that needed to be submitted by email. All they did was
Cut and Paste and send it from their own accounts. They didn't even bother to
read the homework or they clearly would have seen the obvious typos! I am even
sorrier to say that now that I have started asking other professors I think
there may be a much bigger problem with cheating among accounting majors than
anyone realizes. Since we are putting out future professionals this causes
great concern! I am now working on an Ethics lecture to start my Auditing
class off with next semester and wonder two things:
--Does anyone have any neat ideas (materials) to get
ethical points across?
--Does anyone remember a video (I think it was made
by Andersen) that had example vignettes in it. I seem to remember seeing a
video that had a segment on eating hours and pressure to manage earnings.
Reply from George Lan
I know about the video by Arthur Andersen (then) on
ethics with 5 or 6 vignettes. One of the vignette is entitled " The
Order" and I use it and some of the other vignettes from time to time in
my class. I only have a copy of that video which someone gave to me but
Andersen should probably still have copies. There is a manual that comes with
it. Andersen use an ethical framework to analyse ethical dilemmas, which
consists of several steps (facts, issues, stakeholders, ethical principles,
alternatives, recommendations...)The key is to think through carefully the
ethical dilemma. Some students find ethics issues interesting but I've heard
some students commenting that "they hate ethics."
I still find the story of ZZZZ Best (in "Cooking
the Books" video) has much appeal to the students, perhaps because Barry
Minkow was then a very young guy. I've heard he has a degree in religion
now???
I also use a case prepared by AAA, "The CEO
retires" which looks at the many ways that accounting can be creatively
used to increase the compensation of the CEO in his golden years and the
pressure placed on subordinates to go along.
I believe in the "Nuremberg Principle" i.e.
doing something unethical or illegal because you are ordered to do so does not
absolve you from blame; however, real life ethical situations are very often
like this comment at the bottom of an accounting cartoon " Dammed if I
do, Dammed if I don't." I've also heard that just as people become more
risk averse as they get older, they also believe less in ethics. (Not from any
study that I know about).
My two cents worth,
George Lan
University of Windsor
Reply from Scott Bonacker,
This thread lead me to think of what
is the meaning of "ethics" and "morality", and through
that I found a website for American Sign Language interpreters which discusses
in part their responsibility in their roles.
http://asl_interpreting.tripod.com/ethics/jg1.htm
Representational faithfulness is
certainly important in that arena, and if an allegory would be useful then
this might serve.
Scott Bonacker,
CPA McCullough, Officer & Company,
LLC Springfield, Missouri moccpa.com
A Clever Way to Stop Some Types of Cheating
Hossein Nouri [hnouri@TCNJ.EDU]
I am assigning a comprehensive take-home problem to
my managerial accounting course. In order to force students to do the problem
at least by themselves, I am giving different versions of the problem. I
prefer students to do the problem using spread sheet. However, I am concerned
that one student creates the formula for all parts of the problem on the
spread sheet and other students just plug-in the numbers and hand it to me. Do
you have any suggestion how this can be avoided? Most of our students use the
college's labs to do their assignments, with few using their own computers.
Hossein Nouri, PhD, CPA, CFE
Accountancy Program School of Business
The College of New Jersey
P.O.Box 7718 Ewing, NJ 08628-0718 Tel. (609)771-2176
Fax (609)637-5129 Email: hnouri@tcnj.edu
Reply from Elliot Kamlet [ekamlet@BINGHAMTON.EDU]
Write a macro (or get MIS people to help) to require
that the students enter their name as soon as they open the spreadsheet. That
name should then be placed in some cell someplace and the column hidden, and
in addition the name should appear in some prominent place (say cell A1), then
the macro should disable itself. You will know where the name is and can find
it when they submit the project. Then just match names.
They can still get around it but some who cheat will
probably get caught.
Elliot Kamlet
Reply from Gadal, Damian [DGADAL@CI.SANTA-BARBARA.CA.US]
Here is some Visual
Basic to accomplish your spreadsheet task (NOTE: you have two options you can
try):
: Put this into the
"ThisWorkbook" : folder.
Dim strGenName As
String Private Sub Workbook_Open()
done = False While
Not done strGetName = InputBox( _
prompt:="Please
enter your name.", _
Title:="UserName")
done = True
Wend
Sheets("Sheet1").Range("A1").Value
= strGetName 'Option 1: Put name into a hidden sheet
Sheets("Sheet2").Range("A1").Value
= strGetName
Worksheets("Sheet2").Visible
= xlVeryHidden 'Option 2: Put name into a hidden cell
Sheets("Sheet1").Range("A2").Value
= strGetName
Rows("2:2").Hidden
= True End Sub
May 2, 2002 message from Reams, Richard
[rreams@trinity.edu]
In the May/June 2002
issue of the Journal of College Student Development, a major journal of
Student Affairs professionals, Scanlon & Neumann report findings from a
survey of 698 students on six campuses regarding Internet plagiarism. Here are
a few highlights:
· 24.5% reported
plagiarizing online sometimes to very frequently (19% sometimes and 9.6% often
or very frequently). This percentage, the researchers concluded based on
longitudinal data on plagiarism, does NOT indicate a sharp increase in
plagiarism over the past three decades, although the percentage “should be
cause for concern.” · Although 8.3% self-reported purchasing papers from
online paper mills sometimes or often/very frequently, 62.2% PERCEIVED that
their peers patronize paper mill sites sometimes or often/very frequently.
Similarly, although 8% self-reported cutting and pasting text from the
Internet often/very frequently, 50.4% PERCEIVED that their peers do so. This
gross misperception is a contextual factor that probably encourages some
students to plagiarize. (This same contextual factor underlies the social
norms marketing [a.k.a. misperception correction] campaign that I’ve
undertaken for several years regarding the incongruity between students’
exaggerated perceptions of alcohol use vs. actual alcohol use.)
Some of you may want
to see the entire journal article. Because the library does not subscribe to
the Journal of College Student Development [Diane Graves, may I suggest the
library subscribe?], I’m putting a copy on reserve under my name so
interested faculty and staff can have access to it.
Collegially
yours,
Richard Reams
My Project Files Got Corrupted (it used to be that the files just got
lost)
I wonder if this will also extend the tenure clock?
"The New (phony) Student Excuse?" by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher
Ed, June 5, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/05/corrupted
Most of us have had the
experience of receiving e-mail with an attachment, trying to open the
attachment, and finding a corrupted file that won't open. That concept is at
the root of a new Web site advertising itself (perhaps serious only in part)
as the new way for students to get extra time to finish their assignments.
Corrupted-Files.com offers a service -- recently
noted by
several academic bloggers who have expressed concern -- that
sells students (for only $3.95, soon to go up to $5.95) intentionally
corrupted files. Why buy a corrupted file? Here's what the site says: "Step
1: After purchasing a file, rename the file e.g. Mike_Final-Paper. Step 2:
E-mail the file to your professor along with your 'here's my assignment'
e-mail. Step 3: It will take your professor several hours if not days to
notice your file is 'unfortunately' corrupted. Use the time this website
just bought you wisely and finish that paper!!!"
The site promises that students can stop using
"lame excuses" like the deaths of grandmothers or turning in poor work.
While the Web site attempts to distinguish its
service from cheating, it also advises students on how its services could
make it easier for them to get away with turning in a file they know won't
open. "This download includes a 2, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 page corrupted Word
file. Use the appropriate file size to match each assignment. Who's to say
your 10 page paper didn't get corrupted? Exactly! No one can! Its the
perfect excuse to buy yourself extra time and not hand in a garbage paper.
Cheating is not the answer to procrastination! - Corrupted-Files.com is!"
Who would be behind such an operation? Is this the
latest form of cheating?
Inside Higher Ed e-mailed the site's proprietor via
e-mail and learned the following (obviously not verifiable, and the site
owner did not give a name, nor is one listed on the site's registration).
The site was created in December "as a goof" by its owner.
"I didn't think anyone would actually pay for an
excuse but lo and behold.... It was never meant to sell one file but I get
about 3-4 downloads a day (over 10 a day during finals) and don’t advertise
the site," the owner wrote back. "I used the corrupted file excuse back in
my college days (I’m 25) as I started my first business at 19 so I didn't
have much time to do my schoolwork. When I couldn't get an extension, I sent
my professors a corrupted file to buy me time. I know this was not the most
ethical thing but as a young entrepreneur, I did not have much of a choice
as I valued my employees well above my academics." (People commenting on the
blogs that have noticed the trend note that they have been receiving papers
such as those described.)
Asked if he or she had ever received complaints
from professors that this was cheating, the site's owner said that a faculty
member had asked that question and that this was roughly the answer: "Well
... it's a fine line Prof. H. It's basically just a good excuse vs. outright
cheating. Let's face it, how many times have you heard, 'I had a family
emergency' or 'my grandma passed away?' I am simply offering a better
excuse. It's not cheating in the traditional sense as the student is still
doing their own work and not using a roommates' old paper or being foolish
enough to purchase one online. If the student is desperate, it is fair to
assume he/she has considered these paths. In such a situation, would you
rather have a student make up an excuse and hand in their own work a bit
late or submit someone else's work on time?"
Who are the best customers? "Not to anyone's
surprise, but my best clients are from Ivy and top tier schools. I guess the
more perfect people think you are, the more likely in life you are to cheat
to keep that perception."
One irony that the site developer noted: He or she
gave a guest lecture at a university and assigned a project to students at
the professor's request. "One student e-mailed me a corrupted file -- I
couldn't help but to laugh and accept the student’s excuse."
Why keep the site going? "Everyone at my current
venture finds the site humorous so I keep it up. Plus, it does help students
save face with their professors as CF is an alternative to buying a paper
online or using a friend's old paper. CF simply buys the student time and
encourages them to do their own work and not to procrastinate next time
around."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Students who visit porn sites a log may be giving reasons rather than excuses
for file corruption. One way to fight the file corruption scam is to state (bold
face) in the syllabus that students are responsible for backing up files at
least every fifteen minutes. That way less work is lost if files are corrupted
or lost.
June 6, 2009 reply from Bob Jensen
There are various other security measures to consider, because even
trustworthy students may innocently pass along infected files.
In the case of MS Word and Excel documents it is very simple to eliminate
most virus risks by simply requiring each student to submit a MS Word
document as a HTML (htm) or XML (xml) file instead of a doc or xls file.
MS Word and Excel files can also be submitted by students as much safer
PDF files.
For example, open Excel and then click on “ Save as” to see the various
options other than xls.
Of course some functionality may be lost such as embedded macros in xls
or doc files, but these macros are the most dangerous infection sources.
Another safety measure that I used when I was still teaching was to go to
a university computer lab and read student project files and other attached
email files on a lab computer. This protected my office computers. The lab
computers were often more up to date for virus protection, and the
university techies had a daily routine of rebuilding infected lab machines.
Techies could rebuild a lab machine in short time since there were only
“core” system files to be put back on the hard drive. For faculty office
computers there are many more files to be replaced when a faculty computer
machine must be rebuilt.
Four weeks ago I had to have Trinity University rebuild my main computer
that was downed by malware (it was infected by a so-called computer
protection site). I’m pretty good about backup files, but it was much more
of an ordeal for tech support folks and me relative to the simple process of
rebuilding an on-campus lab computer.
By the way, Trinity University still provides tech support on my home
computer only because I purchased it from the virtual Dell Store
administered on the Trinity campus (for a time but not currently). Besides
software savings, the big advantage was lifetime software support from
Trinity.
Bob Jensen
June 8, 2009 reply from Tom Selling
[tom.selling@GROVESITE.COM]
Shameless plug – If anyone thinks the following
constitutes inappropriate use of this listserv, please let me know:
We market our collaboration software (
www.grovesite.com )
principally to commercial organizations (btw,
Chronicle of Higher Education is one of our customers), but it is very easy
to use and straightforwardly adaptable to class administration and filing
sharing. Student “drop boxes” for assignments would be a piece of cake –
although it may not have the exact same bells and whistles as Blackboard.
If anyone would like to try GroveSite for FREE
through the end of the fall semester, please contact me at
tom.selling@grovesite.com . Another
way to go about it is to provision yourself with a fully-functional free
trial from our home page. We can then give you a phone tour and set up some
basic pages, including the assignment drop box for you.
Best, Tom Selling
"'The Computer Ate My Homework': How to Detect Fake Techno-Excuses,"
by Mark Beja, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 2009 ---
Click Here
Forget about making up stories about sick
relatives. There’s a new way to get around homework deadlines by sending
professors corrupted documents, buying a student extra time because the
professor will likely blame computer errors and take hours or days to ask
for a new version. There are, however, ways to identify the frauds.
Corrupted-Files.com, a Web site developed in
December as a joke, its owner says, offers unreadable Word, Excel, or
PowerPoint files that appear, at first glance, to be legitimate. Students
can submit them via e-mail to professors in place of real papers to get a
deadline extension without late penalties. For $3.95, the site promises a
“completed” assignment file will be sent to the buyer within 12 hours, to be
renamed and submitted by the new owner. By the time a professor gives up on
the bogus file, in theory, a student will have been able to complete the
actual assignment.
“I made CF in 3 hours while watching old episodes
of Seinfeld, so if any inspiration, it was George Costanza, the sad king of
excuses,” the site’s owner, Gianni Martire, said in an e-mail message. “The
site was really all just one big goof.”
Mr. Martire confirmed yesterday that he was the New
York City-based entrepreneur behind the site. He said that he planned to
continue collecting data on Corrupted-Files.com for a possible study, but
that his work as co-founder of
Hotlist,
a new social-networking Web site, and on the executive board of
Arts Horizons, a
not-for-profit arts-in-education organization, had been keeping him busy.
Mr. Martire added that he didn’t believe his Web
site promoted cheating, since its users are not plagiarizing others or using
an
essay mill, but just
buying some extra time.
The corrupted-file idea could work, said T. Mills
Kelly, an associate dean at George Mason University, because faculty members
are often busy with work and grading, and used to getting an occasional
corrupted file. But Mr. Kelly says it would not work with him.
“Every time a student e-mails me a paper, I open
the file to make sure that it will open so I know that the paper is turned
in, and if it doesn’t work, I write them on the spot: ‘You have to send me a
new copy,’” he said. “If they don’t send it right away, my brain starts
ticking over.”
Mr. Mills said that by checking a document’s
properties, anyone can see what computer the file was created on and on what
date, as well as how many times the file has been edited.
“What are the odds that you wrote a 10-page paper
10 minutes before you e-mailed it to me, without an edit?” he asked, adding
that circumventing the system by intentionally using a corrupted file was
cheating. “I always recommend failure for the course.”
It seems a corrupted file purchased by The
Chronicle — which had a glitch and arrived several hours late — would
pass some of Mr. Kelly’s tests, but not all of them: The file’s original
author was hidden, but the creation and edit dates and times were marked for
the time the document was downloaded from the Web site.
After Mr. Martire was contacted by reporters, the
Web site changed slightly. Now the comments section reads: “If you need an
extension, just be honest and ask your professor before you use a corrupted
file.”
Cheating in Higher Education Athletics
"Incomplete Passes: College-Athlete Academic Scandals," Bloomberg
Businessweek, February 27, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-27/incomplete-passes-college-athlete-academic-scandals
Academic irregularities related to athlete eligibility have haunted
several U.S. colleges.
Auburn (2006)
Helped by academic advisers, football players padded their grade-point
averages in “directed reading” classes.
Florida (2008)
Cam Newton,
now quarterback of the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, left Florida after facing
potential expulsion for cheating, Fox Sports reported.
Florida State (2009)
Academic advisers participated in taking tests and in writing papers for
basketball and football players.
Fresno State (2003)
The men’s basketball statistician and an academic adviser were caught in a
paper-writing-for-athletes scheme.
Georgia (2003)
The university withdrew from postseason play after basketball players
received inflated grades in a coaching class.
Memphis (2008)
The NCAA stripped the basketball team of its run to the finals after
Derrick Rose’s SAT
scores were ruled invalid.
Michigan (2008)
The Ann Arbor News reported that from 2004 to 2007, 251 athletes
took independent study classes with the same professor and received
suspiciously high grades.
Minnesota (1999)
The basketball team had tournament victories erased after hundreds of
assignments were completed for players.
Stanford (2011)
Academic advisers discontinued a list of classes recommended for years
because they were easy and/or convenient.
Tennessee (2000)
ESPN profiled an English professor whose objections led the university to
acknowledge that, on average, athletes received twice as many grade changes
as other students.
USC (2001)
The NCAA issued sanctions against the football and women’s swimming teams
after tutors were found to have written papers for athletes.
Others ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
A Tale of Two Plagiarists: "As it turns out, at least a couple
passages weren’t written by Rieff or by Sontag" ---
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20191011-Gutkin-Sontag?cid=db&source=ams&sourceId=296279
A more common form of cheating is to have a spouse or significant other do
the academic work.
Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers (and took two online
courses for him)
The wife of a star University of South Florida linebacker says she wrote his
academic papers and took two online classes for him. The accusations against Ben
Moffitt, who had been promoted by the university to the news media as a family
man, were made in e-mail messages to The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr.
Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt called the accusations “hearsay,” and
a university spokesman said the matter was a “domestic issue.” If it is found
that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud, the newspaper reported, the
university could be subject to an NCAA investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education News Blog, January
5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at
Jensen Comment
If Florida investigates this and discovers it was true, I wonder if Moffitt's
diploma will be revoked. Somehow I doubt it.
"Fraud and the Final Four," by Jake New, Inside
Higher Ed, April 1, 2016 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/04/01/two-teams-facing-charges-academic-fraud-meet-ncaa-basketball-tournament?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=f07f910a88-DNU20160401&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-f07f910a88-197565045
. . .
Syracuse entered this year’s tournament following a
season in which its head coach
sat out nine conference games for NCAA violations.
The University of North Carolina remains under investigation for one of the
most egregious cases of academic fraud in NCAA history.
Jensen Comment
After getting caught for 20 years of fake course and repeated promises to reform
you would think UNC would have learned its lesson about academic fraud.
But alas! UNC never seems to learn when it comes to faking courses and grades
for athletes ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Athletics
Question
How extensive was the University of North Carolina athletics phony
course and grade change cheating scandal?
Answer
Even though I made tidbits about this scandal early on, including that
about 10% of the athletes could not read at a third-grade level. I guess
it never sunk in how many years UNC officials were aware of the cheating
and how many athletes were part of this scandal.
. . . since the 1990s Nang' Oris'
department offered hundreds of fake "paper classes" that never
actually met. Some 500 grades had been changed without
authorization . . .
"UNC officials apologize for a huge sports scandal, while
attacking the woman who brought it to light," Bloomberg
Businessweek, February 3-9, 2014 ---
After trying for years to minimize an
academic corruption scandal on its prestigious Chapel Hill campus,
the University of North Carolina has abruptly switched
strategies---form obfuscation to mea culpa. The apologia comes with
a bitter footnote, though in the form of vilification of a campus
whistle-blower.
. . .
UNC called the police after an
internal university inquiry concluded that that
since the 1990s Nang' Oris' department offered
hundreds of fake "paper classes" that never actually met. Some
500 grades had been changed without authorization,
. . .
Also see
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-27/university-of-north-carolina-apologizes-for-fake-classes-promises-real-change
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Old
Kinds of Cheating
The first edition of New Bookmarks in
Year 2002 featured sites where you can either purchase research papers or
download them for free. Since many of you are grading or have just graded term
papers, I thought it might be of interest to show how sophisticated these papers
are becoming --- cheating is becoming more difficult to detect.
For example, note the index on the left
margin at http://www.a1-termpaper.com/wom-gen.shtml
I clicked on Business to obtain the
index at http://www.a1-termpaper.com/bus-idx.shtml
I then clicked on Accounting and
obtained the listing at http://www.a1-termpaper.com/bus-acc.shtml
In the first Year 2002 edition of New
Bookmarks, I will relay a study by a student who used this and other services,
sometimes paying as much as $90 for papers and then examining the grades and
comments written by professors. For an advance view of this study, see http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#SethStevenson
Note that most term papers are not free
online and, therefore, will not show up in Web search engines unless some
student was required by his instructor to put his or her term paper online.
You might be able to detect cheating in
a search engine if the clueless student did not even bother to change the title
of the paper (which can be found using search engines.)
"Teachers fight against Internet plagiarism," by Kimberly Chase, The Christian Science Monitor,
March 2, 2004 --- http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0302/p12s01-legn.html
On www.research-assistance.com , for example, students can browse an alphabetical list
of categories - Cuba, evolution, or racism, just to name a few - to find the paper of
their choice. For $136, a frantic high school or college student can download a 19-page
paper on "Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt." It can be faxed for $9.50 or delivered
overnight for $15.
Fake Modiglianis began to emerge in the 1920s, soon after his death. Now he
is one of the world's most faked artists. There are even fake fakes ---
http://www.vanityfair.com/style/2017/05/worlds-most-faked-artists-amedeo-modigliani-picasso
"A THOUGHTFUL NEW BOOK ON THE MARKET," by Joe Hoyle, Teaching Blog,
August 9, 2013 ---
http://joehoyle-teaching.blogspot.com/2013/08/a-thoughtful-new-book-on-market.html
"The Costs of Cheating," Inside Higher Ed, March 19, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/03/19/qt#222885
Physics students who copy their classmates’ work
learn less than students who don’t plagiarize, researchers at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology found in a
study released yesterday. The researchers created
algorithms to determine when answers submitted by MIT physics students
through a popular
online homework and e-tutoring program had been
copied, then tracked how the serial plagiarists did on their final exams.
Students who copied answers on problems that required the use of algebra
scored two letter grades worse than non-copiers on such problems in the
final, while students who copied more concept-based homework problems did
not fare any worse than their more honest peers. Those who copied 30 percent
of homework problems were three times more likely than the others to fail.
The study recommends several measures that can reduce academically dishonest
behavior, including getting away from lecture-based courses and toward more
interactive teaching methods.
"Judge Rules In Favor Of CCSU Student Expelled For Cheating," by
Leretta Waldman, The Hartford Courant, December 4, 2008 ---
http://www.courant.com/news/education/hcu-cheating-1204,0,4033428.story
A Waterbury Superior Court judge has ruled in favor
of a New Milford man expelled from Central Connecticut State University in
2006 for cheating. In a decision issued late Wednesday, Judge Jane Scholl
cited a preponderance of evidence supporting Matthew Coster's claim that it
was another student, Cristina Duquette of Watertown, who took Coster's term
paper on the holocaust, not the other way around.
Coster and his family brought the civil suit
against Duquette to clear his name and recoup the over $25,000 they spent
pursuing the case. CCSU officials have said they would reconsider their
decision pending the outcome of the suit but to date nothing has been
scheduled.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
What I found interesting is the fact that the student named Matthew Costner was
expelled for a first-time offense. Most colleges are not currently expelling a
student for the first-time plagiarizing of a term paper.
"Cheating
soars, but 'it's all right'," by Dave Newbart, The Chicago Sun Times,
July 25, 2004 --- http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-cheat25.html
When Bill was unsure of the answer to a question in a
finance exam last year, he sent a text message on his cell phone to a friend
who was also taking the test. The friend sent him the correct answer.
When Lisa wasn't sure she could remember mathematical
formulas for an accounting exam, she stored them in a calculator with its own
memory, and then used them to help complete the test.
Bill, 21, and Lisa, 22, both of whom asked that their
real names not be used, study business at DePaul University, which has seen a
tenfold increase in reported cases of cheating in the past five years.
"We like to think our students are more
committed than most, but they are not saints, either,'' said Charles Strain,
the school's associate vice president for academic affairs.
Chicago area schools, from community colleges to
universities such as Northwestern, are also concerned about an increase in
cheating.
"It's rampant,'' said Peg Lee, president of
Oakton Community College in the northern suburbs. "It's everywhere.''
Cheating these days comes with an added twist -- new
technology, which in some cases makes it so easy that students don't even
believe what they are doing is wrong. From cutting and pasting text from a Web
site into a term paper to using cell phones or personal data assistants
equipped with wireless Internet access to search for answers while taking a
test, technology is becoming a partner in dishonesty.
And because of increased competition to get into top
colleges and graduate schools, students say they are under more pressure than
ever to get good grades, leading them to cheat more.
Nationally, more than one in five students admits to
cheating on a test in the past year, according to a survey last year of 14,000
students at 23 schools (including one in Illinois) by the Center for Academic
Integrity at Duke University. More than half admit to cheating on a paper.
If you include minor forms of cheating -- such as
working on an assignment with another student when that's not allowed or
asking a student who already took a test what was on it -- three quarters of
all students admit to doing so.
Don McCabe, the center's founder and a management and
global business professor at Rutgers, said the actual number of cheaters is
likely higher because his data is self-reported.
Every indication is that the problem is growing.
Surveys of high school students by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in
California found that 74 percent said they cheated on an exam in 2002, up from
61 percent a decade ago.
The fastest growing form of cheating, McCabe said, is
taking information from the Internet and passing it off as the student's own
work.
"Students are more liberal in their
interpretation of what's permissible and what's not,'' he said.
Indeed, neither Bill nor Lisa felt bad about
cheating. Lisa said she did it because professors put too much pressure on
students by making some tests or assignments weigh too heavily on an overall
grade.
Continued in the article
University of Texas at Brownsville Cheating Scandal
Authorities last year uncovered a major cheating scandal at the University of
Texas at Brownsville--Texas Southmost College in which employees, some of them
students, helped other students obtain test answers for themselves or give or
sell them to others,
The Brownsville Herald reported. The cheating
involved gaining access to the Blackboard system used by faculty members for
tests and grading, among other uses. The university was vague on how it punished
students, saying that university procedures were followed (which would have
involved an F for students in courses in which they were found to have cheated).
Twenty people -- 6 employees and 14 students -- were involved. The university
considered, but decided against, pressing criminal charges. Juliet V. Garcia,
president of the university, released a statement to the Herald on why she
favored internal handling of the matter. "It’s the job of institutions of higher
education to preserve and honor academic integrity. Yes, academic dishonesty is
a challenge that all educators must be prepared to handle," she said. "The
policies and procedures in place at the university provide the means for the
campus to investigate and make informed decisions on courses of action
appropriate for each case."
Inside Higher Ed, August 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/08/03/qt#204832
The inmates are running the asylum
From Duke University: One of the Most Irresponsible Grading Systems in the
World
Her approach? "So, this year, when I teach 'This Is
Your Brain on the Internet,' I'm trying out a new point system. Do all the work,
you get an A. Don't need an A? Don't have time to do all the work? No problem.
You can aim for and earn a B. There will be a chart. You do the assignment
satisfactorily, you get the points. Add up the points, there's your grade.
Clearcut. No guesswork. No second-guessing 'what the prof wants.' No gaming the
system. Clearcut. Student is responsible." That still leaves the question of
determining whether students have done the work. Here again, Davidson plans to
rely on students. "Since I already have structured my seminar (it worked
brilliantly last year) so that two students lead us in every class, they can now
also read all the class blogs (as they used to) and pass judgment on whether
they are satisfactory. Thumbs up, thumbs down," she writes.
Scott Jaschik, "Getting Out of Grading," Inside Higher Education, August
3, 2009
Jensen Comment
No mention of how Professor Davidson investigates and punishes plagiarism and
other easy ways to cheat in this system. My guess is that she leaves it up to
the students to police themselves any way they like. One way to cheat is simply
hire another student to do the assignment. With no examinations in a controlled
setting, who knows who is doing whose work?
August 4, 2009 reply from David Fordham, James Madison University
[fordhadr@JMU.EDU]
Bob, While I feel the way you do about it, it is
interesting to note that this type of thing isn't new.
In the fall semester of 1973, at the North Campus
of what today is the Florida State College in Jacksonville (formerly FCCJ,
and when I was going there it was called FJC), I enrolled in a
sophomore-level psychology class taught by Dr. Pat Greene. The very first
day, Dr. Greene handed out a list of 30 assignments. Each assignment was
independent study, and consisted of viewing a 15 to 60 minute
video/filmstrip/movie/etc. in the library, or reading a chapter in the
textbook, followed by completion of a 1 to 3 page "worksheet" covering the
major concepts covered in the "lesson".
As I recall, the worksheet was essentially a set of
fill-in-the-blank questions. It was open book, open note, open anything, and
when you completed the worksheet, you put your name on it and dropped it in
Dr. Greene's mailbox in the faculty offices lobby at your convenience.
The first 10 assignments were required in order to
pass the course, but students could pick and choose from the remainder. If
you stopped after the 10 required assignments, you got a D in the class. If
you did 15 assignments, you got a C; 20 a B, and if you completed all 30,
you got an A in the class. Students could pick which lessons to complete
(after the first 10) if they elected not to do all 30.
This was before email, YouTube, and PDF's. Students
worked at their own pace, there was no class meeting whatsoever after that
first day. After the first day of class where I received the syllabus and
assignment sheet, I never attended the classroom again. Dr. Greene
supposedly held office hours during class time for students who wanted to
ask questions, but I never needed it (nor did anyone else I knew of) because
the assignments were so simple and easy, especially since they were open
book, open note, and there was no time limit! There was no deadline, either,
you could take till the end of the semester if you wanted to.
Oh, and no exams, either.
This was also before FERPA. Dr. Greene had a roll
taped to his office door with all students' names on it. It was a manual
spreadsheet, and as you turned in assignments, you got check marks beside
your name in the columns showing which assignments you had "completed". We
never got any of the assignments back, but supposedly if an assignment had
too many errors, the student would get a dash mark instead of a check mark,
indicating the need to do it over again.
Within 2 weeks, I had completed all 30 assignments,
got my A, and never saw Dr. Greene again. I learned at lot about psychology
(everything from Maslow's Hierarchy to Pavlov's slobbering dogs, from the
(now infamous) Hawthorne Effect to the impact of color on emotions), so I
guess the class was a success. But what astounded me was that so many of my
classmates quit after earning the B. The idea of having to do half-again as
much work for an A compared to a B was apparently just too much for most of
my classmates, because when I (out of curiosity) stopped by his office at
the end of the semester, I was blown away by the fact that only a couple of
us had A's, whereby almost everyone else had the B (and a couple had C's,
again to my astonishment). I can't remember if there were any D's or F's.
At the time, I was new to the college environment,
and in my conversations with other faculty members, I discovered that
professors enjoyed something called "academic freedom", and none of my other
professors seemed to have any problem with what Dr. Greene was doing. In
later years, it occurred to me that perhaps we were guinea-pigs for a
psychology study he was doing on motivation. But since he was still using
this method six years later for my younger sister (and using the same
videos, films, and filmstrips!), I have my doubts.
Dr. Greene was a professor for many, many years.
Perhaps he was ahead of his time, with today's camtasia and snag-it and
you-tube recordings... None of his assigned work was his own, it was all
produced by professional producers, with the exception of his worksheets,
which were all the "purple plague" spirit-duplicator handouts.
I've often wondered how much more, if any, I could
have learned if he'd really met with the class and actually tried to teach.
But then again, as I took later psychology classes as part of my management
undergrad (org behavior, supervision, human relations, etc.) I was pleased
with how much I had learned in Dr. Greene's class, so I guess it wasn't a
complete waste of time. Many of my friends who were in his class with me
found the videos and filmstrips a nice break from the dry lectures of some
of our other profs at the time. Plus, we liked the independent-study
convenience. Oh, well...
Bottom line: this type of thing isn't new: 1973 was
35 years ago. Since academic freedom is still around, it doesn't surprise me
that Dr. Greene's teaching (and in this case, his grading) style is still
around too.
David Fordham
James Madison University
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
"The Computer Stole My Homework -- and Sold It Through an Essay Mill,"
by Ben Terris, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2009 ---
Click Here
Without her knowing it, a paper that Melinda
Riebolt co-wrote while getting her M.B.A. was stolen and put up for sale.
And, according to an article that USA Today reported last week, that same
scenario has played out many times before.
The article discusses how some essay mills -- Web
sites that provide written works for students -- surreptitiously steal work
and then sell it for others to pass off as their own.
For the first time, however, those who find
unauthorized postings of their work online may have a way to seek legal
retribution. The article says a class-action lawsuit filed in 2006 is making
its way through the courts, and one judge in Illinois has found a provider
liable on six counts, including fraud and copyright infringement. That site
is called RC2C Inc. and hosts at least nine sites that sell term papers.
Essay mills often provide their own written works.
Holocaust Memoir Turns Out to Be Fiction
A best-selling Holocaust memoir has been revealed to be
a fake. The author was never trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Neither was she
adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis, nor did she trek 1,900 miles
across Europe in search of her deported parents or kill a German soldier in
self-defense. She wasn’t even Jewish, The Associated Press reported. Misha
Defonseca, 71, right, a Belgian writer living in Dudley, Mass., about 60 miles
southwest of Boston, admitted through her lawyers last week that her book, “Misha:
A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” translated into 18 language and adapted
for the French feature film “Surviving With Wolves,” was a fantasy. In a
statement to The Associated Press, Ms. Defonseca said: “The story is mine. It is
not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving. I ask forgiveness to
all who felt betrayed.
Lawrence Van Gelder, The New York Times, March 3, 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/books/03arts-HOLOCAUSTMEM_BRF.html
"Honesty and Honor Codes," by Donald McCabe and Linda Klebe
Treviño, Academe, January/February 2002 --- http://www.aaup.org/publications/Academe/02JF/02jfmcc.htm
Students cheat. But they cheat less often at schools with an honor code and a
peer culture that condemns dishonesty.
A recent editorial in the Cavalier Daily, the
University of Virginia’s student newspaper, opened with the statement,
"The honor system at the university needs to go. Our honor system
routinely rewards cheaters and punishes honesty." In the wake of a highly
publicized cheating scandal in an introductory physics course at the
university, it was easy to understand the frustration and concern surrounding
Virginia’s long-standing practice of trusting students to honor the
university’s tradition of academic integrity.
We could not disagree more, however, with the idea
that it’s time for Virginia or any other campus to abandon the honor system.
We believe instead that America’s institutions of higher education need to
recommit themselves to a tradition of integrity and honor. Asking students to
be honest in their academic work should not fall victim to debates about
cultural relativism. Certainly, such recommitment seems far superior to
throwing up our hands in despair and assuming that the current generation of
students has lost all sense of honor. Fostering integrity may not be an easy
task, but we believe an increasing number of students and campuses are ready
to meet the challenge.
Did Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz
Plagiarize?
Dr George Gheverghese Joseph from The University of
Manchester says the 'Kerala School' identified the 'infinite series'- one of the
basic components of calculus - in about 1350. The discovery is currently - and
wrongly - attributed in books to Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz at the
end of the seventeenth centuries. The team from the Universities of Manchester
and Exeter reveal the Kerala School also discovered what amounted to the Pi
series and used it to calculate Pi correct to 9, 10 and later 17 decimal places.
And there is strong circumstantial evidence that the Indians passed on their
discoveries to mathematically knowledgeable Jesuit missionaries who visited
India during the fifteenth century. That knowledge, they argue, may have
eventually been passed on to Newton himself. Dr Joseph made the revelations
while trawling through obscure Indian papers for a yet to be published third
edition of his best selling book 'The Crest of the Peacock: the Non-European
Roots of Mathematics' by Princeton University Press.
"Indians predated Newton 'discovery' by 250 years ," PhysOrg, August 14,
2007 ---
http://physorg.com/news106238636.html
Social/Cultural Construction of Cheating
September 23, 2006 message from Selsky, John (USF Lakeland
[jselsky@lakeland.usf.edu]
Bob, Amazing
website on cheating and plagiarism! This (attachment) may be of
interest:
<<cheating-JMI2000.pdf>> I've been meaning to write
additional stuff on student cheating but haven't had the time.
Regards, John Selsky
Dr. John W. Selsky
Director, Business Division
Associate Professor of Management
University of South Florida-Lakeland
3433 Winter Lake Road Lakeland, FL 33803 USA +1-863-667-7718
jselsky@lakeland.usf.edu
September 24, 2006 message from Bob Jensen to the AECM
John Selsky sent me a copy of a published paper focused on cheating:
John W. Selsky "Even we are Sheeps": Cultural Displacement in a
Turkish Classroom
Journal of Management Inquiry 2000 9: 362-373.
See
http://jmi.sagepub.com/content/vol9/issue4/
What may be of interest to you is that the above
paper may be downloaded free if you download it before September 30.
My download link was
http://jmi.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/9/4/362
Even though John sent me a copy, I checked out this download alternative so
I could pass this along to you.
This is a very interesting paper on the social/cultural construction of
cheating.
Bob Jensen
Software that monitors students during tests perpetuates inequality and violates
their privacy ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/08/07/1006132/software-algorithms-proctoring-online-tests-ai-ethics/
The coronavirus pandemic has been a boon for the
test proctoring industry. About half a dozen companies in the US claim their
software can accurately detect and prevent cheating in online tests. Examity,
HonorLock, Proctorio, ProctorU, Respondus and others have rapidly grown
since colleges and universities switched to remote classes.
While there’s no official tally, it’s reasonable to
say that millions of algorithmically proctored tests are happening every
month around the world. Proctorio told the New York Times in May that
business had increased by 900% during the first few months of the pandemic,
to the point where the company proctored 2.5 million tests worldwide in
April alone.
I'm a university librarian and I've seen the
impacts of these systems up close. My own employer, the University of
Colorado Denver, has a contract with Proctorio.
It’s become clear to me that algorithmic proctoring
is a modern surveillance technology that reinforces white supremacy, sexism,
ableism, and transphobia. The use of these tools is an invasion of students’
privacy and, often, a civil rights violation.
If you’re a student taking an algorithmically
proctored test, here’s how it works: When you begin, the software starts
recording your computer’s camera, audio, and the websites you visit. It
measures your body and watches you for the duration of the exam, tracking
your movements to identify what it considers cheating behaviors. If you do
anything that the software deems suspicious, it will alert your professor to
view the recording and provide them a color-coded probability of your
academic misconduct.
Depending on which company made the software, it
will use some combination of machine learning, AI, and biometrics (including
facial recognition, facial detection, or eye tracking) to do all of this.
The problem is that facial recognition and detection have proven to be
racist, sexist, and transphobic over, and over, and over again.
In general, technology has a pattern of reinforcing
structural oppression like racism and sexism. Now these same biases are
showing up in test proctoring software that disproportionately hurts
marginalized students.
A Black woman at my university once told me that
whenever she used Proctorio's test proctoring software, it always prompted
her to shine more light on her face. The software couldn’t validate her
identity and she was denied access to tests so often that she had to go to
her professor to make other arrangements. Her white peers never had this
problem.
Similar kinds of discrimination can happen if a
student is trans or non-binary. But if you’re a white cis man (like most of
the developers who make facial recognition software), you’ll probably be
fine.
Students with children are also penalized by these
systems. If you’ve ever tried to answer emails while caring for kids, you
know how impossible it can be to get even a few uninterrupted minutes in
front of the computer. But several proctoring programs will flag noises in
the room or anyone who leaves the camera’s view as nefarious. That means
students with medical conditions who must use the bathroom or administer
medication frequently would be considered similarly suspect.
Beyond all the ways that proctoring software can
discriminate against students, algorithmic proctoring is also a significant
invasion of privacy. These products film students in their homes and often
require them to complete “room scans,” which involve using their camera to
show their surroundings. In many cases, professors can access the recordings
of their students at any time, and even download these recordings to their
personal machines. They can also see each student’s location based on their
IP address.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It would seem that many of software features that reinforce white supremacy,
sexism, ableism, and transphobia also are features of traditional in-classroom
testing procedures where children are seldom allowed, noises are held down,
students are observed continuously by proctors, etc. Bathroom breaks have always
been problematic whether onsite or online. One of my colleagues grew suspicious
of several male buddies who repeatedly took bathroom breaks during a final exam.
When he checked the nearby bathroom he found the course textbook and the
publishers test bank stuffed under paper towels in a disposal can.
It would seem that the author of the
above article downplays the seriousness of cheating and fails to recognize the
many, many students who are expelled from universities or or otherwise punished
for cheating. What cheating does is undermine the integrity of a school that
does nothing to prevent it.
Students who don't cheat despise when
professors let other students get away with cheathing.
Huge Cheating Scandals at the University of Virginia, Harvard, Ohio, Duke,
Cambridge, and Other Universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#UVA
Study: Student attitudes toward cheating may spill over into their careers
---
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-student-attitudes-careers.html
Question
Why did the University of Missouri rename its basketball arena?
Answer (forwarded by Debbie Bowling)
"Wal-Mart heir returns degree amid cheating claims," iWon News,
October 21, 2005 ---
http://snipurl.com/iWonOct21
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Wal-Mart heiress Elizabeth
Paige Laurie has surrendered her college degree following allegations that
she cheated her way through the school.
The University of Southern California said in a
statement that Laurie, 23, "voluntarily has surrendered her degree and
returned her diploma to the university. She is not a graduate of USC."
The statement, dated September 30, said the
university had ended its review of the allegations concerning Laurie.
Laurie's roommate, Elena Martinez, told a
television show last year that she was paid $20,000 to write term papers and
complete other assignments for the granddaughter of Wal-Mart co-founder Bud
Walton. Wal-Mart is the world's biggest retailer. The family could not be
reached for comment.
Following the allegations, the University of
Missouri renamed its basketball arena, which had been paid for in part by a
$425 million donation from the Lauries and was to have been called "Paige
Sports Arena."
Continued in article
Claims of Cheating in Online Courses at Iowa
---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/05/23/claims-cheating-online-courses-iowa?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=3bae57df2e-DNU20160523&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-3bae57df2e-197565045
Respondus and other online tools for
monitoring and exam cheating monitoring ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
Jensen Comment
Security video proctoring can sometimes be more preventative than onsite
proctoring. For example, if there is an onsite proctor students can see when the
proctor is distracted and cheat during the distraction such as pass answers or
use a cell phone when the proctor is looking elsewhere. If they are being
watched continuously by a proctoring camera they cannot be certain if and when
their cheating will be detected if they are cheating in a way that can be
detected by reviewing a video much like stores use videos to detect shoplifting.
Of course not all forms of cheating can be detected by a camera.
If the facial images on camera are quite good this will also help detect when
an unauthorized student is taking an exam.
Professors and Teachers Who Let Students
Cheat
Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management
Accused of Letting Students Cheat
"Northwestern's business school is being rocked by cheating allegations,"
by Abbie Jackson, Business Insider, November 6, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/cheating-scandal-at-northwesterns-kellogg-school-2015-11
Students at
Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management have claimed that six peers
blatantly cheated on a final and that the administration is trying to cover
it up, according to a detailed
article by Ethan Baron of Poets and Quants, which
covers business schools.
Six male students in the MS
in Management Studies program engaged in blatant cheating while taking their
account and statistics finals, Baron reported, citing three students who
spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The anonymous sources
claimed that the students were passing notes, drawing charts in the air, and
sharing answers on their exams when proctors left the room.
The three anonymous students
claim the
administration is complicit in the cheating because it doesn't want the
school's reputation ruined.
"Everybody in the class
knows what is happening and everyone in the class knows that the sole goal
of the administration is to silence the witnesses," one source told Baron.
The students also say that
they fear retribution from the school over discussing the cheating
allegations because the honor code forbids students from discussing possible
violations of the honor code.
The witnesses also
claim that they have been threatened over the phone with physical harm by
the cheaters, Baron reports.
"The day I come to know who
reported me, I will f------ kill him or her,” one of the cheaters pledged,
according to a witness.
Of the six students accused
of cheating, two told Poets and Quants that they did not cheat, two would
not address the allegations against them, and two did not speak to the news
publication.
Poets and Quants got an
email response from Kellogg saying that it takes any cheating allegations
seriously and "all Honor Code issues that are reported are investigated
thoroughly and, if necessary and appropriate, include hearings and
sanctions."
Continued in article
Now it's discriminatory in schools for teachers to try to stop minorities
from cheating
School leaders allow cheating ‘to boost the numbers’: staffers ---
http://nypost.com/2016/07/03/school-leaders-allow-cheating-to-boost-the-numbers-staffers/
Cheating is in the lesson plan at a Brooklyn high
school, where grade-fixing is so blatant, even intellectually disabled
students pass rigorous state tests, faculty members charge.
At Urban Action Academy in Canarsie, an 18-year-old
girl with the reading skills of a kindergartner had a passing grade of 65 on
the Regents US history exam, a whistleblower told The Post.
The girl scored a 73 on the algebra exam, despite
calculation skills at the level of a second-grader.
Teachers suspect the student’s tests were taken by
an educational aide.
Inflated scores will eventually backfire on
disabled students, a school staffer said: “It raises false hopes.”
Urban Action Academy administrators promote a
cheating culture, staffers say.
When the Regents Global History exam was given at
the school on June 14, students stashed review materials in toilet stalls so
they could sneak information during bathroom breaks.
Alert teachers tried to thwart the cheating. But
Assistant Principal Jordan Barnett slammed their “discriminatory” treatment
of students and ordered them to back off, teachers
say.
Continued in article
While the lawsuits mount
Across 20 Years of Fake Courses and Athlete Grade Changing Scandals at the
University of North Carolina
"What Was Jan Boxill Thinking? 3 Gems From Her Inbox," by Andy Thomason,
Chronicle of Higher Education, October 27, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/what-was-jan-boxill-thinking-3-gems-from-her-inbox/106098?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en&elq=54903d1d11d04fcbb1d0fd5284e039f4&elqCampaignId=1707&elqaid=6699&elqat=1&elqTrackId=4f6244591d494ee4b72c694f930fe1b9
To many in academe, the most intriguing question
following last year’s bombshell report of widespread academic fraud at the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was not “How could this happen?”
but, instead, “What was Jan Boxill thinking?”
Ms. Boxill, an ethicist and former chair of the
Chapel Hill faculty, was found to have been a willing participant in the
fake-classes scheme, conspiring to manufacture grades in order to keep
athletes eligible to compete when she was an academic counselor for the
players. Here’s a now-infamous example of Ms. Boxill trading emails with the
mastermind of the scheme, the former manager of the department of African
and Afro-American studies, Deborah Crowder:
Continued in article
"More lawsuits in UNC academic scandal; whistleblower settles with
university," by Sara Ganim, CNN, February 25, 2015 ---
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/25/us/unc-academic-fraud/
Three more athletes who say they were scammed out
of an education at the University of North Carolina are now suing over
academic fraud, and the whistleblower who exposed the fake-class system has
now settled her lawsuit with the university.
Former basketball player Kenya McBee has joined
former football player Mike McAdoo's federal class-action lawsuit, claiming
the university denied him and thousands of other athletes education when
advisers forced him to take classes that never met.
Former basketball player Leah Metcalf, and former
football player James Arnold filed a separate but similar class-action
lawsuit in state court in North Carolina.
Ken Wainstein, who was hired by the university to
act as an independent investigator, revealed in October that academic fraud
had taken place at UNC for 18 years, and that UNC officials were wrong when
they denied -- for nearly five years -- that anyone in athletics was
involved.
Instead it was players, like McAdoo, who were
blamed by the university for cheating and punished by the NCAA.
"All of these student-athletes were promised a
legitimate UNC education, were implored to trust UNC academic advising, and
were then guided into academically bereft courses against their interests,"
said attorney Jeremi Duru, one of the attorneys representing these athletes.
Earlier this year high-profile attorney Michael
Hausfeld filed a class-action suit against UNC and the NCAA over the same
scandal. About 3,100 students -- nearly half of them athletes -- who
enrolled in the fake classes could easily join these lawsuits.
Mary Willingham, the whistleblower who began
revealing details about the sham classes, accused UNC of retaliating against
her before she quit last year, and then sued the university to get her job
back.
Willingham told CNN that she reached a settlement
agreement with the school this week, although it had not yet been approved
by a judge. It would compensate her financially but not restore her job as a
learning specialist and adviser.
Continued in article
Cheated
by Jay M. Smith and Mary Willingham
Potomac, 280 pages, $26.95
Book Review of Cheated
Dark Days in Chapel Hill: If you ran a college and knew there was
substantial money to be had from sports but no requirement to educate athletes,
you might cut corners—that’s exactly what the University of North Carolina did
for nearly two decades.
Mr. Smith is a history professor at the University
of North Carolina, Ms. Willingham was for many years an academic counselor
there who brought attention to the scandal by granting interviews to the
Raleigh News & Observer. The authors accuse their state’s prestige public
campus of “broad dishonesty” and of stocking its teams in football and men’s
basketball—the “revenue sports”—with athletes to generate profit, then
breaking its promise to educate them. Ms. Willingham resigned last year and
later sued the school—a settlement was reached this week—and both authors
recount being shunned in Chapel Hill for helping bring the scandal to light,
so they may have an ax to grind. At times, their account flirts with a tone
of “if only they’d listened to me.” Nonetheless “Cheated” sounds an
important call for reform.
Details of the scheme confirm the worst fears about
“student athletes,” at least as regards football and men’s basketball.
(Other men’s and all women’s collegiate sports generally have good academic
reputations.) Some Tar Heels men’s basketball players, Ms. Willingham
contends, read at a third-grade level. (A university official last year
dismissed her research as “a travesty.”) As a student at Chapel Hill, Green
Bay Packers star Julius Peppers failed real courses but got B’s in what were
known as “paper classes,” barely supervised independent-study courses that
required only a single research paper. (Mr. Peppers claims that he “earned
every grade” he got at UNC.) “Cheated” reports that Rashad McCants, key to
the Tar Heels’ 2005 March Madness title, “saw his GPA rise significantly—he
even made the dean’s list—after a semester in which he had done no academic
work.”
Like many large universities, Chapel Hill has a
committee that grants admission waivers to top sports recruits. “Cheated”
says that the committee admitted players who scored below 400 on the verbal
SAT—that’s the 15th percentile, barely north of illiterate—or who were
chronically absent from high school except on game days. There is no chance
that a student so poorly prepared for college will earn a diploma. All he
can do is generate money for the university.
Most of the phony classes described in the report
were in the African and Afro-American Studies Department, under Prof. Julius
Nyang’oro and a departmental administrator. The department had multiple
subject codes for its courses, including AFRI, AFAM and SWAH (for Swahili).
This allowed transcripts to appear to satisfy Chapel Hill’s distribution
requirement, even if most of an athlete’s “classes” were within the same
department. Mr. Nyang’oro resigned in 2012 and was eventually indicted for
fraud, accused of accepting pay for “teaching” that was imaginary. Charges
were dropped when he agreed to assist investigators.
“Cheated” details how Mr. Nyang’oro liked to hang
around with athletes: He was even invited to serve as a “guest coach” for
the football team. Tutors and academic-support staffers also enjoyed
friendly access to the jocks. At football-factory and basketball-power
programs, teachers and tutors who avert their eyes from grade fixing may be
rewarded with courtside seats and sideline passes.
The authors and the report agree that Mr. Nyang’oro
and the administrator perceived that their role was partly to make academic
problems go away so that stars could tape their ankles. University of North
Carolina officials did not want to know how athletes who had barely bested
chance on their SATs were suddenly pulling A’s at a selective college.
“Cheated” recounts two instances when staffers told superiors that football
or men’s basketball stars handed in plagiarized work. The university took
swift, decisive action, the authors write: It punished those who made the
reports.
Last year, according to Education Department data,
UNC–Chapel Hill cleared $30 million in profit on football and men’s
basketball, a number that does not include whatever part of the $297 million
in gifts and grants received by the school last year was prompted by
athletics, or $130 million in assets held by the athletic foundation
affiliated with the college. Some of the gain is expended on sports that
lose money, but football and men’s basketball are still profit centers. At a
prestige university, the African-American studies department became a
mechanism to exploit African-Americans. Players may as well have been
picking cotton.
Across the big-college landscape, around $3 billion
annually flows from networks to schools in rights fees for national TV
broadcasts of football and men’s basketball. Ticket sales and local
marketing add to the total. Meanwhile, the NCAA almost never sanctions
colleges that don’t educate scholarship athletes.
Coaches and administrators make out well themselves
even if their players don’t get educations. Tar Heels men’s basketball coach
Roy Williams and football coach Larry Fedora each earn $1.8 million per
year, according to the USA Today NCAA salary database. Speaking and
endorsement fees for coaches rise with victory totals. Athletic director
Lawrence Cunningham draws $565,000 annually, plus bonuses for wins.
Perhaps the reader is thinking: Why this worry
about diplomas? Don’t big-college athletes go on to wealth in the pros?
Surely starry-eyed teens with Greek-god physiques arriving at the University
of North Carolina, or at any powerhouse program, believe they’re headed for
professional glory in prime time.
Yet most scholarship players never receive a pro
paycheck. “Cheated” reports that the Chapel Hill swindle went into full
swing in 2003, when the school was trying to rebuild its basketball
reputation. Since that year, 54 Tar Heels have been drafted by the NFL or
NBA. That’s less than a fifth of University of North Carolina football and
men’s basketball scholarship holders during the period. And Chapel Hill does
better than most: Broadly across NCAA football and men’s basketball, only
about 2% of athletic-scholarship recipients are drafted. Because a
bachelor’s degree adds about $1 million to lifetime earnings, the diploma is
the potential economic reward for the overwhelming majority of college
athletes.
Of course, athletes have only themselves to blame
for not taking their studies seriously. But many are encouraged by coaches
to believe pipe dreams about the pros, to focus all their effort on winning
so the coach gets his victory bonus. By the time NCAA athletes realize
they’ve been duped, their scholarships are exhausted. Used up and thrown
away, they are easily replaced by the next batch of starry-eyed teens who
believe their names will be called on draft day.
After the Chapel Hill scandal went public, the
school commissioned a flurry of reports, the two most prominent of which
appeared to tell all but were at heart whitewashes. The first, overseen by
former North Carolina Gov. Jim Martin, in 2012 declared “with confidence”
that the Tar Heels athletic department knew nothing, nothing: “This was not
an athletic scandal,” the report stated. “Sadly, it was clearly an academic
scandal; but an isolated one.” Mr. Smith and Ms. Willingham write that in
“an amazing display of evasiveness and dishonesty,” Chapel Hill chancellor
Holden Thorp pretended that the Martin report concluded the matter. Later
Mr. Thorp resigned and floated away to the provost’s post at Washington
University in St. Louis. The best-case analysis of Mr. Thorp is that he was
hopelessly incompetent; explanations go downhill from there. Yet he paid
little professional price. If an NCAA athlete commits a petty violation, he
can be thrown out of school. University leaders know that if their schools
are caught systematically cheating, a wrist slap will be their fate.
The second report, conducted by a law firm and
released in 2014, revealed that the first report was a fairy tale. Though
Mr. Thorp denied knowing about the “paper classes,” it concluded that he
knew Mr. Nyang’oro’s department “issued higher grades than most other
departments and was popular among student-athletes.” Why wasn’t this a red
flag? But this document, too, largely exonerated those who commissioned it.
Thousands of students got A’s in fake classes. Yet “the higher levels of the
university” were guilty only of “a loose, decentralized approach to
management” that prevented “meaningful oversight,” even though the existence
of “easy-grading classes with little rigor” was widely known.
The second report attached no blame to basketball
coach Williams, the most marketable figure in Chapel Hill athletics,
reporting his insistence that he “constantly preaches that [the] number one
responsibility [of] coaches and counselors is to make sure their players get
a good education.” The men’s basketball program has seven coaches for a
roster that averages 16—the kind of instructor-to-student ratio normally
found only in doctoral programs. Yet we’re asked to believe there’s no way
the coaches could have noticed that many players never seemed to need to be
in class. Mr. Williams should have been fired for presiding over an
institutionally corrupt program. Instead he was given a pass.
Cheating may have gone over the top at Chapel Hill,
but in collegiate sports, institutional corruption is a norm. The NCAA works
assiduously to change the subject from football and men’s basketball
graduation rates, a straightforward measure that anyone can understand.
Instead it offers Academic Progress Rate, a hocus-pocus metric seemingly
designed to be incomprehensible.
Currently the overall APR of big-college sports is
976 out of 1000. That sounds as if everyone’s nearly perfect. But on this
scale, perfection is achieved if all players have at least a 2.0 GPA. Since
the average GPA at public universities is 3.0, what the NCAA touts as
“academic progress” may equate to significantly below-average outcomes in
the classroom.
But the APR shifts the spotlight from actual
grades. Last fall, Louisville announced to fanfare that football coach Bobby
Petrino will receive a $500,000 bonus for his players’ academic performance.
Sound enlightened? The bonus is triggered by the team hitting a 935 APR.
Since the average for NCAA football programs is 951, academic excellence at
Louisville is now defined down to below average.
Cynicism regarding athletics and education pervades
the big-college system. The networks that are “broadcast partners” (their
term) with the NCAA—ABC, CBS, ESPN, Fox, NBC and Turner—have a financial
stake in college sports income and so steer clear of issues like grades and
graduation rates.
Nobody much seems to care so long as money flows.
Steven Spielberg is a member of the board of trustees at USC, where the
graduation rate for African-American men’s basketball players is 25% and 38%
for African-American football players. The reason these numbers are terrible
isn’t that athletes are departing early for the pros—in the past decade,
more than two-thirds of USC football and men’s basketball players were not
drafted. The numbers are terrible because players are used for revenue
without receiving educations. Mr. Spielberg has made two powerful movies
depicting the historical exploitation of African-Americans, “The Color
Purple” and “Amistad.” Where is his movie about present-day exploitation of
African-Americans in college athletics? He need only look out the window at
USC. Or he could buy the rights to “Cheated.”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the UNC scandal and the many, many other athletics
cheating scandals at major universities in the USA ---
http://www.cnn.com/2015/02/25/us/unc-academic-fraud/
We're led to believe that they nearly all cheated at one time or another. The
UNC scandal was unique in that it entailed fake courses and grade changes for
nearly two decades and covered multiple sports and even students who were not
into athletics. The sad thing is that many of the principle coaches and faculty
who cheated moved on from UNC before the scandal broke and are still thriving
unpunished in their careers.
Most of the students now suing UNC were not innocent victims and were
knowingly cheaters. They are victims in a larger sense that they were promised
an education (such as learning how to read) that was denied them in their years
at UNC.
"Former UNC Student-Athletes Detail Fake 'Paper Classes' (for nearly
20 years) In New Lawsuit Against School And NCAA," by Peter Jacobs,
Business Insider, January 23, 2015 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/lawsuit-against-unc-over-paper-classes-2015-1
Two former University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
student-athletes
filed a lawsuit Thursday against their former school
and the NCAA — the organization that
governs college sports — claiming they were deprived of a "meaningful
education."
The lawsuit —
first reported by The Washington Post — follows a
scathing investigative report released last October, detailing a
decades-long academic scandal that predominantly affected UNC
student-athletes.
The
scandal centers around so-called "paper classes" —
which typically never met and only required a final paper — that were
offered through the African and Afro-American Studies (AFAM) department.
These classes were explicity utilized by members of both UNC academic and
athletic departments to help athletes achieve a minimum GPA to maintain
their NCAA eligibility, according to former Justice Department official
Kenneth Wainstein's report.
The plaintiffs in the new lawsuit are former UNC
basketball player Rashanda McCants and former UNC football player Devon
Ramsay. Their lawyers are asking the court to certify the case as a class
action.
"This case arises out of the NCAA and UNC's abject
failure to safeguard and provide a meaningful education to scholarship
athletes who agreed to attend UNC — and take the field — in exchange for
academically sound instruction," McCants and Ramsay's complaint states.
UNC and the NCAA did not fulfill their promise to
scholarship athletes of a quality education and "breached their duties to
student-athletes in spectacular fashion," according to the lawsuit. Rather,
the lawsuit states:
UNC offered dozens of
sham "paper classes" that were designed not to educate but rather to
maintain UNC’s student-athletes' academic eligibility—i.e., to keep them on
the field. And over time these paper classes calcified into a "shadow
curriculum" in which no course attendance was required and no faculty were
involved.
The former student-athletes' complaint also details
how these classes first started.
Former AFAM department administrator Deborah
Crowder began the "paper classes" around 1989, under the supervision of AFAM
chair Julius Nyang'oro, according to the lawsuit. When the classes started,
Crowder "initiated a series of independent studies courses and invited
enrollment from student-athletes" and, even though she was not a member of
the UNC faculty, supervised and graded students' academic work, the lawsuit
claims.
During much of the
Class Period, Crowder managed these paper classes from beginning to end, but
she provided the students with no actual instruction. She registered the
selected students for the classes; she assigned them their paper topics; she
received their completed papers at the end of the semester; she graded the
papers; and she recorded the students' final class grades on the grade
rolls.
When Crowder graded the
papers, she typically awarded As or high Bs—even when she did not read the
papers. Rather, she would typically read the introduction and conclusion and
check to make sure the papers were of appropriate length.
The procedure somewhat changed in the late 1990s,
according to the lawsuit, as Crowder began to register the classes as
lecture courses, rather than independent studies. However, this did not seem
to affect the enrolled students.
"Despite their lecture designation on the course
schedule, these classes continued to operate in the same fashion," according
to the lawsuit. "There was no class attendance or student interaction with
anyone other than Crowder, and Crowder continued to grade the papers."
While these fake classes have been well documented
at UNC, Hausfeld LLP partner Sathya Gosselin, one of the lawyers
representing the former UNC student-athletes, told Business Insider that he
frequently hears from athletes concerned about the quality of their
education.
"I wish I could tell you that the experiences of a
UNC student athletes are not common across many schools, but I hear monthly
from student athletes and their families with concerns about the integrity
of the education they receive," Gosselin told Business Insider. "Its high
time that the powers that be in college sports be held accountable for the
promises they make to student-athletes about their education."
Plantiff and former UNC basketball player Rashanda
McCants released the following statement to Business Insider Friday:
I want to call on all
athletes to stand with me and Devon Ramsay. We must stand strong so that we
can be seen as more than just mere athletes. We are humans; we have voices;
and, although we all love our school, we also love ourselves and the dignity
we built within our own right. My intention is for people to know that I did
everything that was asked of me, on the court and off the court. But the
university and the NCAA failed to keep their promise to me and other college
athletes, and in turn we seek justice. With this said, I hope and pray my
fellow athletes stand with me and Devon in this effort to hold the powers
that be accountable.
In a statement sent to Business Insider, NCAA chief
legal officer Donald Remy said, "We have not yet been notified of the
lawsuit filed in a North Carolina court today. Because we have not seen the
filing, we have no comment."
Adams State University ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adams_State_University
"Adams State U. Changes Policies in Response to ‘Chronicle’ Investigation,"
by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 15, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/adams-state-u-changes-policies-in-response-to-chronicle-investigation/92341?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Adams State University has frozen enrollment in its
print-based correspondence courses in response to
an investigation by The Chronicle
detailing how a former coach helped athletes across the country cheat to
become eligible to compete, according to
a statement
on the university’s website. Adams State has also
commissioned an outside review of its student-verification process and
canceled a mathematics course mentioned in the Chronicle article.
The article states that the former coach,
identified only as “Mr. White,” helped multiple students at Adams State
cheat by impersonating them online and completing work for them. In recent
years, Adams State has enacted policies to step up the security of the
classes. Adams State’s president, David P. Svaldi, said in the statement
that the new review would “help us further assure academic integrity.”
Less Than Honorable Academic Standards and Integrity at the University of
Texas
"How Athletics and Academics Collided at One University," by Brad
Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 10, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/How-AthleticsAcademics/230795/?cid=at
Pamela G. Powell had a problem. As she administered
a final exam in remedial math at the University of Texas at Austin, she
reportedly spotted a high-profile basketball player cheating.
The player, Martez Walker, a freshman from Detroit,
was allegedly snapping pictures of test questions with his phone and looking
for answers from someone outside the classroom, according to two former
academic advisers informed of the incident.
Ms. Powell, a mathematics instructor who had
several athletes in her class that semester, the fall of 2013, contacted
Adam Creasy, her liaison with the athletic department. The instructor asked
what she should do, recalled Mr. Creasy, then an academic counselor for the
football team. He spoke with Brian Davis, then head of academic support for
football, who advised the instructor to talk with Randa Ryan, executive
senior associate athletic director for student services.
What happened next is unclear.
But Mr. Walker passed the class, according to Mr.
Creasy. Soon after, the player was named to the
Big 12 Commissioner’s Honor Roll, for earning at
least a 3.0 grade-point average. That season Mr. Walker became a key
contributor to the team, scoring in double figures seven times, including a
season-high 16 points in an NCAA tournament win against Arizona State
University.
Mr. Walker, who has since transferred to Oakland
University, in Michigan, where he is expected to play basketball this
season, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He withdrew from
Texas last fall, after he was arrested and suspended from the team following
allegations that he had assaulted his girlfriend.
Ms. Powell declined to speak about the situation,
citing student-privacy concerns.
The accusations against Mr. Walker, one of several
new claims of academic misconduct involving Texas athletes, illustrate how
the university has appeared to let academically deficient players push the
limits of its policy on academic integrity as it has sought to improve its
teams' academic records.
Continued in article
Jensen Question
Are there any NCAA Division 1 universities without academic scandals involving
athletes? Perhaps BYU, some Ivy-type universities, and the military
academies. That's about it as far as I can tell. These universities have an
edge. They require reading, writing, and arithmetic before admitting athletes.
And yes, some athletic department majors are much easier than basket weaving.
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Athletics
"Cheating in Atlanta: A Teachable Moment When unions attack testing and
ensure that bad teachers stay hired, it’s no wonder some of them broke the rules,"
by Jason L. Riley, The Wall Street Journal, April 8, 2015 ---
http://www.wsj.com/articles/cheating-in-atlanta-a-teachable-moment-1428521500?tesla=y
. . .
The state decided to investigate cheating in the
public schools after an analysis of test results by the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution found suspiciously high gains in math and reading
proficiency. “A miracle occurred at Atherton Elementary this summer, if its
standardized math test scores are to be believed,” the paper reported in
2008. “Half of the DeKalb County school’s fifth-graders failed a yearly
state test in the spring. When the 32 students took retests, not only did
every one of them pass—26 scored at the highest level.”
The suspicion was warranted. A subsequent 400-page
report issued by the state in 2011 found that 44 of 56 investigated schools
had falsified results on state exams. The cheating was “widespread and
organized” and conducted “with the tacit knowledge and even approval of
high-level administrators.” According to investigators, Atlanta Public
Schools Superintendent Beverly Hall and her aides allowed “cheating—at all
levels—to go unchecked for years.” Teachers would gather at so-called
“erasure” parties to correct answers on exams and inflate scores. Some 178
public-school employees, including 34 principals, were implicated.
Thirty-five of them were eventually indicted by a grand jury, and 21 reached
plea agreements. Hall maintained her innocence but died before she could
stand trial.
The reaction to these shenanigans from defenders of
the public-education status quo has been sad but not at all surprising. Yes,
the teachers were wrong to falsify scores and set up students to fail by
promoting them to the next grade unprepared. But if you are Randi
Weingarten, who heads the powerful American Federation of Teachers (AFT),
the real victims are your union members. For Ms. Weingarten, a strong
opponent of the testing requirements included in the No Child Left Behind
education law signed by President Bush, the Atlanta scandal “crystallizes
the unintended consequences of our test-crazed policies.”
Lily Eskelsen García, who is president of the AFT’s
sister union, the National Education Association (NEA), wrote in a
Journal-Constitution op-ed at the start of the trial that “too often, and in
too many places, we have turned the time-tested practice of teach, learn and
test into a system of test, blame and punish.” She added: “We are using
these tests to punish schools, teachers, students and school districts. This
simply isn’t right. It is toxic.”
. . .
In 2011 an investigation by a local television
station in Atlanta, WSB-TV, revealed that more than 700 teachers in Georgia
had repeatedly failed at least one portion of a test they must pass before
receiving a teaching certificate. Nearly 60 teachers failed the test at
least 10 times, and “there were 297 teachers on the payrolls of metro
Atlanta school systems in the past three years after having failed the state
certification test five times or more.”
Would you want your child taught by someone who
flunked the certification test five times, let alone 10? And would that
instructor be more or less likely to resort to changing student test scores
to hide his own incompetence?
The eagerness to blame No Child Left Behind’s
accountability provisions for these cheating scandals is off-base. The law
has its flaws, including an overly stringent method of judging a school’s
performance, but those flaws aren’t fatal. The much bigger problem is the
one exposed by WSB-TV. Long before Mr. Bush signed NCLB, public-school
teaching was attracting the least-qualified students from universities. For
decades, the test scores of people who enter teaching have trailed those of
people entering other professions, and research by Stanford economist Eric
Hanushek and others shows that the trend has worsened in recent years.
Moreover, brighter college students who do want to
teach for a few years after graduation, via highly selective programs such
as Teach for America, are scorned by the education establishment as
insufficiently committed to the profession. Among other things, Atlanta’s
cheating scandal is a byproduct of who goes into teaching.
"Schoolteacher Cheating," Walter E. Williams, Townhall,
February 5, 2014 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2014/02/05/schoolteacher-cheating-n1788915?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
Philadelphia's public school system has joined
several other big-city school systems, such as those in Atlanta, Detroit and
Washington, D.C., in widespread teacher-led cheating on standardized
academic achievement tests. So far, the city has fired three school
principals, and The Wall Street Journal reports, "Nearly 140 teachers and
administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of
the nation's largest cheating scandals." (1/23/14) (http://tinyurl.com/q5makm3).
Investigators found that teachers got together after tests to erase the
students' incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers. In some
cases, they went as far as to give or show students answers during the test.
Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia
Federation of Teachers, identifies the problem as district officials
focusing too heavily on test scores to judge teacher performance, and
they've converted low-performing schools to charters run by independent
groups that typically hire nonunion teachers. But William Hite,
superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, said cheating by
adults harms students because schools use test scores to determine which
students need remedial help, saying, "There is no circumstance, no matter
how pressured the cooker, that adults should be cheating students."
While there's widespread teacher test cheating to
conceal education failure, most notably among black children, it's just the
tip of the iceberg. The National Assessment of Educational Progress,
published by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for
Education Statistics and sometimes referred to as the Nation's Report Card,
measures student performance in the fourth and eighth grades. In 2013, 46
percent of Philadelphia eighth-graders scored below basic, and 35 percent
scored basic. Below basic is a score meaning that a student is unable to
demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for
proficient work at his grade level. Basic indicates only partial mastery.
It's a similar story in reading, with 42 percent below basic and 41 percent
basic. With this kind of performance, no one should be surprised that of the
state of Pennsylvania's 27 most poorly performing schools on the SAT, 25 are
in Philadelphia.
Continued in article
Too Little Remedy Too Late for a UNC Philosophy Professor (after nearly 20
years of fake classes and lax grading of athletes)
"UNC Is Firing The Sports Ethics Professor Involved In The Fake Class Scandal,"
by Peter Jacobs, Business Insider, December 31, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/unc-is-firing-the-sports-ethics-professor-involved-in-the-fake-class-scandal-2014-12
"Former UNC Basketball Star Says He Got Straight A's Without Going
To A Single Class," by Emmitt Knowlton, Business Insider, June 6,
2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/rashad-mccants-on-unc-academic-scandal-2014-6
Jensen Comment
The University of North Carolina would like to have us believe that the higher
administration and coaches were unaware of the athlete cheating scandals for
nearly 20 years. Yeah Right!
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who allow students to cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics scandals in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies2.htm#Athletics
"UNC's Fake 'Paper Classes' Were Not Just For Athletes — They Were Also
Very Popular With Frat Boys," by Peter Jacobs, Business Insider, October 23,
2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/uncs-fake-paper-classes-were-also-popular-with-frat-boys-2014-10
Jensen Comment
It's possible to estimate the number of students who took fake classes (the
media is reporting 3,100 students over 20 years) at the University of North
Carolina. But we will probably never know the number of students who forged
grade change slips for legitimate courses.
UNC's 20-Year Academic Scandals Were Not Confined to Athletics and African
and Afro-American Studies Departments
Where were the internal controls on grade change forms?
"Widespread Nature of Chapel Hill's Academic Fraud Is Laid Bare," by Jack
Stripling, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 23, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Widespread-Nature-of-Chapel/149603/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
My accounting background makes me think first about internal control. UNC
apparently had no internal control over grade changes. For example, when I
taught at Trinity University a grade change form had four carbon copies that I
submitted to the registrars office. When the student's grade was changed one of
those copies I signed was returned to me.
At UNC the Afro-American Studies Department left grade change forms where
students could get blank copies and forge instructor signatures for virtually
any courses on campus. Apparently a copy of a grade change form was not sent
back to an instructor who would then realize that somebody had forged his or her
signature. UNC gets an F on internal control, and nobody should change that
grade!
Yeah Right! Wink! Wink!
What is unbelievable is that UNC said this went on for 20 years without coaches,
higher administrative officials, and 99.9% of the faculty being aware that
thousands of students were cheating, only about half of them being athletes.
"UNC investigation: Bogus classes were pushed by academic counselors,"
by Dan Kane and Jane Stancill, newsobserver.com, October 22, 2014,
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/10/22/4255098_unc-investigation-bogus-classes.html?rh=
"New Report Implicates UNC's Athletics Department In Fake Classes Scandal,"
by Peter Jacobs, Business Insider, October 22, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-report-implicates-uncs-athletics-department-in-fake-classes-scandal-2014-10
The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
athletics department knew about and encouraged fake classes and grade
manipulation for the school's athletes, according to a new report released
Wednesday.
A previous report released in 2012
revealed a long history at UNC of classes in the Department of Afro and
African-American Studies that never met, as well
as a culture of changing and improving grades. These classes were heavily
populated by student athletes.
The 2012 report cleared the UNC athletics
department of any involvement in the athletes' grade inflation.
This no longer seems to be the case. According to
The News & Observer, Wednesday's report "found
a new culprit: the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes ... The
report describes a fairly broad group of academic and athletic officials who
knew about athletes getting better grades in classes that only required
papers, yet taking little or no action."
Additionally,
student newspaper The Daily Tar Heel reports, the
new report "found clear evidence that academic counselors from the football,
men's basketball and women's basketball teams asked for players to be
enrolled in bogus independent study classes in order for them to be
eligible."
The more recent investigation was led by Kenneth
Wainstein, a former U.S. Justice Department official. Wainstein reportedly
had an unprecedented level of access to material related to the UNC scandal,
as well as the cooperation of former African studies chairman Julius
Nyang'oro and department administrator Deborah Crowder.
"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death threats
after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading age of a THIRD
GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014 ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html
Mary Willingham exposed college athletes' lack of
academic abilities
- She found that 10 per cent read at elementary
school level
- A majority of players' reading level was
between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year for
University of North Carolina
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
More often than not employers make it uncomfortable for whistleblowers who don't
resign. UNC does not deny that for ten years varsity athletes took fake courses
and were "allowed" to change their grades. They just contend that these athletes
did not suffer academically because they were in the wonderful learning
environment of the University of North Carolina. Yeah Right!
UNC Fudging the Grades of Athletes
"Scandal Bowl: Why Tar Heel Fraud Might Be Just the Start," by Paul M.
Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/unc-athletic-scandal-charges-of-fraud-could-be-tip-of-wider-revelations?campaign_id=DN010614
The corruption of
academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus could
turn into the most revelatory of all of the undergraduate sports scandals in
recent memory. Beginning three years ago with what sounded like
garden-variety reports of under-the-table payments from agents and improper
classroom help for athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include
evidence of hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold
numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and faculty
signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate campaign to keep elite
basketball and football players academically eligible to play.
After belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in
this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story deserves wider
attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reporting already done by the News &
Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of North Carolina.
The rot in Chapel Hill
undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest public
institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes that did not
meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is needed. There’s also the
particularly pernicious way that the school’s African and Afro-American
Studies Department has been used to inflate the GPAs of basketball and
football players. The corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black
history and culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of
college athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion.
(UNC’s former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been
criminally indicted for fraud.)
Another reason Chapel Hill
requires sustained investigation is the manner in which the athletic and
academic hierarchies at UNC, along with the National Collegiate Athletic
Association, have so far whitewashed the scandal. Officials have repeatedly
denied that the fiasco’s roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name
of coddling a disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has
left many students intellectually crippled.
Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s lead
investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more
power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task
for which Kane has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state
disloyalty. As he wrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed to
connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and months, I hope I
can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some long-distance perspective.
Valuable tips from concerned local people, some of them UNC alumni, are
already pouring in, and that’s part of the reason I’m going to pursue the
story. Keep those e-mails coming.
One source of insight is Jay
Smith, a professor of early modern French history at UNC. A serious scholar
who understands the university’s sports-happy culture, Smith has developed a
powerful distaste for the way his employer has obfuscated the scandal.
“What’s going on here is so important,” he told me by telephone, “because
it’s emblematic of what I think goes on at major universities all across the
country,” where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.
Smith has the best sort of
self-interested motivation for making sense of what has happened on his
campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess, based in part on
statistics and personal experiences proffered by UNC instructors assigned
over the years to assist varsity athletes. To me that sounds like a
page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO movie.
I asked Smith what he thinks
is going to happen next. He pointed to comments that the local district
attorney made when the disgraced former Afro-Am chairman, Nyang’oro, was
indicted in December. Orange County DA Jim Woodall told the News &
Observer that a second person is also under investigation and could be
indicted soon. Woodall did not identify the second target, except to say the
person is not someone who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have
identified Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as
being involved in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted.
“She retired in 2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to comment
publicly, and Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t return my e-mail
inquiry.
The indictment of Crowder, a
relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack open the case. It
defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant would have operated a rogue
department without the knowledge of more senior faculty members, if not top
university administrators. It further defies reason that this pair would
have created phony classes for athletes without the urging and participation
of people in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going
to have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.
Even before that
happens, according to Smith, one or more well-positioned whistle-blowers are
likely to go public and start naming names if they think the powers that be
are planning to isolate Crowder and Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This
thing goes much higher, and there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.
"Alleged Academic Fraud at U. of North Carolina Tests NCAA's Reach: Myths
surrounding the group's investigation cloud the controversy at Chapel Hill,"
by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Alleged-Academic-Fraud-at-U/134270/
"North Carolina
Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program," Inside Higher Ed,
September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
"Former UNC Basketball Star Says He Got Straight A's Without Going To A
Single Class," by Emmitt Knowlton, Business Insider, June 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessinsider.com/rashad-mccants-on-unc-academic-scandal-2014-6
Rashad McCants, the second-leading scorer on the
University of North Carolina's 2004-05 basketball team that won the national
championship,
told ESPN's "Outside the Lines" that he rarely
attended class, turned in papers written entirely by tutors, and took bogus
courses in the African-American Studies department during his three years in
Chapel Hill.
"I didn't write any papers," McCants said. "When it
was time to turn in our papers for our paper classes, we would get a call
from our tutor ... carpool over to the tutor's house and basically get our
papers and go about our business."
During the spring term of 2005, McCants says he
made the Dean's List and got straight-A's in four classes that he never
attended.
When asked if UNC men's basketball coach Roy
Williams knew about this, McCants told Outside The Lines, "I think he knew
100%. ... It was something that was a part of the program."
Chapel Hill Researcher at Center of Turmoil Over Athletes’ Literacy
Resigns ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/chapel-hill-researcher-at-center-of-turmoil-over-athletes-literacy-resigns/76317?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death threats
after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading age of a THIRD
GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014 ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html
Mary Willingham exposed college athletes' lack of
academic abilities
- She found that 10 per cent read at elementary
school level
- A majority of players' reading level was
between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year for
University of North Carolina
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
More often than not employers make it uncomfortable for whistleblowers who don't
resign. UNC does not deny that for ten years varsity athletes took fake courses
and were "allowed" to change their grades. They just contend that these athletes
did not suffer academically because they were in the wonderful learning
environment of the University of North Carolina. Yeah Right!
UNC Fudging the Grades of Athletes
"Scandal Bowl: Why Tar Heel Fraud Might Be Just the Start," by Paul M.
Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/unc-athletic-scandal-charges-of-fraud-could-be-tip-of-wider-revelations?campaign_id=DN010614
The corruption of
academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus could
turn into the most revelatory of all of the undergraduate sports scandals in
recent memory. Beginning three years ago with what sounded like
garden-variety reports of under-the-table payments from agents and improper
classroom help for athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include
evidence of hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold
numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and faculty
signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate campaign to keep elite
basketball and football players academically eligible to play.
After belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in
this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story deserves wider
attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reporting already done by the News &
Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of North Carolina.
The rot in Chapel Hill
undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest public
institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes that did not
meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is needed. There’s also the
particularly pernicious way that the school’s African and Afro-American
Studies Department has been used to inflate the GPAs of basketball and
football players. The corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black
history and culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of
college athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s
former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been criminally
indicted for fraud.)
Another reason Chapel Hill
requires sustained investigation is the manner in which the athletic and
academic hierarchies at UNC, along with the National Collegiate Athletic
Association, have so far whitewashed the scandal. Officials have repeatedly
denied that the fiasco’s roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name
of coddling a disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has
left many students intellectually crippled.
Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s lead
investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more
power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task
for which Kane has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state
disloyalty. As he wrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed to
connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and months, I hope I
can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some long-distance perspective.
Valuable tips from concerned local people, some of them UNC alumni, are
already pouring in, and that’s part of the reason I’m going to pursue the
story. Keep those e-mails coming.
One source of insight is Jay
Smith, a professor of early modern French history at UNC. A serious scholar
who understands the university’s sports-happy culture, Smith has developed a
powerful distaste for the way his employer has obfuscated the scandal.
“What’s going on here is so important,” he told me by telephone, “because
it’s emblematic of what I think goes on at major universities all across the
country,” where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.
Smith has the best sort of
self-interested motivation for making sense of what has happened on his
campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess, based in part on
statistics and personal experiences proffered by UNC instructors assigned
over the years to assist varsity athletes. To me that sounds like a
page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO movie.
I asked Smith what he thinks
is going to happen next. He pointed to comments that the local district
attorney made when the disgraced former Afro-Am chairman, Nyang’oro, was
indicted in December. Orange County DA Jim Woodall told the News &
Observer that a second person is also under investigation and could be
indicted soon. Woodall did not identify the second target, except to say the
person is not someone who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have
identified Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as
being involved in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted.
“She retired in 2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to comment
publicly, and Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t return my e-mail
inquiry.
The indictment of Crowder, a
relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack open the case. It
defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant would have operated a rogue
department without the knowledge of more senior faculty members, if not top
university administrators. It further defies reason that this pair would
have created phony classes for athletes without the urging and participation
of people in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going
to have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.
Even before that
happens, according to Smith, one or more well-positioned whistle-blowers are
likely to go public and start naming names if they think the powers that be
are planning to isolate Crowder and Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This
thing goes much higher, and there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.
"Alleged Academic Fraud at U. of North Carolina Tests NCAA's Reach: Myths
surrounding the group's investigation cloud the controversy at Chapel Hill,"
by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Alleged-Academic-Fraud-at-U/134270/
"North Carolina
Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program," Inside Higher Ed,
September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
Chapel Hill Researcher at Center of Turmoil Over Athletes’ Literacy
Resigns ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/chapel-hill-researcher-at-center-of-turmoil-over-athletes-literacy-resigns/76317?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death
threats after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading
age of a THIRD GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014
---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html
Mary Willingham exposed college athletes'
lack of academic abilities
- She found that 10 per cent read at
elementary school level
- A majority of players' reading level
was between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year
for University of North Carolina
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
More often than not employers make it uncomfortable for whistleblowers who don't
resign. UNC does not deny that for ten years varsity athletes took fake courses
and were "allowed" to change their grades. They just contend that these athletes
did not suffer academically because they were in the wonderful learning
environment of the University of North Carolina. Yeah Right!
UNC Fudging the Grades of Athletes
"Scandal Bowl: Why Tar Heel Fraud Might Be Just the Start," by
Paul M. Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/unc-athletic-scandal-charges-of-fraud-could-be-tip-of-wider-revelations?campaign_id=DN010614
The corruption
of academics at the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill
campus could turn into the most revelatory of all of the
undergraduate sports scandals in recent memory. Beginning three
years ago with what sounded like garden-variety reports of
under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help for
athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of
hundreds of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold
numbers of grades have been changed without authorization and
faculty signatures forged—all in the service of an elaborate
campaign to keep elite basketball and football players academically
eligible to play.
After
belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story
deserves wider attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reporting already done by the
News & Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of
North Carolina.
The rot in Chapel
Hill undermines UNC’s reputation as one of the nation’s finest
public institutions of higher learning. Officials created classes
that did not meet. That’s not the only reason more scrutiny is
needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way that the
school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used
to inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The
corruption of a scholarly discipline devoted to black history and
culture underscores a racial subtext to the exploitation of college
athletes that typically goes unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s
former longtime Afro-Am chairman, Julius Nyang’oro, has been
criminally indicted for fraud.)
Another reason
Chapel Hill requires sustained investigation is the manner in which
the athletic and academic hierarchies at UNC, along with the
National Collegiate Athletic Association, have so far whitewashed
the scandal. Officials have repeatedly denied that the fiasco’s
roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name of coddling a
disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has left
many students intellectually crippled.
Dan Kane, the
News & Observer‘s lead investigative reporter, does
old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more power to him. Digging
up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task for which Kane
has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state disloyalty.
As he wrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed
to connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and
months, I hope I can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some
long-distance perspective. Valuable tips from concerned local
people, some of them UNC alumni, are already pouring in, and that’s
part of the reason I’m going to pursue the story. Keep those e-mails
coming.
One source of
insight is Jay Smith, a professor of early modern French history at
UNC. A serious scholar who understands the university’s sports-happy
culture, Smith has developed a powerful distaste for the way his
employer has obfuscated the scandal. “What’s going on here is so
important,” he told me by telephone, “because it’s emblematic of
what I think goes on at major universities all across the country,”
where the business of sports undermines the mission of education.
That sounds right to me.
Smith has the best
sort of self-interested motivation for making sense of what has
happened on his campus: He’s writing a book about the whole mess,
based in part on statistics and personal experiences proffered by
UNC instructors assigned over the years to assist varsity athletes.
To me that sounds like a page-turner—and even the basis of an HBO
movie.
I asked Smith what
he thinks is going to happen next. He pointed to comments that the
local district attorney made when the disgraced former Afro-Am
chairman, Nyang’oro, was indicted in December. Orange County DA Jim
Woodall told the News & Observer that a second person is
also under investigation and could be indicted soon. Woodall did not
identify the second target, except to say the person is not someone
who currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have identified
Nyang’oro’s longtime department manager, Deborah Crowder, as being
involved in the bogus classes,” the News & Observer noted.
“She retired in 2009.” Both Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to
comment publicly, and Nyang’oro’s criminal defense lawyer didn’t
return my e-mail inquiry.
The indictment of
Crowder, a relatively low-level administrative figure, could crack
open the case. It defies logic that Nyang’oro and his assistant
would have operated a rogue department without the knowledge of more
senior faculty members, if not top university administrators. It
further defies reason that this pair would have created phony
classes for athletes without the urging and participation of people
in the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going to
have ample reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.
Even before
that happens, according to Smith, one or more well-positioned
whistle-blowers are likely to go public and start naming names if
they think the powers that be are planning to isolate Crowder and
Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This thing goes much higher, and
there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.
"Alleged Academic Fraud at U. of North Carolina Tests NCAA's Reach: Myths
surrounding the group's investigation cloud the controversy at Chapel Hill,"
by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Alleged-Academic-Fraud-at-U/134270/
"North Carolina
Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program," Inside Higher Ed,
September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
"Walmart Spokesman Resigns Over a Lie on His Résumé," Time Magazine,
September 16, 2014 ---
http://time.com/3381672/wal-mart-spokesman-resigns-resume-david-tovar/?xid=newsletter-brief
David Tovar
represented himself as a graduate of the University of Delaware but in fact
had no such degree
In the middle of a probe over alleged corruption in
its international division, Walmart has caught its own spokesman in a lie.
David Tovar, Walmart’s vice president of
communications, and the company’s spokesperson as it responds to allegations
that it violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, has said he is
leaving the job he has held since 2006, Bloomberg
reports.
Continued in article
The above revelation reminds me of a 2007 case at MIT
"MIT dean of admissions confesses fraud, resigns," by Kimberly Chow
Friday, Yale Daily News, April 27, 2007 ---
http://yaledailynews.com/blog/2007/04/27/mit-dean-of-admissions-confesses-fraud-resigns/
Marilee Jones, dean of admissions at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., resigned
Wednesday after university officials discovered she had fabricated her
academic credentials.
Jones’ resume stated that she had earned degrees
from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Union College and Albany Medical
College, but MIT administrators said these were all false claims. After
receiving a phone call last week suggesting that the university investigate
Jones’ credentials, MIT officials determined that Jones had misrepresented
her academic record. Jones, whose resignation was effective immediately,
worked at MIT for 28 years and had acted as dean of admissions since 1997.
Senior Associate Director of Admissions Stuart
Schmill will act as interim director of admissions, and a search for a new
dean of admissions will begin presently, MIT Dean for Undergraduate
Education Daniel Hastings said in an e-mail to the MIT community Wednesday.
Jones issued a statement explaining that she had
falsified her resume when she first applied for a lower-level position at
the university.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Schoolteacher Cheating," Walter E. Williams, Townhall,
February 5, 2014 ---
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2014/02/05/schoolteacher-cheating-n1788915?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
Philadelphia's public school system has joined
several other big-city school systems, such as those in Atlanta, Detroit and
Washington, D.C., in widespread teacher-led cheating on standardized
academic achievement tests. So far, the city has fired three school
principals, and The Wall Street Journal reports, "Nearly 140 teachers and
administrators in Philadelphia public schools have been implicated in one of
the nation's largest cheating scandals." (1/23/14) (http://tinyurl.com/q5makm3).
Investigators found that teachers got together after tests to erase the
students' incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers. In some
cases, they went as far as to give or show students answers during the test.
Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia
Federation of Teachers, identifies the problem as district officials
focusing too heavily on test scores to judge teacher performance, and
they've converted low-performing schools to charters run by independent
groups that typically hire nonunion teachers. But William Hite,
superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, said cheating by
adults harms students because schools use test scores to determine which
students need remedial help, saying, "There is no circumstance, no matter
how pressured the cooker, that adults should be cheating students."
While there's widespread teacher test cheating to
conceal education failure, most notably among black children, it's just the
tip of the iceberg. The National Assessment of Educational Progress,
published by the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for
Education Statistics and sometimes referred to as the Nation's Report Card,
measures student performance in the fourth and eighth grades. In 2013, 46
percent of Philadelphia eighth-graders scored below basic, and 35 percent
scored basic. Below basic is a score meaning that a student is unable to
demonstrate even partial mastery of knowledge and skills fundamental for
proficient work at his grade level. Basic indicates only partial mastery.
It's a similar story in reading, with 42 percent below basic and 41 percent
basic. With this kind of performance, no one should be surprised that of the
state of Pennsylvania's 27 most poorly performing schools on the SAT, 25 are
in Philadelphia.
Continued in article
"California Kids Go to Court to Demand a Good Education The state has
275,000 teachers. On average, two are fired annually for poor performance,"
by Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2014
---
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303553204579347014002418436?mod=djemMER_h
The trial began this week in a lawsuit in Los
Angeles Superior Court aimed at bringing meaningful and badly needed change
to California's public schools. The suit could have far-reaching effects in
American education—in particular on teacher-tenure policies that too often
work to the detriment of students.
I am among the lawyers representing nine brave
schoolchildren, ages 7 to 17, in Vergara v. California. Our arguments are
premised on what the California Supreme Court said more than 40 years ago:
that education is "the lifeline of both the individual and society," serving
the "distinctive and priceless function" as "the bright hope for entry of
poor and oppressed into the mainstream of American society." Every child,
the court held in Serrano v. Priest, has a fundamental right under the
California Constitution to equal educational opportunities.
We will introduce evidence and testimony that the
California school system is violating the rights of students across the
state. While most teachers are working hard and doing a good job, California
law compels officials to leave some teachers in the classroom who are known
to be grossly ineffective.
Because of existing laws, some of the state's best
teachers—including "teachers of the year"—are routinely laid off because
they lack seniority. In other cases, teachers convicted of heinous crimes
receive generous payoffs to go away because school districts know that there
is slim hope of dismissing them. California law makes such firings virtually
impossible. The system is so irrational that it compels administrators to
bestow "permanent employment"—lifetime tenure—on individuals before they
even finish their new-teacher training program or receive teaching
credentials.
As a result of this nonsensical regime, certain
students get stuck with utterly incompetent or indifferent teachers,
resulting in serious harm from which the students may never recover. Such
arbitrary, counterproductive rules would never be tolerated in any other
business. They should especially not be tolerated where children's futures
are at stake.
But in California, as in other states, outdated
laws, entrenched political interests, and policy gridlock have thwarted
legislative solutions meant to protect public-school students, who are not
old enough to vote and are in essence locked out of the political process.
That is why our plaintiffs decided to take a stand and bring this lawsuit
asserting their state constitutional rights.
Through this lawsuit, we are seeking to strike down
five state laws:
• The "last-in, first-out" or LIFO law, which
demoralizes teachers by reducing them to numbers based on their start date,
and forces schools to lay off the most junior teachers no matter how
passionate and successful they are at teaching students.
• The "permanent employment" law, which forces
school districts to make an irreversible commitment to keep teachers until
retirement a mere 18 months after the teachers' first day on the job—long
before the districts can possibly make such an informed decision.
• Three "dismissal" laws that together erect
unnecessary and costly barriers to terminating a teacher based on poor
performance or misconduct. Out of 275,000 teachers statewide, only two
teachers are dismissed each year on average for poor performance. In Los
Angeles, it costs an average of between $250,000 and $450,000 in legal and
other costs, and takes more than four years to dismiss a single teacher.
Even without these laws, ample protections exist for protecting public
employees—including teachers—from improper dismissal.
By forcing some students into classrooms with
teachers unable or unwilling to teach, these laws are imposing substantial
harm. One of our experts, Harvard economist Raj Chetty, recently analyzed
the school district data and anonymous tax records of more than 2.5 million
students in a large urban school district in the Northeast over a 20-year
period.
He found that students taught by a single highly
ineffective teacher experience a nearly 3% reduction in expected lifetime
earnings. They also have a lower likelihood of attending college and an
increased risk of teenage pregnancy compared with students taught by average
teachers. He also conducted a study showing that laying off the least
effective instead of the least experienced teachers would increase the total
lifetime earnings of a single classroom of Los Angeles students by
approximately $2.1 million.
Even worse, the data show that many of the least
effective teachers tend to end up in schools serving predominantly
low-income and minority communities. Thus these laws are exacerbating the
very achievement gap that education is supposed to ameliorate. For example,
a recent study of the Los Angeles Unified School District found that
African-American and Hispanic students are 43% and 68% more likely,
respectively, than white students to be taught by a highly ineffective
teacher. This disparity is the equivalent of losing a month or more of
school every year.
The California teachers unions are opposed to the
goals of our lawsuit and have intervened to help the state of California
defend these harmful laws. But the unions do not speak for all teachers. We
have heard from hundreds of teachers since we filed the case in May 2012.
These are teachers who don't want to be treated like a faceless seniority
number, and who don't want to be laid off just because they started teaching
three days after the ineffective, tenured teacher next door. Some of them
will testify during the trial.
Continued in article
From Infobits on November 29, 2001
"Forget About Policing Plagiarism. Just
Teach" (THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION, vol. 48, issue 12,
November 16, 2001, p. B24) by Rebecca Moore Howard, associate professor of
writing and rhetoric, and director of the writing program, at Syracuse
University.
Howard argues that "[i]n our stampede to fight
what The New York Times calls a 'plague' of plagiarism, we risk becoming the
enemies rather than the mentors of our students; we are replacing the
student-teacher relationship with the criminal-police relationship. Further,
by thinking of plagiarism as a unitary act rather than a collection of
disparate activities, we risk categorizing all of our students as criminals.
Worst of all, we risk not recognizing that our own pedagogy needs reform. Big
reform." The article is online to CHE subscribers at http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i12/12b02401.htm
Jensen Comment
I can't buy this argument. It would bother my conscience too much to give a
higher grade to a student that I strongly suspect has merely copied the
arguments elsewhere than the grade given to a student who tried to develop his
or her own arguments. How can Professor Howard in good conscience give a higher
grade to the suspected plagiarist? This rewards "street smart" at the
expense of "smart." It also advocates becoming more street smart at
the expense of real learning.
I might be cynical here and hope that Professor Howard's physicians graduated
from medical schools who passed students on the basis of being really good
copiers of papers they could not comprehend.
What is not mentioned in the quote above is the labor-union-style argument
also presented by Professor Howard in the article. She argues that we're
already to overworked to have the time to investigate suspected
plagiarism. Is refusing to investigate really being professional as an
honorable academic?
"Chicago State U.’s Interim Provost Is Accused of Plagiarism," by
Charles Huckabee, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 14, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/chicago-state-u-s-interim-provost-is-accused-of-plagiarism/71383?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
The University of Illinois at Chicago is reviewing
the dissertation of Chicago State University’s interim provost, Angela
Henderson, amid allegations that parts of it were plagiarized, the
Chicago Tribune reported. Ms. Henderson, who
became who became interim provost in July, received her Ph.D. in nursing
from Illinois-Chicago in August.
The investigation began last month after a
professor at Chicago State raised concerns that parts of the document were
copied from other sources without proper attribution or with inadequate
citation. A faculty committee of the UIC Graduate College has reviewed the
investigation’s findings and has made a confidential recommendation to Karen
J. Colley, dean of the college. She is expected to decide this week whether
any further action is warranted, a university spokesman said.
The plagiarism charge was first brought by Robert
Bionaz, an associate professor of history at Chicago State who is among a
group of faculty members who operate a blog that has criticized Ms.
Henderson and the university’s president, Wayne D. Watson, among other
administrators. The blog has twice
received letters from a university lawyer,
most recently on January 3, demanding that it
remove images and references to Chicago State and even change its domain
name,
csufacultyvoice.blogspot.com.
"Former University of North Carolina professor faces fraud charge in
academic scandal," Fox News, December 2, 2013 ---
http://www.foxnews.com/sports/2013/12/02/former-university-north-carolina-professor-faces-fraud-charge-in-academic/
A former professor at the center of an academic
scandal involving athletes at the University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill has been charged with a felony, accused of receiving $12,000 in payment
for a lecture course in which he held no classes.
A grand jury on Monday indicted Julius Nyang'Oro
with a single felony count of obtaining property by false pretenses.
Nyang'Oro was chairman of the Department of African
and Afro-American Studies. He resigned from that post in 2011 during a
campus investigation that found certain classes in the department that
instructors did not teach, undocumented grade changes and faked faculty
signatures on some grade reports.
The scandal contributed to the departure of
football coach Butch Davis and the resignation of a former chancellor,
Holden Thorp.
Nyang'Oro, who retired in 2012, could face up to 10
months in prison if convicted. The university said it recouped the $12,000
from his final paycheck.
Calls to two numbers listed for Nyang'Oro rang
busy. A man answering a call to a third number for Nyang'Oro on indictment
documents hung up without comment and follow-up messages weren't returned.
Orange County District Attorney James Woodall said
the professor's 2011 summer course was supposed to have had regular class
meetings. But he said Nyang'oro instead ran an independent study class that
required students to write papers but not show up. The school found that the
course, a late addition to the schedule, had an enrollment of 18 football
players and one former football player.
A campus investigation into academic fraud released
last year blamed the scandal solely on Nyang'oro and a department
administrator who also has since retired. The probe led by former Gov. Jim
Martin concluded that alleged fraud didn't involve other faculty or members
of the athletic department.
Martin, a former college chemistry professor, was
aided by consultants with experience in academic investigations. After
shortcomings of the report's method were highlighted, Martin and university
officials said they lacked the subpoena powers of State Bureau of
Investigation, or SBI, to force people to answer questions and produce
evidence.
"Both the university and Mr. Woodall relied on the
SBI to help determine whether any criminal acts had occurred, since the SBI
had broad investigative powers not available to the university," said Tom
Ross, president of the state university system.
He added in his statement Monday that the
university's ongoing cooperation with the criminal process will continue to
its conclusion.
Martin said there was no evidence the university's
athletics department pushed students into courses with known irregularities
that would allow athletes to remain eligible for competition. Unauthorized
grade changes in the African studies department were not limited to
student-athletes, Martin said, and athletes generally didn't flock to
problematic African studies courses.
The NCAA sanctioned the university's football
program in March 2012 with a one-year bowl ban and scholarship reductions
for previously discovered improper benefits including cash and travel
accommodations. The NCAA reviewed irregularities in the African studies
department after an earlier campus probe found 54 problem classes between
2007 and 2011. The collegiate sports oversight body told university
officials it had found no new rules violations.
The school's chancellor issued her own statement
Monday on the indictment.
"The action described in today's indictment is
completely inconsistent with the standards and aspirations of this great
institution," Chancellor Carol Folt said in a statement. "This has been a
difficult chapter in the university's history, and we have learned many
lessons."
"Scandal Bowl: Why Tar Heel Fraud Might Be Just the Start," by Paul M.
Barrett, Bloomberg Businessweek, January 6, 2014 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-06/unc-athletic-scandal-charges-of-fraud-could-be-tip-of-wider-revelations?campaign_id=DN010614
The corruption of academics at the University
of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus could turn into the most revelatory
of all of the undergraduate sports scandals in recent memory. Beginning
three years ago with what sounded like garden-variety reports of
under-the-table payments from agents and improper classroom help for
athletes, the affair has spread and deepened to include evidence of hundreds
of sham courses offered since the early 1990s. Untold numbers of grades have
been changed without authorization and faculty signatures forged—all in the
service of an elaborate campaign to keep elite basketball and football
players academically eligible to play.
After belatedly catching up with the UNC debacle in
this recent dispatch,
I’ve decided the still-developing story deserves wider
attention. Or, to put it more precisely, the
excellent reporting already done by the News &
Observer of Raleigh merits amplification outside of North Carolina.
The rot in Chapel Hill undermines UNC’s reputation
as one of the nation’s finest public institutions of higher learning.
Officials created classes that did not meet. That’s not the only reason more
scrutiny is needed. There’s also the particularly pernicious way that the
school’s African and Afro-American Studies Department has been used to
inflate the GPAs of basketball and football players. The corruption of a
scholarly discipline devoted to black history and culture underscores a
racial subtext to the exploitation of college athletes that typically goes
unidentified in polite discussion. (UNC’s former longtime Afro-Am chairman,
Julius Nyang’oro, has been criminally indicted for fraud.)
Another reason Chapel Hill requires sustained
investigation is the manner in which the athletic and academic hierarchies
at UNC, along with the National Collegiate Athletic Association, have so far
whitewashed the scandal. Officials have repeatedly denied that the fiasco’s
roots trace to an illicit agenda that, in the name of coddling a
disproportionately black undergraduate athlete population, has left many
students intellectually crippled.
Dan Kane, the News & Observer‘s lead
investigative reporter, does old-school, just-the-facts-m’am work—and more
power to him. Digging up the basic data has been a lonely and arduous task
for which Kane has been rewarded with craven accusations of home state
disloyalty. As he wrote
last month, the six official “reviews” and
“investigations” of the wayward Afro-Am Department have all failed to
connect the dots in any meaningful way. In coming weeks and months, I hope I
can supplement Kane’s dogged efforts with some long-distance perspective.
Valuable tips from concerned local people, some of them UNC alumni, are
already pouring in, and that’s part of the reason I’m going to pursue the
story. Keep those e-mails coming.
One source of insight is Jay Smith, a professor of
early modern French history at UNC. A serious scholar who understands the
university’s sports-happy culture, Smith has developed a powerful distaste
for the way his employer has obfuscated the scandal. “What’s going on here
is so important,” he told me by telephone, “because it’s emblematic of what
I think goes on at major universities all across the country,” where the
business of sports undermines the mission of education. That sounds right to
me.
Smith has the best sort of self-interested
motivation for making sense of what has happened on his campus: He’s writing
a book about the whole mess, based in part on statistics and personal
experiences proffered by UNC instructors assigned over the years to assist
varsity athletes. To me that sounds like a page-turner—and even the basis of
an HBO movie.
I asked Smith what he thinks is going to happen
next. He pointed to comments that the local district attorney made when the
disgraced former Afro-Am chairman, Nyang’oro, was indicted in December.
Orange County DA Jim Woodall told the News & Observer that a second
person is also under investigation and could be indicted soon. Woodall did
not identify the second target, except to say the person is not someone who
currently works for UNC. ”Other probes have identified Nyang’oro’s longtime
department manager, Deborah Crowder, as being involved in the bogus
classes,” the News & Observer noted. “She retired in 2009.” Both
Crowder and Nyang’oro have refused to comment publicly, and Nyang’oro’s
criminal defense lawyer didn’t return my e-mail inquiry.
The indictment of Crowder, a relatively low-level
administrative figure, could crack open the case. It defies logic that
Nyang’oro and his assistant would have operated a rogue department without
the knowledge of more senior faculty members, if not top university
administrators. It further defies reason that this pair would have created
phony classes for athletes without the urging and participation of people in
the UNC athletic bureaucracy. Nyang’oro and Crowder are going to have ample
reason to sing as part of potential plea deals.
Even before that happens, according to Smith,
one or more well-positioned whistle-blowers are likely to go public and
start naming names if they think the powers that be are planning to isolate
Crowder and Nyang’oro as the sole villains. This thing goes much higher, and
there’s much more to come from Chapel Hill.
"University of North Carolina learning specialist receives death threats
after her research finds one in 10 college athletes have reading age of a THIRD
GRADER," by Sara Malm, Daily Mail, January 10, 2014 ---
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2537041/University-North-Carolina-learning-specialist-receives-death-threats-research-finds-one-10-college-athletes-reading-age-fifth-grader.html
Mary Willingham exposed college athletes' lack of
academic abilities
- She found that 10 per cent read at elementary
school level
- A majority of players' reading level was
between 4th and 8th grade
- Men's basketball makes $16.9m-a-year for
University of North Carolina
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Put another way, the poor readers can only comprehend children's books. This is
why they need agents to explain their pro contracts. Opps only a few get pro
contracts.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has
revoked a reading specialist and adjunct professor’s permission to discuss her
research or otherwise use her data on student athlete literacy, just weeks after
she was featured in a network news story on the topic. The university also
questioned her methodology and the validity of her findings.
"Whistle-Blower Blocked," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, January
20, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/20/u-north-carolina-shuts-down-whistle-blower-athletes
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has
revoked a reading specialist and adjunct professor’s permission to discuss
her research or otherwise use her data on student athlete literacy, just
weeks after she was featured in a network news story on the topic. The
university also questioned her methodology and the validity of her findings.
Mary Willingham, who works in the Center for
Student Success and Academic Counseling and teaches an education course,
cannot use data that could be used to identify human subjects until she
receives permission from the university's Institutional Review Board, it
told her last week. Previously, the board determined that review and
approval of her research was not necessary because it involved
“de-identified” data – meaning that it did not contain personally
identifiable information about human research subjects, either to the
researchers or the public.
In other words, the board believed it did not have
to oversee Willingham’s work because her data couldn’t be linked back to her
student subjects by anyone.
Earlier this month, Willingham
told CNN she’d worked with 183 Chapel Hill
basketball and football players for her research, from 2004-12, while she
was a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.
Some 10 percent read below a third-grade level, she said. Willingham also
shared anecdotes about students she’d worked with during her career, such as
one who was illiterate, and one who couldn’t read multisyllabic words.
Another student asked if Willingham could "teach
him to read well enough so he could read about himself in the news, because
that was something really important to him," she told CNN. Her quotes didn't
identify any students by name or unique characteristics.
It’s unclear, however, if those comments were
related to her work as a teacher and adviser or researcher.
Willingham hasn’t published a paper on her
research, but has spoken publicly before about her experiences with student
literacy at Chapel Hill. She is credited with the blowing the whistle on a
no-show course scam involving athletes there that
made national headlines and prompted several internal investigations in
2010. (One of those investigations found that scam was isolated to one
department, and was not motivated by athletics, but dated back to 1997. The
university’s chancellor, Holden Thorp, resigned following the scandal.)
In a statement Friday, the university said the
review board had noted, through Willingham’s recent, public statements, that
she had “collected and retained identified data,” requiring review board
oversight. It did not say which of her statements revealed that.
“All human subjects research requires review by the
university’s Institutional Review Board,” a university spokesman said in a
separate, emailed statement. “Review and approval must be obtained before
the research can begin. In addition, any time there is a change to the
research protocol, the researcher must submit an updated application for
review and approval. Researchers are expected to describe in detail the data
being used in their work. That includes the specific data that a researcher
and their collaborators have collected and/or assembled, any further work on
the data that is planned, and how the data will be analyzed.”
The review board concluded in 2008 and again 2013
that researchers involved in Willingham’s project could not identify
individual subjects and that any codes that could allow linkage to
identifiers were “securely behind a firewall outside the possession of the
research team,” according to the statement. The board directed Willingham to
submit a full application for its review, and said that continued use of her
data without its approval would violate university and federal policies
protecting human research subjects.
The university also disputed Willingham’s claims
that it admits athletes who lack academic preparation.
"I take these claims very seriously, but we have
been unable to reconcile these claims with either our own facts or with
those data currently being cited as the source for the claims,” Chancellor
Carol L. Folt said in a
statement posted on the Chapel Hill website.
“Moreover, the data presented in the media do not match up with those data
gathered by the Office of Undergraduate Admissions. For example, only 2 of
the 321 student-athletes admitted in 2012 and 2013 fell below the SAT and
ACT levels that were cited in a recent CNN report as the threshold for
reading levels for first-year students. And those two students are in good
academic standing.” (The news report cited that threshold as 400 on the SAT
critical reading or writing test, or 16 on the ACT.)
In addition to Folt’s statement, the university
published the results of its
analysis of eight years of admissions data for
athletes, which says 97 percent met the cited threshold. In 2013, it says,
100 percent of admitted student athletes achieved those test scores. The
student government released a similar statement, slamming Willingham’s data.
Folt said the university was investigating further
the discrepancy between its data and those presented in the CNN report. “We
also will do our best to correct assertions we believe are not based in
fact,” she added.
The chancellor and other administrators also
discussed Willingham’s research at a scheduled Faculty Council meeting
Friday. But a faculty member present who did not want to be named or quoted
directly said a lengthy presentation about the project focused almost
entirely on methodological concerns about Willingham’s assessment tool and
how accurately it could be used to correlate scores with grade-level reading
readiness, not the review board issue.
The university published a
news release late Friday about those findings,
accusing Willingham of making a “range of serious mistakes” in her research.
“Carolina has a world-renowned reputation for our
research, and the work we have just reviewed does not reflect the quality
and excellence found throughout the Carolina community,” Folt said in the
release.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I wonder what would happen if reading tests were required for the top ten NCAA
football and basketball varsity players?
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies in higher ed ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
More to the UNC scandal than empty classrooms
"Professors in Class on Time? Check. At the U. of North Carolina, a culture
of autonomy falls victim to one department's no-show scandal," by indsay
Ellis and Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-in-Classroom-on/143813/
. . .
The academic improprieties, in which
professors' signatures were forged to change
students' gradee and undergraduates got
credit for courses that never met, went undetected for nearly 15 years
within the African- and Afro-American-studies department. The university
says the fraud appears to be the work of a longtime administrator in the
department and its chairman, Julius E. Nyang'oro, who led African-American
studies here for nearly two decades. Many of the students who were involved
in the questionable classes were athletes.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The internal control question is how students got access to their grade
sheets in order to change grades! Sounds like an insider made it easy for
them to find those grade sheets in the dead of night.
More to the UNC scandal than empty classrooms
"Professors in Class on Time? Check. At the U. of North Carolina, a culture
of autonomy falls victim to one department's no-show scandal," by indsay
Ellis and Robin Wilson, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 6, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Professors-in-Classroom-on/143813/
. . .
The academic improprieties, in which
professors' signatures were forged to change
students' gradee and undergraduates got
credit for courses that never met, went undetected for nearly 15 years
within the African- and Afro-American-studies department. The university
says the fraud appears to be the work of a longtime administrator in the
department and its chairman, Julius E. Nyang'oro, who led African-American
studies here for nearly two decades. Many of the students who were involved
in the questionable classes were athletes.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The internal control question is how students got access to their grade
sheets in order to change grades! Sounds like an insider made it easy for
them to find those grade sheets in the dead of night.
Didn't UNC learn from FSU?
Academic Fraud and Friction at Florida State University
On Friday,
the National Collegiate Athletic Association announced
that more than 60 athletes at the university had cheated
in two online courses over a year and a half long period, one of the most
serious cases of academic fraud in the NCAA's recent history. Yet just about all
anyone seemed to be able to talk about -- especially Florida State fans in
commenting on the case and
news publications in reporting on it -- is how the
NCAA's penalties (which include requiring Florida State to vacate an
undetermined number of victories in which the cheating athletes competed) might
undermine the legacy of the university's football coach, Bobby Bowden. Bowden
has one fewer career victory than Pennsylvania State University's longtime
coach, Joe Paterno, and if Florida State has to wipe out as many as 14 football
wins from 2007 and 2008, it could end Bowden's chance of being the all-time
winningest coach in big-time college football.
Inside Higher Ed, March 9, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/09/fsu
Compounding FSU's problem is an earlier cheating scandal
20 Florida State University Football Players Likely to Be Suspended in Cheated
Scandal
"Source: Multiple suspensions likely for Music City Bowl, plus 3 games in
2008," by Mark Schlabach, ESPN.com, December 18, 2007 ---
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/news/story?id=3159534
The Now Infamous Favored
Professor by University of Michigan Athletes
A single University of Michigan professor
taught 294 independent studies for students, 85 percent of them
athletes, from the fall of 2004 to the fall of 2007, according to
The Ann Arbor News. According to the
report, which kicks off a series on Michigan athletics and was based on
seven months of investigation, many athletes reported being steered to
the professor, and said that they earned three or four credits for
meeting with him as little as 15 minutes every two weeks. In addition,
three former athletics department officials said that athletes were
urged to take courses with the professor, John Hagen, to raise their
averages. Transcripts examined by the newspaper showed that students
earned significantly higher grades with Hagen than in their regular
courses. The News reported that Hagen initially denied teaching a high
percentage of athletes in his independent studies, but did not dispute
the accuracy of documents the newspaper shared with him. He did deny
being part of any effort to raise the averages of his students. The
newspaper also said that Michigan’s president and athletics director had
declined to be interviewed for the series.
Inside Higher Ed, March 17, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/03/17/qt
Bob Jensen's threads on athletics controversies in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
"CNN Finds Athletes Who 'Read Like 5th Graders'," Inside Higher Ed,
January 8, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/01/08/cnn-finds-athletes-who-read-5th-graders
Jensen Comment
Given their admission qualifications naive analysts might wonder unqualified
applicants got into college. But it's really simple when you think about it. I
recall the time when five varsity basketball players sued UCLA because after
four years at UCLA they still could not read. To UCLA's credit none of these
illiterate basketball players graduated with a diploma.
Athletes Seek Out Professors Who Will Pass Almost Any Athlete
Watkins says it is all too common to see athletes
grouped in certain departments or programs under the sheltering wings of faculty
members who appear to care more about their success on the courts, rinks and
fields than in the classroom. Faculty members are often the most vocal critics
of favoritism for athletes (the issues at Auburn were raised by one whistle
blowing sociology professor against another), he says, but it is frequently
professors who are responsible for the favoritism in the first place.
Rob Capriccioso, "Tackling Favoritism for Athletes," Inside Higher Ed, July 20,
2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/07/20/sports
Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers
(and took two online courses for him)
The wife of a star University of South Florida
linebacker says she wrote his academic papers and took two online classes for
him. The accusations against Ben Moffitt, who had been promoted by the
university to the news media as a family man, were made in e-mail messages to
The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr. Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt
called the accusations “hearsay,” and a university spokesman said the matter was
a “domestic issue.” If it is found that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud,
the newspaper reported, the university could be subject to an NCAA
investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog, January 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat and let students cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
"3 accused in FIU (felony) cheating scandal," by Scott Travis, Sun
Sentinel, December 10, 2013 ---
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/palm-beach/fl-fiu-cheating-scandal-20131210,0,1033690.story
. . .
Police say Alex Fabian Anaya, 30, an FIU alumnus,
logged into a professor's email account in 2012 to access four test exams,
and then organized a distribution system where he was paid up to $150 per
person for a copy of the stolen exam. Police equated the alleged crime to
breaking into someone's house and stealing their property. Anaya was charged
with dealing in stolen property, felony theft and burglary of an unoccupied
structure.
Two current students, Krissy Alexandra Lamadrid,
24, and Jason Anthony Calderon, 24, were charged with dealing in stolen
property. Police say they sold exams to other students. Anaya and Lamadrid
couldn't be reached for comment, while Calderon declined comment.
Anaya "stated that he was well aware that his
actions were illegal," according to the FIU police report. Lamadrid and
Calderon said they knew the exams were stolen, according to the police
report.
. . .
Cheating has been going on for a long time, but
what has changed is the technology," said Ralph Rogers, provost at
Nova Southeastern University in Davie. "There are
very small devices, essentially a watch, where you can access the Internet,
and that has become a challenge."
The
University of Central Florida made national news
in November 2010, when students in a business class bought a test bank sold
online. It was shared with 200 students in the class, leading to unusually
high grades.
The instructor, Richard Quinn, confronted students,
who were required to come clean and take an ethics class or face expulsion.
Most admitted their involvement.
A cheating scandal involving the athletic program
at
Florida State University resulted in a four-year
probation in 2009. An FSU athlete reported he'd been instructed by a
learning specialist to take an online quiz for another athlete. The
university then discovered that 61 athletes in 10 sports, including football
and men's basketball, had committed varying degrees of academic fraud. Most
of the wrongdoing occurred in an online music course.
The Alligator, the student newspaper for the
University of Florida, reported a 2012 case where
a professor discovered that 242 students in a computer science class had
cheated.
UF is now studying new ways to combat cheating as
it launches an online university in the spring. This includes software that
uses cameras to monitor students as they take tests, said Jen Day Shaw, dean
of students.
While cheating allegations aren't unusual, most
don't lead to criminal charges. More common is for students to receive a
grade penalty, and be sent to an ethics class. They may face academic
probation, or in some cases get expelled.
NSU's Rogers said criminal charges are appropriate
in the FIU case if the allegations are true.
"It's a very serious issue to hack into a computer
and steal information," he said. "Someone didn't just find this information
lying around."
"In a Memphis Cheating Ring, the Teachers Are the Accused," by Motoko
Rich, The New York Times, February 2, 2013 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/education/in-memphis-cheating-ring-teachers-are-the-accused.html?hpw&_r=0
In the end, it was a pink baseball cap that
revealed an audacious test-cheating scheme in three Southern states that
spanned at least 15 years.
Test proctors at Arkansas State University
spotted a woman wearing the cap while taking a
national teacher certification exam under one name on a morning in June 2009
and then under another name that afternoon. A supervisor soon discovered
that at least two other impersonators had registered for tests that day.
Ensuing investigations ultimately led to Clarence D.
Mumford Sr., 59, who pleaded guilty on Friday to charges that accused him of
being the cheating ring’s mastermind during a 23-year career in Memphis as a
teacher, assistant principal and guidance counselor.
Federal prosecutors had indicted him on 63 counts,
including mail and wire fraud and identify theft. They said he doctored
driver’s licenses, pressured teachers to lie to the authorities and
collected at least $125,000 from teachers and prospective teachers in
Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee who feared that they could not pass the
certification exams on their own.
Mr. Mumford pleaded guilty to two counts of the
indictment, just a week after he rejected a settlement offer. At the time,
he said that its recommended sentence of 9 to 11 years was “too long a time
and too severe”; the new settlement carries a maximum sentence of 7 years.
Mr. Mumford appeared in Federal District Court here on
Friday wearing a dark suit and a matching yellow tie and pocket
handkerchief. He said little more than “Yes, sir” in answer to questions
from Judge John T. Fowlkes.
Another 36 people, most of them teachers from
Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee, have been swept up in the federal
dragnet, including Clarence Mumford Jr., Mr. Mumford’s son, and
Cedrick Wilson, a former wide receiver for the
Pittsburgh Steelers. (Mr. Wilson paid $2,500 for someone to take a
certification exam for physical education teachers, according to court
documents.)
In addition to the senior Mr. Mumford, eight people
have
pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the
investigation into the ring, and on Friday, a federal prosecutor, John
Fabian, announced that 18 people who confessed to paying Mr. Mumford to
arrange test-takers for them had been barred from teaching for five years.
The case has rattled Memphis at a tumultuous time. The
city’s schools are
merging with the suburban district in surrounding
Shelby County, exposing simmering tensions over race and economic disparity.
The state has also designated 68 schools in the
city as among the lowest-performing campuses in Tennessee, and is gradually
handing control of some of them to charter operators and other groups. And
with a
$90 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, the district is overhauling how it recruits, evaluates and pays
teachers.
District officials say that the test scandal does not
reflect broader problems, and that none of the indicted teachers still work
in the Memphis schools. (At least one teacher is working in Mississippi.)
“It would be unfair to let what may be 50, 60 or 100 teachers who did some
wrong stain the good work of the large number of teachers and administrators
who get up every day and go by the book,” said Dorsey Hopson, the general
counsel for Memphis City Schools
who this week was named the district’s interim superintendent.
“A teacher’s job is very hard. I know it is,” said
Threeshea Robinson, a mother who waited last week to pick up her son, a
fourth grader at Raleigh-Bartlett Meadows Elementary School, where a teacher
who has pleaded guilty taught until last fall. “But I would not want a
doctor who did not pass all his tests operating on me.”
The tests involved are known as Praxis exams, and more
than 300,000 were administered last year by the nonprofit
Educational Testing
Service for people pursuing teaching
licenses or new credentials in specific subjects like biology or history.
By and large, they are considered easy hurdles to
clear. In Tennessee, for example, 97 percent of those who took the exams in
the 2010-11 school year passed.
Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of
FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, said that the
testing service had had problems with
cheating before.
Ray Nicosia, the
executive director of the testing service’s Office of Testing Integrity,
said episodes of impersonation were rare.
Continued in article
"Dishonest Educators," by Walter E. Williams, Townhall, January
9, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/01/09/dishonest-educators-n1482294?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
Nearly two years ago, U.S. News & World Report came
out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal."
It reported that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers
and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating
scandals in U.S. history." More than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta
schools investigated had cheated on the National Assessment of Educational
Progress test, sometimes called the national report card. Cheating orders
came from school administrators and included brazen acts such as teachers
reading answers aloud during the test and erasing incorrect answers. One
teacher told a colleague, "I had to give your kids, or your students, the
answers because they're dumb as hell." Atlanta's not alone. There have been
investigations, reports and charges of teacher-assisted cheating in other
cities, such as Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Los
Angeles and Washington.Recently, The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution's blog carried a story titled "A new cheating scandal:
Aspiring teachers hiring ringers." According to the story, for at least 15
years, teachers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee paid Clarence
Mumford, who's now under indictment, between $1,500 and $3,000 to send
someone else to take their Praxis exam, which is used for K-12 teacher
certification in 40 states. Sandra Stotsky, an education professor at the
University of Arkansas, said, "(Praxis I) is an easy test for anyone who has
completed high school but has nothing to do with college-level ability or
scores." She added, "The test is far too undemanding for a prospective
teacher. ... The fact that these people hired somebody to take an easy test
of their skills suggests that these prospective teachers were probably so
academically weak it is questionable whether they would have been suitable
teachers."
Here's a practice Praxis I math question: Which of
the following is equal to a quarter-million -- 40,000, 250,000, 2,500,000,
1/4,000,000 or 4/1,000,000? The test taker is asked to click on the correct
answer. A practice writing skills question is to identify the error in the
following sentence: "The club members agreed that each would contribute ten
days of voluntary work annually each year at the local hospital." The test
taker is supposed to point out that "annually each year" is redundant.
CNN broke this cheating story last July, but the
story hasn't gotten much national press since then. In an article for
NewsBusters, titled "Months-Old, Three-State Teacher Certification Test
Cheating Scandal Gets Major AP Story -- on a Slow News Weekend" (11/25/12),
Tom Blumer quotes speculation by the blog "educationrealist": "I will be
extremely surprised if it does not turn out that most if not all of the
teachers who bought themselves a test grade are black. (I am also betting
that the actual testers are white, but am not as certain. It just seems that
if black people were taking the test and guaranteeing passage, the fees
would be higher.)"
There's some basis in fact for the speculation that
it's mostly black teachers buying grades, and that includes former Steelers
wide receiver Cedrick Wilson, who's been indicted for fraud. According to a
study titled "Differences in Passing Rates on Praxis I Tests by
Race/Ethnicity Group" (March 2011), the percentages of blacks who passed the
Praxis I reading, writing and mathematics tests on their first try were 41,
44 and 37, respectively. For white test takers, the respective percentages
were 82, 80 and 78.
Continued in article
"Does Everyone Lie? Are we a Culture of Liars?" by accounting
professor Steven Mintz, Ethics Sage, February 1, 2013 ---
http://www.ethicssage.com/2013/02/does-everyone-lie.html
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
NYU Professor Surrenders to Cheating Students: "
“Forget about cheating detection,” he said in an
interview. “It is a losing battle.”
"NYU Prof Vows Never to Probe Cheating Again—and Faces a Backlash," by
Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 21, 2011
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/nyu-prof-vows-never-to-probe-cheating-again%E2%80%94and-faces-a-backlash/32351?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A New York University professor’s blog post is
opening a rare public window on the painful classroom consequences of using
plagiarism-detection software to aggressively police cheating students. And
the post, by Panagiotis Ipeirotis, raises questions about whether the
incentives in higher education are set up to reward such vigilance.
But after the candid personal tale went
viral online
this week, drawing hundreds of thousands of readers, the professor took
it down on NYU’s advice. As Mr. Ipeirotis
understands it, a faculty member from another university sent NYU a
cease-and-desist letter saying his blog post violated a federal law
protecting students’ privacy.
The controversy began on Sunday, when Mr.
Ipeirotis, a computer scientist who teaches in NYU’s Stern School of
Business, published a blog post headlined, “Why I will never pursue cheating
again.” Mr. Ipeirotis reached that conclusion after trying to take a harder
line on cheating in a fall 2010 Introduction to Information Technology
class, a new approach that was driven by two factors. One, he got tenure, so
he felt he could be more strict. And two, his university’s Blackboard
course-management system was fully integrated with Turnitin’s
plagiarism-detection software for the first time, meaning that assignments
were automatically processed by Turnitin when students submitted them.
The result was an education in “how pervasive
cheating is in our courses,” Mr. Ipeirotis wrote. By the end of the
semester, 22 out of the 108 students had admitted cheating.
Some might read that statistic and celebrate the
effectiveness of Turnitin, a popular service that takes uploaded student
papers and checks them against various databases to pinpoint unoriginal
content. Not Mr. Ipeirotis.
“Forget about cheating detection,” he said in an
interview. “It is a losing battle.”
The professor’s blog
post described how crusading against cheating
poisoned the class environment and therefore dragged down his teaching
evaluations. They fell to a below-average range of 5.3 out of 7.0, when he
used to score in the realm of 6.0 to 6.5. Mr. Ipeirotis “paid a significant
financial penalty for ‘doing the right thing,’” he wrote. “The Dean’s office
and my chair ‘expressed their appreciation’ for me chasing such cases (in
December), but six months later, when I received my annual evaluation, my
yearly salary increase was the lowest ever, and significantly lower than
inflation, as my ‘teaching evaluations took a hit this year.’”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Sadly it's the honest students who pay part of the price when professors let
students cheat. Honest students are bringing marshmallows to throw in a
gunfight.
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who let students cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Professors and Teachers Who Let Students
Cheat
From Infobits on November 29, 2001
"Forget About
Policing Plagiarism. Just Teach" (THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION,
vol. 48, issue 12, November 16, 2001, p. B24) by Rebecca Moore Howard,
associate professor of writing and rhetoric, and director of the writing
program, at Syracuse University.
Howard argues
that "[i]n our stampede to fight what The New York Times calls a 'plague' of
plagiarism, we risk becoming the enemies rather than the mentors of our
students; we are replacing the student-teacher relationship with the
criminal-police relationship. Further, by thinking of plagiarism as a
unitary act rather than a collection of disparate activities, we risk
categorizing all of our students as criminals. Worst of all, we risk not
recognizing that our own pedagogy needs reform. Big reform." The article is
online to CHE subscribers at
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v48/i12/12b02401.htm
Jensen Comment
I can't buy this argument. It would bother my conscience too much to give a
higher grade to a student that I strongly suspect has merely copied the
arguments elsewhere than the grade given to a student who tried to develop his
or her own arguments. How can Professor Howard in good conscience give a higher
grade to the suspected plagiarist? This rewards "street smart" at the expense of
"smart." It also advocates becoming more street smart at the expense of real
learning.
I might be cynical here and hope that
Professor Howard's physicians graduated from medical schools who passed students
on the basis of being really good copiers of papers they could not comprehend.
What is not mentioned in the quote
above is the labor-union-style argument also presented by Professor Howard in
the article. She argues that we're already to overworked to have the time to
investigate suspected plagiarism. Is refusing to investigate really being
professional as an honorable academic?
"Cheating: The Experts Weigh In," by: Louis Lavelle, Business Week,
July 26, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2011/07/cheating_the_experts_weigh_in.html
Thanks to David Albrecht for the heads up.
On July 18, the Bloomberg Businessweek
Getting In blog publicized the
story of NYU Stern Professor Panos Ipeirotis,
who caught 20 percent of his class cheating and found the effort he put into
rooting out the cheaters was not worth it. In the future, Ipeirotis said he
would assign projects requiring more original thought to creatively channel
the energies of his highly competitive students.
Some of those who commented on the blog faulted
Ipeirotis, blamed the cheating on the
Stern grading curve, or said that cheating was
common at many schools. Bloomberg Businessweek asked two ethics
experts about the views they expressed.
David Callahan is a senior fellow at Demos, a
public policy organization in New York. He has a Ph.D. in politics and has
written extensively about ethics on his
blog
for years and in his book, The Cheating Culture,
published in 2004.
John Gallagher is an associate dean for the
executive MBA program at Duke University’s
Fuqua School of Business, where one of his
responsibilities is to prosecute honor code violations. Duke dealt with its
own
cheating scandal in 2007. It’s use of the episode
to reinforce the honor code was applauded by many.
Below is an edited transcript of their interview
with reporter
Kiah Lau Haslett.
What was your reaction to this story?
David Callahan: I’m not surprised
at the high level of cheating among business students; research tells us
that
business students cheat at among the highest rates of students.
I think that a lot of professors often get a lot of
pushback for exposing cheating. A professor at the University of Central
Florida
reported a lot of cheating
and
he was subjected to a lot of attacks
to him as a teacher, that it was somehow his fault. I think there’s a lot of
rationalization of students about cheating: They don’t find it surprising
and people are cynical. They assume there’s a lot of cheating and it’s not a
big deal.
Why do students plagiarize?
David Callahan: I think you have to look at the real,
underlying causes. Students are extremely anxious today, they’re incurring
record levels of debt to go to college, and they’re relying on scholarships
and grants dependent upon maintaining a certain GPA. College is no longer
the last stop; now it’s a stepping-stone to a professional school and
graduate school. College transcripts and GPA really matter. On the one hand,
there’s more pressure than ever before to cheat, and on the other hand
there’s a tremendous amount of cynicism. When a professor complains about
cheating and points it out, students push back in a cynical way and say,
“This is commonplace. What’s the big deal?” Or they push back in a defensive
way and say, “The pressure’s on me to get good grades and cheating is one
way to do it.”
What are some assignments that make it easy
for students to cheat or plagiarize? What are some assignments where it's
harder to cheat?
John Gallagher: If you are giving
a proctored exam in a closed room, there's going to be far less opportunity
than if you are giving an assignment that requires people to do analysis and
make recommendations. Many institutions use case studies, so it's likely
that somewhere you can find someone who has done an analysis of the case. I
think that any time you ask students to personalize their work, talking
about its applications and concept, it's very much more difficult. No one
has written that material and it's unique.
What is the professor's role or
responsibility to ensure students don't cheat?
David Callahan: The responsibility
on professors in this day and age is to teach in such a way that makes it
harder for students to cheat. They need to take seriously the responsibility
to reduce the amount of cheating. It doesn't just fall on students to not
cheat. Lots of professors feel overburdened as it is, in terms of their
teaching obligations. Many don't want to make the extra effort in reducing
cheating, and unfortunately they have to make that effort.
Is this the curve's fault?
David Callahan: A zero-sum game
where students have to compete against other students exacerbates the
situation. Nobody wants to be the chump who's honest when everyone else is
cheating and you're in direct competition for grades.
John Gallagher: I don't think so.
[At Fuqua] we have a recommended grade distribution that our professors
follow, but they are never required to give a low pass or a failing grade.
There's no need for students to cheat. There are all kinds of people who
cheat for all kinds of reasons. I don't think that you would ever say that
the primary factor or force that leads students to cheat is there's some
kind of a curve.
What should the punishment be for students
caught cheating? Maximum? Minimum?
David Callahan: For the most part
there's typically very little punishment for cheaters, which is one reason
why there's so much cheating. You typically get punished with a slap on the
wrist: flunk a paper, flunk a class. Rarely are they suspended or expelled.
Of course, there are different gradations of punishment. But I think there
needs to be more. One incentive to cheat is that the punishment is lax or
minimal. If there's no punishment there's no deterrent.
John Gallagher: For us, the
maximum punishment is rescinding the degree. We've had five cases of alumni
where it was later discovered they cheated in one of their courses and their
degrees were revoked. The next is that people are simply expelled from the
university and there is a notation on their official university transcript
stating they were dismissed from the university because of a cheating
conviction.
The least severe punishment I have ever seen is
mandatory failing of the course, but in our particular world that has
significant ramifications. Anyone who fails a course must take a mandatory
one-year leave of absence before being allowed to return to retake the
failed course and finish the program. Everyone who graduates must have a
minimum 3.0 GPA. If you can imagine a five-semester program with a
conviction of cheating the fourth semester and you were given a grade of F
in a course, looking at the number of courses remaining, it might be
mathematically impossible to maintain a GPA and you'd be academically
dismissed.
What do you do when a cheating conviction
happens? What happens to the student?
John Gallagher: I never speak to
companies [who sponsor EMBA students] because of student privacy issues, but
I have witnessed the impact of convictions on students. In my experience,
companies treat this very severely. It's a severe violation of ethics and it
is not something that I would ever expect a company would ignore or have a
wink-wink-nudge-nudge attitude toward at all. In many cases, these companies
are paying students' tuition and if they're not financially involved, then
they've given them the time they need. They are stakeholders in the
student's education, and now the student is caught in an extremely awkward
situation having to explain the circumstances. It is very serious. It can
destroy someone's career and professional reputation.
What should a school do when this happens?
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on Professors Who Let Students Cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Alleged Academic Fraud at U. of North Carolina Tests NCAA's Reach:
Myths surrounding the group's investigation cloud the controversy at Chapel Hill,"
by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Alleged-Academic-Fraud-at-U/134270/
More than a year after allegations of academic
improprieties surfaced in the University of North Carolina's athletic
department, we're still a long way from knowing the full extent of the
problems and whether the NCAA might issue new sanctions.
But you wouldn't know that from a statement the
university released last week, in which it said that the NCAA had yet to
find any rules violations following an apparently extensive joint
investigation. That assertion led to a chorus of unfair criticism against
the NCAA for failing to act.
Several investigations still have yet to be
completed in Chapel Hill, including one led by a former North Carolina
governor. And the allegations—which include reports of players' enrolling in
aberrant courses, unauthorized grade changes, and forged faculty
signatures—could still lead to NCAA sanctions, say former enforcement and
infractions officials at the NCAA, and others familiar with its
investigation.
What once looked like an open-and-shut case of
high-profile players' taking bogus classes to stay eligible is anything but
straightforward. Let's explore a few myths surrounding the case, which could
help explain the public's heightened expectations of penalties and give
clues to where things might be headed.
1. Academic fraud constitutes an NCAA
violation.
Academic impropriety would appear to strike at the
heart of college sports and the NCAA's stated mission to be "an integral
part of higher education and to focus on the development of our
student-athletes."
Yet, despite being a cornerstone of NCAA rules, the
term "academic fraud" is mentioned only once in the entire Division I
manual, as a basis for postseason bans, says John Infante, a former
compliance officer at Colorado State University.
As hard as it may be for the public to understand,
the NCAA rarely gets involved in issues of academic fraud, instead leaving
it up to colleges to police the integrity of their curricula.
In cases involving extra benefits for athletes,
preferential treatment of them, or recruiting violations, the NCAA is and
should be the sole arbiter, college officials say. But in situations that
touch on academic irregularities, NCAA institutions have made it clear that
they don't want the association to meddle.
Unless a member of an athletic department knowingly
arranges for an athlete to receive fraudulent credit, knows about such
fraud, or helps facilitate improper grade changes or other academic
shenanigans, the NCAA usually stays away.
Likewise, if both nonathletes and athletes are
enrolled in the sham classes, the NCAA often doesn't get involved. Its
thinking: This goes beyond sports.
You can question the logic—some, in fact, have said
any form of academic misconduct deserves the NCAA's attention—but it's hard
to argue that the NCAA is better positioned to enforce academic standards
than the faculty.
2. This is one of the biggest academic
scandals college sports has ever seen.
Pat Forde, the national college columnist for
Yahoo! Sports, was among several writers to weigh in on the problems in
recent weeks, saying that North Carolina seems to have "made a mockery of
its ballyhooed academic mission for a long time in order to gain competitive
advantage in football and men's basketball." Its alleged violations, he
argued, could call for the most severe of NCAA penalties, as it may have
demonstrated a lack of institutional control.
A
university report
released in May found that Julius Nyang'oro, a former chair of the
department of African and Afro-American studies, and Deborah Crowder, a
former department manager, had been involved in creating at least 54 classes
that had little or no instruction.
Through a public-records request, the Raleigh
News & Observer
determined that
athletes had accounted
for nearly two-thirds of the enrollments, with football players taking up
more than a third of the seats.
Last month the
newspaper found evidence
that Julius Peppers, a former two-sport star at North Carolina who is now an
all-pro player in the NFL, had gotten D's and F's in many courses, but had
received a B or better in some of the no-show ones.
According to the player's transcript, which the
university accidentally posted on its Web site, he was allowed to take an
independent-studies class the summer after his freshman year—a course
typically offered to more-experienced students who have demonstrated
academic proficiency. Those classes appeared to help Mr. Peppers maintain
his eligibility in football and basketball. (In a statement released by his
agent, Mr. Peppers said he had committed no academic fraud.)
It's hard to see how those alleged transgressions,
which stretched back to the 1990s, didn't provide certain athletes with an
unfair advantage. But are they among the worst ever, as some observers have
claimed?
On the continuum of academic fraud in the NCAA, the
worst violations usually involve accusations of academic dishonesty, in
which someone else does the work for the athletes or they either buy or
plagiarize papers or get access to exam answers ahead of time, says Mr.
Infante, the former Colorado State compliance officer, who now works as an
NCAA expert for Athleticscholarships.net, a Web site on recruiting.
On the opposite end, he says, are examples of
athletes who cluster in easier majors or are directed into snap courses.
Somewhere in the middle are independent-study
courses where there's less assurance that the players are actually doing the
work.
Poorly supervised independent-study courses were
part of the problem at North Carolina, the university's report says. But the
university also found evidence that students had completed written work.
For those and other reasons, maybe this won't turn
out to be one of the worst academic scandals we've seen, says Mr. Infante.
But the North Carolina case could turn out to be one of the more important
ones in pushing the NCAA and member institutions to take a closer look at
how athletes progress through the system.
"The NCAA as a whole ... needs to move beyond [the
Academic Progress Rate] and the awarding of degrees into regulating how
athletes are educated," he says. "If it starts with stricter regulation of
online and independent-study classes, that sounds like a good first step."
3. The NCAA went outside its typical
judicial process to punish Penn State. It should do the same with North
Carolina.
Mr. Forde, the Yahoo! columnist, believes the
situation demands a signal from Mark Emmert, the NCAA's president. "Will he
and the NCAA Executive Committee cowboy up again?" he wrote last month.
"Will they circumvent the rules manual and due process and go after Carolina
on the basis of general principle, à la Penn State?"
Earlier this year the NCAA penalized North Carolina
after members of its football team committed academic fraud and multiple
athletes accepted $31,000 in impermissible benefits. But as the academic
problems there have widened, NCAA leaders have made it clear they're in no
hurry.
They have also done what they can to distance the
problems at North Carolina from those at Penn State, where a former
assistant football coach serially molested young boys while top
administrators reportedly worked to conceal the crimes. The alleged cover-up
led Mr. Emmert to impose unprecedented penalties on the university,
including a $60-million fine and a four-year bowl ban.
But as recently as last week, Mr. Emmert called the
Penn State situation extraordinary and said he hoped he never had to
exercise that type of power again.
Continued in article
"North
Carolina Admits to Academic Fraud in Sports Program," Inside Higher
Ed, September 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/09/20/qt#270772
The Privileged Learners on Campus With Scholarships and Tutors
"Big Sports Programs Step Up Hiring to Help Marginal Students,"
by Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2012
---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/the-fastest-growing-job-in-sports-helping-marginal-students/30171
"What the Hell Has Happened to College Sports?"
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 11, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/What-the-Hell-Has-Happened-to/130071/
Flaunting the NCAA
Academic Standards for Top Athletes
"Bad Apples or More?" by Doug Lederman, Inside Highe Ed,
February 7, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/02/07/ncaa_punishes_almost_half_of_members_of_football_bowl_subdivision_for_major_rules_violations
"College athletes studies guided toward 'major in eligibility'," by Jill
Steeg et al., USA Today, November 2008, Page 1A ---
http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/2008-11-18-majors-cover_N.htm
"The Education of Dasmine Cathey," by Brad Wolverton,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Education-of-Dasmine/132065/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"Dasmine Cathey Reflects on His Moment in the Spotlight," by
Brad Wolverton, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/players/dasmine-reaction/30411
Jensen Comment
This is an article that each of us will probably react differently to
after reading it carefully. Some readers will see this as another case,
in a long list of cases, where a NCAA Division 1 university makes a sham
out of college education of a star, albeit learning disabled, athlete.
By sham I mean where the main goal is to make that athlete able to read
after four years --- whereas the goal for non-athletes in the university
is much higher. As a non-athlete he probably would have flunked out of
the university in the first year. The coaches helped pull him through
courses while he was still eligible to play football only to leave him
hanging out to dry in completing the requirements for a diploma.
Other readers will see this as a case where a learning disabled
student was pushed beyond what he might have otherwise been without
special treatment as an athlete in college. The tragedy is that his
non-athlete counterparts receive no such special treatment from
"coaches."
As a retired college professor I question the commitment of any
student who does not care enough to try by attending class every day and
by seeking help from the teachers.
Personally, I think if Dasmine Cathey gets his diploma it makes a
sham out of that diploma. Dasmine deserves better in life, but why does
it have to be at the expense of lowered academic standards in higher
education?
Has academic fraud become the name of the game in NCAA Division 1
athletics?
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
In the wake of cheating scandals the Chancellor of the University of North
Carolina resigns
"The Achilles Heel," by Kevin Kiley, Inside Higher Ed, September 18, 2012
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/09/18/unc-president-steps-down-after-two-years-athletics-scandals
You can’t plan for everything, and increasingly it
seems like the one thing you don’t plan for will undermine your public
university presidency.
Holden Thorp, chancellor at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, announced Monday that he would step down as
chancellor at the end of the school year, only his fifth on the job, a
premature exit for a chancellor whom many expected to serve at least 10
years.
Prior to being named chancellor in May 2008 at just
43 years old, Thorp had risen meteorically through the ranks of UNC’s
administration, from professor to dean of the university’s College of Arts
and Sciences in five years, and was seen as something of a wunderkind. A UNC
graduate with deep ties to the state, a noted chemist who spent his career
at the university, and a successful entrepreneur, Thorp was viewed by many
as a perfect fit for helping move the university into the 21st century,
bring entrepreneurship and innovation to the forefront of campus activity,
and confront a litany of challenges related to funding, direction and
academics.
But less than six months into his tenure, the
country and state’s economies collapsed, forcing Thorp to confront budget
cuts, salary freezes and protracted revenue constraints. The state’s
political leadership, once immensely supportive of UNC-Chapel Hill and the
rest of the university system, saw significant turnover in 2010. And since
2010, the university has been plagued by a series of scandals -- many
originating in the university’s athletics program – that have dominated
local media headlines.
Many at UNC say Thorp's seemingly perfect pedigree
for the job was undermined by what he inherited: a series of
headline-grabbing and time-consuming problems that they say would doom any
president. “Holden Thorp was largely the victim of circumstance,” said Jay
Smith, a history professor at the university who worked on a faculty
investigation of the university’s athletics problems. “His experience shows
just how treacherous the waters of higher education are right now. If
someone of his talents and energy and commitment can’t succeed in this
position, it makes you wonder who can.”
But others say that Thorp’s background in academics
and quick rise through the ranks left him unprepared to tackle the types of
Gordian knots that modern university presidents face, particularly the
athletics scandals. “The drip-drip-drip of scandals suggest that Thorp has a
poor understanding of shortcomings on his campus and insufficient
appreciation of their import once they come to his attention,” wrote
The Charlotte Observer’s
editorial board on Sunday.
A spokesman for UNC-Chapel Hill said Thorp did not
have time Monday to respond to a request for comment.
Regardless of the exact reason for Thorp’s
departure, he is the latest in a long list of prominent public university
presidents who were either forced out of their positions or chose to step
down in the past two years. That list includes the presidents of the
University of Arizona, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, the
University of Oregon, Pennsylvania State University, and, depending on the
criteria, the University of Virginia, whose president was reinstated shortly
after she was forced out.
In many cases, these presidents said they were
either driven out by scandals that happened on their watch but that they
were unaware of, or that political forces conspired to drive them out. You
can do everything right, they say, and the job will still find a way to
bring you down.
Higher education observers say the widespread
turnover – and
occasional panic by boards – is indicative of
broader shifts in the higher education landscape that are making the role of
public university president increasingly difficult and different from any
other job.
“These universities are going through historic,
unprecedented change that no one is prepared for. Truly, it’s an environment
where, particularly at large universities, you’re responsible for bringing
in hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding, hundreds of millions
in endowments, engaging in economic development and entrepreneurial
activity,” said Lucy Leske, vice president, partner, and co-director of the
education and not-for-profit practice at Witt/Kieffer, an executive search
firm. “How can you be trained for this?”
Those shifts are forcing people like Leske to
reconsider how colleges and universities choose new leaders.
A Difficult Job
Flagship Public University President Departures since 2010
Resignations:
Firings:
“Near Misses”:
By many measures of university success, UNC-Chapel
Hill thrived under Thorp’s leadership. The institution has been steadily
climbing the ranks in terms of research expenditures, cracking the top 10
this year. Student applications increased, and the academic profile of the
incoming class was at its highest levels. Fund-raising increased despite the
recession.
Immediately prior to the recession the university
brought in management consultants Bain & Company to review the institution’s
administrative structure and find ways to reduce costs. The university made
national headlines for that review, the
recommendations from which are estimated to save $50 million a year. Other
notable universities, including the University of California at Berkeley,
Cornell University and the University of Connecticut, have since hired
consultants to perform similar work.
Joe Templeton, a long-serving chemistry professor
at UNC who once chaired the university’s faculty and has led the
implementation of the Bain report as special assistant to the chancellor,
said that in terms of faculty and student success, the university is right
where it should be. “As far as the things that as faculty we care about and
pay attention to, the structure is in good shape and the future is bright,”
he said.
But Templeton and others note that those victories
have been overshadowed by the myriad scandals Thorp has faced, particularly
in the state and in the local media.
First there was the NCAA investigation into the
university’s football program that found that players received impermissible
benefits from agents. The football program received sanctions from the NCAA
that included a one-year ban in post-season play and scholarship reductions.
That scandal led to the firing of head football coach Butch Davis -- a story
that caught national attention and generated significant controversy among
fans and alumni -- and the resignation of longtime athletic director Dick
Baddour.
The football scandal also uncovered academic fraud
by some members of the football team, including evidence that a tutor
altered players’ papers.
Continued in article
Professors who let students cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Coaches who let students cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
Student Plagiarism, Faculty Responsibility,
A review by two Ohio University officials has found
“rampant and flagrant plagiarism” by graduate students in the institution’s
mechanical engineering department — and concluded that three faculty members
either “failed to monitor” their advisees’ writing or “basically supported
academic fraudulence” by ignoring the dishonesty.
The report
by the two-person review team called for the dismissal of two professors, and
university officials said they would bring in a national expert on plagiarism to
advise them.
Doug Lederman, "Student Plagiarism, Faculty Responsibility," Inside Higher Ed,
June 1, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/01/plagiarism
June 2, 2006 reply from Linda Kidwell, University of Wyoming
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
Bob's post reminded me of an interesting article I
recently read:
Woessner, M.C. (2004). "Beating the house: How
inadequate penalties for cheating make plagiarism an excellent gamble." PS:
Political Science & Politics, 37 (2): 313 – 320.
His article is interesting in two ways. First, he
argues that "it is unethical for faculty to knowingly entice students to
plagiarize by promoting policies that actually reward dishonesty." He
maintains that we may entice our students by anything from active neglect to
ineffective enforcement, and he even throws in some Biblical support from
Leviticus: You shall not place a stumbling block before the blind.
Second, he uses expected value functions to
illustrate how ineffective policies make it an excellent gamble for students
to plagiarize, using different combinations of probabilities of being
caught, severities of punishment, and weighting of plagiarized assignments.
I fault the paper for assuming all students are value neutral, in that he
does not include any factor for the cost of compromising your standards
(internal social control in some studies) or, for that matter, the benefit
of going along with the crowd (culture conflict theory in others).
Nonetheless, if we assume away any moral or ethical
component to the decision to cheat, he demonstrates that unless
probabilities of detection are high due to vigilence and penalities are
severe (F in the course, not just on the assignment), students have a strong
incentive to cheat.
So back to Bob's post, Woessner certainly implies
that the faculty are at least as culpable as the students when massive
cheating such as that in the engineering department at Ohio University takes
place.
I'm not sure I agree on an individual student
level, but it's food for thought.
Linda
June 2, 2006 message from John Brozovsky
[jbrozovs@VT.EDU]
Faculty are only culpable if you accept the premise
that students are inherently amoral. If our accounting students are amoral
then Enron is the tip of the iceberg as they will all behave the same way in
a similar circumstance (you would have to assume they are just waiting on
the ideal time to pull shenaigans).
[We do have a fairly decent honor code with
reasonable penalties for those judged guilty by a jury of their peers (4
students 1 faculty member). The peers are typically very willing to find for
guilt in the juries I have served on.]
John
June 3, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen
Trinity University adopted an honor code that has a student court
investigate cheating and assess penalties. The students are more apt to be
tougher on cheating students.
But for faculty it has been a little like rape in that the hassle
involved in reporting it discourages the reporting in some suspected
instances of cheating (in truth I've not made a formal study of this).
On several occasions in the past (before the new Honor Code) I've simply
flunked the student and reported the incident to the Academic Vice President
who maintained a file of reported incidents and could, for repeat offenders,
inflict more serious punishments. Now faculty must appear in "court." More
significantly, the authority to sign the F grade for cheating is thereby
taken out of the hands of the faculty member responsible for grades in a
course.
Bob Jensen
June 2, 2006 reply from Jagdish S. Gangolly
[gangolly@INFOTOC.COM]
I have been following this thread with some
interest.
Medical schools have a pompous ceremony for
orientation for all entering students. It is usually called "white coat"
ceremony.
While the pomp and circumstance at such a ceremony
is incidental, the main objective is to make sure that the students are
being inducted into a noble and learned profession, that their behaviour
after should be different, that they have responsibilities that transcend
averything else, life is precious, their ethical behaviour determines the
future of the profession, etc., etc.,,,
In my own department, I have for a long time
suggested that we desperately need something like that. This is especially
important to accounting, since unlike medical schools that get mature adults
(22-30+ years old), we get juveniles who are less worldly experienced and
more prone to making wrong choices simply because they are younger (if one
agrees with Kohlberg).
The question is, what do we do in such a pompous
but solemn ceremony? What do we call it? Where is our equivalent of the
Hippocratic oath?
I reproduce below both the classic oath and the
modern oaths below. May be we can come up with one of our own.
Jagdish
____________________________________________________
Hippocratic Oath -- Classical Version
"I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and
Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my
witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath
and this covenant:
To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to
my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need
of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal
to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art - if they desire
to learn it - without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral
instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who
has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken
an oath according to the medical law, but no one else.
I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of
the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm
and injustice.
I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who
asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will
not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard
my life and my art.
I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers
from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this
work.
Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the
benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all
mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male
persons, be they free or slaves.
What I may see or hear in the course of the
treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men,
which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding
such things shameful to be spoken about.
If I fulfil this oath and do not violate it, may it
be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all
men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the
opposite of all this be my lot."
Translation from the Greek by Ludwig Edelstein.
From The Hippocratic Oath: Text, Translation, and Interpretation, by Ludwig
Edelstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943.
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Hippocratic Oath—Modern Version
"I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and
judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of
those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as
is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all
measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and
therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is art to medicine as
well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh
the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will
I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a
patient's recovery.
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for
their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most
especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is
given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to
take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness
and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart,
a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the
person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these
related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for
prevention is preferable to cure.
I will remember that I remain a member of society,
with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind
and body as well as the infirm.
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and
art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I
always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I
long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help."
Accounting Instructor Catches UW Students Cheating ---
http://www.smartpros.com/x38003.xml
Apr. 29, 2003 (Associated Press) — As many 60
University of Wisconsin accounting students apparently cheated on take-home
exams, school officials say.
The students were told to take the midterm tests
individually but some worked in groups, accounting department chairman John
Eichenseyer said.
The instructor had allowed the students to take the
tests home so they could attend a presentation April 2 by Sherron Watkins,
the Enron employee who blew the whistle on its questionable accounting
practices.
Students who had done their own work told the
instructor they had heard about widespread cheating on the test, Eichenseyer
said this week.
The instructor, whom Eichenseyer declined to name,
made all students retake the test and it turned out many didn't know the
material.
Many students have admitted cheating since the
instructor confronted them, Eichenseyer said. Students who did much worse on
the in-class test will get that score as their grade for the test.
Student Plagiarism, Faculty Responsibility,
A review by two Ohio University officials has found
“rampant and flagrant plagiarism” by graduate students in the institution’s
mechanical engineering department — and concluded that three faculty members
either “failed to monitor” their advisees’ writing or “basically supported
academic fraudulence” by ignoring the dishonesty.
The report
by the two-person review team called for the dismissal of two professors, and
university officials said they would bring in a national expert on plagiarism to
advise them.
Doug Lederman, "Student Plagiarism, Faculty Responsibility," Inside Higher Ed,
June 1, 2006 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2006/06/01/plagiarism
June 2, 2006 reply from Linda Kidwell, University of Wyoming
[lkidwell@UWYO.EDU]
Bob's post reminded me of an interesting article I
recently read:
Woessner, M.C. (2004). "Beating the house: How
inadequate penalties for cheating make plagiarism an excellent gamble." PS:
Political Science & Politics, 37 (2): 313 – 320.
His article is interesting in two ways. First, he
argues that "it is unethical for faculty to knowingly entice students to
plagiarize by promoting policies that actually reward dishonesty." He
maintains that we may entice our students by anything from active neglect to
ineffective enforcement, and he even throws in some Biblical support from
Leviticus: You shall not place a stumbling block before the blind.
Second, he uses expected value functions to
illustrate how ineffective policies make it an excellent gamble for students
to plagiarize, using different combinations of probabilities of being
caught, severities of punishment, and weighting of plagiarized assignments.
I fault the paper for assuming all students are value neutral, in that he
does not include any factor for the cost of compromising your standards
(internal social control in some studies) or, for that matter, the benefit
of going along with the crowd (culture conflict theory in others).
Nonetheless, if we assume away any moral or ethical
component to the decision to cheat, he demonstrates that unless
probabilities of detection are high due to vigilence and penalities are
severe (F in the course, not just on the assignment), students have a strong
incentive to cheat.
So back to Bob's post, Woessner certainly implies
that the faculty are at least as culpable as the students when massive
cheating such as that in the engineering department at Ohio University takes
place.
I'm not sure I agree on an individual student
level, but it's food for thought.
Linda
June 2, 2006 message from John Brozovsky
[jbrozovs@VT.EDU]
Faculty are only culpable if you accept the premise
that students are inherently amoral. If our accounting students are amoral
then Enron is the tip of the iceberg as they will all behave the same way in
a similar circumstance (you would have to assume they are just waiting on
the ideal time to pull shenaigans).
[We do have a fairly decent honor code with
reasonable penalties for those judged guilty by a jury of their peers (4
students 1 faculty member). The peers are typically very willing to find for
guilt in the juries I have served on.]
John
June 3, 2006 reply from Bob Jensen
Trinity University adopted an honor code that has a student court
investigate cheating and assess penalties. The students are more apt to be
tougher on cheating students.
But for faculty it has been a little like rape in that the hassle
involved in reporting it discourages the reporting in some suspected
instances of cheating (in truth I've not made a formal study of this).
On several occasions in the past (before the new Honor Code) I've simply
flunked the student and reported the incident to the Academic Vice President
who maintained a file of reported incidents and could, for repeat offenders,
inflict more serious punishments. Now faculty must appear in "court." More
significantly, the authority to sign the F grade for cheating is thereby
taken out of the hands of the faculty member responsible for grades in a
course.
Bob Jensen
June 2, 2006 reply from Jagdish S. Gangolly
[gangolly@INFOTOC.COM]
I have been following this thread with some
interest.
Medical schools have a pompous ceremony for
orientation for all entering students. It is usually called "white coat"
ceremony.
While the pomp and circumstance at such a ceremony
is incidental, the main objective is to make sure that the students are
being inducted into a noble and learned profession, that their behaviour
after should be different, that they have responsibilities that transcend
averything else, life is precious, their ethical behaviour determines the
future of the profession, etc., etc.,,,
In my own department, I have for a long time
suggested that we desperately need something like that. This is especially
important to accounting, since unlike medical schools that get mature adults
(22-30+ years old), we get juveniles who are less worldly experienced and
more prone to making wrong choices simply because they are younger (if one
agrees with Kohlberg).
The question is, what do we do in such a pompous
but solemn ceremony? What do we call it? Where is our equivalent of the
Hippocratic oath?
I reproduce below both the classic oath and the
modern oaths below. May be we can come up with one of our own.
Jagdish
____________________________________________________
Hippocratic Oath -- Classical Version
"I swear by Apollo Physician and Asclepius and
Hygieia and Panaceia and all the gods and goddesses, making them my
witnesses, that I will fulfil according to my ability and judgment this oath
and this covenant:
To hold him who has taught me this art as equal to
my parents and to live my life in partnership with him, and if he is in need
of money to give him a share of mine, and to regard his offspring as equal
to my brothers in male lineage and to teach them this art - if they desire
to learn it - without fee and covenant; to give a share of precepts and oral
instruction and all the other learning to my sons and to the sons of him who
has instructed me and to pupils who have signed the covenant and have taken
an oath according to the medical law, but no one else.
I will apply dietetic measures for the benefit of
the sick according to my ability and judgment; I will keep them from harm
and injustice.
I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who
asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect. Similarly I will
not give to a woman an abortive remedy. In purity and holiness I will guard
my life and my art.
I will not use the knife, not even on sufferers
from stone, but will withdraw in favor of such men as are engaged in this
work.
Whatever houses I may visit, I will come for the
benefit of the sick, remaining free of all intentional injustice, of all
mischief and in particular of sexual relations with both female and male
persons, be they free or slaves.
What I may see or hear in the course of the
treatment or even outside of the treatment in regard to the life of men,
which on no account one must spread abroad, I will keep to myself, holding
such things shameful to be spoken about.
If I fulfil this oath and do not violate it, may it
be granted to me to enjoy life and art, being honored with fame among all
men for all time to come; if I transgress it and swear falsely, may the
opposite of all this be my lot."
Translation from the Greek by Ludwig Edelstein.
From The Hippocratic Oath: Text, Translation, and Interpretation, by Ludwig
Edelstein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1943.
____________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________
Hippocratic Oath—Modern Version
"I swear to fulfill, to the best of my ability and
judgment, this covenant:
I will respect the hard-won scientific gains of
those physicians in whose steps I walk, and gladly share such knowledge as
is mine with those who are to follow.
I will apply, for the benefit of the sick, all
measures [that] are required, avoiding those twin traps of overtreatment and
therapeutic nihilism.
I will remember that there is art to medicine as
well as science, and that warmth, sympathy, and understanding may outweigh
the surgeon's knife or the chemist's drug.
I will not be ashamed to say "I know not," nor will
I fail to call in my colleagues when the skills of another are needed for a
patient's recovery.
I will respect the privacy of my patients, for
their problems are not disclosed to me that the world may know. Most
especially must I tread with care in matters of life and death. If it is
given me to save a life, all thanks. But it may also be within my power to
take a life; this awesome responsibility must be faced with great humbleness
and awareness of my own frailty. Above all, I must not play at God.
I will remember that I do not treat a fever chart,
a cancerous growth, but a sick human being, whose illness may affect the
person's family and economic stability. My responsibility includes these
related problems, if I am to care adequately for the sick.
I will prevent disease whenever I can, for
prevention is preferable to cure.
I will remember that I remain a member of society,
with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind
and body as well as the infirm.
If I do not violate this oath, may I enjoy life and
art, respected while I live and remembered with affection thereafter. May I
always act so as to preserve the finest traditions of my calling and may I
long experience the joy of healing those who seek my help."
Accounting Instructor Catches UW Students Cheating --- http://www.smartpros.com/x38003.xml
Apr. 29, 2003 (Associated Press) — As many 60
University of Wisconsin accounting students apparently cheated on take-home
exams, school officials say.
The students were told to take the midterm tests
individually but some worked in groups, accounting department chairman John
Eichenseyer said.
The instructor had allowed the students to take the
tests home so they could attend a presentation April 2 by Sherron Watkins, the
Enron employee who blew the whistle on its questionable accounting practices.
Students who had done their own work told the
instructor they had heard about widespread cheating on the test, Eichenseyer
said this week.
The instructor, whom Eichenseyer declined to name,
made all students retake the test and it turned out many didn't know the
material.
Many students have admitted cheating since the
instructor confronted them, Eichenseyer said. Students who did much worse on
the in-class test will get that score as their grade for the test.
"Experts Say Schools Need to Screen for Cheating," by Shalia Dewan,
The New York Times, February 12, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/13/education/13erase.html?hpw
This week, Georgia officials said they had found
evidence that
cheating might have occurred on standardized tests
at one in five public elementary and middle schools around the state. What
was extraordinary, however, was not so much the extent of the problem, but
the decision of the state to screen for cheating at all.
Using a computer scanner, the state used a simple,
quick analysis to flag classes where an unusually high number of wrong
answers were erased and corrected. The testing company generated the data at
no charge.
Yet even as test scores carry greater stakes for
students, schools and districts, testing experts say most states fail to use
even this most elementary means to monitor for cheating.
“No one is doing it, and when you ask people why
they’re not doing it, they shrug their shoulders,” said Jennifer Jennings, a
sociologist at
New York University who studies school
accountability.
Ms. Jennings suggested that the federal government
should require states to check their test results. “It’s absolutely
scandalous that we have no audit system in place to address any of this,”
she said.
Cheating on tests used to be thought of as
primarily the domain of students, but as standardized test results have
taken on an increasing importance as a way to measure schools, the culprits
have increasingly turned out to be educators, experts said.
Under the federal
No Child Left Behind law, schools are required to
meet improvement goals or face penalties including, in the worst cases, the
loss of jobs. Cities like New York and Houston have recently threatened the
tenure of teachers whose students do not meet goals.
As the consequences have grown more serious,
reports of cheating have exploded, said Robert Schaeffer, the president of
FairTest, an
organization that opposes the emphasis on standardized testing. “They’ve
gone from a handful a year to a handful a month,” he said.
Because parents, students and administrators all
like to see higher scores, said Gregory J. Cizek, a testing expert at the
University of North Carolina, “There’s really no
incentive to vigorously pursue cheaters.”
He said some states did not ask their testing
contractors to generate an erasure analysis, while others did receive them
but did not use them.
One problem, experts said, was asking school
systems to police themselves, which often requires the kind of independent
oversight set up in Georgia. The state Department of Education is led by an
elected superintendent, Kathy Cox, but the governor,
Sonny Perdue,
controls a separate Office of Student Achievement, which has auditing
powers.
It was the Office of Student Achievement that
conducted the erasure study, not the Education Department.
Even states that have weathered widespread cheating
scandals do not necessarily follow up with regular statistical monitoring.
In 2005, after an investigation by The Dallas Morning News pointed to
extensive cheating in Texas, the state hired Caveon Test Security, a Utah
company that improves testing procedures, to conduct what the company calls
“forensics
analyses” of answer forms. But the company was not
retained to do yearly monitoring, said John Fremer, Caveon’s president.
Caveon’s forensics analyses use several methods of
detecting cheating, screening not only for erasures but improbable increases
or decreases in scores, individual students whose performance swings widely
from year to year, patterns where multiple students share the same wrong
answers and other anomalies.
Erasures alone only indicate certain types of
misconduct, as when answers are changed after a test. Other methods, Mr.
Fremer said, flag other types of cheating, like filling in the remaining
answers on an incomplete form.
States that are not checking answers with such
forensic measures cannot use the excuse that they are new, said Walt Haney,
a senior researcher at the
Center for the
Study of Testing, Evaluation and Educational Policy
at
Boston College. Using statistics to detect
cheating on standardized tests dates back to the 1920s, and erasure analyses
are practically as old as filling in bubbles on answer forms with a No. 2
pencil.
Of about 16 state public education clients of his
company, Mr. Fremer said, fewer than 10 conduct such analysis regularly. A
few other states use their own testing vendors, as Georgia did, to provide
similar data. Mr. Fremer said he thought more states would move toward
statistical analysis in order to maintain public confidence in test scores
and school ratings.
“I don’t think they can avoid doing it,” he said.
“There’s too much riding on the test results.”
Southern states, which have embraced the
accountability movement in education, have also been quicker to adopt
statistical methods to combat cheating.
South Carolina has been quietly using an erasure
analysis since the 1980s, said Elizabeth Jones, the director of the state
Education Department’s Office of Assessment. If a class is flagged for
suspicious activity, the state sends testing monitors the following year,
and sometimes educators are criminally prosecuted or lose their teaching
certificates.
Principals and teachers are well aware that the
state can detect erasures, and only a handful of classes are flagged each
year, Ms. Jones said.
In Washington, the superintendent of education has
recently conducted the first of what is to be an annual statistical analysis
of test results. Twelve of about 230 schools were flagged and asked to
conduct investigations, said Chad Colby, a spokesman for the Office of the
State Superintendent of Education. (The state superintendent oversees the
District of Columbia Public Schools and the city’s
charter schools.)
In Mississippi, Caveon does forensics analyses each
time a test is administered, and the state withholds questionable scores
until an investigation is completed.
“Initially, it was a new thing and folks were a
little skeptical — could we really reach these kind of conclusions just by
looking at the data?” said Kristopher Kaase, Mississippi’s deputy
superintendent for instructional programs. But investigations bore out the
statistical findings. “That’s made believers out of the school districts,”
he said.
NYT: Former Missouri Professor Stole Student’s Research to Sell New
Drug, Lawsuit Alleges ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/01/us/university-missouri-cequa-lawsuit.html
Thank you Elliot Kamlet for the heads up
Late researcher faked Kumamoto earthquake data, university finds ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/03/18/late-researcher-faked-kumamoto-earthquake-data-university-finds/
Rise in Research Cheating
"A Sharp Rise in Retractions Prompts Calls for Reform," by Carl Zimmer,
The New York Times, April 16, 2012 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/rise-in-scientific-journal-retractions-prompts-calls-for-reform.html?_r=2&
In the fall of 2010, Dr. Ferric C. Fang made an
unsettling discovery. Dr. Fang, who is editor in chief of the journal
Infection and Immunity, found that one of his authors had doctored several
papers.
It was a new experience for him. “Prior to that
time,” he said in an interview, “Infection and Immunity had only retracted
nine articles over a 40-year period.”
The journal wound up retracting six of the papers
from the author, Naoki Mori of the University of the Ryukyus in Japan. And
it soon became clear that Infection and Immunity was hardly the only victim
of Dr. Mori’s misconduct. Since then, other scientific journals have
retracted two dozen of his papers, according to the watchdog blog Retraction
Watch.
“Nobody had noticed the whole thing was rotten,”
said Dr. Fang, who is a professor at the University of Washington School of
Medicine.
Dr. Fang became curious how far the rot extended.
To find out, he teamed up with a fellow editor at the journal, Dr. Arturo
Casadevall of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. And
before long they reached a troubling conclusion: not only that retractions
were rising at an alarming rate, but that retractions were just a
manifestation of a much more profound problem — “a symptom of a
dysfunctional scientific climate,” as Dr. Fang put it.
Dr. Casadevall, now editor in chief of the journal
mBio, said he feared that science had turned into a winner-take-all game
with perverse incentives that lead scientists to cut corners and, in some
cases, commit acts of misconduct.
“This is a tremendous threat,” he said.
Last month, in a pair of editorials in Infection
and Immunity, the two editors issued a plea for fundamental reforms. They
also presented their concerns at the March 27 meeting of the National
Academies of Sciences committee on science, technology and the law.
Members of the committee agreed with their
assessment. “I think this is really coming to a head,” said Dr. Roberta B.
Ness, dean of the University of Texas School of Public Health. And Dr. David
Korn of Harvard Medical School agreed that “there are problems all through
the system.”
No one claims that science was ever free of
misconduct or bad research. Indeed, the scientific method itself is intended
to overcome mistakes and misdeeds. When scientists make a new discovery,
others review the research skeptically before it is published. And once it
is, the scientific community can try to replicate the results to see if they
hold up.
But critics like Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall argue
that science has changed in some worrying ways in recent decades —
especially biomedical research, which consumes a larger and larger share of
government science spending.
In October 2011, for example, the journal Nature
reported that published retractions had increased tenfold over the past
decade, while the number of published papers had increased by just 44
percent. In 2010 The Journal of Medical Ethics published a study finding the
new raft of recent retractions was a mix of misconduct and honest scientific
mistakes.
Several factors are at play here, scientists say.
One may be that because journals are now online, bad papers are simply
reaching a wider audience, making it more likely that errors will be
spotted. “You can sit at your laptop and pull a lot of different papers
together,” Dr. Fang said.
But other forces are more pernicious. To survive
professionally, scientists feel the need to publish as many papers as
possible, and to get them into high-profile journals. And sometimes they cut
corners or even commit misconduct to get there.
To measure this claim, Dr. Fang and Dr. Casadevall
looked at the rate of retractions in 17 journals from 2001 to 2010 and
compared it with the journals’ “impact factor,” a score based on how often
their papers are cited by scientists. The higher a journal’s impact factor,
the two editors found, the higher its retraction rate.
The highest “retraction index” in the study went to
one of the world’s leading medical journals, The New England Journal of
Medicine. In a statement for this article, it questioned the study’s
methodology, noting that it considered only papers with abstracts, which are
included in a small fraction of studies published in each issue. “Because
our denominator was low, the index was high,” the statement said.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating by faculty are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
"Disgrace: On Marc Hauser," by Mark Gross, The Nation, January
9, 2012 ---
http://www.thenation.com/article/165313/disgrace-marc-hauser?page=0,2
. . .
Although some of my knowledge of the Hauser case is
based on conversations with sources who have preferred to remain unnamed,
there seems to me to be little doubt that Hauser is guilty of scientific
misconduct, though to what extent and severity remains to be revealed.
Regardless of the final outcome of the investigation of Hauser by the
federal Office of Research Integrity, irreversible damage has been done to
the field of animal cognition, to Harvard University and most of all to Marc
Hauser.
Bob Jensen's threads on the lack of validity testing and investigations of
misconduct in accountics science ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
"Bad science: The psychology behind exaggerated & false research [infographic],"
Holykaw, December 21, 2011 ---
http://holykaw.alltop.com/bad-science-the-psychology-behind-exaggerated
One in three scientists admits to using shady research practices.
Bravo: Zero accountics scientists admit to using shady research practices.
One in 50 scientists admit to falsifying data outright.
Bravo: Zero accountics scientists admit to falsifying data in the history
of accountics science.
Reports of colleague misconduct are even more common.
Bravo: But not in accountics science
Misconduct rates are highest among clinical, medical, and phamacological
researchers
Bravo: Such reports are lowest (zero) among accountics scientists
Four ways to make research more honest
- Make all raw data available to other scientists
- Hold journalists accountable
- Introduce anonymous publication
- Change from real science into accountics science where research is
unlikely to be validated/replicated except on rare occasions where no errors
are ever found
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
"Here are the most-retracted scientists in the world, ranked," by
Julia Belluz, Vox, June 25, 2015 ---
http://www.vox.com/2015/6/24/8834405/scientists-most-retractions
. . .
Yoshitaka Fujii (total retractions: 183)
Joachim Boldt (89)
Peter Chen (60)
Diederik Stapel (54)
Hua Zhong (41)
drian Maxim (38)
Shigeaki Kato (36)
Hendrik Schön (36)
Hyung-In Moon (35)
Naoki Mori (32)
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Truth in Science: Whatever Happened to the Piltdown Man?
http://daily.jstor.org/piltdown-man-hoax/
Large-Scale Fake Data in Academe
"The Case of the Amazing Gay-Marriage Data: How a Graduate Student
Reluctantly Uncovered a Huge Scientific Fraud," by Jesse Singal, New York
Magazine, May 2015 ---
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/05/how-a-grad-student-uncovered-a-huge-fraud.html
The exposure of one of the
biggest scientific frauds in recent memory didn’t start with concerns about
normally distributed data, or the test-retest reliability of feelings
thermometers, or anonymous Stata output on shady message boards, or any of
the other statistically complex details that would make it such a bizarre
and explosive scandal. Rather, it started in the most unremarkable way
possible: with a graduate student trying to figure out a money issue.
It was September of 2013,
and David Broockman (pronounced “brock-man”), then a third-year
political-science doctoral student at UC Berkeley, was blown away by some
early results published by Michael LaCour, a political-science grad student
at UCLA. On the first of the month, LaCour had invited Broockman, who is
originally from Austin, Texas, to breakfast during the American Political
Science Association’s annual meeting in Chicago. The pair met in a café
called Freshii at the Palmer House Hilton, where the conference was taking
place, and LaCour showed Broockman some early results on an iPad.
. . .
So when LaCour and
Green’s research was eventually published in December 2014 in Science,
one of the leading peer-reviewed research publications in the world, it
resonated far and wide. “When
contact changes minds: an expression of transmission of support for gay
equality” garnered
attention in the New York Times and a
segment on "This
American Life" in which a reporter tagged along
with canvassers as they told heart-wrenching stories about being gay. It
rerouted countless researchers’ agendas, inspired activists to change their
approach to voter outreach, generated shifts in grant funding, and launched
follow-up experiments.
But back in 2013, the
now-26-year-old Broockman, a self-identifying “political science nerd,” was
so impressed by LaCour’s study that he wanted to run his own version of it
with his own canvassers and his own survey sample. First, the
budget-conscious Broockman had to figure out how much such an enterprise
might cost. He did some back-of-the-envelope calculations based on what he’d
seen on LaCour’s iPad — specifically, that the survey involved about 10,000
respondents who were paid about $100 apiece — and out popped an imposing
number: $1 million. That can’t be right, he thought to himself.
There’s no way LaCour — no way any grad student, save one who’s
independently wealthy and self-funded — could possibly run a study that cost
so much. He sent out a Request for Proposal to a bunch of polling firms,
describing the survey he wanted to run and asking how much it would cost.
Most of them said that they couldn’t pull off that sort of study at all, and
definitely not for a cost that fell within a graduate researcher’s budget.
It didn’t make sense. What was LaCour’s secret?
Eventually, Broockman’s
answer to that question would take LaCour down.
"Journals Find Fakery in Many Images Submitted to Support Research,"
by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, May 27, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/05/3028n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Kristin Roovers was a postdoctoral fellow at the
University of Pennsylvania with a bright career ahead of her—a trusted
member of a research laboratory at the medical school studying the role of
cell growth in diabetes.
But when an editor of The Journal of Clinical
Investigation did a spot-check of one of her images for an article in
2005, Roovers's research proved a little too perfect.
The image had dark bands on it, supposedly showing
different proteins in different conditions. "As we looked at it, we realized
the person had cut and pasted the exact same bands" over and over again,
says Ushma S. Neill, the journal's executive editor. In some cases a copied
part of the image had been flipped or reversed to make it look like a new
finding. "The closer we took a look, the more we were convinced that the
data had been fabricated or manipulated in order to support the
conclusions."
As computer programs make images easier than ever
to manipulate, editors at a growing number of scientific publications are
turning into image detectives, examining figures to test their authenticity.
And the level of tampering they find is alarming.
"The magnitude of the fraud is phenomenal," says Hany Farid, a
computer-science professor at Dartmouth College who has been working with
journal editors to help them detect image manipulation. Doctored images are
troubling because they can mislead scientists and even derail a search for
the causes and cures of disease.
Ten to 20 of the articles accepted by The
Journal of Clinical Investigation each year show some evidence of
tampering, and about five to 10 of those papers warrant a thorough
investigation, says Ms. Neill. (The journal publishes about 300 to 350
articles per year.)
In the case of Ms. Roovers, editors notified the
federal Office of Research Integrity, which polices government-financed
science projects. The office concluded that the images had been improperly
manipulated, as had images the researcher had produced for papers published
in three other journals. That finding led two of those journals to retract
papers that Ms. Roovers had co-authored, papers that had been cited by other
researchers dozens of times.
The episode damaged careers—Ms. Roovers resigned
from the lab and is ineligible for U.S. government grants for five years—and
delayed progress in an important line of scientific inquiry.
Experts say that many young researchers may not
even realize that tampering with their images is inappropriate. After all,
people now commonly alter digital snapshots to take red out of eyes, so why
not clean up a protein image in Photoshop to make it clearer?
"This is one of the dirty little secrets—that
everybody massages the data like this," says Mr. Farid. Yet changing some
pixels for the sake of "clarity" can actually change an image's scientific
meaning.
The Office of Research Integrity says that 44
percent of its cases in 2005-6 involved accusations of image fraud, compared
with about 6 percent a decade earlier.
New tools, such as software developed by Mr. Farid,
are helping journal editors detect manipulated images. But some researchers
are concerned about this level of scrutiny, arguing that it could lead to
false accusations and unnecessarily delay research.
Easy to Alter
The alterations made by Ms. Roovers at the
University of Pennsylvania were "very easy" to do, says Richard K. Assoian,
a professor of pharmacology at Penn who worked with the young researcher and
served as her mentor while she was a doctoral student at the University of
Miami. "It's basic Photoshopping," he says.
Ms. Roovers admitted that she used the software,
though she says she was not the only one in the lab to do so.
"I certainly did something wrong, but I don't think
I was alone in the whole thing," she says, adding that it was not her intent
to deceive. "It was trying to present it even better."
Continued in article
University of Vermont Scientist Admits to Cheating
On a rainy afternoon in June, Eric Poehlman stood
before a federal judge in the United States District Court in downtown
Burlington, Vt. His sentencing hearing had dragged on for more than four hours,
and Poehlman, dressed in a black suit, remained silent while the lawyers argued
over the appropriate sentence for his transgressions. Now was his chance to
speak. A year earlier, in the same courthouse, Poehlman pleaded guilty to lying
on a federal grant application and admitted to fabricating more than a decade’s
worth of scientific data on obesity, menopause and aging, much of it while
conducting clinical research as a tenured faculty member at the University of
Vermont. He presented fraudulent data in lectures and in published papers, and
he used this data to obtain millions of dollars in federal grants from the
National Institutes of Health — a crime subject to as many as five years in
federal prison. Poehlman’s admission of guilt came after more than five years
during which he denied the charges against him, lied under oath and tried to
discredit his accusers. By the time Poehlman came clean, his case had grown into
one of the most expansive cases of scientific fraud in U.S. history.
Jeneen Interlandi, "An Unwelcome Discovery," The New York Times, October
22, 2006 ---
Click Here
Question
Did this chemistry professor cheat?
A
former graduate student of the State University of New York at Binghamton has
filed a $202-million lawsuit against the institution and four of its current and
former faculty members, contending that his former dissertation adviser
appropriated and published the results of two experiments he conducted without
including him as a co-author, a local newspaper, the Press & Sun-Bulletin,
reported.
"Former Graduate Student at SUNY-Binghamton Says Professor Stole His Work,"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2007 ---
Click Here
If
this is correct, it is incredible and is contrary to the principles most follow.
What Stealing intellectual property is common for staff members at universities,
who must write articles for their supervisor to either take the lead or take
sole ownership. There were three complaints of this at my institution, and the
university was able to sweep the dirt under the rug and the abuse of power
continues. Of the three, there are a myriad of stories of many more. What is
shocking is that some of these instances are documented by the conference
sessions available online and the original author’s submission! Perhaps staff
members should realize that even if your work is University property, it is not
your supervisors. Is there legal action here since the intellectual property
belongs to the employer for at-will staff? Shame on leadership who allow
academic dishonesty to prevail by supervisors, and yet publicly demand integrity
in the classroom!
The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 21, 2007 ---
Click Here
Bob Jensen's threads on Appearance Versus the Reality of Research
Independence and Freedom are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#ResearchIndependence
If your paper was rejected for publication, call the FBI
"When authors attack" Candace Sams's decision to report bad Amazon
reviewers to the FBI is further proof why it's best not to respond publicly to
your critics," by Allison Flood, The Guardian, December 23, 2009 ---
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog
Candace Sams's decision to report bad Amazon
reviewers to the FBI is further proof why it's best not to respond publicly
to your critics.
This year has seen its
fair share of authors kicking off about poor reviews, from Alice Hoffman,
who called a Boston Globe critic a "moron" on Twitter
following a negative review of her novel The Story Sisters, to Alain de
Botton, who
posted an excoriating comment on a reviewer's blog
after a poor write-up for The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work in the New York
Times. But the latest upset, played out on the pages of Amazon, is possibly
the weirdest.
Not only does it centre on
the dire-sounding romance novel,
Electra Galaxy's Mr Interstellar Feller (product
description: "When a handsome yet stuffy intergalactic cop is forced to
enter the Electra Galaxy's Mr Interstellar Feller competition, and is
partnered with an Earth cop as his manager and overseer, hilarity and
romance ensue"), but it takes the bizarro quotient to new levels.
After
Amazon reviewer LB Taylor gave the novel one star,
calling it "a sad excuse for romance, mystery, and humor", she found herself
attacked online by one NiteflyrOne – shortly outed by commentors as Candace
Sams, author of the novel. With the discussion numbering almost 400 posts,
Sams has now deleted her posts. Fortunately,
they've been saved for posterity
by a host of sites.
"Authors,"
she wrote, "rarely have full editorial control;
rarely do they have even 'scant' control over their covers or the language
used in dialogue or even sequencing of scenes: love scenes, kissing scenes,
scenes of violence, etc. These are ultimately controlled by editorial
staff…very rarely the author alone." Oh I see – blame the editor.
And later,
in response to another (also negative) review: "It
might behoove them to understand that all romances will not read they way
they think they should; romances should 'not' be cookie-cutters of one
another. This has been the biggest complaint about romance on the whole -
that they all sound alike. Apparently 'some' reviewers 'want' them to sound
alike. When they don't, they aren't able to handle the material."
She then
tells the thread that she's reporting naysayers
to the FBI.
This is wonderfully batty
stuff – on a par, I'd say, with Anne Rice's 2004 outburst on Amazon when she
told negative reviewers they were "interrogating this text from the wrong
perspective". "Your stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am
doing are slander,"
she wrote. "You have
used the site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies."
And I have to say, while I
agree with
Neil Gaiman's point that the Sams affair is "a
horrible car crash [and] if any of you are ever tempted to respond to bad
reviews or internet trolls etc, it's a salutary reminder of why some things
are better written in anger and deleted in the morning", I find angry author
responses strangely compelling. I like seeing flashes of the person behind
the book, and while responding may do the author's reputation no good at all
– turning the other cheek being the best way to deal with negative reviews -
I can see why they might do it anyway. Yes, it's a car crash, but I can't
stop rubber-necking
Jensen Comment
I've more suspicious of authors and/or publishers planting phony raving reviews.
There's a lot of moral hazard here.
Bob Jensen's threads on assessment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm
Colleges That Cheat
"Hundreds of Chicago State Students Were Ineligible for Aid,"
Inside Higher Ed, August 11, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/11/qt#267507
Hundreds of Chicago State University students
received state financial aid even though they lacked the grades needed to
remain enrolled,
The Chicago Tribune reported. The Tribune
reported last month about Chicago State failing to enforce its rules about
suspending those who fail to meet minimal grade requirements, but the
information about state financial aid emerged Wednesday at a state hearing.
"In Lawsuits, Graduates of 2 Law Schools Accuse Their Alma Maters of
Inflating Employment Data," by Ryan Brown, Chronicle of Higher Education,
August 10, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Lawsuits-Graduates-Accuse/128596/
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Colleges That Cheat in Athletics ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
How to Mislead With Statistics: Create a Denominator Effect
"W&L, Other Colleges Goose Rankings by Counting Incomplete Applications to
Shrink Acceptance Rate," by Paul Caron, TaxProf Blog, September 23,
2013 ---
http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2013/09/wapo-washington-.html
Jensen Comment
I know a Professor X who used to do something similar. Nearly 80% of his
students had an A grade going into the final. On the last day of class he handed
out teaching evaluations --- well in advance of the final examination scheduled
late in final exam week. Then in the the final exam he clobbered them with an
exam that made them happy to pass the course with any grade.
Of course, there's a difference between Professor X versus the colleges that
report incomplete applications as full applications in computing admission
acceptance rates. In the case of Professor X it did not take many semesters for
it to become widely known across campus how he was shrinking the number of top
grades in his courses. In the case of W&L and other colleges shrinking
acceptance rates it might never have become known by the media how these
colleges were fudging their acceptance rates.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in higher education are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education college ranking controversies ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
"Law Deans in Jail," by Morgan Cloud and George B. Shepherd. SSRN,
February 24, 2012 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1990746
Abstract:
A most unlikely collection of suspects - law schools, their deans, U.S. News
& World Report and its employees - may have committed felonies by publishing
false information as part of U.S. News' ranking of law schools. The possible
federal felonies include mail and wire fraud, conspiracy, racketeering, and
making false statements. Employees of law schools and U.S. News who
committed these crimes can be punished as individuals, and under federal law
the schools and U.S. News would likely be criminally liable for their
agents' crimes.
Some law schools and their deans submitted false
information about the schools' expenditures and their students'
undergraduate grades and LSAT scores. Others submitted information that may
have been literally true but was misleading. Examples include misleading
statistics about recent graduates' employment rates and students'
undergraduate grades and LSAT scores.
U.S. News itself may have committed mail and wire
fraud. It has republished, and sold for profit, data submitted by law
schools without verifying the data's accuracy, despite being aware that at
least some schools were submitting false and misleading data. U.S. News
refused to correct incorrect data and rankings errors and continued to sell
that information even after individual schools confessed that they had
submitted false information. In addition, U.S. News marketed its surveys and
rankings as valid although they were riddled with fundamental methodological
errors.
Bob Jensen's threads on media rankings of colleges and universities ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#BusinessSchoolRankings
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"The Law School System Is Broken," National Jurist, February
2012 ---
Click Here
http://www.nxtbook.com/splash/nationaljurist/nationaljurist.php?nxturl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nxtbook.com%2Fnxtbooks%2Fcypress%2Fnationaljurist0212%2Findex.php#/18/OnePage
Thank you Paul Caron for the heads up
It's a troubling trend. The total amount of debt
that has been used to pay for legal education has risen to $3.6 billion, up
from less than $2 billion just ten years prior. And if the current trends
continue, that figure could reach $7 billion by 2020.
It's not a problem that has gone unnoticed. Legal
education observers are worried, recent graduates are frantic and law
schools are looking at their options. ...
[T]here is no easy or simple answer to the problem.
... The reason for the debt is easier to understand: law school tuition
continues to outpace inflation. It increased by 74% from 1998 to 2008.
Why does tuition continue to grow? Most agree it is
related to the number of law professors walking around law school campuses
nowadays. Faculty salaries make up a majority of a law school's budget. And
law schools increased their faculty size by 40% from 1998 to 2008, according
to a National Jurist report. That meant almost 5,000 law professors were
added in 10 years, with the average student-to-faculty ratio dropping from
18.5-to-1 in 1998 to 14.9-to-1.
And why did law schools expand their faculties so
rapidly? Law has become more complex and specialized. Law schools today
offer far more course than ever before, and specializations. But critics
point out that the race to do better in the U.S. News & World Report annual
rankings has also fueled the growth.
Turkey Times for Overstuffed Law Schools ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#OverstuffedLawSchools
Journal Editors' Reactions to Word of Plagiarism? Largely Silence
"Journal Editors' Reactions to Word of Plagiarism? Largely Silence,"
by Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 20, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Journal-Editors-Reactions-to/129829/
Lior Shamir was surprised to learn that one of his
papers had been plagiarized. He was even more surprised to learn that it had
been plagiarized, by his count, 21 times.
But what really astonished him is that no one
seemed to care.
In July, Mr. Shamir, an assistant professor of
computer science at Lawrence Technological University, near Detroit,
received an anonymous e-mail signed "Prof. Against Plagiarism." That's how
he found out that multiple paragraphs from a paper he had presented at a
2006 conference, titled "Human Perception-Based Color Segmentation Using
Fuzzy Logic," also appeared in a 2010 paper by two professors in Iran. There
was no question of coincidence—the wording was identical—and his paper
wasn't even cited.
Curious, he started to poke around some more. One
of the Iranian professors, Ali Moghani, a professor at the Institute for
Color Science and Technology, in Tehran, appeared to have copied parts of
the paper in eight different publications. (Mr. Moghani did not respond to a
request for comment.) But he wasn't the only one. The more Mr. Shamir
looked, the more he found. Those 21 papers had 26 authors, all of whom had
published Mr. Shamir's work under their names, without credit.
It's not as if the paper was a central part of his
academic work. In fact, he had forgotten about it until he got the anonymous
e-mail. Now, though, he was intrigued, and more than a little annoyed.
So he started contacting journals, indexing
services, conference organizers. He sent, by his estimate, about 30 e-mails.
He expected that the papers, once it was shown that they had been
plagiarized, would be retracted. Maybe he would get an explanation, or an
apology, or a response of some kind.
In fact, he received only a couple of replies.
Among those he did receive was a reply from
Mohammad Reza Darafsheh, the other Iranian academic. Mr. Darafsheh, a
professor of mathematics at the University of Tehran, wrote that "[a]bout
the overlap of some sentences in chapter 4 of our paper with yours we feel
sorry." But he added that it was "only about one page." The e-mail ended
with an offer to collaborate with Mr. Shamir in the future.
When contacted by The Chronicle, Mr. Darafsheh
wrote in an e-mail that only one paragraph was identical to the original,
and that it had "no scientific value." After it was pointed out to Mr.
Darafsheh that, in truth, about 400 words of the eight-page paper appeared
to have been copied directly from Mr. Shamir's paper, he insisted that there
had been no copying, and that it was merely a "co-accident."
Mr. Darafsheh and Mr. Moghani's paper was published
in the Italian Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics. The Chronicle
contacted the editor, Piergiulio Corsini, who in turn asked Violeta Leoreanu
Fotea, a professor of mathematics at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, in
Romania, to investigate. After reviewing both papers, she wrote that she
could "not say that Darafsheh and Moghani have plagiarized the work of
Shamir."
After The Chronicle e-mailed her multiple examples
of just such copying from the paper, Ms. Leoreanu Fotea acknowledged that it
was "a lot of identical text," and said Mr. Corsini would decide how to
handle the matter. But he wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle that he was
not sure what decision he was supposed to make. "The paper has been already
published, and I cannot cancel it," he wrote. "I'm sorry for what happened."
Later, Ms. Leoreanu Fotea wrote to say that "two
lines on this unpleasant episode of plagiarism" would appear in a future
edition of the journal. 'Deny the Undeniable'
In 2009, another paper that borrowed heavily from
Mr. Shamir's without credit was published in the Proceedings of the Second
International Conference on Emerging Trends in Engineering & Technology. One
of the co-authors was Preeti Bajaj, president of the G.H. Raisoni College of
Engineering, in India, who was also chair of the conference where the
plagiarized paper was presented.
That plagiarism was first reported this past
September by the journal Nature India, in which Ms. Bajaj acknowledged that
portions were copied but blamed a graduate assistant who was a co-author of
the paper. She told Nature India that the assistant had been fired. What she
did not mention was that the paper was published again this year in the
Journal of Information Hiding and Multimedia Signal Processing. In an e-mail
to The Chronicle, she wrote in uncertain English that as a co-author, "I'm
guilty but I didn't knew my student will do so." In a follow-up message, she
asserted that the "research truth can be known to only those who understands
and work on the technology." Ms. Bajaj did not respond to a request for
further explanation.
Continued in article
Question
Have there been any recent plagiarism incidents detected for American Accounting
Association research journals?
Plagiarism arises when these journal authors plagiarized or when these journal
authors had their own writings plagiarized.
I know of one back in the 1960s where TAR published a paper in its entirety that
was previously published in Management Science. TAR issued an apology and
the author, from Scandinavia, was not punished in any way to my knowledge other
than to face the embarrassment of being caught. By the way, it was Les
Livingstone who first notified the AAA that this TAR paper was plagiarized.
Celebrities Who Plagiarize/Cheat
Multiple incidents of plagiarism helped doom Joe Biden's first presidential
run in 1988 ---
https://www.businessinsider.com/plagiarism-scandal-joe-biden-first-presidential-run-1988-2019-3
MIT: Machine learning has revealed exactly how much of a Shakespeare
play was written by someone else ---
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/614742/machine-learning-has-revealed-exactly-how-much-of-a-shakespeare-play-was-written-by-someone/
CNN Fires Donna Brazile for Rigging Debates
--- Giving Hillary Questions in Advance ---
http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/24525-about-time-cnn-fires-donna-brazile-for-rigging-debates-giving-hillary-questions-in-advance
Jensen Comment
The sad part that comes as no surprise is that Hillary Clinton willingly
cheated. Under the pay-to-play policy Donna may even get a high level
appointment in the incoming White House.
Bob Jensen's threads on celebrities who cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities
Biden Admits Plagiarism in School But Says It Was Not
'Malevolent' (1987 Article) ---
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3875767/posts
When Ted Kennedy cheated at Harvard --
-
http://content.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1919041,00.html
A lifetime of hard, and often selfish, living also took its toll on
Kennedy. In 1951, as a freshman at Harvard who was more interested in
football than his studies, Kennedy arranged for a friend to take his spring
Spanish exam. He was caught cheating and was subsequently expelled from the
school for two years, during which time he served as a military police
officer in Paris at the arrangement of his father. Years later, while he was
a law student at the University of Virginia, Kennedy was arrested for
reckless driving after a chase with police.
Plagiarism Software Unveils a New Source for 11 of Shakespeare’s Plays
Shakespeare
leaned heavily on George North, a minor figure in the court of Queen Elizabeth.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/07/books/plagiarism-software-unveils-a-new-source-for-11-of-shakespeares-plays.html
In the Victorian era, a different kind of ghostwriting became
popular—largely because it allowed men to take all the credit ---
https://daily.jstor.org/wb-yeats-live-in-spirit-medium/
Monkey See Monkey Do
"Jane Goodall apologizes for lifting passages from Wikipedia for her new book,"
by Elizabeth Foster, National Post, March 20, 2013 ---
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/03/20/jane-goodall-apologizes-for-failing-to-cite-passages-from-wikipedia-and-elsewhere-in-her-new-book/
Jane Goodall, the primatologist famous for her
painstaking research, has apologized for including dozens of passages
without attribution in her new book.
Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of
Plants is an exploration of the critical role nature plays in our world. The
book’s focus on plant life is a departure for Goodall, whose expertise has
long been primates.
While much of the book details Goodall’s personal
experiences and opinions, sections ranging from a sentence to entire
paragraphs were borrowed from websites like Wikipedia without attribution or
footnotes.
Jensen Comment
Jane Goodall purportedly lifted verbatim sections from Wikipedia and various
other documents. Admissions such as this are bound to raise questions about the
integrity of the researcher in all other works, particularly the gathering of
data.
Supreme Court nominee Gorsuch lifted from earlier works in
his scholarly papers: Report ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/05/supreme-court-nominee-gorsuch-lifted-earlier-works-scholarly-papers-report/
Other celebrates who plagiarized including Jane Goodall, Martin
Luther King, Jr., Vladimir Putin, Mexico’s President (Enrique Peña Nieto),
Arianna Huffington, Seinfeld's wife, Fareed Zakaria, etc. ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/05/supreme-court-nominee-gorsuch-lifted-earlier-works-scholarly-papers-report/
When making excuses for plagiarism, celebrities and others
usually assert that their assistants or ghost writers did the plagiarizing,
although taking credit for writings of others without acknowledgement is
equally unethical since the 19th century when academics commonly took credit for
works of their students without acknowledgement ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/04/05/supreme-court-nominee-gorsuch-lifted-earlier-works-scholarly-papers-report/
I've not seen where Judge Gorsuch is making such a claim when confronted with
the recent allegations, but this may well be the reason. I flunked a student who
complained that his employee who wrote the term paper did the plagiarizing.
Slavoj Žižek Charged With Plagiarizing A White Nationalist Magazine
Article ---
http://www.openculture.com/2014/07/slavoj-zizek-charged-with-plagiarizing-a-white-nationalist-magazine-article.html
Bob Jensen's threads on celebrity plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities
Germany: Family Minister Giffey quits amid plagiarism scandal ---
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-family-minister-giffey-quits-amid-plagiarism-scandal/a-57580334
Mexico’s President (Enrique Peña Nieto) Is
Said to Have Plagiarized Law Thesis ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/mexicos-president-is-said-to-have-plagiarized-law-thesis/113652?elqTrackId=acc84e8bbba549008c1f362af2c164e8&elq=a8e9ea2372fe418882ef792d3a667f3b&elqaid=10365&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3880
"U.S. Senator’s Academic Thesis Contains Evidence of Plagiarism," by
Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 23, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/u-s-senators-college-thesis-contains-evidence-of-plagiarism?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Sen. John E. Walsh, a Montana Democrat, apparently
plagiarized parts of his thesis on American Middle East policy, copying
large sections from a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace document
without attribution,
The New York Times reports.
The thesis, written while Mr. Walsh was completing
a master’s degree at the United States Army War College, a graduate-level
institution, concludes with six policy recommendations, all of which were
copied from the Carnegie document nearly verbatim.
Mr. Walsh said on Tuesday that he didn’t think he
had plagiarized the paper, adding, “I didn’t do anything intentional here.”
Jensen Comment
"The Case of the Progressive Plagiarist," by Alexander Nazaryan,
Newsweek, June 13, 2014 ---
http://www.newsweek.com/case-progressive-plagiarist-254746
In a lengthy
article that was obviously thoroughly researched and was, just as
obviously, a long time in the making,
New Republic contributor Christopher Ketcham convincingly
argues that the firebrand left-wing journalist Chris Hedges has
routinely plagiarized in his work, liberally
borrowing from the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Naomi Klein, not to
mention Ketcham’s wife.
Once part of a New
York Times team that won a Pulitzer Prize, Hedges has recently
turned to political criticism that some have deemed strident;
he has even been accused of anti-Israeli
sentiment that appears to lapse at times into animosity for Jews
themselves.
As bad as Hedges’s
journalistic crimes might have been, his condescension to those who
confronted him were even worse. As Ketcham writes:
In September 2003,
[University of Texas classics professor Thomas Palaima] published a
piece on the Hemingway plagiarism in the
Austin American-Statesman, in which he
noted that plagiarists “are not merely stunting their own
intellectual development or disappointing their professors. By
disguising the fact that they are not speaking in their own voices,
[they] diminish our belief that their voices are original and worth
listening to.” According to Palaima, when he and Hedges spoke on the
phone prior to publication of the American-Statesman piece, Hedges
suggested that Palaima was not competent to question his work.
Palaima, a MacArthur Fellow and veteran classicist, replied that he
was adhering to the basic rules of scholarship in which proper
citation is given.
Hedges’s assured downfall recalls
that of pop-sci writer Jonah Lehrer. Both men appeared to have
thought they were above basic journalistic propriety. Both were wrong.
NYT: Similarities in 2 Novels Raise Questions About the Limits of
Literary Influence on Dan Mallory ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/books/dan-mallory-woman-window-denzil.html
Question
who were at least two famous world leaders who plagiarized doctoral theses?
Answer
Two that I know of off the top of my head are
Martin Luther King and
Vladimir Putin. Doubts are raised that Putin ever read his thesis that
plagiarized from a
U.S. textbook. Iran's President Ahmadinejad allegedly plagiarizes, although
I don't know if he plagiarized in his doctoral thesis ---
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2006/10/ahmadinejad_i_h.html
It's not clear that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesis
Large parts of an economics thesis written by President
Vladimir Putin in the mid-1990s were lifted straight out of a U.S. management
textbook published 20 years earlier, The Washington Times reported Saturday,
citing researchers at the Brookings Institution. It was unclear, however,
whether Putin had even read the thesis, which might have been intended to
impress the Western investors who were flooding into St. Petersburg in the
mid-1990s, the report said. Putin oversaw the city's foreign economic relations
at the time.
"Putin Accused of Plagiarizing Thesis," Moscow Times, March 27, 2006 ---
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/27/011.html
Jensen Comment
What's interesting about this news item is that it was published in Moscow. This
would not have happened in the old Soviet Union.
Martin Luther King Jr. has been accused of widespread plagiarism, including
parts of his doctoral thesis ---
http://www.martinlutherking.org/thebeast.html
Other celebrity plagiarists ---
http://www.cfif.org/htdocs/freedomline/current/in_our_opinion/plagiarism.htm
Renewed Accusations of Plagiarism by Arianna Huffington
"Blast from the Past," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed, October 14, 2013
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/10/14/petition-calls-uva-block-arianna-huffington-campus-appearance
Arianna Huffington is set to appear at the
University of Virginia this week to meditate on its famed “lawn” with
spiritualist Deepak Chopra. But a petition started by a former graduate
student there calls for Huffington’s invitation to be rescinded, citing
allegations that she once plagiarized a revered professor’s work.
“We are outraged that Ms. Huffington would come to
very university that employed an esteemed professor of art history, the late
Dr. Lydia Csató Gasman, whose original and groundbreaking scholarship on
Picasso was plagiarized by Huffington,” the
petition reads. “We hereby request that in
deference to the legacy and memory of Professor Gasman who taught in the
McIntire Department of Art and Art History for over 20 years, and in light
of the fact that Ms. Huffington's actions were in breach of the Honor Code,
Ms. Huffington be informed of this error in judgment, and therefore
uninvited.”
Kimberlee Cloutier-Blazzard, a Boston-area writer
and adjunct professor of art history who last taught at Simmons College, and
who is A.B.D. from Virginia, started the petition late last week. She hopes
to garner 1,000 signatures by Tuesday, when Huffington is set to visit.
In an e-mail, Cloutier-Blazzard said: “There are
many former students, colleagues, and friends of Professor Gasman who
remember the plagiarism incident when it occurred, and its effects on
Professor Gasman, and are astounded that U.Va. would bring Ms. Huffington to
grounds.”
Along with petition, the former student and others
involved in the matter sent formal letters to President Teresa Sullivan and
various faculty leaders.
The plagiarism allegations date back to 1988, and
the publication of Huffington’s Picasso: Creator and Destroyer.
Gasman, who had all but published a four-volume thesis on Picasso, already
available on file in typescript, accused Huffington of stealing many of her
ideas.
The incident is detailed in a 1994 profile on
Huffington and her then-husband, Michael Huffington, in
Vanity Fair: It alleges that Huffington
heavily borrowed from Gasman's then-novel ideas about Picasso's
relationships with women and other matters.
"On the eve of publication of Arianna’s Picasso
biography, according to Gasman and her husband, Daniel, Arianna started
calling them,” the article says. “She also sent Gasman a letter saying that
she had quoted her and that ‘each quote is fully attributed in the Source
Notes in the back of the book.’ When Gasman received the book, she was in
Israel tending her sick mother, and she gave it only a cursory once-over.
She sent Arianna a note. Later, however, after Gasman had given Picasso
a more careful reading — it cites her only twice in the source notes, and
not at all in the acknowledgments — she was horrified. ‘What she did was
steal 20 years of my work.’”
In the piece, Picasso biographer John Richardson
says that Huffington used Gasman’s thesis like a “kind of dictionary,”
“systematically cannibalizing” her thesis.
Lyn Bolen Warren, a former student of Gasman's to
whom she left her manuscripts, co-founded a nonprofit organization dedicated
to preserving and publishing the professor's work, the Lydia Csato Gasman
Archives for Picasso and Modernist Studies. She said the incident occurred
during her time at Virginia.
"I clearly remember how incensed Professor Gasman
was because she had spent decades gathering the information and discoveries
in her thesis and [Huffington] just 'lifted' the whole parts, and yet she
used what she stole in an abhorrent way emphasizing not what Gasman had
found to be true about Picasso but instead played up an evil side of
Picasso," Warren said via e-mail. "So she not only stole, she manipulated
the material in ways opposite from Gasman's for dramatic effect."
Gasman, who died in 2010, is quoted as having told
Huffington she was an “intellectual kleptomaniac,” who allegedly asked to
settle the matter with her financially -- which Huffington denies.
Huffington was not quoted in the Vanity Fair
article. She denied the allegations in a 2008
New Yorker profile.
Chopra and Huffington are guests of the
university’s new Contemplative Sciences Center. In a
news release about the appearance, David Germano,
the center’s director, said the event was scheduled for a reading day so
that students can benefit from the positive effects of meditation.
Continued in article
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had the
most instances of digital piracy and other copyright infringements among
American colleges and universities in 2008 for the second year in a row,
according to a report released by Bay-TSP, a
California company that offers tracking applications for copyrighted works.
According to the company’s
annual report, MIT had
2,593 infringements of media owned by Bay-TSP’s clients. The University of
Washington and Boston University ranked second and third, with 1,888 and
1,408 infringements, respectively.
Clients of the company, whose name means “Bay-Area
Track, Security, Protect,” include motion-picture studios; software,
video-game and publishing companies; and sports and pay-per-view television
networks.
The annual report provides an analysis of data
collected using piracy-network crawling software. The company does not track
all instances of Internet-based piracy, said Jim E. Graham, a Bay-TSP
spokesman. It only monitors violations of movies, videos, TV shows, or
software that clients ask the company to follow.
Mr. Graham also said not all violations result in a
take-down notice. Clients give the company varying instructions for their
data, ranging from sending take-down notices to simply tracking how often
and by whom the material is infringed.
Although MIT ranks first
among domestic colleges and universities, it is not in the top 10 worldwide.
The University of Botswana had 9,027 infringements, followed by Sweden’s
Uppsala University, which had 8,032 infringements, according to the report.
Jeffrey I. Schiller, the information-services and
technology-network manager at MIT, said he has not
seen a copy of Bay-TSP’s report, but the
institution does not tolerate copyright infringement, nor does it receive an
unusual number of take-down notices.
“I haven’t formally counted the number of take-down
notices we’ve received, but if we get more than a few, it’s a big day,” he
said. “If we represented truly the worst-case scenario, then copyright
infringement can’t be a really big problem, because we don’t have that
much.”
After this book was reviews by Oprah, my wife made me order it. Backorder
is actually the case since Amazon could not get immediate copies after the Oprah
show. Now there are charges flying about concerning plagiarism.
"Analysts: Seinfeld's defense rings hollow: Wife claims she never saw
cookbook she's accused of plagiarizing," WorldNetDaily, November 2, 2007 ---
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=58467
Jerry Seinfeld's wife's claim that she never saw
the cookbook she's accused of plagiarizing rings hollow against
market-research practices in the book-publishing industry, analysts say.
The author of "The Sneaky Chef: Simple Strategies
for Hiding Healthy Foods in Kids' Favorite Meals" charges that Jessica
Seinfeld stole the theme of her book and at least 15 recipes when she wrote
a remarkably similar book, "Deceptively Delicious: Simple Secrets to Get
Your Kids Eating Good Food," that appeared several months later.
"I have never seen or read this other book,"
Seinfeld said.
Her husband, comedian Jerry Seinfeld, Monday
defended his wife in an appearance on CBS' "Late Show With David Letterman."
"My wife never saw the book, read the book, used
the book," he insisted.
But publishing analysts point out that book agents
scour the market before a book is formally proposed to rule out competing
titles. And book editors and publishing boards conduct even more stringent
market research before offering writers a contract.
"There's no way they missed 'Sneaky Chef,'" said a
senior editor with a major New York publishing house, who wished to remain
anonymous.
In fact, Seinfeld's publisher HarperCollins had
access to the original manuscript of "Sneaky Chef" almost six months before
signing her to a contract. Its author, Missy Chase Lapine, submitted her
139-page book proposal with 31 recipes and 11 purees twice to HarperCollins
– once in February 2006 without an agent and again with an agent in May
2006.
HarperCollins signed Seinfeld one month later, in
June 2006.
Lapine says that after her publisher, Running
Press, contacted HarperCollins, the cover of "Deceptively Delicious" was
changed from the one featured in a promotional brochure. In the title, the
word "sneaky" was replaced with "simple."
Jerry Seinfeld called Lapine, former publisher of
"Eating Well" magazine, a "wacko."
The comic's wife's cookbook has climbed to the top
of the New York Times and Amazon bestsellers lists thanks in large part to
an Oct. 8 appearance on the "Oprah" show. Lapine says she and her publicists
pitched Oprah's producers five times without success.
Host Oprah Winfrey and the Seinfelds are close, and
she has a role in Jerry Seinfeld's new animated film, "Bee Movie."
Also, Jessica Seinfeld reportedly gave Winfrey 21
pairs of rare designer shoes valued at some $20,000.
During the World Series last week, Jerry Seinfeld
appeared in a Hewlett Packard TV spot promoting the HP notebook in which he
plugs not only his movie but also his wife's book. Thumbing through a
digital image of "Deceptively Delicious," he remarks, "My wife wrote a
cookbook. She is a genius"
Grade Changing Scandal at Florida A&M (on the
heels of the earlier financial fraud scandals)
Florida A&M University’s law school is facing a
grade-changing scandal. Last week,
The Tallahassee Democrat reported that three
administrators had been fired and two students had been dismissed over
inappropriate grade changes and admissions issues. Today, without offering
details,
the newspaper is reporting that the dismissed
students didn’t have grades changed, but a student who did remains enrolled. In
addition, also without details, the newspaper says that two of the fired
employees reported the grade changing.
Inside Higher Ed, June 20, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/20/qt
Juicy Gossip on Alleged Cheating at the University of West Virginia
"West Virginia U. Roiled Over Alleged Transcript Rewrite for Governor's
Daughter," by Paul Fain, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 9, 2008
---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/01/1083n.htm?at
Michael S. Garrison was controversial at West
Virginia University even before his arrival in September as president. Now
he is linked to a developing scandal that raises questions about the ties
between the university and the state's power brokers in politics and
business.
The uproar began on December 21 with
an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette,
which alleged that the university had rewritten the academic record of
Heather M. Bresch, a top executive at a West Virginia pharmaceutical company
and the daughter of the state's governor, Joe Manchin III, a Democrat.
Both university officials and Ms. Bresch have a
different view of the discrepancy, blaming a clerical error by the
university for the appearance that Ms. Bresch was 22 credits short of her
M.B.A. degree. But allegations that a political insider received favorable
treatment have inflamed Mr. Garrison's many critics among West Virginia
faculty members, who were already fuming about his qualifications and his
cozy ties to the state's capital.
Mr. Garrison, 38, is a lawyer who has held several
political posts, most notably as chief of staff to a former governor and as
chairman of the state's Higher Education Policy Commission. Some faculty
members asserted that the presidential search had been rigged in his favor
(The
Chronicle, April 6, 2007). And, in a rare
step, the Faculty Senate voted to oppose Mr. Garrison's selection even
before it was official (The
Chronicle, April 12, 2007).
Ms. Bresch and Mr. Garrison have long-standing
connections. They were classmates in high school and as undergraduates at
West Virginia. The influence wielded by Ms. Bresch's father, the governor,
is rivaled by that of Milan (Mike) Puskar, chairman and co-founder of Mylan
Laboratories Inc., a large West Virginia-based drug company where Ms. Bresch
serves as chief operating officer. Mr. Puskar is one of the university's
most generous donors.
West Virginia
University’s nationally accredited 13 ½ month MBA program is ideal for someone
interested in pursuing the MBA immediately after completing the bachelor’s
degree or for someone looking to change careers and/or enhance job
opportunities.
From the WVA MBA Program Website ---
http://www.be.wvu.edu/mba/index.htm
No mention is made of academic credit being available for any work
experience. Since the Executive MBA program at WVA is designed for working
professionals it would seem that all students in the program would be elgible
for work experience credit if any other student got such credit for four
courses.
"W.
Va. Governor's Daughter Speaks Out on Degree Controversy," by Paul Fain,
Chronicle of Higher Education, April 9, 2008 ---
Click Here
West Virginia University gave a panel of outside
experts the task in January of investigating an
explosive academic-transcript controversy,
involving discrepancies in an executive M.B.A.
claimed by Heather M. Bresch, the governor’s daughter. Ms. Bresch is a
former classmate of the
university’s president,
Michael S. Garrison, and is a top executive with a
drug company, Mylan Inc., whose chairman, Milan (Mike) Puskar, is a major
donor to the university.
Ms. Bresch spoke publicly about her transcript for
the first time this week, in a meeting with the investigative panel and in
an
interview with
the Associated Press. She said she had earned the degree fairly,
substituting work-experience credits for four classes. She also denied
allegations that she had received favorable treatment because of her
political connections.
“I secured my degree in ’98 when my father wasn’t
governor, when Mike Puskar hadn’t given millions, and Mike Garrison wasn’t
president,” Ms. Bresch said.
The former head of the university’s executive
M.B.A. program, Paul Speaker, with whom Ms. Bresch said she reached an
agreement on her work credits, also testified before the panel. Mr. Speaker
declined to discuss Ms. Bresch’s case in an interview with the AP, citing
privacy laws, but said he could not remember any instance where work
experience had taken the place of course work.
“If you look through the annals of anything at the
university,” Mr. Speaker said, “you will not find a single course for which
experience would replace the course.”
Fareed Zakaria ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fareed_Zakaria
Incident 2
"
Fareed Zakaria Busted for Plagiarism Once More," by Jack Cashill, American
Thinker, August 24, 2014 ---
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/08/fareed_zakaria_busted_for_plagiarism_once_more.html
Incident 1
Last week Mr. Zakaria apologized "unreservedly" to New
Yorker writer Jill Lepore after a blogger noticed that a paragraph in his Time
column was all-but identical to something Ms. Lepore had written. Mr. Zakaria
has now been given a month's suspension by his employers pending further review
of his work.
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444508504577591054290952344.html?mg=reno64-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
"In Defense of Fareed Zakaria: The famous pundit made a mistake,
but the schadenfreude brigades are guilty of worse," by Bret Stephens, The Wall
Street Journal, August 15, 2012 ---
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444508504577591054290952344.html?mg=reno64-wsj#mod=djemEditorialPage_t
. . .
Last week Mr. Zakaria apologized "unreservedly" to
New Yorker writer Jill Lepore after a blogger noticed that a
paragraph in his Time column was all-but identical to something Ms. Lepore
had written. Mr. Zakaria has now been given a month's suspension by his
employers pending further review of his work.
We'll see if there are other shoes to drop. Among
the more mystifying aspects of this story is that plagiarism in the age of
Google is an offense hiding in plain sight, especially when the kind of
people who read Mr. Zakaria's columns are the same kind of people who read
the New Yorker. Why couldn't he have added the words, "As the New Yorker's
Jill Lepore wrote . . ."? What could he possibly have been thinking?
My guess is he wasn't thinking. That's never a good
thing, but it's something that might happen to an overcommitted journalist
so constantly in the public eye that he forgets he's there. The proper
response is the full apology he has already made, and maybe a
reconsideration of whether the current dimensions of Fareed Zakaria Inc. are
sustainable. Otherwise, end of story.
But that's not how Mr. Zakaria is being treated. To
some of his critics, nothing less than the Prague Defenestration will do.
Here, for instance, is Jim Sleeper in the
Huffington Post—a publication that earns much of its keep piggybacking on
the work of others. "Zakaria is a trustee of Yale," notes Mr. Sleeper. "If
the Yale Corporation were to apply to itself the standards it expects its
faculty and students to meet, Zakaria would have to take a leave or resign."
Mr. Sleeper, a one-time tabloid columnist, goes on
to impugn Mr. Zakaria for various offenses, such as dissing people Mr.
Sleeper obviously likes and commanding speaking fees Mr. Sleeper seems to
think are too high. If Mr. Sleeper has ever been offered $75,000 to deliver
deep thoughts to a corporate board and turned the money down, it would be
interesting to see the evidence. Otherwise, his is the most vulgar voice of
envy.
Also gloating are the people who detest Mr. Zakaria
for his views. In a recent column in Reason magazine, Ira Stoll—who often
insinuates that this editorial page gets all its good ideas from him—more or
less gives Mr. Zakaria a plagiarism pass, then lights into him for holding
incorrect views on tax rates and the Middle East. Who knew that disagreeing
with Ira Stoll was one of the world's greatest journalistic offenses?
I'm an occasional guest on Mr. Zakaria's show, for
which I get no pay and not much glory. Mr. Zakaria and I have an amicable
relationship but have never socialized. And my political views are
considerably to the right of his, to say the least.
But I will give Mr. Zakaria this: He anchors one of
the few shows that treats foreign policy seriously, that aims for an honest
balance of views, and that doesn't treat its panelists as props for an
egomaniacal host. He's also one of the few prominent liberals I know who's
capable of treating an opposing point of view as something other than a slur
on human decency.
In my book, that makes him a good man who's made a
mistake. No similar compliment can be paid to the schadenfreude brigades now
calling for his head.
Celebrities Who Plagiarize/Cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Holocaust Memoir Turns Out to Be Fiction
A best-selling Holocaust memoir has been revealed to be
a fake. The author was never trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Neither was she
adopted by wolves who protected her from the Nazis, nor did she trek 1,900 miles
across Europe in search of her deported parents or kill a German soldier in
self-defense. She wasn’t even Jewish, The Associated Press reported. Misha
Defonseca, 71, right, a Belgian writer living in Dudley, Mass., about 60 miles
southwest of Boston, admitted through her lawyers last week that her book, “Misha:
A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years,” translated into 18 language and adapted
for the French feature film “Surviving With Wolves,” was a fantasy. In a
statement to The Associated Press, Ms. Defonseca said: “The story is mine. It is
not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving. I ask forgiveness to
all who felt betrayed.
Lawrence Van Gelder, The New York Times, March 3, 2008 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/books/03arts-HOLOCAUSTMEM_BRF.html
Margaret Jones' memoir, Love and Consequences,
recounts her early days selling drugs in South Central Los Angeles as well as
her eventual escape to college and publishing. If it sounds too good to be true,
that's because it is. The story is just the latest in a string of frauds that
have rocked the publishing industry.
:Memoir of Girl's Escape from Drugs, Gangs Is Bogus," NPR, March 5, 2008
---
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87898701
Authoring Ethics or Lack Thereof
Question
How do prestigious professors plagiarize in textbook "authoring" without even
knowing it?
"Schoolbooks Are Given F’s in Originality," by Diana Jean Schemo, The New
York Times, July 14, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/books/13textbook.html
The language is virtually identical to that in the
2005 edition of another textbook, “America: Pathways to the Present,” by
different authors. The books use substantially identical language to cover
other subjects as well, including the disputed presidential election of
2000, the Persian Gulf war, the war in Afghanistan and the creation of the
Department of Homeland Security.
Just how similar passages showed up in two books is
a tale of how the largely obscure $4 billion a year world of elementary and
high school textbook publishing often works, for these passages were not
written by the named authors but by one or more uncredited writers. And
while it is rare that the same language is used in different books, it is
common for noted scholars to give their names to elementary and high school
texts, lending prestige and marketing power, while lesser known writers have
a hand in the books and their frequent revisions.
As editions pass, the names on the spine of a book
may have only a distant or dated relation to the words between the covers,
diluted with each successive edition, people in the industry, and even
authors, say.
In the case of the two history texts, the authors
appeared mortified by the similarities and said they had had nothing to do
with the changes.
“They were not my words,” said Allan Winkler, a
historian at Miami University of Ohio, who wrote the “Pathways” book with
Andrew Cayton, Elisabeth I. Perry and Linda Reed. “It’s embarrassing. It’s
inexcusable.”
Wendy Spiegel, a spokeswoman for Pearson Prentice
Hall, which published both books and is one of the nation’s largest textbook
publishers, called the similarities “absolutely an aberration.”
She said that after Sept. 11, 2001, her company,
like other publishers, hastily pulled textbooks that had already been
revised and were lined up for printing so that the terror attacks could be
accounted for. The material on the attacks, as well as on the other
subjects, was added by in-house editors or outside writers, she said.
She added that it was “unfortunate” that the books
had identical passages, but said that there were only “eight or nine” in
volumes that each ran about 1,000 pages.
Gilbert T. Sewall, director of the American
Textbook Council, a nonprofit group that monitors history textbooks, said he
was not familiar with this particular incident. But Mr. Sewall said the
publishing industry had a tendency to see authors’ names as marketing tools.
“The publishers have a brand name and that name
sells textbooks,” he said. “That’s why you have well-established authorities
who put their names on the spine, but really have nothing to do with the
actual writing process, which is all done in-house or by hired writers.”
The industry is replete with examples of the
phenomenon. One of the most frequently used high school history texts is
“Holt the American Nation,” first published in 1950 as “Rise of the American
Nation” and written by Lewis Paul Todd and Merle Curti. For each edition,
the book appeared with new material, long after one author had died and the
other was in a nursing home. Eventually, the text was reissued as the work
of another historian, Paul S. Boyer.
Professor Boyer, emeritus professor of history at
the University of Wisconsin at Madison, acknowledged that the original
authors had supplied the structure of the book that carries his name. But he
said that as he revises the text, he adds new scholarship, themes and
interpretations. He defended the disappearance of the original authors’
names from the book, saying it would be more misleading to carry their names
when they had no say in current editions.
“Textbooks are hardly the same as the Iliad or
Beowulf,” he added.
Richard Blake, a spokesman for Harcourt Education,
a division of Holt, said none of the editors involved in the extended use of
the Todd and Curti names were still with the company. But he said that now
“all contributors and reviewers on each edition are listed in the front of
the book,” and that naming new principal authors depended largely on the
extent of their contributions.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
What also happens in authoring of textbooks for basic courses in accounting is
that a senior professor at a huge-market college is added largely for purposes
of gaining an adoption in his/her university or community college. The actual
contribution of that professor to the book is somewhat as questionable as when
some prestigious authors lend their names to a basic textbook where a
lesser-known "co-author" wrote most of the book.
Professors Who Plagiarize/Cheat
Retraction Watch (cheating in research) ---
http://retractionwatch.com
The Retraction Watch Database ---
http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx?
For example, put Accounting into the subject box and view the hit list (not all
are accounting research retractions)
Bob Jensen's threads on professor cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Elsevier journal to retract widely debunked masks study whose author claimed
a Stanford affiliation ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2021/04/26/elsevier-journal-to-retract-widely-debunked-masks-study-whose-author-claimed-a-stanford-affiliation/
Moshe Porat, the former business school dean who submitted false data for a
higher US News ranking, remains on the Temple faculty faces federal charges of one count
of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of wire fraud
Click Here
If convicted he faces up to 25 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.
Monash University academic’s article retracted over plagiarism ---
https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/monash-uni-academic-s-article-retracted-over-plagiarism-20210223-p5757z.html
Did a Journal Editor Publish Someone Else's Work as His Own?
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2021/01/27/did-journal-editor-publish-someone-elses-work-his-own?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=6b001ca536-DNU_2021_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-6b001ca536-197565045&mc_cid=6b001ca536&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Consumer business professor leaves Pitt after retractions for data
anomalies ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/08/13/consumer-researcher-leaves-pitt-after-retractions-for-data-anomalies/
USC-Children’s Hospital Los Angeles researcher out following faked data
probe ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/29/usc-childrens-hospital-los-angeles-researcher-out-following-misconduct-probe/
Retraction of paper on
romantic crushes marks second for psychology researcher ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/07/22/retraction-of-paper-on-romantic-crushes-marks-second-for-psychology-researcher/
Editors of Ethnologia
Europaea announce the retractions of seven more papers by Mart Bax, the Dutch
anthropologist whose misconduct includes not only making up data but making up
papers — at least 61 of them ---
https://ee.openlibhums.org/article/id/1801/
Nature: When a handful of authors were caught reviewing their own
papers, it exposed weaknesses in modern publishing systems ---
https://www.nature.com/news/publishing-the-peer-review-scam-1.16400
A renowned Oxford scholar claimed that he discovered a first-century gospel
fragment. Now he’s facing allegations of antiquities theft, cover-up, and fraud
---
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/06/museum-of-the-bible-obbink-gospel-of-mark/610576/
Youth Football Coach Set Up After-School Programs to Bilk Medicaid Out of
Millions of Dollars ---
https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/health-care-fraud-ring-busted-051320
A year after the University
of Maryland asked two Elsevier journals to retract papers, they haven’t ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/04/22/a-year-after-a-university-asked-two-elsevier-journals-to-retract-papers-they-havent/
Walter E. Williams:
Fixing College Corruption ---
https://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2020/04/15/fixing-college-corruption-n2566832?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=04/15/2020&bcid=b16c6f948f297f77432f990d4411617f&recip=17935167
America's
colleges are rife with corruption. The financial squeeze resulting from
COVID-19 offers opportunities for a bit of remediation. Let's first examine
what might be the root of academic corruption, suggested by the title of a
recent study, "Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of
Scholarship." The study was done by Areo, an opinion and analysis digital
magazine. By the way, Areo is short for Areopagitica, a speech delivered by
John Milton in defense of free speech.
Authors
Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay and Peter Boghossian say that something
has gone drastically wrong in academia, especially within certain fields
within the humanities. They call these fields "grievance studies," where
scholarship is not so much based upon finding truth but upon attending to
social grievances. Grievance scholars bully students, administrators and
other departments into adhering to their worldview. The worldview they
promote is neither scientific nor rigorous. Grievance studies consist of
disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, gender studies, queer,
sexuality and critical race studies.
In 2017 and
2018, authors Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian started submitting bogus
academic papers to academic journals in cultural, queer, race, gender, fat
and sexuality studies to determine if they would pass peer review and be
accepted for publication. Acceptance of dubious research that journal
editors found sympathetic to their intersectional or postmodern leftist
vision of the world proves the problem of low academic standards.
Several of
the fake research papers were accepted for publication. The Fat Studies
journal published a hoax paper that argued the term bodybuilding was
exclusionary and should be replaced with "fat bodybuilding, as a
fat-inclusive politicized performance." One reviewer said, "I thoroughly
enjoyed reading this article and believe it has an important contribution to
make to the field and this journal." "Our Struggle Is My Struggle:
Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice
Feminism," was accepted for publication by Affilia, a feminist journal for
social workers. The paper consisted in part of a rewritten passage from Mein
Kampf. Two other hoax papers were published, including "Rape Culture and
Queer Performativity at Urban Dog Parks." This paper's subject was
dog-on-dog rape. But the dog rape paper eventually forced Boghossian,
Pluckrose and Lindsay to prematurely out themselves. A Wall Street Journal
writer had figured out what they were doing.
Some papers accepted for
publication in academic journals advocated training men like dogs and
punishing white male college students for historical slavery by asking them
to sit in silence in the floor in chains during class and to be expected to
learn from the discomfort. Other papers celebrated morbid obesity as a
healthy life choice and advocated treating privately conducted masturbation
as a form of sexual violence against women. Typically, academic journal
editors send submitted papers out to referees for review. In recommending
acceptance for publication, many reviewers gave these papers glowing praise.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on
professors who let students cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Bob Jensen's threads on
professors who cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoFabricate
Bob Jensen's threads on grade
inflation ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#RateMyProfessor
Current and past editions of my blog called Fraud
Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
In the 1970s, a Stanford psychologist, David Rosenhan, published
‘findings’ deeply critical of American psychiatric methods. The problem was they
were almost entirely fictional ---
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2020/01/how-david-rosenhans-fraudulent-thud-experiment-set-back-psychiatry-for-decades/
A former historian at Columbia University who resigned last year in the wake of
a involving
his award-winning book on North Korea has lost a 2005 paper for misusing his
sources ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/02/20/disgraced-korea-scholar-formerly-of-columbia-loses-paper-for-plagiarism/
The plagiarism scandal ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2017/07/05/historian-returns-prize-high-profile-book-70-corrections/
The Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) today retracted a
paper it published last year claiming that vaping was linked to heart attacks ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/02/18/journal-retracts-hotly-contested-paper-on-vaping-and-heart-attacks/
University of Central Florida to fire 3 faculty members accused of
helping student get PhD in exchange for grants ---
https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/education/os-ne-ucf-fake-degree-professors-20200127-b2qpqedpa5eafcmvlculcrnzla-story.html?cid=db&source=ams&sourceId=296279
UCF plans to fire two professors and the director
of its Institute for Simulation and Training because they helped a student
fraudulently obtain a doctoral degree in exchange for the student helping
the institute secure grants, the university announced Monday.
The university also started the process to revoke
the student’s PhD, which, UCF documents show, was completed using work from
other students and amounted to plagiarism.
“There was a quid pro quo between” the graduate
student and one of the professors, “providing funding in exchange for a PhD
from UCF,” according to an investigative report by a Washington, D.C., law
firm hired by the university.
The student also may have violated federal bribery
laws, the law firm report said. The dissertation appears to be based on
research he “neither designed nor conducted,” it added.
UCF officials began an investigation in 2016 when
someone called a university hotline to report a student was “being unusually
helped” in exchange for “providing and overseeing research funds” for a lab
at the Institute for Simulation and Training, letters sent to the three
employees show.
The student worked for an “agency” that provided
research funding, the documents show. That agency had been making grants to
the institute since at least 2007 and has been one of its “most significant
sources of funding,” said the report by the Cohen Seglias law firm.
Continued in article
Russian Journals Retract
More Than 800 Papers Following Probe ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2020/01/09/russian-journals-retract-more-800-papers-following-probe?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=06516695f4-DNU_2019_COPY_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-06516695f4-197565045&mc_cid=06516695f4&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Jensen Comment
Russian has long been noted as a nation where both professors and student cheat.
Hans Eysenck ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Eysenck
Journal retracts 30-year-old
paper by controversial psychologist Hans Eysenck ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/01/21/journal-retracts-30-year-old-paper-by-controversial-psychologist-hans-eysenck/
Academic support for genetics differences in intelligence by race has been on
the decline for some time.
Psychiatrist who stole grant
funds also engaged in research misconduct ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/12/30/psychiatrist-who-stole-grant-funds-also-engaged-in-research-misconduct-says-ori/
This is Not an Incidence of
Intentional Cheating
A Case Study on What a Carleton College Assistant Professor Discovered That a
Coding Error Nullified Her Research Findings ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/03/26/i-was-shocked-i-felt-physically-ill-and-still-she-corrected-the-record/#more-119159
Similar to the Intentional Cheating of James Hunton: FSU Criminologist Accused
of Cooking the Books ---
https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/20190924-Criminology?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&cid=at&source=ams&sourceId=296279
. . .
The behind-the-scenes fight over these (five) flawed papers has escalated
into something more fraught than your standard academic disagreement. While
Stewart has remained publicly mum, and hasn’t responded to multiple
interview requests made over several weeks, privately he has been vocal
about what he views as a campaign of harassment against him. In emails and
text messages sent to colleagues, Stewart has portrayed himself as the
target of “data thugs” who are attempting to ruin his career. In an email to
Florida State administrators, he accused one of his co-authors of having
“essentially lynched me and my academic character.” It’s a loaded verb
choice not only because Stewart is black, but also because two of the five
papers in question focus on the horrific history of lynching in the United
States.
The co-author
Stewart referred to in that email is Justin Pickett. For the last few
months, Pickett, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice
at New York’s University at Albany, has repeatedly pushed Stewart to share
the relevant data and has posted online a 27-page critique of
suspicious findings in one of the papers
He has also contacted Florida State administrators and journal editors,
urging them to investigate.
Pickett’s actions have divided the field of
criminology: Some applaud his zeal in attempting to uncover the truth, while
others see him as violating unspoken norms of collegiality. Stewart and
Pickett are locked in a dispute that reflects a broader debate in social
science about the reliability of results and the transparency of methods.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
This reminds me of the accounting professor James Hunton scandal. Hunton refused
to cooperate even with investigators within his own university (Bentley) where
he was accordingly terminated and has apparently withdrawn from academe after
over 30 co-authored papers were retracted from various journals.
A law researcher who has falsely claimed to have been affiliated with
several institutions has lost eight more publications, bringing his retraction
total to 31 and earning him a spot in the top 20 of our leaderboard ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2020/12/14/legal-researcher-up-to-23-retractions-for-false-affiliations-plagiarism/
Accounting fraudster James Hunton comes
it at Rank 14 on the Retraction Watch Leaderboard with 37 retractions and
loss of his career as an accounting professor ---
https://retractionwatch.com/the-retraction-watch-leaderboard/
REPORT OF JUDITH A. MALONE, BENTLEY UNIVERSITY ETHICS OFFICER, CONCERNING DR.
JAMES E. HUNTON
July 21, 2014 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Pursuant to the Bentley University Ethics Complaint
Procedures (“Ethics Policy”), this report summarizes the results of an
eighteen - month investigation into two separate allegations of research
misconduct that were received by Bentley in November 2012 and January 2013
against James E. Hunton, a former Professor of Accountancy. The complainants
– one a confidential reporter (as defined in the Ethics Policy) and the
other a publisher – alleged that Dr. Hunton engaged in research misconduct
in connection wit h two papers that he published while a faculty member at
the University: “A Field Experiment Comparing the Outcomes of Three Fraud
Brainstorming Procedures: Nominal Group, Round Robin, and Open Discussion,”
The Accounting Review 85 (3): 911 - 935 (“Fraud Br barnstorming”) and “The
Relationship between Perceived Tone at the Top and Earnings Quality,”
Contemporary Accounting Research 28 (4): 1190 - 1224 (“Tone at the Top”).
Because of concerns regarding Fraud Brainstorming
that the editors at The Accounting Review had been discussing with Dr.
Hunton since May 2012, the editors withdrew that paper in November 2012.
Bentley received the allegation of research misconduct from the confidential
reporter later that month. The confidential reporter also raised questions
about ten other articles that Dr. Hunton published or provided data for
while he was at Bentley, which, the reporter alleged, raised similar
questions of research integrity.
In my role as Ethics Officer, it was my duty to
make the preliminary determination n about whether the allegations warranted
a full investigation. To make that determination, I met with Dr. Hunton in
person when Bentley received this allegation, after I first instructed
Bentley IT to back up and preserve all of his electronic data store d on
Bentley’s servers. During that meeting, we discussed the allegation, I
explained the process that would be followed if I found an investigation was
warranted, and I described the need for his cooperation, including the
specific admonition that he pre serve, and make available to me, all
relevant materials, including electronic and paper documents. This
information and these instructions were confirmed in writing to Dr. Hunton.
Dr. Hunton resigned shortly after that meeting, which coincided with my de
termination that a full investigation was warranted.
In January 2013 as the investigation was just
getting underway, Bentley received the second allegation of research
misconduct from the editor of Contemporary Accounting Research. The editor
had contacted ted Dr. Hunton directly in November 2012 with concerns about
Tone at the Top after the Fraud Brainstorming paper was retracted. The
journal brought the issue to Bentley’s attention after the response it
received failed to resolve its concerns. When Bentley received this second
allegation, I informed Dr. Hunton of it, as well.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The last paragraph of the article suggests that Professor Hunton did not
cooperate in the investigation to the extent that it is unknown if his
subsequently retracted papers were also based upon fabricated data. The last
paragraph reads as follows:
Bentley cannot determine with confidence which
other papers may be based on fabricated data. We will identify all of the co
- authors on papers Dr. Hunton published while he was at Bentley that
involve research data. We will inform them that, unless they have
independent evidence of the validity of the data, we plan to ask the
journals in which the papers they co - authored with Dr. Hunton were
published to determine, with the assistance of the co - authors, whether the
data analyzed in the papers were valid. The various journals will then have
the discretion to decide whether any further action is warranted, including
retracting or qualifying, with regard to an y of Dr. Hunton’s papers that
they published
Years ago Les Livingstone was the first person to detect
a plagiarized Accounting Review article (back in the 1960s when we were both
doctoral students at Stanford). This was long before digital versions
articles could be downloaded. The TAR editor published an apology to the
original authors in the next edition of TAR. The article first appeared in Management
Science and was plagiarized in total for TAR by a Norwegian (sigh).
The Hunton scandal along with intentional cheating scandals of other professors are
summarized below.
A professor of political science at the University of Porto in Portugal
has had at least five papers retracted for plagiarism ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/11/25/political-science-prof-up-to-five-retractions-for-plagiarism/
A Dutch university has found a former psychology researcher at the
institution guilty of misconduct for several offenses ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/12/05/psychology-researcher-committed-misconduct-says-university/
The methodology does not generate the results’:
Journal corrects accounting study with flawed
methods ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/11/13/the-methodology-does-not-generate-the-results-journal-corrects-accounting-study-with-flawed-methods/
What a difference a Yi,t=β0+β1IOˆi,t+β2Xi,t+ωt+εi,t.Yi,t=β0+β1IO^i,t+β2Xi,t+ωt+εi,t.
makes.
The authors of a 2016 paper
on institutional investing have corrected their article — to include the
equation above — in the wake of persistent questions about their
methodology. The move follows the protracted retraction earlier
this year of a similar article in The
Accounting Review by
the duo, Andrew
Bird and Stephen
Karolyi, of
Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, for related problems.
The bottom line, it seems,
is that Bird and Karolyi appear to be unable adequately to explain their
research methods in ways that stand up to scrutiny.
The
correction involves a paper published in The
Review of Financial Studies,
from Oxford University Press, titled “Do institutional investors demand
public disclosure. According to the statement (the
meat of which is behind a paywall):
. . .
Alex Young,
an accounting researcher at Hofstra University in Hempstead, NY, who raised
questions about Karolyi and Bird’s retracted article and ultimately failed
to replicate it,
was not one of the readers who raised concerns about the other article. But,
he told us:
I would be very interested to see the
authors’ data and code that generate the results presented
in the paper.
Jensen Comment
Because accounting researchers rarely conduct replications and the few
replications that are attempted are almost never published, it's refreshing to
see that Professor Young attempted this replication.
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School: Is There a Replication
Crisis in Research?
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/research-replication-crisis/
Richard Feynman Creates a Simple Method for Telling Science From
Pseudoscience (1966) ---
http://www.openculture.com/2016/04/richard-feynman-creates-a-simple-method-for-telling-science-from-pseudoscience-1966.html
By Feynman's standard standard accountics science is pseudoscience
February 17, 2019 Retraction Watch Weekend Scandal News ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/02/16/weekend-reads-article-retracted-because-of-racial-characterizations-indias-high-retraction-rate-meet-the-fraud-finder/
Harvard should be embarrassed over Jill Abramson's plagiarisms
Why are students expelled for cheating but not faculty?
Remember the 60+ Harvard students expelled for plagiarizing a homework
assignment in a political science course?
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#UVA
For a review of Abramson's book (with no mention of plagiarism) see
https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/279251/kill-jill
Data Fabrication: Leading UK scientists retract a paper in Nature,
and one in Science, on the same day ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/04/11/authors-have-papers-in-nature-and-science-retracted-on-the-same-day/
Edward J. Fox, a former faculty member at the University of Washington,
faked data in a manuscript submitted to Nature and in an NIH grant application
---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/04/02/former-university-of-washington-researcher-faked-data-say-feds/
‘Search for inspiration’ lands too close to plagiarism, forcing retraction
of grief paper ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/04/18/search-for-inspiration-lands-too-close-to-plagiarism-forcing-retraction-of-grief-paper/
Plagiarism in a Book Review
http://retractionwatch.com/2019/05/25/weekend-reads-pharmacy-deans-book-review-retracted-scientists-out-at-emory-after-questions-about-links-to-china-mit-prof-faces-allegations-about-misplaced-credit/
A book review by the incoming dean of a leading
pharmacy school in Canada has been retracted from the Lancet because
“substantial passages…match parts of a review of the same book” by a
newspaper columnist. (Ivan Oransky, Medscape)
Columbia historian stepping down after plagiarism finding ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/09/17/columbia-historian-stepping-down-after-plagiarism-finding/
The University of Michigan thought its misconduct investigation was
complete. Then a PubPeer comment appeared.---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/03/06/a-university-thought-its-misconduct-investigation-was-complete-then-a-pubpeer-comment-appeared/
Plagiarism prompts retraction of 25-year-old article by prominent priest ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/03/04/plagiarism-prompts-retraction-of-25-year-old-article-by-prominent-priest/
After more than a year of back and forth, The Accounting
Review retracts a paper on tax avoidance ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2019/01/15/after-more-than-a-year-of-back-and-forth-an-accounting-journal-retracts-a-paper-on-tax-avoidance/
Attempted Replications Fail
A pair of business researchers in Pittsburgh has lost
a controversial
2017 paper on how institutional stock holdings affect tax strategies amid
concerns about the validity of the data.
The article, “Governance
and taxes: evidence from regression discontinuity,”
which appeared in The Accounting Review, was written by
Andrew Bird
and
Stephen Karolyi,
of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.
According to the abstract:
We implement a regression discontinuity design to examine the effect of
institutional ownership on tax avoidance. Positive shocks to
institutional ownership around Russell index reconstitutions lead, on
average, to significant decreases in effective tax rates (ETRs) and
greater use of international tax planning using tax haven subsidiaries.
These effects are smaller for firms with initially strong governance and
high executive equity compensation, suggesting poor governance as an
explanation for the undersheltering puzzle, and appear to come about as
a result of improved managerial incentives and increased monitoring by
institutional investors. Furthermore, we observe the largest decreases
among high ETR firms, and increases for low ETR firms, consistent with
institutional ownership pushing firms towards a common level of tax
avoidance.
The article triggered a
100-plus page long
thread
on Economics Job Market Rumors poking holes in the analysis, as well as
an entry on
PubPeer.
It also prompted a
lengthy analysis
in the January 2018 issue of Econ Journal Watch by Alex Young, then of North
Dakota State University and
now of Hofstra,
who attempted to replicate both the 2017 article and
2015 version of the work:
Jensen Comment
If this had been a plagiarism issue we might have called the authors the
Pittsburgh Stealers. However, it appears to be more of a problem of data
fabrication.
The most sensational accounting research cheating scandal in history also
entailed data fabrication with 30+ papers eventually refracted wherever Jim
Hunton was a co-author ---
Scroll down to Hunton
RETRACTED ARTICLE: Facilitating debugging of web
applications through recording reduction ---
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10664-017-9519-z
Cut and Paste Non-cited Plagiarism of His Own Undisputed Work Leads to an
Embarrassing Retraction ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/05/02/a-new-data-thug-is-born/
"A model for ethical reasoning": Retraction of Sternberg (2012) ---
http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2018-65591-002
Robert Sternberg, a psychology professor at Cornell University in Ithaca,
New York, whose work has been cited more than 140,000 times, has had a second
paper retracted because he duplicated his previous work ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2018/12/10/prominent-psychologist-at-cornell-notches-second-retraction/
Jensen Comment
Failing to disclose duplication is one type of offense even when the
"duplication" is a legitimate attempt at replication. It's a worse offense when
it does not even entail replication with new data and analyses.
Professors Fabricating Data and Their Other Research Frauds
Using a database of 750 cases of research fraud from around the world,
professors examine fraud as a phenomenon, tracing its history and trajectory and
looking at what can be done about it ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/12/05/book-dissects-research-fraud-organizational-level?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=df16c5da25-DNU20171205&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-df16c5da25-197565045&mc_cid=df16c5da25&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Sometimes the best research centers go astray
Harvard and the Brigham Hospital recommend 31 retractions for cardiac stem
cell work ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2018/10/14/harvard-and-the-brigham-recommend-31-retractions-for-cardiac-stem-cell-work/
Duke University to settle case alleging researchers used fraudulent data
to win millions in grants ---
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/11/duke-university-settle-case-alleging-researchers-used-fraudulent-data-win-millions
NYT Investigation: Louisiana School Made Headlines for Sending Black
Kids to Elite Colleges. Here’s the Reality ---
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/tm-landry-college-prep-black-students.html?elqTrackId=39d876d33bb84ff8ba9ff1d9a3b754f3&elq=a9781e478e4e4ab884c26d9213c9d2ff&elqaid=21547&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=10337
A College President Accused of Plagiarism ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/12/03/president-lemoyne-owen-college-accused-plagiarism?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=7ecf161916-DNU_WO20181203_PREV_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-7ecf161916-197565045&mc_cid=7ecf161916&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
Dartmouth College: Star researcher in health policy plagiarized a
colleague, probe says ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/08/20/star-researcher-in-health-policy-plagiarized-a-colleague-probe-says/
Journals Retract 6 More Articles by a Controversial Cornell Food Scientist
---
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Journals-Retract-6-More/244576?cid=db&elqTrackId=d093e0e2dccd462b89e3ebb8016f8e92&elq=addd0bb16f5c4913ac7f9bae2a96dc00&elqaid=20596&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=9701
How to Mislead With Statistics ---
So you want to tax the rich – here’s which candidate’s plan makes the most sense
---
https://theconversation.com/so-you-want-to-tax-the-rich-heres-which-candidates-plan-makes-the-most-sense-111945
Jensen Comment
To be honest I like most of this article because it correctly raises doubts
about the AOC (income) and Warren (wealth) tax proposals. However, I think it
oversimplifies the Sanders (inheritance) tax proposals. Firstly, it ignores how
wealthy estates can maneuver to greatly reduce Bernie Sanders' projected income
from the estate tax changes. Just like high income people can maneuver to avoid
the AOC income tax proposal, wealthy people can maneuver to protect themselves
from estate taxes. The first and most obvious ploy is to leave the USA just like
the wealthiest billionaire in the UK just moved to Monaco. The second ploy is to
move the bulk of the estate into Tax-Free Foundations like the moves of Bill
Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros, and virtually all super wealthy
individuals. By the way these foundations do wonderful things that might get
bogged down in politics. For example, rather than donate so much of Bill Gates'
wealth to reducing diseases and improving sanitation worldwide Congress might be
more inclined to divert that money domestic causes. Also Congress might be less
inclined than Bill Gates to fund technology such as worm toilets that conserve
water worldwide.
A publisher (SAGE) just retracted ten papers whose peer review was
“engineered” ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/07/12/publisher-has-known-of-problem-of-fake-reviews-for-years-so-how-did-10-papers-slip-its-notice/
Many publishers have been duped by fake peer reviews, which have brought
down more than 600 papers to date. But some continue to get fooled.
Recently, SAGE retracted 10 papers published as part of two special
collections in Advances in Mechanical Engineering after discovering
the peer review process that had been managed by the guest editors “did not
meet the journal’s usual rigorous standards.” After a new set of reviewers
looked over the collections, they determined 10 papers included “technical
errors,” and the content “did not meet the journal’s required standard of
scientific validity.”
Yeah, we’re not exactly sure what happened here, either. SAGE gave us a
little extra clarity — but not much.
SAGE is no stranger to the damage caused by fake reviews. In 2014, one of
its journals busted a “peer review and citation ring” that
took down 60 papers,
and
prompted the resignation of Taiwan’s education minister.
The following year, it
retracted 17 more papers from five different journals,
all affected by faked reviews.
So how did the latest papers escape the editors’ notice?
Continued in article
University of Illinois at Chicago went to
great lengths to block the release of information about a child psychiatry trial
gone wrong ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/07/03/a-university-went-to-great-lengths-to-block-the-release-of-information-about-a-trial-gone-wrong-a-reporter-fought-them-and-revealed-the-truth
Reports of misconduct investigations can tell us a lot. Here are more than
a dozen of them ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/07/02/reports-of-misconduct-investigations-can-tell-us-a-lot-here-are-more-than-a-dozen-of-them/
University recommends researcher be fired after misconduct finding ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/06/28/university-recommends-researcher-be-fired-after-misconduct-finding/
You can’t make this stuff up: Plagiarism guideline paper retracted
for…plagiarism ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2015/04/01/you-cant-make-this-stuff-up-plagiarism-guideline-paper-retracted-for-plagiarism/
Management professor admits to falsification, resigns ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/03/21/marketing-researcher-admits-to-falsification-resigns/#more-63410
Authorship for sale: Some journals willing to add authors to papers they
didn’t write ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/09/13/authorship-sale-journals-willing-add-authors-papers-didnt-write/
Authors retract paper on psychopathic traits
in bosses ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2018/01/12/authors-withdraw-paper-psychopathic-traits-bosses/
Sex, Plagiarism and Spyware. This Is Not Your Average Copyright Complaint
---
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/01/books/emme-cline-lawsuit-boies.html
Jensen Comment
This is analogous to issues of academic standards when spouses or partners write
term papers and/or take distance education courses for those partners.
Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers (and took
two online courses for him)
The wife of a star University of South Florida
linebacker says she wrote his academic papers and took two online classes for
him. The accusations against Ben Moffitt, who had been promoted by the
university to the news media as a family man, were made in e-mail messages to
The Tampa Tribune, and followed Mr. Moffitt’s filing for divorce. Mr. Moffitt
called the accusations “hearsay,” and a university spokesman said the matter was
a “domestic issue.” If it is found that Mr. Moffitt committed academic fraud,
the newspaper reported, the university could be subject to an NCAA
investigation.
"Linebacker's Wife Says She Wrote His Papers," Chronicle of Higher Education
News Blog, January 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3707/linebackers-wife-says-she-wrote-his-papers?at
Jensen Comment
If the university had investigated this and discovered it was true, I wonder if
Moffitt's diploma would've be revoked. Somehow I doubt it.
Former prof fudged dozens of images, says university ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2017/06/19/former-prof-fudged-dozens-images-says-university/
The former vice chancellor for research at the
University of California, Los Angeles, has
retracted a 2012 paper after an internal investigation found evidence of
image manipulation.---
http://mct.aacrjournals.org/content/16/5/977
Science is retracting a paper about how human pollution is harming
fish, after months of questions about the validity of the data ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/02/stolen-data-prompts-science-flag-debated-study-fish-plastics/
107 Studies Published in a Cancer Journal Have Just Been Retracted ---
http://www.sciencealert.com/107-studies-published-in-a-cancer-journal-have-just-been-retracted?elqTrackId=4561655267734dd89d40a6a025280840&elq=8e6f5d6a03de49d39c19969b99040d75&elqaid=13671&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=5674
Iowa State University Political Science: Academic Integrity That
Wasn't ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/12/20/frequent-source-comments-politics-admits-no-formal-focus-group-informed-his-insights?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=de6a599079-DNU20161220&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-de6a599079-197565045&goal=0_1fcbc04421-de6a599079-197565045&mc_cid=de6a599079&mc_eid=1e78f7c952
AP reveals political science professor who cited a
focus group as key source for his many interviews and essays never had one.
Iowa State University will not take any action
involving a professor who has made misleading references to a focus group in
frequent commentaries on U.S. politics.
Steffen Schmidt, a political science professor
at the university, is an oft-quoted source in local and state media outlets
for his insight about issues related to the presidential election and
politics more widely. In his comments to the media and opinion pieces, he
has frequently referenced a focus group that informs his public comments.
An Associated Press
report found that the term “focus group” in
Schmidt's statements and writings refers not to a carefully designed
academic study or a set of trusted expert sources but to anyone Schmidt
might speak with about an issue he comments on.
The AP began looking into the focus group in November after Schmidt cited
its findings in
a critique of Hillary Clinton’s outreach to
African-American, women and LGBTQ voters. After the AP filed an open records
request for communications about the focus group, he acknowledged that there
was no set panel.
Schmidt said in an email that he was not aware
the term would be confusing and plans to stop using it in the future.
“My thought is that I don’t need to use any
term in future, since the columns are my views,” he added.
Iowa State’s leadership drew a distinction
between use of the term in formal research in scholarly venues and in
opinions offered to the media or in news columns.
“His use of the term ‘focus group’ has been to
provide context or support for opinion pieces he has shared with media,”
said Wolfgang Kliemann, the university’s associate vice president for
research and research integrity officer. “At no point has he presented this
as formal research, nor does it meet the definition of research in a federal
or academic sense. We have been clear about Dr. Schmidt’s intent.”
Marybeth Gasman is a University of Pennsylvania higher education professor
and the editor of
Academics Going Public: How to Write and Speak Beyond Academe.
She said that argument put forth by Iowa State doesn’t hold water. The term
“focus group” is not a confusing one, and it does not take on a different
meaning depending on the context, she said.
“He knows exactly what it means,” Gasman said.
“He also knows it lends an enormous amount of weight to his argument if he
uses that term.”
A focus
group usually involves a random collection of people -- not a group of an
academic’s friends or colleagues and students he encounters, as Schmidt told
the AP he saw the term. A professor's focus group research may also require
the approval of a university institutional review board, a committee set up
to approve and monitor research involving human subjects
"Science Isn’t Broken." By Christie Aschwanden, Nate Silver's 5:38
Blog, August 19, 2015 ---
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/#part1
If you follow the headlines, your confidence in science may have taken a hit
lately. Peer review? More like self-review. An investigation in November
uncovered a scam in which
researchers were
researchers were rubber-stamping their own work,
circumventing peer review at five high-profile
publishers. Scientific journals? Not exactly a badge of legitimacy, given
that the International Journal of Advanced Computer Technology recently
accepted for publication
a paper titled “Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List,”
whose text was nothing more than those seven words,
repeated over and over
for
10 pages.
Two other journalsallowed
an engineer posing as Maggie Simpson and Edna Krabappel to publish a paper,
“Fuzzy, Homogeneous Configurations.” Revolutionary findings? Possibly
fabricated. In May, a couple of University of California, Berkeley, grad
students discovered irregularities in
Michael LaCour’s influential paper
suggesting that an in-person conversation with a gay person could change how
people felt about same-sex marriage. The journal Science retracted the paper
shortly after, when LaCour’s co-author could find no record of the
data.Taken together, headlines like these might suggest that science is a
shady enterprise that spits out a bunch of dressed-up nonsense. But I’ve
spent months investigating the problems hounding science, and I’ve learned
that the headline-grabbing cases of misconduct and fraud are mere
distractions. The state of our science is strong, but it’s plagued by a
universal problem: Science is hard . . .
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Accounting researchers have a bit easier since it's almost certain their
research will never be subjected to replication ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTaR.htm
U. of Colorado Rescinds Pharmaceutical Researcher’s Ph.D. Over Falsified
Data ---
http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-colorado-revokes-pharmaceutical-researchers-ph-d-over-falsified-data/114137?elqTrackId=ddbfa33597cb4c44bb7ce14fb8cbde6b&elq=78e96a60b431451ba50f46a55c1908b3&elqaid=10625&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=4014
Why bother teaching our students not to cheat when professors can get away
with it? ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Price-of-Plagiarism/237250?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=aa0428dcd9704cb59cb9f6331eb68705&elq=052eb8c4832c4a2e985e0c6a61a014f8&elqaid=9985&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=3686
Jensen Comment
Professors are allowed to cheat in subtle ways. For example, four professors
(usually in different universities) agree to conduct research and write papers
in pairs. They play the odds game in journal acceptance. Suppose they put all
four names on eight papers that were written by different pairs. They put all
four names on eight papers playing the game that two of the eight papers might
be accepted by the top research journals of their discipline.
If students might play this game in a slightly different way only each paper
may only have one author. We would call it cheating when students write papers
for one another. In higher education we call it just trying to get a publication
hit in a top journal.
Ethnography ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnography
Is this academic cheating or worse"
Conflict Over Sociologist's Narrative Puts Spotlight on Ethnography ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Conflict-Over-Sociologists/230883?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en&elqTrackId=6cf1ab9ba37949f6a7d0209ec6e4a715&elq=93ab1ebf84574eaf9e13c2052209b2f6&elqaid=8063&elqat=1&elqCampaignId=2557
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in academia ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
"Meet Retraction Watch, the Blog That Points
Out the Human Stains on the Scientific Record," by Steve Kolowich,
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 25, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Meet-Retraction-Watch-the/233373/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Most
people would not have been interested in the sins of
Ariel Fernández.
In 2013 someone suggested that
Mr. Fernández, an Argentine scientist, had
contributed bad data to a
genomics paper. Two of the
institutions affiliated with Mr. Fernández had
investigated; one had found his data credible, the
other had not. "Interpret the data with due
caution," wrote the editors of BMC Genomics,
the journal that had published the paper two years
earlier, in a note to readers.
The implications of the
note were hard to parse.
What exactly had gone wrong? Could the paper be
trusted, or not? What did "due caution" mean?
Retraction Watch was set
up to answer questions like those. By that time the
thorny little blog had already planted itself in the
side of journal editors and researchers who
preferred that errors in the scientific record be
dealt with discreetly. Its founders, a pair of
veteran science writers, were not just interested in
big-ticket fraud cases; they were determined to
apply scrutiny to scientific screwups of all kinds,
including the obscure ones that tended to slip
through the cracks.
So when BMC Genomics
posted its note, Retraction Watch wanted answers.
"One of Fernández’s three institutions, we don’t
know which, found cause for concern with his
results," wrote Adam Marcus, one of the blog’s
founders, in a
post about the journal’s
note. "Another did not (why only two are referenced
here is a mystery). What, we wonder, did Fernández
have to say about all this?"
He
soon got a response: Take down the post, or I will
sue you.
Retraction Watch later quoted
several emails that its editors said Mr. Fernández
had sent to Mr. Marcus and to editors at BMC
Genomics. The messages
threatened legal action
against the blog and asked the journal to help stop
Retraction Watch from damaging Mr. Fernández’s
reputation. (In an email to The Chronicle,
Mr. Fernández denied writing the messages. "Someone
is using my email address," he said, adding, "I
don’t read blogs.")
In
the messages, Mr. Fernández argued that his paper
should not have been written about on a blog called
Retraction Watch because technically the journal had
issued an "expression of concern," not a retraction.
When Mr. Marcus explained that he had made the
distinction clearly in his post, he received a
reply, in all caps, insisting that his post amounted
to libel.
It
was not the first time a scientist had threatened to
sue Retraction Watch, and it wouldn’t be the last.
Over the last five years, Mr. Marcus and his
partner, Ivan Oransky, have gotten under the skin of
plenty of researchers and journal editors by turning
retraction-spotting into a spectator sport. In the
process they have earned a few enemies — along with
many fans, including a few powerful grantmakers.
Unexpected Influence
Armed now with a bona fide
reputation and $700,000 in foundation funding,
Retraction Watch finds itself in a position of
unexpected influence at a time when scientific
researchers are struggling to maintain their
credibility in the public eye. The past decade has
seen an boom in research-fraud cases, some of which
have made national headlines. A
recent meta-study of 100
psychology papers found that less than half of the
published findings could be replicated. People
looking for excuses to distrust scientists no longer
need to look very hard.
Continued in article
New TAR (The Accounting Review) Retractions Listed in the July 2015 Edition of The Accounting
Review ---
http://aaajournals.org/toc/accr/current
RETRACTIONS
1707 |
|
Partial Retraction: Section IV: Survey in R&D
Capitalization and Reputation-Driven Real Earnings Management
Nicholas
Seybert
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (437 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
1709 |
|
Retraction: Potential Functional and
Dysfunctional Effects of Continuous Monitoring
James E.
Hunton,
Elaine G. Mauldin and
Patrick R. Wheeler
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (377 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
1711 |
|
Retraction: Financial Reporting Transparency and
Earnings Management
James E.
Hunton,
Robert Libby and
CheriL. Mazza
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (358 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
1713 |
|
Retraction: Does the Form of Management’s
Earnings Guidance Affect Analysts’ Earnings Forecasts?
Robert Libby,
Hun-Tong Tan and
James E. Hunton
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (384 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
1715 |
|
Retraction: Capital Market Pressure, Disclosure
Frequency-Induced Earnings/Cash Flow Conflict, and Managerial
Myopia
Sanjeev
Bhojraj and
Robert Libby
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (297 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
1717 |
|
Retraction: An Assessment of the Relation Between
Analysts' Earnings Forecast Accuracy, Motivational Incentives
and Cognitive Information Search Strategy
James E.
Hunton and
Ruth Ann McEwen
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (458 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
New AH (Accounting Horizons) Retractions Listed in the September 2015 Edition of Accounting
Horizons ---
http://aaajournals.org/toc/acch/current
RETRACTIONS
743 |
|
Retraction: The Impact of
Client and Auditor Gender on Auditors' Judgments
Anna Gold,
James E. Hunton and
Mohamed I. Gomaa
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (363 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
745 |
|
Retraction: Does Graduate
Business Education Contribute to Professional Accounting
Success?
Benson Wier,
Dan N. Stone and
James E. Hunton
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (364 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
747 |
|
Retraction: Sampling
Practices of Auditors in Public Accounting, Industy, and
Government
Thomas W. Hall,
James E. Hunton and
Bethane Jo Pierce
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (368 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
749 |
|
Retraction: Is Analyst
Forecast Accuracy Associated With Accounting Information Use?
Ruth Ann McEwen and
James E. Hunton
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (347 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
751 |
|
Retraction: Performance of
Accountants in Private Industry: A Survival Analysis
James E. Hunton and
Benson Weir
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (397 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
753 |
|
Retraction: Hierarchical
and Gender Differences in Private Accounting Practice
James E. Hunton,
Presha E. Neidermeyer and
Benson Wier
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (408 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
Retraction Watch (cheating in research) ---
http://retractionwatch.com
From the Scout Report on August 21, 2015
Faked Peer Reviews Lead to 64 Retractions by Major Publisher
Faked peer review prompts 64 retractions
http://www.nature.com/news/faked-peer-reviews-prompt-64-retractions-1.18202
Another Mass Retraction
http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/43761/title/Another-Mass-Retraction/
The stm report: An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing
http://www.stm-assoc.org/2012_12_11_STM_Report_2012.pdf
Hindawi Concludes an In-depth Investigation into Peer Review Fraud
http://www.hindawi.com/statement/
COPE statement on inappropriate manipulation of peer review processes
http://publicationethics.org/news/cope-statement-inappropriate-manipulation-peer-review-processes
Retraction Watch
http://retractionwatch.com/
I'll Put Your Name on Mine if You Put My Name on Yours
"More Scientific Papers Have Dozens of Authors," Inside Higher Ed,
August 11, 20158 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/08/11/more-scientific-papers-have-dozens-authors?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=0cac71a7a2-DNU20150811&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-0cac71a7a2-197565045
Jensen Comment
Years ago Cooley, Heck, and Jensen noted the rise in co-authoring in accounting
research journals. One of the main reasons is an effort to increase the number
of hits in this era where promotion and tenure committees mainly count the
number of hits in research journals irrespective of the number of authors on a
paper. Also division of labor came about with the popularity of shaking the
piñata of purchased databases with econometric models. Some co-authors of
accounting research papers are experts in data mining who know almost nothing
about accounting. My point is that the rise of computer analysis is one of the
causes of the rise in co-authoring.
"An Analysis of Contributors to Accounting Journals Part II: The
Individual Academic Journals," by Philip Cooley, Louis Heck, and Bob Jensen,
The International Journal of Accounting,
Vol.26, 1991, pp. 1-17.
54..
"An Analysis of Contributors to Accounting Journals. Part I: The
Aggregate Perfformances," by Philip Cooley,
Louis Heck, and Bob Jensen, The International
Journal of Accounting, Vol.25, 1990, pp. 202-217. Released in
1991.
One risk of being a co-author is that if one of your co-authors cheats
(e.g., faked data or plagiarism) your name gets dragged down in the retraction
process. Exhibit A are the 30+ accounting research papers that had Jim Hunton as
a co-author ---
See Below (scroll down to Hunton)
Retraction Watch (cheating in research) ---
http://retractionwatch.com
Retraction Watch (cheating in research) ---
http://retractionwatch.com
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating in higher education ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Alice Goffman ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Goffman
Controversy About Alice's Academic Integrity ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Goffman#Controversy
But again, to focus exclusively on
Goffman’s individual conduct misses the larger point. Alice Goffman is a product
of system that uncritically rewards the kind of things she was doing, even when
those things may have included engaging in serious crimes, or serious academic
misconduct.
"Alice Goffman's Implausible Ethnography," by Paul
Campos, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 21, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Alice-Goffmans-Implausible-/232491/?cid=at
'On the Run’ reveals the flaws in how
sociology is sometimes produced, evaluated, and rewarded.
. . .
Those words make a moving statement, spoken as they
are by a man who has worked hard all his life to overcome the racism that
blights American society, and who has seen his daughter and his
grandchildren fall victim to drug addiction, chronic unemployment, and a
criminal-justice system that imprisons an astonishingly high percentage of
African-American men.
Unfortunately, it’s difficult to know if George
Taylor actually said those things. Indeed, Taylor’s speech raises the
possibility that Goffman embellished or conflated some of the most
compelling material in her book.
Attentive readers will have noticed that Taylor’s
remarks appear to have been made after Barack Obama became president. Yet
Goffman dates her interview with Taylor to the fall of 2007, when Obama was
just emerging as a serious candidate for the Democratic nomination, and did
not yet herald the coming of "a new era" to anyone.
Even more inexplicably, readers will discover two
pages later that Chuck, whom Goffman says she has just visited in the county
jail before meeting his grandfather, was no longer alive in the fall of
2007, since, as the book recounts, he was murdered in the summer of that
year. As far as I’ve been able to determine, none of the book’s many
enthusiastic reviewers — not to mention its editors or the academic referees
who vetted the manuscript for the University of Chicago Press — seem to have
noticed this incongruity. (Douglas Mitchell, an executive editor at the
press, declined to answer questions about On the Run.)
Standing alone, this kind of mistake might not be
particularly significant. Perhaps Goffman misread her field notes, and the
interview with Taylor took place in 2008 or 2009. Perhaps the reference to
visiting Chuck several months after his murder can be explained in similar
terms, although that seems improbable; Goffman describes Chuck’s death as a
shattering emotional event for her personally, so it’s hard to imagine how
she could have made such an error.
But this incident is just one of numerous and
significant incongruities, contradictions, inaccuracies, and improbable
incidents scattered throughout On the Run. (Goffman declined interview
requests, and decided not to answer most questions by email. The Chronicle
Review has invited Goffman to respond to this article.)
Continued in a very long article
A Success Case for the Inability to Replicate
in Validation of Social Science Research
"The Unraveling of Michael LaCour," by Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher
Education, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 2, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Unraveling-of-Michael/230587/?cid=at
By his own account, Michael J. LaCour has told big
lies. He claimed to have received $793,000 in research grants. In fact, he
admits now, there were no grants.
The researchers who attempted to replicate his
widely lauded Science paper on persuasion
instead exposed a brazen fabrication, one in which Mr. LaCour appears to
have forged an email and invented a representative for a research firm.
New York magazine’s Science of Us blog noted that Mr. LaCour claimed to
have won
a nonexistent teaching award, and then caught him
trying to cover up that fiction.
As more facts emerge from one of the strangest
research scandals in recent memory, it becomes clear that this wasn’t merely
a flawed study performed by a researcher who cut a few corners. Instead it
appears to have been an elaborate, years-long con that fooled several highly
respected, senior professors and one of the nation’s most prestigious
journals.
Commenters are doling out blame online. Who, if
anyone, was supervising Mr. LaCour’s work? Considering how perfect his
results seemed, shouldn’t colleagues have been more suspicious? Is this
episode a sign of a deeper problem in the world of university research, or
is it just an example of how a determined fabricator can manipulate those
around him?
Those questions will be asked for some time to
come. Meanwhile, though, investigators at the University of California at
Los Angeles, where Mr. LaCour is a graduate student, are still figuring out
exactly what happened.
It now appears that even after Mr. LaCour was
confronted about accusations that his research was not on the level, he
scrambled to create a digital trail that would support his rapidly crumbling
narrative, according to sources connected to UCLA who asked to speak
anonymously because of the university investigation. The picture they paint
is of a young scholar who told an ever-shifting story and whose varied
explanations repeatedly failed to add up.
An Absence of Evidence
On May 17, Mr. LaCour’s dissertation adviser, Lynn
Vavreck, sent him an email asking that he meet her the next day. During that
meeting, the sources say, Ms. Vavreck told Mr. LaCour that accusations had
been made about his work and asked whether he could show her the raw data
that underpinned his (now-retracted) paper, "When Contact Changes Minds: An
Experiment on Transmission of Support for Gay Equality." The university
needed proof that the study had actually been conducted. Surely there was
some evidence: a file on his computer. An invoice from uSamp, the company
that had supposedly provided the participants. Something.
That paper, written with Donald Green, a professor
of political science at Columbia University who is well-known for pushing
the field to become more experimental, had won an award and had been
featured in
major news
outlets and in
a segment on This American Life. It was
the kind of home run graduate students dream about, and it had helped him
secure an offer to become an assistant professor at Princeton University. It
was his ticket to an academic career, and easily one of the most
talked-about political-science papers in recent years. It was a big deal.
Jensen Comment
Detection of fraud with inability to replicate is quite common in the physical
sciences. It occasionally happens in the social sciences. More commonly,
however, whistleblowers are the most common source of fraud detection, often
whistleblowers that were insiders in the research process itself such as when
insiders revealed the faked data of
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
I know of zero instances where failure to replicate detected fraud in the
entire history of accounting research.
One reason is that exacting replication itself is a rare event in academic
accounting research ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#Replication
Academic accountants most likely consider themselves more honest than other
academic researchers to a point where journal editors do not require replication
and in most instances like The Accounting Review will not even publish
critical commentaries about published articles ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Whereas real scientists are a suspicious lot when it comes to published
research, accounting researchers tend to be a polite and unsuspecting lot ---
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
Large-Scale Fake Data in Academe
"The Case of the Amazing Gay-Marriage Data: How a Graduate Student
Reluctantly Uncovered a Huge Scientific Fraud," by Jesse Singal, New York
Magazine, May 2015 ---
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2015/05/how-a-grad-student-uncovered-a-huge-fraud.html
"Report: Duke Ignored Warnings on Research Fraud," by January 13,
2015, Inside Higher Ed, January 13, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2015/01/13/report-duke-ignored-warnings-research-fraud
Duke University ignored a graduate student's
warnings about possible misconduct in the lab of a cancer researcher, years
before the case exploded into public view, The Cancer Letter
reported. The newsletter published documents
showing that a medical student, Bradford Perez, tried to inform campus
administrators about statistical anomalies in studies produced in the lab of
Anil Potti, a cancer researcher. But university officials discouraged Perez
from filing a formal complaint, the newsletter reported. Potti ultimately
was found to have misrepresented his credentials and Duke was sued by
participants in clinical trials that the university suspended amid the
controversy.
"Medical Scholar Built Career on Enormous Fraud, Investigation Finds,"
by Andy Thomason, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 10, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/medical-scholar-built-career-on-enormous-fraud-investigation-finds?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Two years ago, West Virginia University was nearly
ready to name a new department chair: Anoop Shankar, a member of the Royal
College of Physicians with a Ph.D. in epidemiology and dozens of papers in
scholarly journals under his belt.
There was just one problem,
reports NBC News: Mr. Shankar wasn’t any of those
things.
The results of the network’s investigation,
published Wednesday morning, show Mr. Shankar’s exploits to be that of “a
charming, bright-minded impostor who built a career on a base of lies.”
The extent of Mr. Shankar’s deceptions began to
emerge when the chair of the School of Public Health’s promotion and tenure
committee began a review of his résumé. He found, among many other
falsehoods, that Mr. Shankar had not actually written any of the papers
listed on his curriculum vitae. After the university dug deeper, Mr. Shankar
resigned, in December 2012.
But the university hasn’t spoken publicly on the
case. As a result, NBC News reports, Mr. Shankar was hired for a position at
Virginia Commonwealth University. That college opened its own probe only
after NBC News submitted questions about Mr. Shankar for its investigation.
As a result, he left the university last month.
Scientist’s radiation cover-up might have cost
thousands of lives
"The fallout of the Nobel scam of 1946," by Lawrence Solomon, Financial
Post, February 10, 2015 ---
http://business.financialpost.com/2012/02/10/lawrence-solomon-the-fallout-of-the-nobel-scam-of-1946/
The unintentional Obamacare Wrecking
Ball Professor from MIT
MIT economist Jonathan Gruber is one of the foremost architects of Obamacare,
having bragged that he "knows more about this law" than anyone else in his
field. He's also emerged as an unintentional one-man wrecking ball against
Obamacare, making public statements that have undermined the Obama
administration's legal and political defenses of the president's signature
domestic legacy.
http://www.townhallmail.com/zlzjrctbjjwkrbjbkbrptkgllfkllbftddpcqrwdbwmdms_wzvdnjvgdsn.html
"Watch Obamacare Architect Jonathan
Gruber Explain Why "Lack of Transparency" Was Key to Passing the Health Care
Law," by Peter Suderman, Reason Magazine, November 10, 2014 ---
http://reason.com/blog/2014/11/10/watch-obamacare-architect-jonathan-grube
. . .
It's even harder to believe now that he has
admitted that he thinks it's fine to mislead people if doing so
bolsters the policy goals he favors. It's really quite telling,
about the law and also about Gruber. Gruber may believe that American voters
are stupid, but he was the one who was dumb enough to say all this on
camera.
Jensen Comment
Condoning the misleading of the public for political
purposes by a scientist borders on fabrication of data and may be in violation
of his university's (MIT) academic integrity policy.
Similar issues arose in the allegations
against Phil Jones regarding integrity of his climate temperature recordings ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_email_controversy
Professor Jones stepped aside temporarily but was reinstated. Nevertheless these
and similar allegations badly damaged the public's confidence in climate change
data.
Jon Krosnick, professor of communication, political
science and psychology at Stanford University, said scientists were
overreacting. Referring to his own poll results of the American public, he
said "It's another funny instance of scientists ignoring science." Krosnick
found that "Very few professions enjoy the level of confidence from the
public that scientists do, and those numbers haven't changed much in a
decade. We don't see a lot of evidence that the general public in the United
States is picking up on the (University of East Anglia) emails. It's too
inside baseball."[139]
The Christian Science Monitor, in an article titled
"Climate scientists exonerated in 'climategate' but public trust damaged,"
stated, "While public opinion had steadily moved away from belief in
man-made global warming before the leaked CRU emails, that trend has only
accelerated."[140] Paul Krugman, columnist for the New York Times, argued
that this, along with all other incidents which called into question the
scientific consensus on climate change, was "a fraud concocted by opponents
of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media."[141] But UK
journalist Fred Pearce called the slow response of climate scientists "a
case study in how not to respond to a crisis" and "a public relations
disaster".[142]
A. A. Leiserowitz, Director of the Yale University
Project on Climate Change, and colleagues found in 2010 that:
Climategate had a significant effect on public
beliefs in global warming and trust in scientists.
The loss of trust in scientists, however, was
primarily among individuals with a strongly individualistic worldview or
politically conservative ideology. Nonetheless, Americans overall continue
to trust scientists more than other sources of information about global
warming.
In late 2011, Steven F. Hayward wrote that "Climategate
did for the global warming controversy what the Pentagon Papers did for the
Vietnam war 40 years ago: It changed the narrative decisively."[143] An
editorial in Nature said that many in the media "were led by the nose, by
those with a clear agenda, to a sizzling scandal that steadily defused as
the true facts and context were made clear."
Jensen Comment
Professor Gruber's confession will similarly affect the public opinion of the
way Obamacare was foisted on the public. This is not a proud moment in science
or the life of a scientist and his university.
"UNLV Professor Is Investigated for Career-Spanning Plagiarism," by
Peter Schmidt, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 21, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/UNLV-Professor-Is-Investigated/148443/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Also see
http://chronicle.com/article/Anatomy-of-a-Serial-Plagiarism/148437/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Plagiarism appears to be an act that some in
academe cannot resist duplicating.
Mustapha Marrouchi, a professor of postcolonial
literature at the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, is facing accusations
of dozens of acts of plagiarism over the past 24 years, even after twice
previously being publicly called out for lifting the words of other
scholars.
The
documented instances of Mr. Marrouchi’s quoting
the works of others without attribution include passages in his books,
essays, blog posts, and course descriptions. They begin with his 1990
dissertation as a doctoral student at the University of Toronto, extend
through his four years on the faculty of Louisiana State University’s
English department, and continue up through three journal articles published
last year.
In some cases, he is accused of improperly claiming
as his own entire essays by other writers in which he changed just a few
words. In a 2008 essay on Al Qaeda published in the journal Callaloo,
for example, he reprinted, without attribution, much of a review of the
movie 300 written by the New Yorker staff writer David
Denby the year before. In a 1992 incident which marks the first time he was
publicly accused of plagiarism, Queen’s Quarterly published an
essay by Mr. Marrouchi that repeated almost verbatim the content of another
writer’s essay in the London Review of Books.
Mr. Marrouchi could not be reached by telephone on
Tuesday and Wednesday and did not return several emails seeking comment.
Administrators at the University of Nevada at Las
Vegas, citing a policy against commenting on personnel matters, refused to
discuss the allegations against Mr. Marrouchi or to say anything about him
other than that he remains on the faculty there. Several faculty members in
the university’s English department, where he has worked since 2008,
similarly refused to comment on the accusations against him.
Continued in article
October 19, 2014 message from
Dan Stone
Source:
http://aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/iace-50965
"Douglas Kalesnikoff and Fred Phillips have
requested that the American Accounting Association retract their
article, "Ramm Wholesale: Reviewing Audit Work," published in Issues in
Accounting Education August 2013, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 629-636, along
with the corresponding teaching notes, published in Issues in Accounting
Education Teaching Notes August 2013, Vol. 28, No. 3, pp. 38-46 because
the case is based on, but did not provide appropriate attribution to,
Maxall Company, AICPA Case No. 2002-02, written by Mattie C. Porter and
Robert H. Barr, Jr."
D Stone comment - the second AAA retraction in the
history of the organization?
Jensen Comment
As of October 19, 2014 there is no mention of this retraction at
http://aaajournals.org/doi/full/10.2308/iace-50473
The Kalesnikoff and Phillips article can still be downloaded like any other
article.
Presumably it will soon have a Retraction warning. But it probably will still be
available for downloading.
The earlier retraction was a
paper by James E. Hunton and Anna Gold (2013) Retraction: A Field Experiment
Comparing the Outcomes of Three Fraud Brainstorming Procedures: Nominal Group,
Round Robin, and Open Discussion. The Accounting Review: January 2013, Vol. 88,
No. 1, pp. 357-357. doi: h
http://aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/accr.2010.85.3.911
That article does contain a warning of a "Retraction/"
However it can still be downloaded.
TAR Retractions Listed in the July 2015 Edition of The Accounting
Review ---
http://aaajournals.org/toc/accr/current
RETRACTIONS
1707 |
|
Partial Retraction: Section IV: Survey in R&D
Capitalization and Reputation-Driven Real Earnings Management
Nicholas
Seybert
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (437 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
1709 |
|
Retraction: Potential Functional and
Dysfunctional Effects of Continuous Monitoring
James E.
Hunton,
Elaine G. Mauldin and
Patrick R. Wheeler
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (377 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
1711 |
|
Retraction: Financial Reporting Transparency and
Earnings Management
James E.
Hunton,
Robert Libby and
CheriL. Mazza
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (358 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
1713 |
|
Retraction: Does the Form of Management’s
Earnings Guidance Affect Analysts’ Earnings Forecasts?
Robert Libby,
Hun-Tong Tan and
James E. Hunton
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (384 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
1715 |
|
Retraction: Capital Market Pressure, Disclosure
Frequency-Induced Earnings/Cash Flow Conflict, and Managerial
Myopia
Sanjeev
Bhojraj and
Robert Libby
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (297 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
1717 |
|
Retraction: An Assessment of the Relation Between
Analysts' Earnings Forecast Accuracy, Motivational Incentives
and Cognitive Information Search Strategy
James E.
Hunton and
Ruth Ann McEwen
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (458 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
AH Retractions Listed in the September 2015 Edition of Accounting
Horizons ---
http://aaajournals.org/toc/acch/current
RETRACTIONS
743 |
|
Retraction: The Impact of
Client and Auditor Gender on Auditors' Judgments
Anna Gold,
James E. Hunton and
Mohamed I. Gomaa
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (363 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
745 |
|
Retraction: Does Graduate
Business Education Contribute to Professional Accounting
Success?
Benson Wier,
Dan N. Stone and
James E. Hunton
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (364 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
747 |
|
Retraction: Sampling
Practices of Auditors in Public Accounting, Industy, and
Government
Thomas W. Hall,
James E. Hunton and
Bethane Jo Pierce
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (368 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
749 |
|
Retraction: Is Analyst
Forecast Accuracy Associated With Accounting Information Use?
Ruth Ann McEwen and
James E. Hunton
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (347 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
751 |
|
Retraction: Performance of
Accountants in Private Industry: A Survival Analysis
James E. Hunton and
Benson Weir
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (397 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
|
753 |
|
Retraction: Hierarchical
and Gender Differences in Private Accounting Practice
James E. Hunton,
Presha E. Neidermeyer and
Benson Wier
Citation |
Full Text |
PDF (408 KB) |
Supplemental Material |
Retraction Watch (cheating in research) ---
http://retractionwatch.com
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
More Retractions of Jim Hunton's Publications
March 28, 2015 message from XXXXX
Hi Bob,
I know you’ve been interested in the Hunton
retractions. I thought you might want to know that he recently had his three
publications in JAR retracted (bringing the total to six retractions). I
think these are all his JAR publications.
If you post this or pass this along, I’d rather not
be associated with the news.
Here is the link:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10.1111/(ISSN)1475-679X/earlyview
Here is a document with the text from the
retractions.
The third one is the most interesting in my
opinion. Someone said it sounds like he got his excuse from a student!
More about the Jim Hunton cheating scandals ---
http://retractionwatch.com/2015/06/29/accounting-professor-notches-30-retractions-after-misconduct-finding/#more-29236
"Following Retraction, Bentley Professor Resigns," Inside Higher Ed,
December 21, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/12/21/following-retraction-bentley-professor-resigns
James E. Hunton, a prominent accounting professor
at Bentley University, has resigned amid an investigation of the retraction
of an article of which he was the co-author, The Boston Globe reported. A
spokeswoman cited "family and health reasons" for the departure, but it
follows the retraction of an article he co-wrote in the journal Accounting
Review. The university is investigating the circumstances that led to the
journal's decision to retract the piece.
REPORT OF JUDITH A. MALONE, BENTLEY UNIVERSITY ETHICS OFFICER, CONCERNING
DR. JAMES E. HUNTON
July 21, 2014 ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Pursuant to the Bentley University Ethics Complaint
Procedures (“Ethics Policy”), this report summarizes the results of an
eighteen - month investigation into two separate allegations of research
misconduct that were received by Bentley in November 2012 and January 2013
against James E. Hunton, a former Professor of Accountancy. The complainants
– one a confidential reporter (as defined in the Ethics Policy) and the
other a publisher – alleged that Dr. Hunton engaged in research misconduct
in connection wit h two papers that he published while a faculty member at
the University: “A Field Experiment Comparing the Outcomes of Three Fraud
Brainstorming Procedures: Nominal Group, Round Robin, and Open Discussion,”
The Accounting Review 85 (3): 911 - 935 (“Fraud Br barnstorming”) and “The
Relationship between Perceived Tone at the Top and Earnings Quality,”
Contemporary Accounting Research 28 (4): 1190 - 1224 (“Tone at the Top”).
Because of concerns regarding Fraud Brainstorming
that the editors at The Accounting Review had been discussing with Dr.
Hunton since May 2012, the editors withdrew that paper in November 2012.
Bentley received the allegation of research misconduct from the confidential
reporter later that month. The confidential reporter also raised questions
about ten other articles that Dr. Hunton published or provided data for
while he was at Bentley, which, the reporter alleged, raised similar
questions of research integrity.
In my role as Ethics Officer, it was my duty to
make the preliminary determination n about whether the allegations warranted
a full investigation. To make that determination, I met with Dr. Hunton in
person when Bentley received this allegation, after I first instructed
Bentley IT to back up and preserve all of his electronic data store d on
Bentley’s servers. During that meeting, we discussed the allegation, I
explained the process that would be followed if I found an investigation was
warranted, and I described the need for his cooperation, including the
specific admonition that he pre serve, and make available to me, all
relevant materials, including electronic and paper documents. This
information and these instructions were confirmed in writing to Dr. Hunton.
Dr. Hunton resigned shortly after that meeting, which coincided with my de
termination that a full investigation was warranted.
In January 2013 as the investigation was just
getting underway, Bentley received the second allegation of research
misconduct from the editor of Contemporary Accounting Research. The editor
had contacted ted Dr. Hunton directly in November 2012 with concerns about
Tone at the Top after the Fraud Brainstorming paper was retracted. The
journal brought the issue to Bentley’s attention after the response it
received failed to resolve its concerns. When Bentley received this second
allegation, I informed Dr. Hunton of it, as well.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The last paragraph of the article suggests that Professor Hunton did not
cooperate in the investigation to the extent that it is unknown if his prior
research papers were also based upon fabricated data. The last paragraph reads
as follows:
Bentley cannot determine with confidence which
other papers may be based on fabricated data. We will identify all of the co
- authors on papers Dr. Hunton published while he was at Bentley that
involve research data. We will inform them that, unless they have
independent evidence of the validity of the data, we plan to ask the
journals in which the papers they co - authored with Dr. Hunton were
published to determine, with the assistance of the co - authors, whether the
data analyzed in the papers were valid. The various journals will then have
the discretion to decide whether any further action is warranted, including
retracting or qualifying, with regard to an y of Dr. Hunton’s papers that
they published
Years ago Les Livingstone was the first person
to detect a plagiarized article in TAR (back in the 1960s when we were both
doctoral students at Stanford). This was long before digital versions
articles could be downloaded. The TAR editor published an apology to the
original authors in the next edition of TAR. The article first appeared in
Management Science and was plagiarized in total for TAR by a
Norwegian (sigh).
November 28, 2012 forward from Dan Stone
Anna Gold sent me the following statement and also
indicated that she had no objections to my posting it on AECM:
Explanation of Retraction (Hunton & Gold 2010)
On November 9, 2012, The Accounting Review
published an early-view version of the voluntary retraction of Hunton & Gold
(2010). The retraction will be printed in the January 2013 issue with the
following wording:
“The authors confirmed a misstatement in the
article and were unable to provide supporting information requested by the
editor and publisher. Accordingly, the article has been retracted.”
The following statement explains the reason for the
authors’ voluntary retraction. In the retracted article, the authors
reported that the 150 offices of the participating CPA firm on which the
study was based were located in the United States. In May 2012, the lead
author learned from the coordinating partner of the participating CPA firm
that the 150 offices included both domestic and international offices of the
firm. The authors apologize for the inadvertently inaccurate description of
the sample frame.
The Editor and the Chairperson of the Publications
Committee of the American Accounting Association subsequently requested more
information about the study and the participating CPA firm. Unfortunately,
the information they requested is subject to a confidentiality agreement
between the lead author and the participating firm; thus, the lead author
has a contractual obligation not to disclose the information requested by
the Editor and the Chairperson. The second author was neither involved in
administering the experiment nor in receiving the data from the CPA firm.
The second author does not know the identity of the CPA firm or the
coordinating partner at the CPA firm. The second author is not a party to
the confidentiality agreement between the lead author and the CPA firm.
The authors offered to print a correction of the
inaccurate description of the sample frame; however, the Editor and the
Chairperson rejected that offer. Consequently, in spite of the authors'
belief that the inaccurate description of the sample does not materially
impact either the internal validity of the study or the conclusions set
forth in the Article, the authors consider it appropriate to voluntarily
withdraw the Article from The Accounting Review at this time. Should the
participating CPA firm change its position on releasing the requested
information in the future, the authors will request that the Editor and the
Chairperson consider reinstating the paper.
Signed:
James Hunton Anna Gold
References: Hunton, J. E. and Gold, A. (2010), “A
field experiment comprising the outcomes of three fraud brainstorming
procedures: Nominal group, round robin, and open discussions,” The
Accounting Review 85(3): 911-935.
December 1, 2012 reply from Harry Markopolos <notreallyharry@outlook.com>
Harry Markopolos <notreallyharry@outlook.com>
The explanation provided by the Hunton and Gold
regarding the recent TAR retraction seems to provide more questions than
answers. Some of those questions raise serious concerns about the validity
of the study.
1. In the paper, the audit clients are described as
publically listed (p. 919), and since the paper describes SAS 99 as being
applicable to these clients, they would presumably be listed in the U.S.
However, according to Audit Analytics, for fiscal year 2007, the Big Four
auditor with the greatest number of worldwide offices with at least one SEC
registrant was PwC, with 134 offices (the remaining firms each had 130
offices). How can you take a random sample of 150 offices from a population
of (at most) 134?
Further, the authors state that only clients from
the retail, manufacturing, and service industries with at least $1 billion
in gross revenues with a December 31, 2007 fiscal year-end were considered
(p. 919). This restriction further limits the number of offices with
eligible clients. For example, the Big Four auditor with the greatest number
of offices with at least one SEC registrant with at least $1 billion in
gross revenues with a December 31, 2007 fiscal year end was Ernst & Young,
with 102 offices (followed by PwC, Deloitte and KPMG, with 94, 86, and 83
offices, respectively). Limiting by industry would further reduce the pool
of offices with eligible clients (this would probably be the most limiting
factor, since most industries tend to be concentrated primarily within a
handful of offices).
2. Why the firm would use a random sample of their
worldwide offices in the first place, especially a sample including foreign
affiliates of the firm? Why not use every US office (or every worldwide
office with SEC registrants)? The design further limited participation to
one randomly selected client per office (p. 919). This design decision is
especially odd. If the firm chose to sample from the applicable population
of offices, why not use a smaller sample of offices and a greater number of
clients per office? Also, why wouldn’t the firm just sample from the pool of
eligible clients? Finally, would the firm really expect its foreign
affiliates to be happy to participate just because the US firm is asking
them to do so? Would it not be much simpler and more effective to focus on
US offices and get large numbers of clients from the largest US Offices
(e.g., New York, Chicago, LA) and fill in the remaining clients needed to
reach 150 clients from smaller offices?
3. Given the current hesitancy of the Big Four to
allow any meaningful access to data, why would the international offices be
consistently willing to participate in the study, especially since each
national affiliate of the Big Four is a distinct legal entity? The
coordination of this study across the firm’s international offices seems
like a herculean effort, at least. Further, even if the authors were not
aware that the population of offices included international offices, the
lead author was presumably aware of the identity of the partner coordinating
the study for the firm. Footnote 4 of the paper and discussion on page 919
suggest that the US national office coordinated the study. It seems quite
implausible that the US national office alone would be able to coordinate
the study internationally.
4. In the statement that has been circulated among
the accounting research community, the authors state:
“The second author was neither involved in
administering the experiment nor in receiving the data from the CPA firm.
The second author does not know the identity of the CPA firm or the
coordinating partner at the CPA firm. The second author is not a party to
the confidentiality agreement between the lead author and the CPA firm.”
However, this statement is inconsistent with
language in the paper suggesting that both authors had access to the data
and were involved in discussions with the firm regarding the design of the
study (e.g. Footnote 17). Also, isn’t this kind of arrangement quite odd, at
best? Not even the second author could verify the data. We are left with
only the first author’s word that this study actually took place with no way
for anyone (not even the second author or the journal editor) to obtain any
kind of assurance on the matter. Why wouldn’t the firm be willing to allow
Anna or Harry Evans to sign a confidentiality agreement in order to obtain
some kind of independent verification? If the firm was willing to allow the
study in the first place, it seems quite unreasonable for them to be
unwilling to allow a reputable third party (e.g. Harry) to obtain
verification of the legitimacy of the study. In addition, assuming the firm
is this extremely vigilant in not allowing Harry or Anna to know about the
firm, does it seem odd that the firm failed to read the paper before
publication and, therefore, note the errors in the paper, including the
claim that is made in multiple places in the paper that the data came from a
random sample of the firm’s US offices?
5. Why do the authors state that the paper is being
voluntarily withdrawn if the authors don’t believe that the validity of the
paper is in any way questioned? The retraction doesn’t really seem
voluntary. If the authors did actually offer to retract the study that
implies that the errors in the paper are not simply innocent mistakes.
Given that most, if not all US offices would have
had to be participants in the study (based on the discussion above), it
wouldn’t be too hard to obtain some additional information from individuals
at the firms to verify whether or not the study actually took place. In
particular, if we were to locate a handful of partners from each of the Big
Four who were office-managing partners in 2008, we could ask them if their
office participated in the study. If none of those partners recall their
office having participated in the study, the reported data would appear to
be quite suspect.
Sincerely,
Harry Markopolos
Jensen Comment
Thanks to the Ethics Officer at Bentley College on July 14, 2014 we now know
more of the story.
I have no idea what happened to Professor Hunton after he resigned from
Bentley University in 2012.
Jensen Comment
"Cassius Clay" (or
Mohammad Ali)
Shouted to the media: "I am the greatest!"
Perhaps so. At least he supposedly did not rig his own championship fight
outcomes.
This does not appear to be the case for media shouts by the Henry W. Bloch
School of Business at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.
"For Business School’s No. 1 Ranking, Big Asterisk Looms," by Mitch
Gerber, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 28, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/for-business-schools-no-1-ranking-big-asterisk-looms/82737?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
When a study found that the business school at the
University of Missouri at Kansas City boasted the world’s No. 1 program in
innovation-management research, officials from the chancellor on down basked
publicly in the news.
Now an
investigation by The Kansas City Star has
cast substantial doubt on that glowing result.
The two authors of the 2011 paper, who were
visiting scholars at the school when they did the study, apparently
structured it to ensure the top ranking, the newspaper reports.
Administrators at the school were aware of the reshaping of the data, the
Star adds.
“I just think this paper is fatally flawed,” said
Ivan Oransky, of the blog Retraction Watch.
A likely motive for the effort, the newspaper says,
was to meet the expectations of Henry W. Bloch, the benefactor for whom the
school is named.
The university told the Star that it
stands by the study.
"Crack Down on Scientific Fraudsters," by Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky,
The New York Times, July 10, 2014 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/11/opinion/crack-down-on-scientific-fraudsters.html?_r=2
. . .
Even though research misconduct is far from rare, Dr.
Han’s case was unusual in that he had to resign. Criminal charges against
scientists who commit fraud are even more uncommon. In fact, according to a
study published last year, “most investigators who
engage in wrongdoing, even serious wrongdoing, continue to conduct research
at their institutions.” As part of our
reporting, we’ve written about multiple academic researchers who have been
found guilty of misconduct and then have gone on to work at pharmaceutical
giants. Unusual, too, is the fact that Iowa State has agreed to reimburse
the government about $500,000 to cover several years of Dr. Han’s salary and
that the National Institutes of Health has decided to withhold another $1.4
million that it had promised the university as part of the grant.
But don’t applaud yet, taxpayers: The N.I.H. isn’t
doing anything about the rest of the $10 million granted to Dr. Han’s boss,
Michael Cho, after the two scientists announced the apparently exciting
results now known to be fraudulent.
In the vast majority of cases, in fact, funding is
not repaid. And just a few of the hundreds of American scientists found to
have committed misconduct have served prison time.
In 2006, Eric T. Poehlman was sentenced to a year in
prison — the
first scientist to be imprisoned for falsifying a grant application —
and also had to pay about $200,000 in restitution for
whistle-blower lawsuits and lawyers’ fees. But the millions awarded to the
University of Vermont for his work were never repaid.
Scott S. Reuben, an anesthesiologist, spent six months
in federal prison starting in 2010 for faking data in many of his studies.
Dr. Reuben was also forced to pay back more than $360,000 to Pfizer as
restitution for misusing the drugmaker’s grant money.
But these are the rare cases. And Dr. Han may have
remained one of the hundreds of fraudster scientists who faced little
punishment if it weren’t for the attention of a senator. The three-year ban,
Senator
Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, told the
Office of Research Integrity in a Feb. 10 letter, “seems like a very light
penalty for a doctor who purposely tampered with a research trial and
directly caused millions of taxpayer dollars to be wasted on fraudulent
studies.” (In fact, just two of the 11 cases reported by the O.R.I. last
year led to outright bans. Most only required supervision by a scientist in
good standing with research overseers.)Senator Grassley is correct: The
office needs teeth, and the people who helped pull them, not surprisingly,
were scientists. The office never recovered from its case against Thereza
Imanishi-Kari, a Tufts University researcher accused of fraud in her work
with a Nobel laureate, the biologist
David Baltimore. In 1991, investigators at the
O.R.I. — then called the Office of Scientific Integrity — found Dr. Imanishi-Kari
guilty of misconduct and lying to cover up her actions, but in 1996 they
were overruled by panelists for its parent agency, the Department of Health
and Human Services, who
concluded that the office had failed to prove its
case.
Scientists used the Imanishi-Kari case as an example
of government oversight run amok. But the O.R.I.’s presence as a deterrent,
and oversight, does far more good than harm. Congress should give it even
more needed authority. A good starting point would be to grant the office
the right to issue administrative subpoenas like those its sister agency,
the National Science Foundation, can use to gain access to university
documents. Without subpoena power, the O.R.I. is able to see only what
institutions want to share. Congress should also help by apportioning more
funding to the office, whose budget is currently about $8.6 million, down
from $9.1 million in 2010.
There are suggestions that other countries may be
starting to take the lead on stronger penalties, based on recent cases in
France, Italy and Britain. Recouping losses from fraud and deliberate
misconduct — not shrugging them off — should be a high priority for federal
agencies that fund scientific research.
The good news is that finding a cure for
federal-funding amnesia isn’t difficult. If the O.R.I. feels that its
mandate does not include getting misused public money back, then Congress
should widen the office’s authority and expand its budget.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
To investigate scientific fraud, follow the money. These days the money trail is
deepest in health science and environmental science, especially research on
climate change.
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
"The Corruption of Peer Review Is Harming Scientific Credibility:
Dubious studies on the danger of hurricane names may be laughable. But bad
science can cause bad policy," by Hank Campbell, The Wall Street Journal,
July 13, 2014 ---
http://online.wsj.com/articles/hank-campbell-the-corruption-of-peer-review-is-harming-scientific-credibility-1405290747?tesla=y&mod=djemMER_h&mg=reno64-wsj
Academic publishing was rocked by the news on July
8 that a company called Sage Publications is retracting 60 papers from its
Journal of Vibration and Control, about the science of acoustics. The
company said a researcher in Taiwan and others had exploited peer review so
that certain papers were sure to get a positive review for placement in the
journal. In one case, a paper's author gave glowing reviews to his own work
using phony names.
Acoustics is an important field. But in biomedicine
faulty research and a dubious peer-review process can have life-or-death
consequences. In June, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National
Institutes of Health and responsible for $30 billion in annual
government-funded research, held a meeting to discuss ways to ensure that
more published scientific studies and results are accurate. According to a
2011 report in the monthly journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, the
results of two-thirds of 67 key studies analyzed by Bayer researchers from
2008-2010 couldn't be reproduced.
That finding was a bombshell.
Replication is a
fundamental tenet of science, and the hallmark of peer review is that other
researchers can look at data and methodology and determine the work's
validity. Dr. Collins and co-author Dr. Lawrence Tabak highlighted the
problem in a January 2014 article in Nature. "What hope is there that other
scientists will be able to build on such work to further biomedical
progress," if no one can check and replicate the research, they wrote.
The authors pointed to several reasons for flawed
studies, including "poor training of researchers in experimental design," an
"emphasis on making provocative statements," and publications that don't
"report basic elements of experimental design." They also said that "some
scientists reputedly use a 'secret sauce' to make their experiments work—and
withhold details from publication or describe them only vaguely to retain a
competitive edge."
Papers with such problems or omissions would never
see the light of day if sound peer-review practices were in place—and their
absence at many journals is the root of the problem. Peer review involves an
anonymous panel of objective experts critiquing a paper on its merits.
Obviously, a panel should not contain anyone who agrees in advance to give
the paper favorable attention and help it get published. Yet a variety of
journals have allowed or overlooked such practices.
Absent rigorous peer review, we get the paper
published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Titled "Female hurricanes are deadlier than male hurricanes," it concluded
that hurricanes with female names cause more deaths than male-named
hurricanes—ostensibly because implicit sexism makes people take the storms
with a woman's name less seriously. The work was debunked once its methods
were examined, but not before it got attention nationwide.
Such a dubious paper made its way into national
media outlets because of the imprimatur of the prestigious National Academy
of Sciences.
Yet a look at the organization's own submission
guidelines makes clear that if you are a National Academy member today, you
can edit a research paper that you wrote yourself and only have to answer a
few questions before an editorial board; you can even arrange to be the
official reviewer for people you know. The result of such laxity isn't just
the publication of a dubious finding like the hurricane gender-bias claim.
Some errors can have serious consequences if bad science leads to bad
policy.
In 2002 and 2010, papers published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences claimed that a pesticide
called atrazine was causing sex changes in frogs. As a result the
Environmental Protection Agency set up special panels to re-examine the
product's safety. Both papers had the same editor, David Wake of the
University of California, Berkeley, who is a colleague of the papers' lead
author, Tyrone Hayes, also of Berkeley.
In keeping with National Academy of Sciences
policy, Prof. Hayes preselected Prof. Wake as his editor. Both studies were
published without a review of the data used to reach the finding. No one has
been able to reproduce the results of either paper, including the EPA, which
did expensive, time-consuming reviews of the pesticide brought about by the
published claims. As the agency investigated, it couldn't even use those
papers about atrazine's alleged effects because the research they were based
on didn't meet the criteria for legitimate scientific work. The authors
refused to hand over data that led them to their claimed results—which meant
no one could run the same computer program and match their results.
Earlier this month, Nature retracted two studies it
had published in January in which researchers from the Riken Center for
Development Biology in Japan asserted that they had found a way to turn some
cells into embryonic stem cells by a simple stress process. The studies had
passed peer review, the magazine said, despite flaws that included
misrepresented information.
Fixing peer review won't be easy, although exposing
its weaknesses is a good place to start. Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC
Berkeley, is a co-founder of the Public Library of Science, one of the
world's largest nonprofit science publishers. He told me in an email that,
"We need to get away from the notion, proven wrong on a daily basis, that
peer review of any kind at any journal means that a work of science is
correct. What it means is that a few (1-4) people read it over and didn't
see any major problems. That's a very low bar in even the best of
circumstances."
Continued in article
"In Japan, Research Scandal Prompts Questions," by David McNeill,
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 30, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/In-Japan-Research-Scandal/147417/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
. . .
Ms. Obokata’s actions "lead us to the conclusion
that she sorely lacks, not only a sense of research ethics, but also
integrity and humility as a scientific researcher,"
a
damning report concluded. The release of the
report sent Ms. Obokata, who admits mistakes but not ill intent, to the
hospital in shock for a week. Riken has dismissed all her appeals, clearing
the way for disciplinary action, which she has pledged to fight.
In June the embattled researcher
agreed to retract both Nature
papers—under duress, said her lawyer. On July 2,
Nature released a statement from her and
the other authors officially retracting the papers.
The seismic waves from Ms. Obokata’s rise and
vertiginous fall continue to reverberate. Japan’s top universities are
rushing to install antiplagiarism software and are combing through old
doctoral theses amid accusations that they are honeycombed with similar
problems.
The affair has sucked in some of Japan’s most
revered professors, including Riken’s president, Ryoji Noyori, a Nobel
laureate, and Shinya Yamanaka, credited with creating induced pluripotent
stem cells. Mr. Yamanaka, a professor at Kyoto University who is also a
Nobel laureate, in April denied claims that he too had manipulated images in
a 2000 research paper on embryonic mouse stem cells, but he was forced to
admit that, like Ms. Obokata, he could not find lab notes to support his
denial.
The scandal has triggered questions about the
quality of science in a country that still punches below its international
weight in cutting-edge research. Critics say Japan’s best universities have
churned out hundreds of poor-quality Ph.D.’s. Young researchers are not
taught how to keep detailed lab notes, properly cite data, or question
assumptions, said Sukeyasu Yamamoto, a former physicist at the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst and now an adviser to Riken. "The problems we see
in this episode are all too common," he said.
Hung Out to Dry?
Ironically, Riken was known as a positive
discriminator in a country where just one in seven university researchers
are women—the lowest share in the developed world. The organization was
striving to push young women into positions of responsibility, say other
professors there. "The flip side is that they overreacted and maybe went a
little too fast," said Kathleen S. Rockland, a neurobiologist who once
worked at Riken’s Brain Science Institute. "That’s a pity because they were
doing a very good job."
Many professors, however, accuse the institute of
hanging Ms. Obokata out to dry since the problems in her papers were
exposed. Riken was under intense pressure to justify its budget with
high-profile results. Japan’s news media have focused on the role of Yoshiki
Sasai, deputy director of the Riken Center and Ms. Obokata’s supervisor, who
initially promoted her, then insisted he had no knowledge of the details of
her research once the problems were exposed.
Critics noted that even the head of the inquiry
into Ms. Obokata’s alleged misconduct was forced to admit in April that he
had posted "problematic" images in a 2007 paper published in Oncogene.
Shunsuke Ishii, a molecular geneticist, quit the investigative committee.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on the need for independent replication and other
validity studies in research (except in accountancy were accountics researchers
are not encouraged by journals to do validity checks) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
"UNLV Fires Professor for Repeated Plagiarism," by Peter Schmidt,
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 2, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/UNLV-Fires-Professor-for/150309/?cid=at
The University of Nevada at Las Vegas has fired
Mustapha Marrouchi, a professor of postcolonial literature, based on its
finding that he plagiarized the work of numerous other scholars, according
to documents it released to The Chronicle on Monday in response to an
open-records request.
Donald D. Snyder, the university’s president, told
the professor in a letter dated November 7 that he was firing Mr. Marrouchi
for cause, effective immediately, based on the conclusions of a special
hearing officer and the recommendations of a special hearing committee.
The five-member hearing committee had unanimously
found Mr. Marrouchi guilty of academic dishonesty and of misconduct deemed
serious enough to render him unfit to remain in his job in the university’s
English department.
The committee voted, 4 to 1, in favor of his
dismissal, with the dissenter arguing that instead he should be suspended
for a year and required to forfeit six years’ worth of pay increases,
apologize to his victims, undergo ethics training, and submit to
plagiarism-software analysis any scholarly work he intends to submit to
publishers over the next three years.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism detection tools ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"What Is Detected?" by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, July
14, 2014 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/07/14/turnitin-faces-new-questions-about-efficacy-plagiarism-detection-software
Jensen Comment
It's hardly surprising that most student plagiarism goes undetected. As
detection tools get more sophisticated so do the criminals in general except for
the ones that are probably too stupid to get into college or crazed out of their
minds with drug addiction.
One way to beat the plagiarism detection tools is to take the time to
cleverly rewrite and paraphrase that which is essentially copied.
Another reason that students get away with plagiarism is that in most
instances their writings are not read by many people other than a weary
professor who is probably grading their writing along with the submissions of 30
or more other students.
For professors who plagiarize the risks are greater due, in large part, to a
wider audience of readers who are also experts on the subject matter. Professor
plagiarism rewritings and paraphrasing of copied works need to be much more
clever than those of students. History Professor Matthew C. Whitaker at Arizona
State University rewrote/paraphrased and may have gotten away with it had he not
done so much of it in a book that would be carefully read by experts on the
subject matter.
Professor Whitaker got caught! But I doubt that credit can be given to
plagiarism detectors like Turnitin. I suspect he was much too clever for that
type of detection.
Some professors and students who plagiarize may not have done so directly
They may have copied the works of their assistants or used services of companies
that ghost write papers and books. How does one account for the fact that the
famous anthropologist Jane Goodall plagiarized from Wikipedia? She surely is too
smart to plagiarize directly herself. I guess (with no evidence whatsoever) that
she may have borrowed the writings of a subordinate who did the plagiarizing.
In previous centuries in Europe lifting works of subordinates would not
even have been considered cheating since the writings (and sometimes even
paintings) of subordinates was considered the works of their masters. In modern
times this is academic cheating.
Monkey See Monkey Do
"Jane Goodall apologizes for lifting passages from Wikipedia for her new book,"
by Elizabeth Foster, National Post, March 20, 2013 ---
http://arts.nationalpost.com/2013/03/20/jane-goodall-apologizes-for-failing-to-cite-passages-from-wikipedia-and-elsewhere-in-her-new-book/
Jane Goodall, the primatologist famous for her
painstaking research, has apologized for including dozens of passages
without attribution in her new book.
Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of
Plants is an exploration of the critical role nature plays in our world. The
book’s focus on plant life is a departure for Goodall, whose expertise has
long been primates.
While much of the book details Goodall’s personal
experiences and opinions, sections ranging from a sentence to entire
paragraphs were borrowed from websites like Wikipedia without attribution or
footnotes.
"New Book, New Allegations," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed,
May 13, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/05/13/arizona-state-professor-accused-plagiarism-second-time#sthash.OmcGllGb.dpbs
An investigation into plagiarism allegations
against an Arizona State University professor of history in 2011 found him
not guilty of deliberate academic misconduct, but the case remained
controversial. The chair of his department’s tenure committee resigned in
protest and other faculty members spoke out against the findings, saying
their colleague – who recently had been promoted to full professor – was
cleared even though what he did likely would have gotten an undergraduate in
trouble.
Now, Matthew C. Whitaker has written a new book,
and allegations of plagiarism are being levied against him once again.
Several blogs – one anonymously, and in great detail – have documented
alleged examples of plagiarism in the work. Several of his colleagues have
seen them, and say they raise serious questions about Whitaker’s academic
integrity.
Meanwhile, Whitaker says he won’t comment on
allegations brought forth anonymously, and his publisher, the University of
Nebraska Press, says it’s standing by him.
Three years ago, several senior faculty members in
Whitaker’s department accused him of uncited borrowing of texts and ideas
from books, Wikipedia and a newspaper article in his written work and a
speech. In response, the university appointed a three-member committee to
investigate. The group found that Whitaker’s work contained no “substantial
or systematic plagiarism,” but that he had been careless in some instances,
as reported by Inside Higher Ed at the
time. As a result, the university did not impose serious sanctions on the
scholar, who is the founding director of Arizona State’s Center for the
Study of Race and Democracy.
In response, Monica Green, professor of history,
resigned as department tenure committee chair. Several other professors
called the investigation flawed and incomplete in a formal complaint to the
university and in public statements.
Whitaker at the time told the university that his
colleagues were pursuing a personal vendetta, possibly due to his race and
the fact that they disagreed with his promotion,
The Arizona Republic reported.
The university backed Whitaker, saying that the
investigation had been thorough and carried out by distinguished scholars.
In January, the University of Nebraska Press
published Whitaker’s newest book,
Peace Be Still: Modern Black America from World War II to Barack Obama.
Several prominent professors of history have written
blurbs for the book, which won the Bayard Rustin Book Award from the Tufts
University Center for the Study of Race and Democracy.
But not everyone is impressed.
Since the book’s publication, a blog called the
Cabinet
of Plagiarism has detailed numerous alleged
instances of plagiarism in the book, including text and ideas taken from
information websites and published scholarship. The blog is
moderated by someone using the name Ann Ribidoux, who did not return a
posted request for comment. There is no one on the Arizona State faculty by
that name.
Matthew C. Whitaker Homepage at ASU ---
http://csrd.asu.edu/people/matthew-c-whitaker-phd
"2 Houston Professors Charged With Lying to Get Grants," Inside
Higher Ed, April 29, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2014/04/29/2-houston-professors-charged-lying-get-grants#sthash.GRY8YqLl.dpbs
.. her thoughts – if not always her words – remain
her own.
"In Her Own Words," April 25, 2014," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside
Higher Ed, April 25, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/04/25/investigation-brown-professors-plagiarism-case-goes-public#sthash.vVCokmYE.dpbs
Brown University’s investigation into a professor
accused of plagiarism was supposed to remain confidential. But after it was
leaked to the student newspaper, the professor is speaking out both to
apologize for what she says was unintentional plagiarism and to assert that
her thoughts – if not always her words – remain her own.
While some colleagues criticized the university’s
response to its inquiry into Vanessa Ryan, assistant professor of English,
especially in light of the fact that she recently was named as an associate
dean who oversees a graduate teaching program, others have come to her
defense. Plagiarism is often framed as an ethical choice, they say, but
unintentional plagiarism is easier and maybe more common than many believe.
“In August 2013, I learned that my book contains
inadvertent errors of attribution, which resulted from mistakes I made in
documenting my research as I worked on the project over many years,” Ryan
said via email. “I take full responsibility for these mistakes.”
At the same time, she said, “While, as a result of
these mistakes, my book uses words from other scholars’ writings without
attribution, the substance of the ideas in the book is my own.”
Last year, Brown University received an anonymous
allegation that Ryan’s book, Thinking Without Thought in the Victorian
Novel, published in 2012 by Johns Hopkins University Press, contained
numerous instances of plagiarism.
David Savitz, vice president for research at Brown,
said his predecessor determined that there was enough cause to convene a
three-member panel of senior faculty members familiar with Ryan’s area of
research but without personal ties to investigate.
After a “very serious” inquiry, “what they found
didn’t rise to the level of the research misconduct,” Savitz said of the
panel. Although there were unattributed quotes, Savitz said the panel found
they weren’t central to Ryan’s argument, and were related to “peripheral or
contextual issues.”
Quoting from the panel’s report, Ryan said the
investigators found the “passages did not reflect the co-opting of others’
views as [my] own and notwithstanding these passages, the contribution of
[my] book still stands.”
Ryan said she took immediate action, notifying her
publisher, her department chair, other colleagues and the scholars
improperly cited in her book.
She added: “I want to underscore how seriously I
take academic integrity and how distressed I am to have made these
unintentional mistakes. As my students and colleagues know, I am passionate
about my work as a scholar, teacher, and member of our academic community.”
Still, some at Brown are not satisfied by that
apology or by the university’s response to the query. Someone with access to
the confidential plagiarism report leaked it to the student newspaper, the
Brown Daily Herald. The paper ran a story and
also reported that 13 English professors had written to the administration
questioning the findings of the report and Ryan’s appointment in January as
associate dean of the graduate school, in which she leads a training program
for teaching assistants. To some faculty, it seemed like the wrong job for
someone accused of bad academic behavior, however unintentional.
Ryan is still a faculty member, but is on
administrative leave from that position until her contract expires next
year, a university spokeswoman said.
James Egan, professor of English, said via email:
“I stand behind what we wrote in the letter,” referring to the faculty
letter saying that the university had acted inappropriately. But he declined
further comment due to a department decision not to speak with media about
the case.
Philip Gould, department chair, said he was not
immediately available for comment.
Despite the criticism from some of her colleagues
at Brown, others have stood behind Ryan since the allegations went public.
Kate Flint, a Victorianist who is familiar with
Ryan’s work, and who is chair of the department of art history at the
University of Southern California, said that Ryan’s response to the
allegations demonstrates her academic integrity. Immediately, Flint said,
Ryan called her to explain and offer an apology (although Flint’s work was
not part of the investigation, to her knowledge).
Continued in article
It's Rare for Universities to Fire Tenured Professors Who Plagiarize
"Columbia U. Says It Will Fire Professor Accused of Plagiarizing a Former
Colleague and Students," by Thomas Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education,"
June 24, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/06/3520n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
A Columbia University professor has been suspended
and will be fired for plagiarism and for obstructing the university's
investigation into her case, a spokeswoman said on Monday.
The allegations against Madonna G. Constantine, a
tenured professor of psychology and education at Columbia's Teachers
College, first came to light in February after an investigation, conducted
by a law firm hired by the university, found that Ms. Constantine had
plagiarized the work of a former colleague and two former students (The
Chronicle, February 21). This month a faculty
committee accepted the administration's ruling.
In February university officials reduced her salary
and asked for her resignation, which she did not give.
A spokeswoman for the university confirmed that a
memorandum was delivered to faculty members on Monday informing them of the
decision to suspend Ms. Constantine, pending dismissal.
The spokeswoman declined to give further details.
In an interview last February, Ms. Constantine
vigorously defended herself against allegations of plagiarism, and argued
that it was she instead who had been plagiarized. She also contended that
the university is biased against her and that her accusers are motivated by
envy and racism (The
Chronicle, February 22).
Ms. Constantine did not respond to an interview
request Monday afternoon. But her lawyer, Paul J. Giacomo Jr., said the
university had ignored information that would clear her. "The evidence that
was offered by her accusers is highly questionable and is belied by evidence
in Teachers College's own records," he said. Mr. Giacomo said that his
client was keeping all options open and that she may appeal her termination
to a faculty committee.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Punishments for faculty plagiarism are seldom as hurtful as punishments for
student plagiarism. The key is admission of guilt with a humble apology. Denial
and defiance can be more costly as Madonna G. Constantine discovered at Columbia
University (see above link).
"Research Fraud Found in Iowa State AIDS Study," Inside Higher Ed,
December 24, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/12/24/research-fraud-found-iowa-state-aids-study
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
announced Monday that it had found that Dong-Pyou
Han, until recently an assistant professor at Iowa State University,
falsified results of research he was conducting on a vaccine that could be
used to prevent the spread of HIV. The agency found him to have engaged in
"intentional spiking" of lab samples, and concluded that the results of
these samples prompted considerable interest in the research involved --
including the awarding of more research grants. Han apparently added human
blood to samples that were supposed to be rabbit blood, and the additional
blood skewed the results,
The Des Moines Register
reported. HHS said that Han had admitted his actions.
The Register reported that he had resigned from Iowa State and that
he could not be reached for comment.Continued in article
Jesus' Wife Hoax: This is not about Christianity per se. It's about
cheating and hoaxes in academe.
"How the 'Jesus' Wife' Hoax Fell Apart The media loved the 2012 tale from
Harvard Divinity School," by Jerry Pattengale, The Wall Street Journal, May
1, 2014 ---
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304178104579535540828090438?mod=djemMER_h&mg=reno64-wsj
In September 2012, Harvard Divinity School
professor Karen King announced the discovery of a Coptic (ancient Egyptian)
gospel text on a papyrus fragment that contained the phrase "Jesus said to
them, 'My wife . . .' " The world took notice. The possibility that Jesus
was married would prompt a radical reconsideration of the New Testament and
biblical scholarship.
Yet now it appears almost certain that the
Jesus-was-married story line was divorced from reality. On April 24,
Christian Askeland—a Coptic specialist at Indiana Wesleyan University and my
colleague at the Green Scholars Initiative—revealed that the "Gospel of
Jesus' Wife," as the fragment is known, was a match for a papyrus fragment
that is clearly a forgery.
Almost from the moment Ms. King made her
announcement two years ago, critics attacked the Gospel of Jesus' Wife as a
forgery. One line of criticism said that the fragment had been sloppily
reworked from a 2002 online PDF of the Coptic Gospel of Thomas and even
repeated a typographical error.
But Ms. King had defenders. The Harvard Theological
Review recently published a group of articles that attest to the papyrus's
authenticity. Although the scholars involved signed nondisclosure agreements
preventing them from sharing the data with the wider scholarly community,
the
New York Times
NYT +0.76%
was given access to the studies ahead of
publication. The newspaper summarized the findings last month, saying "the
ink and papyrus are very likely ancient, and not a modern forgery." The
article prompted a tide of similar pieces, appearing shortly before Easter,
asserting that the Gospel of Jesus' Wife was genuine.
Then last week the story began to crumble faster
than an ancient papyrus exposed in the windy Sudan. Mr. Askeland found,
among the online links that Harvard used as part of its publicity push,
images of another fragment, of the Gospel of John, that turned out to share
many similarities—including the handwriting, ink and writing instrument
used—with the "wife" fragment. The Gospel of John text, he discovered, had
been directly copied from a 1924 publication.
"Two factors immediately indicated that this was a
forgery," Mr. Askeland tells me. "First, the fragment shared the same line
breaks as the 1924 publication. Second, the fragment contained a peculiar
dialect of Coptic called Lycopolitan, which fell out of use during or before
the sixth century." Ms. King had done two radiometric tests, he noted, and
"concluded that the papyrus plants used for this fragment had been harvested
in the seventh to ninth centuries." In other words, the fragment that came
from the same material as the "Jesus' wife" fragment was written in a
dialect that didn't exist when the papyrus it appears on was made.
Mark Goodacre, a New Testament professor and Coptic
expert at Duke University, wrote on his NT Blog on April 25 about the Gospel
of John discovery: "It is beyond reasonable doubt that this is a fake, and
this conclusion means that the Jesus' Wife Fragment is a fake too." Alin
Suciu, a research associate at the University of Hamburg and a Coptic
manuscript specialist, wrote online on April 26: "Given that the evidence of
the forgery is now overwhelming, I consider the polemic surrounding the
Gospel of Jesus' Wife papyrus over."
Having evaluated the evidence, many specialists in
ancient manuscripts and Christian origins think Karen King and the Harvard
Divinity School were the victims of an elaborate ruse. Scholars had assumed
that radiometric tests would return an early date (at least in antiquity),
because the Gospel of Jesus' Wife fragment had been cut from a genuinely
ancient piece of material. Likewise, those familiar with papyri had
identified the ink used as soot-based—preferred by forgers because the Raman
spectroscopy tests used to test for age would be inconclusive.
Continued in article
Princeton's Nobel Laureate economist and political activist Paul Krugman is
sometimes known to cherry pick data or even invent data in order to make a
political point ---
Paul Krugman ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
. . .
Krugman's columns have drawn criticism as well as
praise. A 2003 article in The Economist[ questioned Krugman's
"growing tendency to attribute all the world's ills to George Bush," citing
critics who felt that "his relentless partisanship is getting in the way of
his argument" and claiming errors of economic and political reasoning in his
columns. Daniel Okrent, a former The New York Times ombudsman, in his
farewell column, criticized Krugman for what he said was "the disturbing
habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that
pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assault.
"The Missing Data in Krugman’s German Austerity Narrative" Daniel J.
Mitchell, Townhall, February 25, 2014 ---
http://finance.townhall.com/columnists/danieljmitchell/2014/02/25/the-missing-data-in-krugmans-german-austerity-narrative-n1800047?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
There’s an ongoing debate about
Keynesian economics, stimulus spending, and
various
versions of fiscal austerity,
and regular readers know I do everything possible to explain that you can
promote added prosperity by reducing the
burden of government spending.
. . .
But here’s the problem with his article. We know
from the (misleading) examples above
(not quoted here) that he’s complained about
supposed austerity in places such as the United Kingdom and France, so one
would think that the German government must have been more profligate with
the public purse.
After all, Krugman wrote they haven’t “imposed a
lot of [austerity] on themselves.”
So I followed the advice in Krugman’s “public
service announcement.” I didn’t just repeat what people have said. I dug
into
the data to see what
happened to government spending in various nations.
And I know you’ll be shocked to see that Krugman
was wrong. The Germans have been more frugal (at least in the sense of
increasing spending at the slowest rate) than nations that supposedly are
guilty of “spending cuts.”
"Cardiology researcher faked data in his prizewinning PhD thesis — and NIH,
AHA grants: ORI," Retraction Watch, October 2013 ---
http://retractionwatch.wordpress.com/2013/10/17/cardiology-researcher-faked-data-in-his-prizewinning-phd-thesis-and-nih-aha-grants-ori/
Nitin Aggarwal, formerly of the Medical College of
Wisconsin, faked data in his PhD thesis, grant applications to the NIH and
American Heart Association, and in two papers, according to
new findings by the Office of Research Integrity.
Jensen Comment
It's not clear how he got caught. Data faking is most commonly caught in the
real sciences by insider whistleblowers (such as research assistants) and
replication which in the natural sciences is virtually mandatory. Unfortunately,
in accountics science replication is rare and this type of whistle blowing is
unheard of for accounting research cheating.
"Corruption in Higher Education Appears to Be on the Rise Globally, Report
Says," by Aisha Labi, Chronicle of Higher Education, October 1, 2013
---
http://chronicle.com/article/Corruption-in-Higher-Education/142013/
Corruption in higher education is nothing new,
probably existing since the first college opened its doors. But as more
people around the world seek college degrees, there's evidence that bribes
for grades, admissions fraud, and other corrupt practices are on the rise.
"We're certainly discovering more of it," said
Stephen P. Heyneman, a professor of international-education policy at
Vanderbilt University and a former education official with the World Bank.
"Whether that's because we're paying more attention to it or because it's
worsening, I don't know."
In a report released on Tuesday by Transparency
International, a nongovernmental organization, Mr. Heyneman and other
experts examine trends and examples of corruption in education, from primary
schools to public university systems. The publication,
"Global Corruption Report: Education," is one in a
series of reports the group produces annually on corruption around the
world, but it's the first to focus on education.
Corruption in higher education very likely has been
exacerbated by the rapid expansion of the sector in recent decades,
transforming what were once elite systems to mass higher-education systems,
the report says. That transformation, coupled with the growing
internationalization of higher education, has triggered significant
problems.
"In some instances, corruption has invaded whole
systems of higher education and threatens the reputation of research
products and graduates, regardless of their guilt or innocence," Mr.
Heyneman writes in the report.
'Denuded and
Corrupted'
The most corrupt regions include Southeast Asia and
many of the Central Asian republics, where Mr. Heyneman describes entire
systems as "denuded and corrupted from within." One instructor in Kazakhstan
told him how her dean had asked to borrow her grade book before she
administered final examinations. When he returned it to her, the grades for
half of her students were already filled in.
In another instance, a Ph.D. student Mr. Heyneman
had gotten to know over several visits explained why she had not yet
received her degree even though she had defended her dissertation long
before: She didn't have enough money to pay the chairman of her dissertation
committee the bribe he was demanding.
Often students are required not only to read the
costly textbook a professor has written and assigned to all his students,
but also to prove that they actually had purchased the book by presenting
receipts.
The different kinds of corruption he has
encountered led Mr. Heyneman to conclude that "the problem of corruption is
endemic but is not identical in different parts of the world."
In the former Soviet states, bribes and other forms
of monetary corruption are the norm. In sub-Saharan Africa, sexual
exploitation of students by faculty members and administrators is pervasive.
In other countries, personal corruption is more prevalent, with family
members pressing an instructor to award a grade or pass a student as a
favor.
The report describes plagiarism by students, a
pressing concern for many American colleges, as a kind of personal
corruption.
'The Elephant in
the Room'
While the specific nature of the corruption is
idiosyncratic to individual regions, the effects of corruption often cross
national borders. The large numbers of Chinese graduate students in the
United States, for example, have made corruption in China a pressing issue
for many American institutions. The students routinely submit personal
statements of purpose with their applications that they have not written,
Mr. Heyneman said, and they have cheated on the Toefl and other
language-proficiency tests as well.
"This is a major diplomatic issue for both China
and the U.S," said Mr. Heyneman. "China depends for its economy on having
well-educated people, and it spends hundreds of millions of dollars on
subsidizing students who study abroad. The problem is, many come
unprepared."
The Real Scandal Concerns the Academics in the USA Who Buy This Phony
Research for Tenure and Promotions and Pay Raises
"Looks good on paper A flawed system for judging research is leading to
academic fraud," The Economist, September 28, 2013 ---
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21586845-flawed-system-judging-research-leading-academic-fraud-looks-good-paper?frsc=dg|a
Thank you Richard Sansing for the heads up.
DISGUISED as employees of a gas company, a team of
policemen burst into a flat in Beijing on September 1st. Two suspects inside
panicked and tossed a plastic bag full of money out of a 15th-floor window.
Red hundred-yuan notes worth as much as $50,000 fluttered to the pavement
below.
Money raining down on pedestrians was not as
bizarre, however, as the racket behind it. China is known for its pirated
DVDs and fake designer gear, but these criminals were producing something
more intellectual: fake scholarly articles which they sold to academics, and
counterfeit versions of existing medical journals in which they sold
publication slots.
As China tries to take its seat at the top table of
global academia, the criminal underworld has seized on a feature in its
research system: the fact that research grants and promotions are awarded on
the basis of the number of articles published, not on the quality of the
original research. This has fostered an industry of plagiarism, invented
research and fake journals that Wuhan University estimated in 2009 was worth
$150m, a fivefold increase on just two years earlier.
Chinese scientists are still rewarded for doing
good research, and the number of high-quality researchers is increasing.
Scientists all round the world also commit fraud. But the Chinese evaluation
system is particularly susceptible to it.
By volume the output of Chinese science is
impressive. Mainland Chinese researchers have published a steadily
increasing share of scientific papers in journals included in the
prestigious Science Citation Index (SCI—maintained by Thomson Reuters, a
publisher). The number grew from a negligible share in 2001 to 9.5% in 2011,
second in the world to America, according to a report published by the
Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China. From 2002 to
2012, more than 1m Chinese papers were published in SCI journals; they
ranked sixth for the number of times cited by others. Nature, a science
journal, reported that in 2012 the number of papers from China in the
journal’s 18 affiliated research publications rose by 35% from 2011. The
journal said this “adds to the growing body of evidence that China is fast
becoming a global leader in scientific publishing and scientific research”.
In 2010, however, Nature had also noted rising
concerns about fraud in Chinese research, reporting that in one Chinese
government survey, a third of more than 6,000 scientific researchers at six
leading institutions admitted to plagiarism, falsification or fabrication.
The details of the survey have not been publicly released, making it
difficult to compare the results fairly with Western surveys, which have
also found that one-third of scientists admit to dishonesty under the
broadest definition, but that a far smaller percentage (2% on average) admit
to having fabricated or falsified research results.
In 2012 Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences, an American journal, published a study of retractions accounting
for nation of origin. In it a team of authors wrote that in medical journal
articles in PubMed, an American database maintained by the National
Institutes of Health, there were more retractions due to plagiarism from
China and India together than from America (which produced the most papers
by far, and so the most cheating overall). The study also found that papers
from China led the world in retractions due to duplication—the same papers
being published in multiple journals. On retractions due to fraud, China
ranked fourth, behind America, Germany and Japan.
“Stupid Chinese Idea”
Chinese scientists have urged their comrades to
live up to the nation’s great history. “Academic corruption is gradually
eroding the marvellous and well-established culture that our ancestors left
for us 5,000 years ago,” wrote Lin Songqing of the Chinese Academy of
Sciences, in an article this year in Learned Publishing, a British-based
journal.
In the 1980s, when China was only beginning to
reinvest in science, amassing publishing credits seemed a good way to use
non-political criteria for evaluating researchers. But today the
statistics-driven standards for promotion (even when they are not handed out
merely on the basis of personal connections) are as problematic as in the
rest of the bureaucracy. Xiong Bingqi of the 21st Century Education Research
Institute calls it the “GDPism of education”. Local government officials
stand out with good statistics, says Mr Xiong. “It is the same with
universities.”
The most valuable statistic a scientist can tally
up is SCI journal credits, especially in journals with higher "impact
factors"—ones that are cited more frequently in other scholars’ papers. SCI
credits and impact factors are used to judge candidates for doctorates,
promotions, research grants and pay bonuses. Some ambitious professors amass
SCI credits at an astounding pace. Mr Lin writes that a professor at Ningbo
university, in south-east China, published 82 such papers in a three-year
span. A hint of the relative weakness of these papers is found in the fact
that China ranks just 14th in average citations per SCI paper, suggesting
that many Chinese papers are rarely quoted by other scholars.
The quality of research is not always an issue for
those evaluating promotions and grants. Some administrators are unqualified
to evaluate research, Chinese scientists say, either because they are
bureaucrats or because they were promoted using the same criteria
themselves. In addition, the administrators’ institutions are evaluated on
their publication rankings, so university presidents and department heads
place a priority on publishing, especially for SCI credits. This dynamic has
led some in science circles to joke that SCI stands for “Stupid Chinese
Idea”.
Crystal unclear
The warped incentive system has created some big
embarrassments. In 2009 Acta Crystallographica Section E, a British journal
on crystallography, was forced to retract 70 papers co-authored by two
researchers at Jinggangshan university in southern China, because they had
fabricated evidence described in the papers. After the retractions the
Lancet, a British journal, published a broadside urging China to take more
action to prevent fraud. But many cases are covered up when detected to
protect the institutions involved.
The pirated medical-journal racket broken up in
Beijing shows that there is a well-developed market for publication beyond
the authentic SCI journals. The cost of placing an article in one of the
counterfeit journals was up to $650, police said. Purchasing a fake article
cost up to $250. Police said the racket had earned several million yuan
($500,000 or more) since 2009. Customers were typically medical researchers
angling for promotion.
Continued in article
Utah Fires Assistant Professor and Retires Another After Finding Science Lab
Was Reckless With Data and Manipulated Images
"U. of Utah Review Finds ‘Reckless’ Research Misconduct in Lab," by Nick
DeSantis, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/jp/u-of-utah-review-finds-reckless-research-misconduct-in-lab?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"Let's Talk about Academic Integrity, Part I: BI (Before the Internet),"
by Tracy Mitrano, Inside Higher Ed, August 16, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/law-policy-and-it/lets-talk-about-academic-integrity-part-i-bi-internet
"German Education Minister Stripped of Doctorate," Inside Higher Ed,
February 7, 2013 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2013/02/06/german-education-minister-stripped-doctorate
A panel at Heinrich Heine University has decided to
strip Germany's education minister, Annette Schavan, of her doctorate
because the committee found her dissertation to be plagiarized, the
Associated Press reported.
Schavan denies the charges and plans to appeal. A
former defense minister in Germany resigned in 2011 after revelations that
he had copied portions of his doctoral thesis.
Jensen Comment
In days of old the writings of students were considered the works of their major
professors who sometimes helped themselves to these works without even
acknowledging the original authors. This no longer is the case in modern times.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"In a Memphis Cheating Ring, the Teachers Are the Accused," by Motoko
Rich, The New York Times, February 2, 2013 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/education/in-memphis-cheating-ring-teachers-are-the-accused.html?hpw&_r=0
In the end, it was a pink baseball cap that
revealed an audacious test-cheating scheme in three Southern states that
spanned at least 15 years.
Test proctors at Arkansas State University
spotted a woman wearing the cap while taking a
national teacher certification exam under one name on a morning in June 2009
and then under another name that afternoon. A supervisor soon discovered
that at least two other impersonators had registered for tests that day.
Ensuing investigations ultimately led to Clarence D.
Mumford Sr., 59, who pleaded guilty on Friday to charges that accused him of
being the cheating ring’s mastermind during a 23-year career in Memphis as a
teacher, assistant principal and guidance counselor.
Federal prosecutors had indicted him on 63 counts,
including mail and wire fraud and identify theft. They said he doctored
driver’s licenses, pressured teachers to lie to the authorities and
collected at least $125,000 from teachers and prospective teachers in
Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee who feared that they could not pass the
certification exams on their own.
Mr. Mumford pleaded guilty to two counts of the
indictment, just a week after he rejected a settlement offer. At the time,
he said that its recommended sentence of 9 to 11 years was “too long a time
and too severe”; the new settlement carries a maximum sentence of 7 years.
Mr. Mumford appeared in Federal District Court here on
Friday wearing a dark suit and a matching yellow tie and pocket
handkerchief. He said little more than “Yes, sir” in answer to questions
from Judge John T. Fowlkes.
Another 36 people, most of them teachers from
Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee, have been swept up in the federal
dragnet, including Clarence Mumford Jr., Mr. Mumford’s son, and
Cedrick Wilson, a former wide receiver for the
Pittsburgh Steelers. (Mr. Wilson paid $2,500 for someone to take a
certification exam for physical education teachers, according to court
documents.)
In addition to the senior Mr. Mumford, eight people
have
pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the
investigation into the ring, and on Friday, a federal prosecutor, John
Fabian, announced that 18 people who confessed to paying Mr. Mumford to
arrange test-takers for them had been barred from teaching for five years.
The case has rattled Memphis at a tumultuous time. The
city’s schools are
merging with the suburban district in surrounding
Shelby County, exposing simmering tensions over race and economic disparity.
The state has also designated 68 schools in the
city as among the lowest-performing campuses in Tennessee, and is gradually
handing control of some of them to charter operators and other groups. And
with a
$90 million grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation, the district is overhauling how it recruits, evaluates and pays
teachers.
District officials say that the test scandal does not
reflect broader problems, and that none of the indicted teachers still work
in the Memphis schools. (At least one teacher is working in Mississippi.)
“It would be unfair to let what may be 50, 60 or 100 teachers who did some
wrong stain the good work of the large number of teachers and administrators
who get up every day and go by the book,” said Dorsey Hopson, the general
counsel for Memphis City Schools
who this week was named the district’s interim superintendent.
“A teacher’s job is very hard. I know it is,” said
Threeshea Robinson, a mother who waited last week to pick up her son, a
fourth grader at Raleigh-Bartlett Meadows Elementary School, where a teacher
who has pleaded guilty taught until last fall. “But I would not want a
doctor who did not pass all his tests operating on me.”
The tests involved are known as Praxis exams, and more
than 300,000 were administered last year by the nonprofit
Educational Testing
Service for people pursuing teaching
licenses or new credentials in specific subjects like biology or history.
By and large, they are considered easy hurdles to
clear. In Tennessee, for example, 97 percent of those who took the exams in
the 2010-11 school year passed.
Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of
FairTest, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, said that the
testing service had had problems with
cheating before.
Ray Nicosia, the
executive director of the testing service’s Office of Testing Integrity,
said episodes of impersonation were rare.
Continued in article
"Dishonest Educators," by Walter E. Williams, Townhall, January
9, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://townhall.com/columnists/walterewilliams/2013/01/09/dishonest-educators-n1482294?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl
Nearly two years ago, U.S. News & World Report came
out with a story titled "Educators Implicated in Atlanta Cheating Scandal."
It reported that "for 10 years, hundreds of Atlanta public school teachers
and principals changed answers on state tests in one of the largest cheating
scandals in U.S. history." More than three-quarters of the 56 Atlanta
schools investigated had cheated on the National Assessment of Educational
Progress test, sometimes called the national report card. Cheating orders
came from school administrators and included brazen acts such as teachers
reading answers aloud during the test and erasing incorrect answers. One
teacher told a colleague, "I had to give your kids, or your students, the
answers because they're dumb as hell." Atlanta's not alone. There have been
investigations, reports and charges of teacher-assisted cheating in other
cities, such as Philadelphia, Houston, New York, Detroit, Baltimore, Los
Angeles and Washington.Recently, The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution's blog carried a story titled "A new cheating scandal:
Aspiring teachers hiring ringers." According to the story, for at least 15
years, teachers in Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee paid Clarence
Mumford, who's now under indictment, between $1,500 and $3,000 to send
someone else to take their Praxis exam, which is used for K-12 teacher
certification in 40 states. Sandra Stotsky, an education professor at the
University of Arkansas, said, "(Praxis I) is an easy test for anyone who has
completed high school but has nothing to do with college-level ability or
scores." She added, "The test is far too undemanding for a prospective
teacher. ... The fact that these people hired somebody to take an easy test
of their skills suggests that these prospective teachers were probably so
academically weak it is questionable whether they would have been suitable
teachers."
Here's a practice Praxis I math question: Which of
the following is equal to a quarter-million -- 40,000, 250,000, 2,500,000,
1/4,000,000 or 4/1,000,000? The test taker is asked to click on the correct
answer. A practice writing skills question is to identify the error in the
following sentence: "The club members agreed that each would contribute ten
days of voluntary work annually each year at the local hospital." The test
taker is supposed to point out that "annually each year" is redundant.
CNN broke this cheating story last July, but the
story hasn't gotten much national press since then. In an article for
NewsBusters, titled "Months-Old, Three-State Teacher Certification Test
Cheating Scandal Gets Major AP Story -- on a Slow News Weekend" (11/25/12),
Tom Blumer quotes speculation by the blog "educationrealist": "I will be
extremely surprised if it does not turn out that most if not all of the
teachers who bought themselves a test grade are black. (I am also betting
that the actual testers are white, but am not as certain. It just seems that
if black people were taking the test and guaranteeing passage, the fees
would be higher.)"
There's some basis in fact for the speculation that
it's mostly black teachers buying grades, and that includes former Steelers
wide receiver Cedrick Wilson, who's been indicted for fraud. According to a
study titled "Differences in Passing Rates on Praxis I Tests by
Race/Ethnicity Group" (March 2011), the percentages of blacks who passed the
Praxis I reading, writing and mathematics tests on their first try were 41,
44 and 37, respectively. For white test takers, the respective percentages
were 82, 80 and 78.
Continued in article
"Does Everyone Lie? Are we a Culture of Liars?" by accounting
professor Steven Mintz, Ethics Sage, February 1, 2013 ---
http://www.ethicssage.com/2013/02/does-everyone-lie.html
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Ohio State Researcher Guilty of Falsifying Federal Studies,"
Inside Higher Ed, December 24, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/12/24/ohio-state-researcher-guilty-falsifying-federal-studies
The federal Office of Research Integrity
has concluded that an Ohio State University
pharmacology professor fabricated data in studies sponsored by the National
Institutes of Health. The agency announced last month that two
investigations by the university and its own inquiry had uncovered evidence
that Terry S. Elton falsified data in five published papers, all of which
the university recommended be retracted. Elton has been barred from
participation in federal studies for three years.
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Two years after student loses (Ohio State) PhD, the Office of Research
Integrity (finally) concludes he committed misconduct ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2018/05/25/two-years-after-student-loses-phd-ori-concludes-he-committed-misconduct/
Jensen Comment
The most notorious research integrity cheat in academic accounting is former
Bentley Professor James E. Hunton who had over 33 or more published research
papers retracted ---
https://retractionwatch.com/2015/06/29/accounting-professor-notches-30-retractions-after-misconduct-finding/
Jim earned his Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Arlington. This makes me
wonder if this university investigated the integrity of Hunton's thesis and gave
consideration to retracting his doctorate.
For Jim Hunton maybe the world did end on December 21, 2012
"Following Retraction, Bentley Professor Resigns," Inside Higher Ed,
December 21, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/12/21/following-retraction-bentley-professor-resigns
James E. Hunton, a prominent accounting professor
at Bentley University, has resigned amid an investigation of the retraction
of an article of which he was the co-author, The Boston Globe reported. A
spokeswoman cited "family and health reasons" for the departure, but it
follows the retraction of an article he co-wrote in the journal Accounting
Review. The university is investigating the circumstances that led to the
journal's decision to retract the piece.
An Accounting Review Article is Retracted
One of the article that Dan mentions has been
retracted, according to
http://aaajournals.org/doi/abs/10.2308/accr-10326?af=R
Retraction: A Field Experiment Comparing the
Outcomes of Three Fraud Brainstorming Procedures: Nominal Group, Round
Robin, and Open Discussion
James E. Hunton, Anna Gold Bentley University and
Erasmus University Erasmus University This article was originally published
in 2010 in The Accounting Review 85 (3) 911–935; DOI:
10/2308/accr.2010.85.3.911.
The authors confirmed a misstatement in the article
and were unable to provide supporting information requested by the editor
and publisher. Accordingly, the article has been retracted.
November 15, 2012 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Richard,
Is this the first example of a
retracted TAR, JAR, and JAE article in since the 1960s?
Thank you for the heads up on the Hunton
and Gold article. This is sad, because Steve Kachelmeier pointed
out this article to me last year as an example of where the researchers
used real-world experimentation data using subjects from a large CPA
firm as opposed to students. Another factor that surprised me was was
sample size of supposedly 2,614 auditors.
Bob Kaplan wrote the following in
"Accounting Scholarship that Advances Professional Knowledge and
Practice," AAA Presidential Scholar Address by Robert S. Kaplan,
The Accounting Review, March 2011, pp. 372-373
Some scholars
in public health schools also intervene in practice by
conducting large-scale field experiments on real people in their
natural habitats to assess the efficacy of new health and safety
practices, such as the use of designated drivers to reduce
alcohol-influenced accidents. Few academic accounting scholars,
in contrast, conduct field experiments on real professionals
working in their actual jobs (Hunton and Gold [2010] is an
exception). The large-scale statistical studies and field
experiments about health and sickness are invaluable, but,
unlike in accounting scholarship, they represent only one
component in the research repertoire of faculty employed in
professional schools of medicine and health sciences.
One thing I note is that the article
has not been removed from the TAR database. The article still
exists with a large "Retracted" stamp that appears over every page
of the article
I attached the picture of a sample page.
Would the Techies on the AECM
explain this:
The "Retracted" stamp is transparent in terms of copying any
passage or table in the article. In other words, the article can be
quoted as easily by copy and paste as text without any interference from
the "Retracted Stamp." It cannot, however, be copied as a picture
without interference from the "Retracted Stamp."
Is this the first example of a retracted
TAR, JAR, and JAE article in since the 1960s
Years ago Les Livingstone was the first
person to detect a plagiarized article in TAR (back in the 1960s when we
were both doctoral students at Stanford). This was long before digital
versions articles could be downloaded. The TAR editor published an
apology to the original authors in the next edition of TAR. The article
first appeared in Management Science and was plagiarized in
total for TAR by a Norwegian (sigh).
Not much can be done to warn readers about
hard copy articles if they are subsequently "retracted." One thing
that can be done these days is to have an AAA Website that lists
retracted publications in all AAA journals. The Hunton and Gold
article may be the only one since the 1960s.
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
November 28, 2012 forward from Dan Stone
Anna Gold sent me the following statement and also
indicated that she had no objections to my posting it on AECM:
Explanation of Retraction (Hunton & Gold 2010)
On November 9, 2012, The Accounting Review
published an early-view version of the voluntary retraction of Hunton & Gold
(2010). The retraction will be printed in the January 2013 issue with the
following wording:
“The authors confirmed a misstatement in the
article and were unable to provide supporting information requested by the
editor and publisher. Accordingly, the article has been retracted.”
The following statement explains the reason for the
authors’ voluntary retraction. In the retracted article, the authors
reported that the 150 offices of the participating CPA firm on which the
study was based were located in the United States. In May 2012, the lead
author learned from the coordinating partner of the participating CPA firm
that the 150 offices included both domestic and international offices of the
firm. The authors apologize for the inadvertently inaccurate description of
the sample frame.
The Editor and the Chairperson of the Publications
Committee of the American Accounting Association subsequently requested more
information about the study and the participating CPA firm. Unfortunately,
the information they requested is subject to a confidentiality agreement
between the lead author and the participating firm; thus, the lead author
has a contractual obligation not to disclose the information requested by
the Editor and the Chairperson. The second author was neither involved in
administering the experiment nor in receiving the data from the CPA firm.
The second author does not know the identity of the CPA firm or the
coordinating partner at the CPA firm. The second author is not a party to
the confidentiality agreement between the lead author and the CPA firm.
The authors offered to print a correction of the
inaccurate description of the sample frame; however, the Editor and the
Chairperson rejected that offer. Consequently, in spite of the authors'
belief that the inaccurate description of the sample does not materially
impact either the internal validity of the study or the conclusions set
forth in the Article, the authors consider it appropriate to voluntarily
withdraw the Article from The Accounting Review at this time. Should the
participating CPA firm change its position on releasing the requested
information in the future, the authors will request that the Editor and the
Chairperson consider reinstating the paper.
Signed:
James Hunton Anna Gold
References: Hunton, J. E. and Gold, A. (2010), “A
field experiment comprising the outcomes of three fraud brainstorming
procedures: Nominal group, round robin, and open discussions,” The
Accounting Review 85(3): 911-935.
December 1, 2012 reply from Harry Markopolos <notreallyharry@outlook.com>
Harry Markopolos <notreallyharry@outlook.com>
The explanation provided by the Hunton and Gold
regarding the recent TAR retraction seems to provide more questions than
answers. Some of those questions raise serious concerns about the validity
of the study.
1. In the paper, the audit clients are described as
publically listed (p. 919), and since the paper describes SAS 99 as being
applicable to these clients, they would presumably be listed in the U.S.
However, according to Audit Analytics, for fiscal year 2007, the Big Four
auditor with the greatest number of worldwide offices with at least one SEC
registrant was PwC, with 134 offices (the remaining firms each had 130
offices). How can you take a random sample of 150 offices from a population
of (at most) 134?
Further, the authors state that only clients from
the retail, manufacturing, and service industries with at least $1 billion
in gross revenues with a December 31, 2007 fiscal year-end were considered
(p. 919). This restriction further limits the number of offices with
eligible clients. For example, the Big Four auditor with the greatest number
of offices with at least one SEC registrant with at least $1 billion in
gross revenues with a December 31, 2007 fiscal year end was Ernst & Young,
with 102 offices (followed by PwC, Deloitte and KPMG, with 94, 86, and 83
offices, respectively). Limiting by industry would further reduce the pool
of offices with eligible clients (this would probably be the most limiting
factor, since most industries tend to be concentrated primarily within a
handful of offices).
2. Why the firm would use a random sample of their
worldwide offices in the first place, especially a sample including foreign
affiliates of the firm? Why not use every US office (or every worldwide
office with SEC registrants)? The design further limited participation to
one randomly selected client per office (p. 919). This design decision is
especially odd. If the firm chose to sample from the applicable population
of offices, why not use a smaller sample of offices and a greater number of
clients per office? Also, why wouldn’t the firm just sample from the pool of
eligible clients? Finally, would the firm really expect its foreign
affiliates to be happy to participate just because the US firm is asking
them to do so? Would it not be much simpler and more effective to focus on
US offices and get large numbers of clients from the largest US Offices
(e.g., New York, Chicago, LA) and fill in the remaining clients needed to
reach 150 clients from smaller offices?
3. Given the current hesitancy of the Big Four to
allow any meaningful access to data, why would the international offices be
consistently willing to participate in the study, especially since each
national affiliate of the Big Four is a distinct legal entity? The
coordination of this study across the firm’s international offices seems
like a herculean effort, at least. Further, even if the authors were not
aware that the population of offices included international offices, the
lead author was presumably aware of the identity of the partner coordinating
the study for the firm. Footnote 4 of the paper and discussion on page 919
suggest that the US national office coordinated the study. It seems quite
implausible that the US national office alone would be able to coordinate
the study internationally.
4. In the statement that has been circulated among
the accounting research community, the authors state:
“The second author was neither involved in
administering the experiment nor in receiving the data from the CPA firm.
The second author does not know the identity of the CPA firm or the
coordinating partner at the CPA firm. The second author is not a party to
the confidentiality agreement between the lead author and the CPA firm.”
However, this statement is inconsistent with
language in the paper suggesting that both authors had access to the data
and were involved in discussions with the firm regarding the design of the
study (e.g. Footnote 17). Also, isn’t this kind of arrangement quite odd, at
best? Not even the second author could verify the data. We are left with
only the first author’s word that this study actually took place with no way
for anyone (not even the second author or the journal editor) to obtain any
kind of assurance on the matter. Why wouldn’t the firm be willing to allow
Anna or Harry Evans to sign a confidentiality agreement in order to obtain
some kind of independent verification? If the firm was willing to allow the
study in the first place, it seems quite unreasonable for them to be
unwilling to allow a reputable third party (e.g. Harry) to obtain
verification of the legitimacy of the study. In addition, assuming the firm
is this extremely vigilant in not allowing Harry or Anna to know about the
firm, does it seem odd that the firm failed to read the paper before
publication and, therefore, note the errors in the paper, including the
claim that is made in multiple places in the paper that the data came from a
random sample of the firm’s US offices?
5. Why do the authors state that the paper is being
voluntarily withdrawn if the authors don’t believe that the validity of the
paper is in any way questioned? The retraction doesn’t really seem
voluntary. If the authors did actually offer to retract the study that
implies that the errors in the paper are not simply innocent mistakes.
Given that most, if not all US offices would have
had to be participants in the study (based on the discussion above), it
wouldn’t be too hard to obtain some additional information from individuals
at the firms to verify whether or not the study actually took place. In
particular, if we were to locate a handful of partners from each of the Big
Four who were office-managing partners in 2008, we could ask them if their
office participated in the study. If none of those partners recall their
office having participated in the study, the reported data would appear to
be quite suspect.
Sincerely,
Harry Markopolos
Type I and Type II Errors ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_positive#Type_I_error
Also see
http://www.stats.gla.ac.uk/steps/glossary/hypothesis_testing.html
"Psychopathy, Academic Accountants’ Attitudes towards Ethical Research
Practices, and Publication Success," by Charles D. Bailey, SSRN, December 8,
2012 ---
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=218690
"The Data Vigilante: Students aren’t the only ones cheating—some
professors are, too. Uri Simonsohn is out to bust them. inShare48," by
Christopher Shea, The Atlantic, December 2012 ---
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/12/the-data-vigilante/309172/
Uri Simonsohn, a research psychologist at the
University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, did not set out to be a
vigilante. His first step down that path came two years ago, at a dinner
with some fellow social psychologists in St. Louis. The pisco sours were
flowing, Simonsohn recently told me, as the scholars began to indiscreetly
name and shame various “crazy findings we didn’t believe.” Social
psychology—the subfield of psychology devoted to how social interaction
affects human thought and action—routinely produces all sorts of findings
that are, if not crazy, strongly counterintuitive. For example, one body of
research focuses on how small, subtle changes—say, in a person’s environment
or positioning—can have surprisingly large effects on their behavior.
Idiosyncratic social-psychology findings like these are often picked up by
the press and on Freakonomics-style blogs. But the crowd at the restaurant
wasn’t buying some of the field’s more recent studies. Their skepticism
helped convince Simonsohn that something in social psychology had gone
horribly awry. “When you have scientific evidence,” he told me, “and you put
that against your intuition, and you have so little trust in the scientific
evidence that you side with your gut—something is broken.”
Simonsohn does not look like a vigilante—or, for
that matter, like a business-school professor: at 37, in his jeans, T-shirt,
and Keen-style water sandals, he might be mistaken for a grad student. And
yet he is anything but laid-back. He is, on the contrary, seized by the
conviction that science is beset by sloppy statistical maneuvering and, in
some cases, outright fraud. He has therefore been moonlighting as a
fraud-buster, developing techniques to help detect doctored data in other
people’s research. Already, in the space of less than a year, he has blown
up two colleagues’ careers. (In a third instance, he feels sure fraud
occurred, but he hasn’t yet nailed down the case.) In so doing, he hopes to
keep social psychology from falling into disrepute.
Simonsohn initially targeted not flagrant
dishonesty, but loose methodology. In a paper called “False-Positive
Psychology,” published in the prestigious journal Psychological Science, he
and two colleagues—Leif Nelson, a professor at the University of California
at Berkeley, and Wharton’s Joseph Simmons—showed that psychologists could
all but guarantee an interesting research finding if they were creative
enough with their statistics and procedures.
The three social psychologists set up a test
experiment, then played by current academic methodologies and widely
permissible statistical rules. By going on what amounted to a fishing
expedition (that is, by recording many, many variables but reporting only
the results that came out to their liking); by failing to establish in
advance the number of human subjects in an experiment; and by analyzing the
data as they went, so they could end the experiment when the results suited
them, they produced a howler of a result, a truly absurd finding. They then
ran a series of computer simulations using other experimental data to show
that these methods could increase the odds of a false-positive result—a
statistical fluke, basically—to nearly two-thirds.
Just as Simonsohn was thinking about how to follow
up on the paper, he came across an article that seemed too good to be true.
In it, Lawrence Sanna, a professor who’d recently moved from the University
of North Carolina to the University of Michigan, claimed to have found that
people with a physically high vantage point—a concert stage instead of an
orchestra pit—feel and act more “pro-socially.” (He measured sociability
partly by, of all things, someone’s willingness to force fellow research
subjects to consume painfully spicy hot sauce.) The size of the effect Sanna
reported was “out-of-this-world strong, gravity strong—just super-strong,”
Simonsohn told me over Chinese food (heavy on the hot sauce) at a restaurant
around the corner from his office. As he read the paper, something else
struck him, too: the data didn’t seem to vary as widely as you’d expect
real-world results to. Imagine a study that calculated male height: if the
average man were 5-foot‑10, you wouldn’t expect that in every group of male
subjects, the average man would always be precisely 5-foot-10. Yet this was
exactly the sort of unlikely pattern Simonsohn detected in Sanna’s data.
Simonsohn launched an e-mail correspondence with
Sanna and his co-authors; the co-authors later relayed his concerns to
officials at the University of North Carolina, Sanna’s employer at the time
of the study. Sanna, who could not be reached for comment, has since left
Michigan. He has also retracted five of his articles, explaining that the
data were “invalid,” and absolving his co-authors of any responsibility. (In
a letter to the editor of Psychological Science, who had asked for more
detail, Sanna mentioned “research errors” but added that he could say no
more, “at the direction of legal counsel.”)
Not long after the exchange with Sanna, a colleague
sent Simonsohn another study for inspection. Dirk Smeesters of Erasmus
University Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, had published a paper about
color’s effect on what social psychologists call “priming.” Past studies had
found that after research subjects are prompted to think about, say, Albert
Einstein, they are intimidated by the comparison, and perform poorly on
tests. (Swap Einstein out for Kate Moss, and they do better.) Smeesters
sought to build on this research by showing that colors can interact with
this priming in strange ways. Simultaneously expose people to blue (a
soothing hue), for example, and the Einstein and Moss effects reverse. But a
strange thing caught Simonsohn’s eye: the outcomes that Smeesters had
predicted ahead of time were eerily similar, across the board, to his actual
outcomes.
Simonsohn ran some simulations using both
Smeesters’s own data and data found in other papers, and determined that
such a data array was unlikely to occur naturally. Then he sent Smeesters
his findings, launching what proved to be a surreal exchange. Smeesters
admitted to small mistakes; Simonsohn replied that those mistakes couldn’t
explain the patterns he’d identified. “Something more sinister must have
happened,” he recalled telling Smeesters. “Someone intentionally manipulated
the data. This may be difficult to accept.”
“I was trying to give him any out,” Simonsohn said,
adding that he wasn’t looking to ruin anyone’s career. But in June, a
research-ethics committee at Smeesters’s university announced that it had
“no confidence in the scientific integrity” of three of his articles. (The
committee noted that it had no reason to suspect Smeesters’s co-authors of
any wrongdoing.) According to the committee’s report, Smeesters said “he
does not feel guilty” and also claimed that “many authors knowingly omit
data to achieve significance, without stating this.” Smeesters, who could
not be reached for comment, resigned from the university, prompting another
Dutch scholar to publicly remark that Simonsohn’s fraud-detecting technique
was “like a medieval torture instrument.”
That charge disturbs Simonsohn, who told me he
would have been content with a quiet retraction of Smeesters’s article. The
more painful allegation, however, is that he is trying to discredit social
psychology. He adores his chosen field, he said, funky, counterintuitive
results and all. He studied economics as an undergrad at Chile’s Universidad
Católica (his father ran a string of video-game arcades in Santiago;
Simonsohn initially hoped to go into hotel management), but during his
senior year, an encounter with the psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s work
convinced him to switch fields. He prefers psychology’s close-up focus on
the quirks of actual human minds to the sweeping theory and deduction
involved in economics. (His own research, which involves decision making,
includes a recent study titled “Weather to Go to College,” which finds that
“cloudiness during [college] visits has a statistically and practically
significant impact on enrollment rates.”)
So what, then, is driving Simonsohn? His
fraud-busting has an almost existential flavor. “I couldn’t tolerate knowing
something was fake and not doing something about it,” he told me.
“Everything loses meaning. What’s the point of writing a paper, fighting
very hard to get it published, going to conferences?”
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
"My Adviser Stole My Research," by Stacy Patton, Chronicle of
Higher Education, November 11, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/My-Adviser-Stole-My-Research/135694/?cid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Much of the conversation about plagiarism in
academe focuses on professors who steal from their scholarly equals. But
growing pressures to publish, particularly in the sciences, can also
increase the temptation for professors to defraud their graduate students,
some scholars say.
Graduate students and their advisers spend long,
intense stretches of time working together on research experiments and
publications. But those collaborations sometimes disintegrate into
competition over intellectual property, and the resulting disputes can be as
murky as the student-adviser relationship itself.
Universities' research-misconduct processes may not
protect vulnerable graduate students from retaliation, but the systems can
also be ill-equipped to protect faculty from disgruntled advisees. Since
discussions between students and their advisers are often private, it can be
hard to judge who originated an idea. And courts and juries often fail to
understand the nuances of graduate student-faculty relationships.
John M. Braxton, one of the authors of
Professors Behaving Badly (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), says
advisers have sometimes plagiarized student dissertations and lab notes to
support their own articles, grant proposals, and applications for lucrative
patents. He has seen cases where professors remove students' names from
research projects when they begin to show innovative results, or publish
articles without offering co-authorship to a student who has made
substantial conceptual or methodological contributions.
Padmapriya Ashokkumar and Mazdak Taghioskoui are
two former graduate students who say that happened to them. And they have
both found themselves in precarious positions after accusing their advisers
of plagiarizing their research projects. Both are suing their former
universities and are hopeful that the courts will help compensate them for
how their allegations derailed their academic ambitions, they say.
Ms. Ashokkumar, who studied computer science and is
from India, attended the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. Mr. Taghioskoui,
who studied electrical engineering and is from Iran, attended George
Washington University and got his Ph.D. there.
Ms. Ashokkumar first became concerned about an
adviser stealing her work in January of 2007, when she Googled her own name.
She wanted to see how many Web sites had picked up two papers she'd written
with Scott Henninger, then an associate professor at Nebraska, who had been
her adviser. Together, they had developed a tool to help software engineers
create user-friendly Web sites for consumers.
As she scrolled down the computer screen, she saw
that an article she'd written with Mr. Henninger
for a university publication in 2005 had,
unbeknownst to her, been presented by him a year later at a conference
workshop in Georgia. On the site, she saw that her name had been removed as
a co-author. Instead, she was listed in an acknowledgments section. Only a
small portion of the original article, she says, had been revised.
Mr. Henninger, she says, had once told her that the
co-authored research wasn't good enough to publish off campus or present at
conferences.
"For him to tell me that the work was not good
enough, then turn around and submit it without my name, was a stab in the
back," she says.
Ms. Ashokkumar and Mr. Henninger already had a
rocky relationship; she had changed advisers before making her Web
discovery. After she saw the reference to her research without her name on
it, she complained to the graduate chair and then to the department chair,
who reviewed the evidence and advised her to file a formal complaint with
the university's research-integrity officer.
Ms. Ashokkumar says that after Mr. Henninger was
informed that the university was investigating him for misconduct, he
accused her of plagiarizing his work in another paper. He did so, she says,
when he discovered that she and her new advisers intended to present that
paper for an international software-engineering symposium. According to
court documents provided by the university, the paper was based on a
research topic that Mr. Henninger and Ms. Ashokkumar had proposed, and that
he had previously written about alone.
"My future was under question," she says. "He told
me, 'I have the power to make sure you are thrown out of the university.'"
The university's research-misconduct committee
finished its investigation in April 2007 and upheld Ms. Ashokkumar's
plagiarism complaint against her former adviser. The committee also
dismissed his complaint against her.
In the wake of the dispute, the university proposed
calming the turmoil surrounding Ms. Ashokkumar in her department by asking
her to allow Mr. Henninger to serve on her dissertation committee. She
refused.
The two advisers she had been working with refused
to continue with her, she says. She tried to find a new adviser, but no
other faculty member agreed to take her on.
"I was seen as somebody who was difficult to work
with and created trouble," she says, "because I stood up for my rights."
When she couldn't find a new adviser, she says she was told she would have
to start a new dissertation project, despite five years of work. In limbo,
with no adviser or committee, she was dropped from her program, she says.
A spokeswoman for the university said officials
there could not comment on a matter that involved pending litigation.
"The university had an obligation to restore her to
the department," says Gene Summerlin, Ms. Ashokkumar's lawyer. "Padma got
caught in an academic turf war, and the university put the professor's
interests ahead of the graduate student."
Ms. Ashokkumar, who now works as a software
engineer for a company in Austin, Tex., is seeking $150,000 in damages,
which she says represents the difference in pay she would have received with
a Ph.D. and what she now earns without one. She also wants the university to
provide her with an adviser and committee so she can return to her program
and earn a doctorate.
Mr. Henninger, who resigned from his position in
July 2008, according to court documents, could not be reached for comment.
The university has argued in briefs it filed in the case that Ms.
Ashokkumar's allegations of retaliation contain false and defamatory
statements against Mr. Henninger, and that he was "denied fundamental
due-process rights by not being fully informed of the charges and evidence
against him in order to be able to identify and effectively present
rebutting evidence."
'Known to Break
Legs'
When graduate students say an adviser stole their
work, it can be hard for universities to decipher right from wrong, says
Barbara A. Lee, a labor-relations professor at Rutgers University.
"It can be very difficult for an institution to
determine whether the faculty member had the idea and the student developed
it, or the student developed the idea and shared it with the faculty member
and the faculty member improved it," Ms. Lee says.
Allegations of retaliation can also be hard to sort
out. There may be good reasons, she adds, why a student who has had a
problem with an adviser can't find a new one.
Jensen Comment
One of my former colleagues, a professor of business and department chair, was
called back by one of the most prestigious universities in the United States to
give reason why his PhD should not be revoked due to plagiarism, in his thesis,
of published works of an accounting professor at that prestigious institution.
My colleague was totally shocked and confused. During the hearings on this
matter it became evident that the accounting professor had instead plagiarized
my friend's dissertation and not vice versa.
It's important to note that the university was prepared to punish the student
severely by revoking his PhD degree. But in the case of the cheating faculty
member there was no punishment. I know this professor and know that he continued
to teach for that institution as a tenured professor. Perhaps punishment for
cheating only works in one direction in many (most?) instances.
"German Education Minister Accused of
Plagiarism," Inside Higher Ed, October 16, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/10/16/german-education-minister-accused-plagiarism
Germany's education minister, Annette Schavan, is under
scrutiny following an investigation by the University of
Düsseldorf that suggested she plagiarized her Ph.D.
dissertation,
Spiegel Online reported.
"Not only because of a pattern recurring throughout the
work, but also because of specific features found in a
significant plurality of sections (in the work), it can
be stated that there was a clear intention to deceive,"
said a report on the investigation.
A
significant number of passages in Schavan's dissertation
"show the characteristics of a plagiaristic approach,"
the report added. Schavan, who until now has not
commented specifically on the charges, told Südwest
Presse: "It is rather striking that a confidential
report written by a university professor is given to the
press before the person concerned even knows of its
existence. I completely reject the charges."
"Research Misconduct on the Rise, Study Finds," Inside Higher Ed,
October 3, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/10/03/research-misconduct-rise-study-finds
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who
plagiarize and otherwise cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Fortunately this sort of public dispute has never happened in accountics
science where professors just don't steal each others' ideas or insultingly
review each others' work in public. Accountics science is a polite science ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
"Publicizing (Alleged) Plagiarism," by Alexandra Tilsley, Inside
Higher Ed, October 22, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/10/22/berkeley-launches-plagiarism-investigation-light-public-nature-complaints
The varied effects of the Internet age on the world
of academic research are
well-documented, but a website devoted solely to
highlighting one researcher’s alleged plagiarism has put a new spin on the
matter.
The University of California at Berkeley has begun
an investigation into allegations of plagiarism in professor Terrence
Deacon’s book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter,
largely in response to
the website
created about the supposed problems with Deacon’s
book. In Incomplete
Nature, Deacon, the chair of Berkeley's
anthropology department, melds science and philosophy to explain how mental
processes, the stuff that makes us human, emerged from the physical world.
The allegations are not of direct, copy-and-paste
plagiarism, but of using ideas without proper citation. In a June review in
The New York Review of Books, Colin McGinn, a professor of
philosophy at the University of Miami, writes that ideas in Deacon’s book
draw heavily on ideas in works by
Alicia Juarrero,
professor emerita of philosophy at Prince George’s Community College who
earned her Ph.D. at Miami, and Evan Thompson, a philosophy professor at the
University of Toronto, though neither scholar is cited, as Thompson also
notes in his own
review in Nature.
McGinn writes: “I have no way of knowing whether
Deacon was aware of these books when he was writing his: if he was, he
should have cited them; if he was not, a simple literature search would have
easily turned them up (both appear from prominent presses).”
That is an argument Juarrero and her colleagues
Carl Rubino and Michael Lissack have pursued forcefully and publicly. Rubino,
a classics professor at Hamilton College, published a book with Juarrero
that he claims Deacon misappropriated, and that book was published by
Lissack’s Institute for the
Study of Coherence and Emergence. Juarrero, who
declined to comment for this article because of the continuing
investigation, is also a fellow of the institute.
Continued in article
"Fake Peer Reviews, the Latest Form of Scientific Fraud, Fool Journals,"
by Josh Fischman, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 30, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Fake-Peer-Reviews-the-Latest/134784/
Scientists appear to have figured out a new way to
avoid any bad prepublication reviews that dissuade journals from publishing
their articles: Write positive reviews themselves, under other people's
names.
In incidents involving four scientists—the latest
case coming to light two weeks ago—journal editors say authors got to
critique their own papers by suggesting reviewers with contact e-mails that
actually went to themselves.
The glowing endorsements got the work into
Experimental Parasitology, Pharmaceutical Biology, and several other
journals. Fake reviews even got a pair of mathematics articles into journals
published by Elsevier, the academic publishing giant, which has a system in
place intended to thwart such misconduct. The frauds have produced
retractions of about 30 papers to date.
"I find it very shocking," said Laura Schmidt,
publisher in charge of mathematics journals at Elsevier. "It's very serious,
very manipulative, and very deliberate."
This "has taken a lot of people by surprise," wrote
Irene Hames, a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, in an e-mail
to The Chronicle. The committee is an international group of
science editors that advises journals on ways to handle misconduct. "It
should be a wake-up call to any journals that don't have rigorous reviewer
selection and screening in place," she wrote.
Blame lies with those journals, she said, that
allow authors to nominate their own reviewers and don't check credentials
and contacts.
What's worse, said Ivan Oransky, co-publisher of
the blog Retraction Watch, which first uncovered this pattern, is that some
editors saw red flags but published the papers anyway. Later retractions
don't undo the harm created by
introducing falsehoods
into the scientific literature, he said, noting that some of these papers
were published years ago and have been cited by several other researchers.
'Do-It-Yourself'
Reviews
Claudiu Supuran, editor in chief of the Journal
of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry, became suspicious that
one of his authors was engaged in "do-it-yourself" peer review in 2010.
Hyung-In Moon, now an assistant professor at Dong-A University, in Busan,
South Korea, had submitted a manuscript along with the names of several
potential reviewers. Mr. Supuran, then an associate editor at the journal,
duly sent the article out for review and became suspicious when good reviews
came back in one or two days. "Reviewers never respond that quickly," he
said.
So he sent the manuscript to two scientists whom he
picked himself. Their reviews suggested revisions but were also positive, so
the article was published.
Jensen Comment
This problem probably never arises in accountics science since there are few, if
any peer reviews published in the accounting research journals. Academic
accounting research is also rarely reviewed in practitioner journals. The
closest thing we have to peer reviews are book reviews and published conference
proceedings where discussant papers are also published. But those "peer reviews"
are not faked and are, as a rule, not very critical of the research in question.
I suspect that anonymous referees who write caustic rejections are much more
polite and soft in their criticisms if their reviews are not anonymous. At one
time, the accounting research conferences at the University of Chicago used to
pride themselves in impoliteness (remember Sel Becker and Bob Jensen), but I
suspect those conferences are much more polite in the past 40 years.
I'm always a Doubting Thomas when reading book reviews in such places as
Amazon. The problem may not be that the authors themselves write fake reviews,
but the publishing companies may instigate positive reviews. About the only
reviews I really trust on Amazon are the negative reviews, and the reviews on
Amazon often contain a subset of negative reviews.
The hope for honest peer reviews of accounting research is in the blogs and
listservs like the AECM, but the blogs have to restrain themselves against
"political politeness" as well as "political correctness" if they are to
maintain academic integrity." Problems lie in that gray zone of where
researchers treat criticisms of their work as insults. There are of course
bullies and monsters who cross too far into that gray zone of criticism. I seem
to have become one of those who has made some criticisms too personal. For
this I apologize. I really am going to try to get better when pushing into
that gray zone of criticism.
"Research Misconduct on the Rise, Study Finds," Inside Higher Ed,
October 3, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/10/03/research-misconduct-rise-study-finds
Jensen Comment
Whew! To date there is not one reported research misconduct incident in
accountics science. Or is it that lack of replication and commentary simply
leads to a fantasy that there's never any research misconduct in accountics
science?
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who plagiarized and/or cheated in other
ways ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
How Accountics Scientists Should Change:
"Frankly, Scarlett, after I get a hit for my resume in The Accounting
Review I just don't give a damn"
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
One more mission in what's left of my life will be to try to change this
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/temp/AccounticsDamn.htm
Gaming for Tenure as an Accounting Professor ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
(with a reply about tenure publication point systems from Linda Kidwell)
Possibly the Worst Academic Scandal in Past 100 Years: Deception
at Duke
The Loose Ethics of Co-authorship of Research in Academe
In general we don't allow faculty to have publications ghost written for
tenure and performance evaluations. However, the rules are very loose regarding
co-author division of duties. A faculty member can do all of the research but
pass along all the writing to a co-author except when co-authoring is not
allowed such as in the writing of dissertations.
In my opinion the rules are too loose regarding co-authorship. Probably the
most common abuse in the current "publish or perish" environment in academe is
the partnering of two or more researchers to share co-authorships when their
actual participation rate in the research and writing of most the manuscripts is
very small, maybe less than 10%. The typical partnering arrangement is for an
author to take the lead on one research project while playing only a small role
in the other research projects
Gaming for Tenure as an
Accounting Professor ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTenure.htm
(with a reply about tenure publication point systems from Linda Kidwell)
Another common abuse, in my opinion, is where a senior faculty member with a
stellar reputation lends his/her name to an article written and researched
almost entirely by a lesser-known colleague or graduate student. The main author
may agree to this "co-authorship" when the senior co-author's name on the paper
improves the chances for publication in a prestigious book or journal.
This is what happened in a sense in what is becoming the most notorious
academic fraud in the history of the world. At Duke University a famous
cancer researcher co-authored research that was published in the most
prestigious science and medicine journals in the world. The senior faculty
member of high repute is now apologizing to the world for being a part of a
fraud where his colleague fabricated a significant portion of the data to make
it "come out right" instead of the way it actually turned out.
What is interesting is to learn about how super-knowledgeable researchers at
the Anderson Cancer Center in Houston detected this fraud and notified the Duke
University science researchers of their questions about the data. Duke appears
to have resisted coming out with the truth way to long by science ethics
standards and even continued to promise miraculous cures to 100 Stage Four
cancer patients who underwent the miraculous "Duke University" cancer cures that
turned out to not be miraculous at all. Now Duke University is exposed to quack
medicine lawsuit filed by families of the deceased cancer patients who were
promised phone 80% cure rates.
The above Duke University scandal was the headline module in the February 12,
2012 edition of CBS Sixty Minutes. What an eye-opening show about science
research standards and frauds ---
Deception at Duke (Sixty Minutes
Video) ---
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-18560_162-57376073/deception-at-duke/
Next comes the question of whether college administrators operate under
different publishing and speaking ethics vis-à-vis their faculty
"Faking It for the Dean," by Carl Elliott, Chronicle of Higher Education,
February 7, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/says-who/43843?sid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
Added Jensen Comment
I've no objection to "ghost writing" of interview remarks as long as the ghost
writer is given full credit for doing the writing itself.
I also think there is a difference between speeches versus publications with
respect to citations. How awkward it would be if every commencement speaker had
to read the reference citation for each remark in the speech. On the other hand,
I think the speaker should announce at the beginning and end that some of the
points made in the speech originated from other sources and that references will
be provided in writing upon request.
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who let students cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
"Former Harvard Psychologist Fabricated and Falsified, Report Says,"
by Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 5, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/report-says-former-harvard-psychologist-fabricated-falsified/30748
Marc Hauser was once among the big, impressive
names in psychology, head of the Cognitive Evolution Laboratory at Harvard
University, author of popular books like Moral Minds. That
reputation unraveled when a university investigation found him responsible
for
eight counts of scientific misconduct, which led
to
his resignation last year.
Now the federal Office of Research Integrity has
released its report on Hauser’s actions,
determining that he fabricated and falsified results from experiments. Here
is a sampling:
- Hauser published “fabricated data” in a paper
on how cotton-top tamarin monkeys learn rules. In one of the graphs
“half of the data” was made up. That paper has since been retracted.
- Hauser falsified coding in two other
experiments with tamarins “making the results statistically significant
when the results coded by others showed them to be nonsignificant.”
Those experiments were not published after members of Hauser’s lab
objected that his coding was wrong.
- Again in an experiment involving tamarin
monkeys, Hauser “falsely described the methodology used to code the
results for experiments” that led to “a false proportion or number of
animals showing a favorable response.”
Hauser “neither admits nor denies” any research
misconduct but, according to the report, accepts the findings. He has agreed
to three years of extra scrutiny of any federally supported research he
conducts, though the requirement may be moot considering that Hauser is no
longer employed by a university. Hauser says in a written statement that he
is currently “focusing on at-risk youth”; his LinkedIn profile lists him as
a co-founder of Gamience, an e-learning company.
In the statement, Hauser calls the five years of
investigation into his research “a long and painful period.” He also
acknowledges making mistakes, but seems to blame his actions on being
stretched too thin. “I tried to do too much, teaching courses, running a
large lab of students, sitting on several editorial boards, directing the
Mind, Brain & Behavior Program at Harvard, conducting multiple research
collaborations, and writing for the general public,” he writes.
He also implies that some of the blame may actually
belong to others in his lab. Writes Hauser: “I let important details get
away from my control, and as head of the lab, I take responsibility for all
errors made within the lab, whether or not I was directly involved.”
But that take—the idea that the problems were
caused mainly by Hauser’s inattention—doesn’t square with the story told by
those in his laboratory. A former research assistant, who was among those
who blew the whistle on Hauser, writes in an e-mail that while the report
“does a pretty good job of summing up what is known,” it nevertheless
“leaves off how hard his co-authors, who were his at-will employees and
graduate students, had to fight to get him to agree not to publish the
tainted data.”
The former research assistant points out that the
report takes into account only the research that was flagged by
whistle-blowers. “He betrayed the trust of everyone that worked with him,
and especially those of us who were under him and who should have been able
to trust him,” the research assistant writes.
As
detailed in this Chronicle article,
several members of his laboratory double-checked Hauser’s coding of an
experiment and concluded he was falsifying the results so that those results
would support the hypothesis, turning a failed experiment into a success. In
2007 they brought that and other evidence to Harvard officials, who began an
investigation, raiding Hauser’s lab and seizing computers.
Gerry Altmann believes the report is significant
because it finds that Hauser falsified data—that is, investigators found
that Hauser didn’t just make up findings, but actually changed findings to
suit his purposes. Altmann is the editor of a journal, Cognition,
that published a 2002 paper by Hauser that has since been retracted. When
you falsify data, Altmann writes in an e-mail, “you are deliberately
reporting as true something that you know is not.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
To my knowledge cheating by accountics scientists has never once been reported
to the public. Perhaps this is partly due to lack of replication and lack of
importance of many findings to merit whistle blowing ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"Penn Whistle-Blower Says University Side-Stepped Ghostwriting Complaint,"
by Paul Basken, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 26, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Penn-Whistle-Blower-Says/132609/
The University of Pennsylvania was so eager to
clear its psychiatry-department chairman and a colleague of ghostwriting
charges that it disregarded an offer to review documents proving their
hidden corporate author, a faculty whistle-blower has charged.
The company that employed the outside author,
Scientific Therapeutics Information, agreed to give Penn documents showing
that Dwight L. Evans, its chairman of psychiatry, and Laszlo Gyulai, an
associate professor of psychiatry, were not the original authors of a 2001
journal article, according to a complaint filed Tuesday on behalf of Jay D.
Amsterdam, a professor of psychiatry at Penn.
The university, however, "intentionally chose not
to review these highly probative documents," Bijan Esfandiari, a lawyer for
Dr. Amsterdam, said Tuesday in a letter to the federal government's Office
of Research Integrity. "The university's
struthious approach to the probative and available
STI documents is disturbing and creates the impression that its inquiry was
anything but intended to discover the truth."
The case involves a June 2001 article in The
American Journal of Psychiatry that Dr. Amsterdam has described as
overstating the benefits and understating the risks of the antidepressant
drug Paxil. Dr. Amsterdam has cited evidence that Scientific Therapeutics
Information was hired by Paxil's manufacturer, SmithKline Beecham, now known
as GlaxoSmithKline, and that two STI writers largely produced the article
that listed five university authors, including Drs. Evans and Gyulai.
Additional listed authors include researchers from
Harvard University, the University of Miami, and the University of Texas
Health Sciences Center at San Antonio. While the University of Pennsylvania
conducted a review that absolved Drs. Evans and Gyulai of participating in
ghostwriting, the other three universities have not chosen to investigate
their faculties' roles, Mr. Esfandiari said.
A spokesman for the University of Texas Health
Sciences Center at San Antonio, Will C. Sansom, said the office of the vice
president for research "conducted an internal review and found no merit to
the assertions" concerning Charles L. Bowden, the Texas institution's
chairman of psychiatry, who was listed as an author of the June 2001
article. Officials at Harvard and the University of Miami did not respond to
requests for comment.
Haunted by
Questions
Universities have come under growing pressure in
recent years from internal and external critics, including in Congress, to
crack down on the practice of researchers allowing their names to be placed
on medical-journal articles that are actually written by companies with an
interest in the drug or device being studied.
The
ghostwriting complaint raised by Dr. Amsterdam has
gained particular attention because of the reputation of the institutions,
the prominence of the researchers, and the extent of corroborating
documentation. In addition, the president of Penn, Amy Gutmann, is chairman
of the federal government's Presidential Commission for the Study of
Bioethical Issues.
Penn has rejected suggestions that Ms. Gutmann step
down from the presidential bioethics commission while she resolves the
complaint against her faculty, and the university has declined to make
public its investigative review of the case. In that review, the university
acknowledged Drs. Evans and Gyulai allowed their names to be listed on the
June 2001 journal article but said they deserved no sanction because the
article was published before new university rules and journal standards
expressly forbidding ghostwriting went into effect.
Critics of that decision include Jeffrey R. Lacasse,
an assistant professor of social work at Arizona State University, and
Jonathan Leo, an associate dean of students and associate professor of
neuroanatomy at Lincoln Memorial University. In a commentary published May
31 in the Springer journal Society, Mr. Lacasse and Mr. Leo contend
that the Penn review asked the wrong question. Penn spent its investigation
showing that Drs. Evans and Gyulai made some contributions to the article
but entirely side-stepped the key question of whether it failed to properly
note the STI writers, led by Sally K. Laden, who contributed the bulk of the
writing, Mr. Lacasse and Mr. Leo said.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The sidebar here is why rumors that the real authors and fake authors were
showering together on campus were not investigated as well. Oops, that rumor
commenced at Penn State rather than Penn.
Professors Who Cheat (in this case fabricate data and research outcomes)
Dutch begin documenting and trying to explain top social psychologist's massive
fraud.
"A Star's Collapse." Inside Higher Ed, November 28, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/11/28/scholars-analyze-case-massive-research-fraud
Bob Jensen's threads on the how top accounting research journals don't do
enough to deter accounting professors who (might) cheat
574 Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
If you're going to plagiarize a poet, copy the works of obscure poets like
Bob Jensen, Neal Hannon, and Wanda Wallace. It's dumb to plagiarize Dylan
Thomas, Shakespeare, or Robert Frost.
"British Instructor Accused of Copying Work of Dylan Thomas,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 22, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/global/british-instructor-accused-of-copying-work-of-dylan-thomas/33527?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A creative-writing instructor at Britain’s
Open University
has been accused of “multiple instances” of
plagiarism, including what “appears to be a verbatim copy of a radio play”
by Dylan Thomas,
reports The Telegraph.
The distance-learning institution is investigating the matter. Allegations
against Joanne Benford include her virtually copying a Dylan Thomas story,
“Holiday Memory,” under the same title in Down by the Water, which
her Web
site says is her first book. The Welsh writer’s
estate has issued a cease-and-desist letter to Ms. Benford, adds the
newspaper, which says it was unable to reach her for comment.
Jensen Comment
I wonder what defense the attorneys for
Roger
Clemens and
Casey
Anthony would mount for Joanne Benford.
One possible defense is that the students were assigned the tasks of
identifying the plagiarized passages and to reference the original sources.
Of course it's hard to defend Benford's acceptance of royalties for
plagiarized passages. Then again, justice was not exactly served in the cases of
Clemens, Anthony, OJ, Vladimir Putin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jerry Seinfield's
wife, and on and on and on ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities
How Professor Stapel committed academic research fraud is becoming known,
but why he did so remains a mystery
"The Fraud Who Fooled (Almost) Everyone," by Tom Bartlett,
Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3. 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/the-fraud-who-fooled-almost-everyone/27917
It’s
now known that Diederik Stapel, the Dutch social
psychologist who was suspended by Tilburg University in September, faked
dozens of studies and managed not to get caught for years despite his
outrageous fabrications. But how, exactly, did he do it?
That question won’t be fully answered for a
while—the investigation into the vast fraud is continuing. But a
just-released
English version of Tilburg’s interim report on
Stapel’s deception begins to fill in some of the details of how he
manipulated those who worked with him.
This was, according to the report, his modus
operandi:
Continued in article
"Former Penn State Prof Charged With $3M Fraud," Inside Higher Ed,
February 1, 2012 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2012/02/01/former-penn-state-prof-charged-3m-fraud
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"U. of Kansas Researcher Is Penalized for Plagiarism," Chronicle of
Higher Education, December 23, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/u-of-kansas-researcher-is-penalized-for-plagiarism/39383
The U.S. Office of Research Integrity has found
that a University of Kansas researcher, Gerald Lushington, engaged in
research misconduct on projects supported by National Institutes of Health
grant money. According to a notice published in today’s
Federal Register, Mr. Lushington, who is
director of a bioinformatics center at Kansas and is director of its
Molecular Graphics and Modeling Lab, approved “publication of three articles
and one abstract he knew contained significant amounts of plagiarized text
without attribution or citation from other writers’ published papers.” The
notice says Mr. Lushington has agreed to undergo supervision of his research
supported by the Public Health Service and to exclude himself from serving
as an adviser to the service, among other things.
"U. of Utah Fires Faculty Member Deemed to Have Plagiarized,"
Inside Higher Ed, August 19, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/19/qt#268194
The University of Utah has fired a political
science professor after concluding that he engaged in a "pattern of
plagiarism," the Salt Lake Tribune
reported. The newspaper said that a faculty panel
determined that Bahman Bakhtiari, former head of the university's Middle
East Center, had committed plagiarism, but that the panel recommended
against dismissing him. But according to documents provided to the
Tribune, it said, Utah's interim president overruled the faculty body.
"Plagiarism -- holding out the work of another as one’s own -- strikes at
the very core of academic integrity," the newspaper quoted the interim
president, Lorris Betz, as writing in a June 30 letter. "The only
appropriate sanction in this case is dismissal, which is necessary to
preserve the academic integrity of the institution and to restore public
confidence in the university." Bakhtiari has contended that the overlap in
his work and that of others was unintentional and too limited to qualify as
a pattern.
"Michigan State Finds That Professor Plagiarized," Inside Higher Ed,
April 20, 2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/04/20/qt#257476
A Michigan State University panel has found that
Sharif Shakrani, a professor there, plagiarized in a 2010 analysis he wrote
of school-consolidation plans in the state, The Grand Rapids Press reported.
The panel also found three other instances of plagiarism by Shakrani, who
declined to comment on the findings. His analysis has been heatedly debated
in the state by people with various positions on school consolidation. A
decision on any punishment of the professor is pending.
I once had a proof of mine plagiarized in a dastardly way
Jensen Comment
I can't recall adding "QED" to the bottom of anything since I retired.
However, I once had a QED proof that was plagiarized by a reviewer who later published the
proof as his own proof. The best I got was a belated reference to my working
paper when he was called out by an angry Editor.
My still unpublished working paper is at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/127wp/127wp.htm
The proof is in Exhibits 2 and 3.
Over the years I've had an amazing number of requests for this old working
paper.
When the technology became available, I finally served it up at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/127wp/127wp.htm
Question
What "tactics" of this controversial professor led to his resignation/firing?
Answer
Alleged misrepresentation of facts.
"Controversial Journalism Prof to Retire," Inside Higher Ed, June 14,
2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/06/14/qt#262441
Northwestern University announced Monday that David
Protess will retire on August 31. As professor of journalism, Protess won
acclaim for leading the Innocence Project, which worked to help falsely
accused individuals demonstrate their innocence, but in the last year his
tactics have been questioned by law enforcement officials and the
university.
David Protess Press Announcement from Northwestern ---
http://www.northwestern.edu/newscenter/stories/2011/04/university-statement-david-protess_mobile.html
Northwestern University generally does not discuss
publicly actions regarding its faculty and staff. However statements in the
media by Professor David Protess and our desire to be as forthcoming as
possible on an issue of great importance to the University, its faculty, our
students, alumni and our community prompt us to make the following
statement.
This afternoon Medill Dean John Lavine shared
information with his faculty that explained his decision several weeks ago
not to assign teaching responsibilities to Professor David Protess this
quarter. Protess is on leave from both teaching and directing the Medill
Innocence Project this quarter.
Lavine’s decision followed a thorough review by the
University and its outside counsel, Jenner & Block, of the information
provided by Protess to Lavine and University attorneys in connection with a
court case and of the practices and procedures of the Medill Innocence
Project, which has been led by Protess. The review uncovered numerous
examples of Protess knowingly making false and misleading statements to the
dean, to University attorneys, and to others. Such actions undermine the
integrity of Medill, the University, the Innocence Project, students,
alumni, faculty, the press, the public, the State and the Court.
Under Professor Protess’ supervision, student
journalists working with the Medill Innocence Project investigated the
murder conviction of Anthony McKinney from Fall 2003 through spring 2006.
In May 2009, the Cook County State’s Attorney’s
Office issued a court-approved subpoena to Medill seeking 11 categories of
documents relating to the McKinney case, including a request for memoranda
created by students as part of their investigative journalism work on the
case. The University began working on a way to respond to the subpoena
completely and accurately and also protect our students, their privacy and
journalistic independence.
To be responsive to the subpoena, Northwestern
needed to be certain which materials could be protected by a claim of
reporter’s privilege under Illinois law and not be relinquished to the State
and what materials would have to be turned over because they had been
published or shared with a third party outside Medill. University lawyers
repeatedly made that distinction clear to Protess, and Northwestern relied
on his representations, as the long-time director of the Innocence Project,
regarding what had been shared outside Medill and for which privilege could
therefore not be claimed. Based on the information provided by Protess, the
University took the position that student memos were privileged.
However, in June 2010 the University discovered
that there were many inconsistencies emerging between Protess’
representations and the facts. Mr. McKinney’s lawyers produced in court
student memos they said were received from Protess or from the Medill
Innocence Project at his direction – documents Protess had said were never
shared outside Medill. As a result, it became clear that the position the
University had taken in court concerning the students’ memos was not
supportable. Additionally, Sidley Austin, the law firm representing Protess
and the University, informed the court that statements it had previously
made were not accurate and withdrew its representation of Protess.
Northwestern then hired Jenner & Block to determine what had happened in the
subpoena response process.
Jenner & Block scrutinized relevant material
obtained from computer hard drives related to the McKinney matter and
conducted interviews with individuals with first-hand knowledge of the
conduct regarding the subpoenas in the case.
The review uncovered considerable evidence that
Protess: authorized the release of all student memos to Mr. McKinney’s
lawyers despite his repeated claims to the contrary; knew from the very
beginning that doing so waived any claim of privilege; and repeatedly
provided false and misleading information to the lawyers and the dean. As
just one example, in December 2009 Protess sent them a falsified
communication in an attempt to hide the fact that the student memos had been
shared with Mr. McKinney’s lawyers. This communication included what
Protess said was a copy of a November 2007 email, unredacted save for
removal of “personal information,” that he had sent to his program
assistant. The email copy he provided stated that: “My position about
memos, as you know, is that we don’t keep copies….” However, examination of
the original 2007 email, which was only recently obtained by the University,
revealed that the original wording actually was: “My position about memos,
as you know, is that we share everything with the legal team, and don’t keep
copies….”
In sum, Protess knowingly misrepresented the facts
and his actions to the University, its attorneys and the dean of Medill on
many documented occasions. He also misrepresented facts about these matters
to students, alumni, the media and the public. He caused the University to
take on what turned out to be an unsupportable case and unwittingly
misrepresent the situation both to the Court and to the State.
Medill makes clear its values on its website, with
the first value to “be respectful of the school, yourself and others - which
includes personal and professional integrity.” Protess has not maintained
that value, a value that is essential in teaching our students. That is why
Medill Dean John Lavine has assigned the course to another faculty member
this quarter and Protess is on leave.
The Medill Innocence Project’s work and
achievements have been instrumental in pursuing the truth and righting
wrongs. Northwestern University and Medill are committed to this work and
its continuance, and the investigative journalism class related to the
Project is now underway for the quarter with new leadership.
Another very controversial case where a tenured professor was actually fired
from the University of Colorado is the Ward Churchill case where Churchill was
accused of plagiarism and of false claims that he is a Native American --- The
Cherokee Wannabe.
The Saga of Ward Churchill ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
In June 2011 Churchill's long-awaited appeal was accepted for deliberation by
the Colorado Supreme Court. The Court is expected to rule on this case late in
2011,
Question
How do you stay in college semester after semester with a grade average of 0.0?
"Chicago State Let Failing Students Stay," Inside Higher Ed, July 26,
2011 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/07/26/qt#266185
Chicago State University officials have been
boasting about improvements in retention rates. But an investigation by
The Chicago Tribune found that part of
the reason is that students with grade-point averages below 1.8 have been
permitted to stay on as students, in violation of university rules. Chicago
State officials say that they have now stopped the practice, which the
Tribune exposed by requesting the G.P.A.'s of a cohort of students. Some of
the students tracked had G.P.A.'s of 0.0.
Jensen Comment
There is a bit of integrity at CSU. Professors could've just given the students
A grades like some other high grade inflation universities or changed their
examination answers in courses somewhat similar to the grade-changing practices
of a majority of Atlanta K-12 schools. Now that CSU will no longer retain low
gpa students, those other practices may commence at CSU in order to keep the
state support at high levels. And some CSU professors may just let students
cheat. It's not clear how many CSU professors will agree to these other ways to
keep failing students on board.
Bob Jensen's threads on Professors Who Cheat and Allow Students to Cheat
are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#RebeccaHoward
Bob Jensen's threads on grade inflation are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#GradeInflation
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
"PhD Degree revoked, plagiarist will pay to settle lawsuit Saturday,
by Encarnacion Pyle, The Columbus Dispatch, February 5, 2011 ---
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/02/05/degree-revoked-plagiarist-will-pay-to-settle-lawsuit.html?sid=101
Thank you David Albrecht for the heads up.
An Ohio State University graduate whose degree was
revoked last year for plagiarizing has agreed to pay another professor
$15,000 to settle a federal lawsuit.
In August, a Bowling Green State University
professor sued Elisabeth Nixon, an OSU alumnus who received her doctorate in
2006, saying she stole multiple passages from her dissertation.
A month later, an academic-misconduct committee at
Ohio State concluded that Nixon had plagiarized and ordered her to return
her diploma. Nixon, a Clintonville resident, has worked on and off as a
part-time faculty member at four campuses: Columbus State Community College,
Franklin University, Otterbein University and Western Kentucky University.
In her complaint, Montana C. Miller, a folklore
professor, asked the federal court to order Nixon to stop copying her work
and to destroy any material that contained unauthorized excerpts. Miller of
Perrysburg in northwestern Ohio also requested damages and any profit Nixon
might have earned from the copied material.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Sometimes a reverse plagiarism also transpires. One of my former colleagues, a
professor of business and department chair, was called back by one of the most
prestigious universities in the United States to give reason why his PhD should
not be revoked due to plagiarism, in his thesis, of published works of an
accounting professor at that prestigious institution. My colleague was totally
shocked and confused. During the hearings on this matter it became evident that
the accounting professor had instead plagiarized my friend's dissertation and
not vice versa.
It's important to note that the university was prepared to punish the student
severely by revoking his PhD degree. But in the case of the cheating faculty
member there was no punishment. I know this professor and know that he continued
to teach for that institution as a tenured professor. Perhaps punishment for
cheating only works in one direction.
"The Value of Replication," by Steven Novella, Science-Based
Medicine, June 15, 2011 ---
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/index.php/the-value-of-replication/
Daryl Bem is a respected psychology researcher who
decided to try his hand at parapsychology. Last year he published a series
of studies in which he
claimed evidence for precognition — for test
subjects being influenced in their choices by future events. The studies
were published in a peer-reviewed psychology journal, the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology. This created somewhat of a
controversy,
and was deemed by some to be a failure of peer-review.
While the study designs were clever (he simply
reversed the direction of some standard psychology experiments, putting the
influencing factor after the effect it was supposed to have), and the
studies looked fine on paper, the research raised many red flags —
particularly in Bem’s conclusions.
The episode has created the opportunity to debate
some important aspects of the scientific literature. Eric-Jan Wagenmakers
and others questioned the p-value approach to statistical analysis, arguing
that it tends to over-call a positive result.
They argue for a Bayesian analysis, and in their
re-analysis of the Bem data they found the evidence for psi to be
“weak to non-existent.” This is essentially the
same approach to the data that we support as science-based medicine, and the
Bem study is a good example of why. If the standard techniques are finding
evidence for the impossible, then it is more likely that the techniques are
flawed rather than the entire body of physical science is wrong.
Now another debate has been spawned by the same Bem
research — that involving the role and value of exact replication. There
have already been several attempts to replicate Bem’s research, with
negative results:
Galak and Nelson,
Hadlaczky, and
Circee,
for example. Others, such as psychologist Richard
Wiseman, have also replicated Bem’s research with negative results, but are
running into trouble getting their studies published — and this is the crux
of the new debate.
According to Wiseman, (as
reported by The Psychologist, and
discussed by Ben Goldacre) the Journal of
Personality and Social Psychology turned down Wiseman’s submission on the
grounds that they don’t publish replications, only “theory-advancing
research.” In other words — strict replications are not of sufficient
scientific value and interest to warrant space in their journal. Meanwhile
other journals are reluctant to publish the replication because they feel
the study should go in the journal that published the original research,
which makes sense.
This episode illustrates potential problems with
the scientific literature. We often advocate at SBM that individual studies
can never be that reliable — rather, we need to look at the pattern of
research in the entire literature. That means, however, understanding how
the scientific literature operates and how that may create spurious
artifactual patterns.
For example, I recently wrote about the so-called
“decline effect” — a tendency for effect sizes to
shrink or “decline” as research on a phenomenon progresses. In fact, this
was first observed in the psi research, as the effect is very dramatic there
— so far, all psi effects have declined to non-existence. The decline effect
is likely a result of artifacts in the literature. Journals are more
inclined to publish dramatic positive studies (“theory-advancing research”),
and are less interested in boring replications, or in initially negative
research. A journal is unlikely to put out a press release that says, “We
had this idea, and it turned out to be wrong, so never-mind.” Also, as
research techniques and questions are honed, research results are likely to
become closer to actual effect sizes, which means the effect of researcher
bias will be diminished.
If the literature itself is biased toward positive
studies, and dramatic studies, then this would further tend to exaggerate
apparent phenomena — whether it is the effectiveness of a new drug or the
existence of anomalous cognition. If journals are reluctant to publish
replications, that might “hide the decline” (to borrow an inflammatory
phrase) — meaning that perhaps there is even more of a decline effect if we
consider unpublished negative replications. In medicine this would be
critical to know — are we basing some treatments on a spurious signal in the
noise of research.
There have already been proposals to create a
registry of studies, before they are even conducted (specifically for human
research), so that the totality of evidence will be transparent and known —
not just the headline-grabbing positive studies, or the ones that meet the
desires of the researchers or those funding the research. This proposal is
primarily to deal with the issue of publication bias — the tendency not to
publish negative studies.
Wiseman now makes the same call for a registry of
trials before they even begin to avoid the bias of not publishing
replications. In fact, he has taken it upon himself to create a
registry of attempted replications of Bem’s research.
While this may be a specific fix for replications
for Bem’s psi research — the bigger issues remain. Goldacre argues that
there are systemic problems with how information filters down to
professionals and the public. Reporting is highly biased toward dramatic
positive studies, while retractions, corrections, and failed replications
are quiet voices lost in the wilderness of information.
Most readers will already understand the critical
value of replication to the process of science. Individual studies are
plagued by flaws and biases. Most preliminary studies turn out to be wrong
in the long run. We can really only arrive at a confident conclusion when a
research paradigm produces reliable results in different labs with different
researchers. Replication allows for biases and systematic errors to average
out. Only if a phenomenon is real should it reliably replicate.
Further — the excuse by journals that they don’t
have the space now seems quaint and obsolete, in the age of digital
publishing. The scientific publishing industry needs a bit of an overhaul,
to fully adapt to the possibilities of the digital age and to use this as an
opportunity to fix some endemic problems. For example, journals can publish
just abstracts of certain papers with the full articles available only
online. Journals can use the extra space made available by online publishing
(whether online only or partially in print) to make dedicated room for
negative studies and for exact replications (replications that also expand
the research are easier to publish). Databases and reviews of such studies
can also make it as easy to find and access negative studies and
replications as it is the more dramatic studies that tend to grab headlines.
Conclusion
The scientific endeavor is now a victim of its own
success, in that research is producing a tsunami of information. The modern
challenge is to sort through this information in a systematic way so that we
can find the real patterns in the evidence and reach reliable conclusions on
specific questions. The present system has not fully adapted to this volume
of information, and there remain obsolete practices that produce spurious
apparent patterns in the research. These fake patterns of evidence tend to
be biased toward the false positive — falsely concluding that there is an
effect when there really isn’t — or at least in exaggerating effects.
These artifactual problems with the literature as a
whole combine with the statistical flaws in relying on the p-value, which
tends to over-call positive results as well. This problem can be fixed by
moving to a more Bayesian approach (considering prior probability).
All of this is happening at a time when prior
probability (scientific plausibility) is being given less attention than it
should, in that highly implausible notions are being seriously entertained
in the peer-reviewed literature. Bem’s psi research is an excellent example,
but we deal with many other examples frequently at SBM, such as homeopathy
and acupuncture. Current statistical methods and publication biases are not
equipped to deal with the results of research into highly implausible
claims. The result is an excess of false-positive studies in the literature
— a residue that is then used to justify still more research into highly
implausible ideas. These ideas can never quite reach the critical mass of
evidence to be generally accepted as real, but they do generate enough noise
to confuse the public and regulators, and to create an endless treadmill of
still more research.
The bright spot is that highly implausible research
has helped to highlight some of these flaws in the literature. Now all we
have to do is fix them.
Jensen Recommendation
Read all or at least some of the 58 comments following this article
daedalus2u comments:
Sorry if this sounds harsh, it is meant to be harsh. What this episode
shows is that the journal JPSP is not a serious scientific journal. It
is fluff, it is pseudoscience and entertainment, not a journal worth
publishing in, and not a journal worth reading, not a journal that has
scientific or intellectual integrity.
“Professor Eliot Smith, the editor of JPSP
(Attitudes and Social Cognition section) told us that the journal has a
long-standing policy of not publishing simple replications. ‘This policy
is not new and is not unique to this journal,’ he said. ‘The policy
applies whether the replication is successful or unsuccessful; indeed, I
have rejected a paper reporting a successful replication of Bem’s work
[as well as the negative replication by Ritchie et al].’ Smith added
that it would be impractical to suspend the journal’s long-standing
policy precisely because of the media attention that Bem’s work had
attracted. ‘We would be flooded with such manuscripts and would not have
page space for anything else,’ he said.”
Scientific journals have an obligation to the
scientific community that sends papers to them to publish to be honest
and fair brokers of science. Arbitrarily rejecting studies that
directly bear on extremely controversial prior work they have published,
simply because it is a “replication”, is an abdication of their
responsibility to be a fair broker of science and an honest record of
the scientific literature. It conveniently lets them publish crap with
poor peer review and then never allow the crap work to be responded to.
If the editor consider it impractical to
publish any work that is a replication because they would then have no
space for anything else, then they are receiving too many manuscripts.
If the editor needs to apply a mindless triage of “no replications”,
then the editor is in over his head and is overwhelmed. The journal
should either revise the policy and replace the overwhelmed editor, or
real scientists should stop considering the journal a suitable place to
publish.
. . .
Harriet Hall comments
A close relative of the “significant but trivial”
problem is the “statistically significant but not clinically
significant” problem. Vitamin B supplements lower blood homocysteine
levels by a statistically significant amount, but they don’t decrease
the incidence of heart attacks. We must ask if a statistically
significant finding actually represents a clinical benefit for patient
outcome, if it is POEMS – patient-oriented evidence that matters.
"Alternative Treatments for ADHD Alternative Treatments for ADHD: The
Scientific Status," David Rabiner, Attention Deficit Disorder Resources,
1998 ---
http://www.addresources.org/?q=node/279
Based on his review of the existing research
literature, Dr. Arnold rated the alternative treatments presented on a 0-6
scale. It is important to understand this scale before presenting the
treatments. (Note: this is one person's opinion based on the existing data;
other experts could certainly disagree.) The scale he used is presented
below:
- 0-No supporting evidence and not worth
considering further.
- 1-Based on a reasonable idea but no data
available; treatments not yet subjected to any real scientific study.
- 2-Promising pilot data but no careful trial.
This includes treatments where very preliminary work appears promising,
but where the treatment approach is in the very early stages of
investigation.
- 3-There is supporting evidence beyond the
pilot data stage but carefully controlled studies are lacking. This
would apply to treatments where only open trials, and not double-blind
controlled trials, have been done.
Let me briefly review the difference between an
open trial and a double-blind trial because this is a very important
distinction. Say you are testing the effect of a new medication on ADHD.
In an open trial, you would just give the medication to the child, and
then collect data on whether the child improved from either parents or
teachers. The child, the child's parents, and the child's teacher would
all know that the child was trying a new medication. In a double-blind
trial, the child would receive the new medicine for a period of time and
a placebo for a period of time. None of the children, parents, or
teachers would know when medication or placebo was being received. The
same type of outcome data as above would be collected during both the
medication period and the placebo period.
The latter is considered to be a much more
rigorous test of a new treatment because it enables researchers to
determine whether any reported changes are above and beyond what can be
attributed to a placebo effect. In an open trial, you cannot be certain
that any changes reported are actually the result of the treatment, as
opposed to placebo effects alone. It is also very hard for anyone to
provide objective ratings of a child's behavior when they know that a
new treatment is being used. Therefore, open trials, even if they yield
very positive results, are considered only as preliminary evidence.
- 4-One significant double-blind, controlled
trial that requires replication. (Note: replicating a favorable
double-blind study is very important. The literature is full of
initially promising reports that could not be replicated.)
- 5-There is convincing double-blind controlled
evidence, but further refinement is needed for clinical application.
This rating would be given to treatments where replicated double-blind
trials are available, but where it is not completely clear who is best
suited for the treatment. For example, a treatment may be known to help
children with ADHD, but it may be effective for only a minority of the
ADHD population and the specific subgroup it is effective for is not
clearly defined.
- 6-A well established treatment for the
appropriate subgroup. Of the numerous alternative treatments reviewed by
Dr. Arnold, no treatments received a rating of 6.
Only one treatment reviewed received a rating of 5.
Dr. Arnold concluded that there is convincing scientific evidence that some
children who display
Continued in article
"If you can write it up and get it published you're not
even thinking of reproducibility," said Ken Kaitin, director of the Tufts Center
for the Study of Drug Development. "You make an observation and move on. There
is no incentive to find out it was wrong."
April 14, 2012 reply from Richard Sansing
Inability to replicate may be a problem in other
fields as well.
http://www.vision.org/visionmedia/article.aspx?id=54180
Richard Sansing
Bob Jensen's threads on replication in accountics science ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Replication Paranoia: Can you imagine anything like this happening
in accountics science?
"Is Psychology About to Come Undone?" by Tom Bartlett, Chronicle of
Higher Education, April 17, 2012 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/percolator/is-psychology-about-to-come-undone/29045?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
If you’re a psychologist, the news has to make you
a little nervous—particularly if you’re a psychologist who published an
article in 2008 in any of these three journals: Psychological Science,
the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, or the
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
Because, if you did, someone is going to check your
work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed
the Reproducibility Project, which aims to
replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The
project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific
values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a
sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way
of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be
bunk.”
For decades, literally, there has been talk about
whether what makes it into the pages of psychology journals—or the journals
of other disciplines, for that matter—is actually, you know, true.
Researchers anxious for novel, significant, career-making findings have an
incentive to publish their successes while neglecting to mention their
failures. It’s what the psychologist Robert Rosenthal named “the file drawer
effect.” So if an experiment is run ten times but pans out only once you
trumpet the exception rather than the rule. Or perhaps a researcher is
unconsciously biasing a study somehow. Or maybe he or she is flat-out faking
results, which is not unheard of.
Diederik Stapel, we’re looking at you.
So why not check? Well, for a lot of reasons. It’s
time-consuming and doesn’t do much for your career to replicate other
researchers’ findings. Journal editors aren’t exactly jazzed about
publishing replications. And potentially undermining someone else’s research
is not a good way to make friends.
Brian Nosek
knows all that and he’s doing it anyway. Nosek, a
professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, is one of the
coordinators of the project. He’s careful not to make it sound as if he’s
attacking his own field. “The project does not aim to single out anybody,”
he says. He notes that being unable to replicate a finding is not the same
as discovering that the finding is false. It’s not always possible to match
research methods precisely, and researchers performing replications can make
mistakes, too.
But still. If it turns out that a sizable
percentage (a quarter? half?) of the results published in these three top
psychology journals can’t be replicated, it’s not going to reflect well on
the field or on the researchers whose papers didn’t pass the test. In the
long run, coming to grips with the scope of the problem is almost certainly
beneficial for everyone. In the short run, it might get ugly.
Nosek told Science that a senior colleague
warned him not to take this on “because psychology is under threat and this
could make us look bad.” In a Google discussion group, one of the
researchers involved in the project wrote that it was important to stay “on
message” and portray the effort to the news media as “protecting our
science, not tearing it down.”
The researchers point out, fairly, that it’s not
just social psychology that has to deal with this issue. Recently, a
scientist named C. Glenn Begley attempted to replicate 53 cancer studies he
deemed landmark publications. He could only replicate six. Six! Last
December
I interviewed Christopher Chabris about his paper
titled “Most Reported Genetic Associations with General Intelligence Are
Probably False Positives.” Most!
A related new endeavour called
Psych File Drawer
allows psychologists to upload their attempts to
replicate studies. So far nine studies have been uploaded and only three of
them were successes.
Both Psych File Drawer and the Reproducibility
Project were started in part because it’s hard to get a replication
published even when a study cries out for one. For instance, Daryl J. Bem’s
2011 study that seemed to prove that extra-sensory perception is real — that
subjects could, in a limited sense, predict the future —
got no shortage of attention and seemed to turn
everything we know about the world upside-down.
Yet when Stuart Ritchie, a doctoral student in
psychology at the University of Edinburgh, and two colleagues failed to
replicate his findings, they had
a heck of a time
getting the results into print (they finally did, just recently, after
months of trying). It may not be a coincidence that the journal that
published Bem’s findings, the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology, is one of the three selected for scrutiny.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
Scale Risk
In accountics science such a "Reproducibility Project" would be much more
problematic except in behavioral accounting research. This is because accountics
scientists generally buy rather than generate their own data (Zoe-Vonna Palmrose
is an exception). The problem with purchased data from such as CRSP data,
Compustat data, and AuditAnalytics data is that it's virtually impossible to
generate alternate data sets, and if there are hidden serious errors in the data
it can unknowingly wipe out thousands of accountics science publications all at
one --- what we might call a "scale risk."
Assumptions Risk
A second problem in accounting and finance research is that researchers tend to
rely upon the same models over and over again. And when serious flaws were
discovered in a model like CAPM it not only raised doubts about thousands of
past studies, it made accountics and finance researchers make choices about
whether or not to change their CAPM habits in the future. Accountics researchers
that generally look for an easy way out blindly continued to use CAPM in
conspiracy with journal referees and editors who silently agreed to ignore CAPM
problems and limitations of assumptions about efficiency in capital markets---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#EMH
We might call this an "assumptions risk."
Hence I do not anticipate that there will ever be a Reproducibility Project
in accountics science. Horrors. Accountics scientists might not continue to be
the highest paid faculty on their respected campuses and accounting doctoral
programs would not know how to proceed if they had to start focusing on
accounting rather than econometrics.
Bob Jensen's threads on replication and other forms of validity checking
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
"One Economist's Mission to Redeem the Field of Finance," by Dan
Barrett, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 17, 2012 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Robert-Shillers-Mission-to/131456/
Bob Jensen's threads on the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#EMH
Why Even Renowned Scientists Need to Have Their Research Independently
Replicated
"Author on leave after Harvard inquiry Investigation of scientist’s work
finds evidence of misconduct, prompts retraction by journal," by Carolyn Y.
Johnson, The Boston Globe, August 10, 2010 ---
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/08/10/author_on_leave_after_harvard_inquiry/
Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser — a
well-known scientist and author of the book “Moral Minds’’ — is taking a
year-long leave after a lengthy internal investigation found evidence of
scientific misconduct in his laboratory.
The findings have resulted in the retraction of an
influential study that he led. “MH accepts responsibility for the error,’’
says the retraction of the study on whether monkeys learn rules, which was
published in 2002 in the journal Cognition.
Two other journals say they have been notified of
concerns in papers on which Hauser is listed as one of the main authors.
It is unusual for a scientist as prominent as
Hauser — a popular professor and eloquent communicator of science whose work
has often been featured on television and in newspapers — to be named in an
investigation of scientific misconduct. His research focuses on the
evolutionary roots of the human mind.
In a letter Hauser wrote this year to some Harvard
colleagues, he described the inquiry as painful. The letter, which was shown
to the Globe, said that his lab has been under investigation for three years
by a Harvard committee, and that evidence of misconduct was found. He
alluded to unspecified mistakes and oversights that he had made, and said he
will be on leave for the upcoming academic year.
In an e-mail yesterday, Hauser, 50, referred
questions to Harvard. Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal declined to comment on
Hauser’s case, saying in an e-mail, “Reviews of faculty conduct are
considered confidential.’’
“Speaking in general,’’ he wrote, “we follow a well
defined and extensive review process. In cases where we find misconduct has
occurred, we report, as appropriate, to external agencies (e.g., government
funding agencies) and correct any affected scholarly record.’’
Much remains unclear, including why the
investigation took so long, the specifics of the misconduct, and whether
Hauser’s leave is a punishment for his actions.
The retraction, submitted by Hauser and two
co-authors, is to be published in a future issue of Cognition, according to
the editor. It says that, “An internal examination at Harvard University . .
. found that the data do not support the reported findings. We therefore are
retracting this article.’’
The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’
ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had
been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The
paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that
this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’
ability to learn language. In doing such experiments, researchers videotape
the animals to analyze each trial and provide a record of their raw data.
The work was funded by Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and
Behavior program, the National Science Foundation, and the National
Institutes of Health. Government spokeswomen said they could not confirm or
deny whether an investigation was underway.
The findings have resulted in the retraction of an
influential study that he led. “MH accepts responsibility for the error,’’
says the retraction of the study on whether monkeys learn rules, which was
published in 2002 in the journal Cognition.
Two other journals say they have been notified of
concerns in papers on which Hauser is listed as one of the main authors.
It is unusual for a scientist as prominent as
Hauser — a popular professor and eloquent communicator of science whose work
has often been featured on television and in newspapers — to be named in an
investigation of scientific misconduct. His research focuses on the
evolutionary roots of the human mind.
In a letter Hauser wrote this year to some Harvard
colleagues, he described the inquiry as painful. The letter, which was shown
to the Globe, said that his lab has been under investigation for three years
by a Harvard committee, and that evidence of misconduct was found. He
alluded to unspecified mistakes and oversights that he had made, and said he
will be on leave for the upcoming academic year.
In an e-mail yesterday, Hauser, 50, referred
questions to Harvard. Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal declined to comment on
Hauser’s case, saying in an e-mail, “Reviews of faculty conduct are
considered confidential.’’
“Speaking in general,’’ he wrote, “we follow a well
defined and extensive review process. In cases where we find misconduct has
occurred, we report, as appropriate, to external agencies (e.g., government
funding agencies) and correct any affected scholarly record.’’
Much remains unclear, including why the
investigation took so long, the specifics of the misconduct, and whether
Hauser’s leave is a punishment for his actions.
The retraction, submitted by Hauser and two
co-authors, is to be published in a future issue of Cognition, according to
the editor. It says that, “An internal examination at Harvard University . .
. found that the data do not support the reported findings. We therefore are
retracting this article.’’
The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’
ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had
been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The
paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that
this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’
ability to learn language. In doing such experiments, researchers videotape
the animals to analyze each trial and provide a record of their raw data.
The work was funded by Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and
Behavior program, the National Science Foundation, and the National
Institutes of Health. Government spokeswomen said they could not confirm or
deny whether an investigation was underway.
Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York
University and one of the co-authors of the paper, said he drafted the
introduction and conclusions of the paper, based on data that Hauser
collected and analyzed.
“Professor Hauser alerted me that he was concerned
about the nature of the data, and suggested that there were problems with
the videotape record of the study,’’ Marcus wrote in an e-mail. “I never
actually saw the raw data, just his summaries, so I can’t speak to the exact
nature of what went wrong.’’
The investigation also raised questions about two
other papers co-authored by Hauser. The journal Proceedings of the Royal
Society B published a correction last month to a 2007 study. The correction,
published after the British journal was notified of the Harvard
investigation, said video records and field notes of one of the co-authors
were incomplete. Hauser and a colleague redid the three main experiments and
the new findings were the same as in the original paper.
Science, a top journal, was notified of the Harvard
investigation in late June and told that questions about record-keeping had
been raised about a 2007 paper in which Hauser is the senior author,
according to Ginger Pinholster, a journal spokeswoman. She said Science has
requested Harvard’s report of its investigation and will “move with utmost
efficiency in light of the seriousness of issues of this type.’’
Colleagues of Hauser’s at Harvard and other
universities have been aware for some time that questions had been raised
about some of his research, and they say they are troubled by the
investigation and forthcoming retraction in Cognition.
“This retraction creates a quandary for those of us
in the field about whether other results are to be trusted as well,
especially since there are other papers currently being reconsidered by
other journals as well,’’ Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said in an
e-mail. “If scientists can’t trust published papers, the whole process
breaks down.’’
This isn’t the first time Hauser’s work has been
challenged.
In 1995, he was the lead author of a paper in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at whether
cotton-top tamarins are able to recognize themselves in a mirror.
Self-recognition was something that set humans and other primates, such as
chimpanzees and orangutans, apart from other animals, and no one had shown
that monkeys had this ability.
Gordon G. Gallup Jr., a professor of psychology at
State University of New York at Albany, questioned the results and requested
videotapes that Hauser had made of the experiment.
“When I played the videotapes, there was not a
thread of compelling evidence — scientific or otherwise — that any of the
tamarins had learned to correctly decipher mirrored information about
themselves,’’ Gallup said in an interview.
In 1997, he co-authored a critique of the original
paper, and Hauser and a co-author responded with a defense of the work.
In 2001, in a study in the American Journal of
Primatology, Hauser and colleagues reported that they had failed to
replicate the results of the previous study. The original paper has never
been retracted or corrected.
Continued in article
August 10, 2010 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
[gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU]
Bob,
This is a classic example that shows how difficult
it is to escape accountability in science. First, when Gordon Gallup, a
colleague in our Bio-Psychology in Albany questioned the results, at first
Hauser tried to get away with a reply because Albany is not Harvard. But
then when Hauser could not replicate the experiment he had no choice but to
confess, unless he was willing to be caught some time in the future with his
pants down.
However, in a sneaky way, the confession was sent
by Hauser to a different journal. But Hauser at least had the gumption to
confess.
The lesson I learn from this episode is to do
something like what lawyers always do in research. They call it Shepardizing.
It is important not to take any journal article at its face value, even if
the thing is in a journal as well known as PNAS and by a person from a
school as well known as Harvard. The other lesson is not to ignore a work or
criticism even if it appears in a lesser known journal and is by an author
from a lesser known school (as in Albany in this case).
Jagdish -- J
Jagdish Gangolly (gangolly@albany.edu)
Department of Informatics College of Computing &
Information
State University of New York at Albany 7A, Harriman Campus Road, Suite 220
Albany, NY 12206
August 10, 2010 message from Paul Williams
[Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]
Bob and Jagdish,
This also illustrates the necessity of keeping records of experiments. How
odd that accounting researchers cannot see the necessity of "keeping a
journal!!!"
"Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard," by Tom Bartlett,
Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Document-Sheds-Light-on/123988/
Ever since word got out that a prominent Harvard
University researcher was on leave after an investigation into academic
wrongdoing, a key question has remained unanswered: What, exactly, did he
do?
The researcher himself, Marc D. Hauser, isn't
talking. The usually quotable Mr. Hauser, a psychology professor and
director of Harvard's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, is the author of Moral
Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Ecco,
2006) and is at work on a forthcoming book titled "Evilicious: Why We
Evolved a Taste for Being Bad." He has been voted one of the university's
most popular professors.
Harvard has also been taciturn. The public-affairs
office did issue a brief written statement last week saying that the
university "has taken steps to ensure that the scientific record is
corrected in relation to three articles co-authored by Dr. Hauser." So far,
Harvard officials haven't provided details about the problems with those
papers. Were they merely errors or something worse?
An internal document, however, sheds light on what
was going on in Mr. Hauser's lab. It tells the story of how research
assistants became convinced that the professor was reporting bogus data and
how he aggressively pushed back against those who questioned his findings or
asked for verification.
A copy of the document was provided to The
Chronicle by a former research assistant in the lab who has since left
psychology. The document is the statement he gave to Harvard investigators
in 2007.
The former research assistant, who provided the
document on condition of anonymity, said his motivation in coming forward
was to make it clear that it was solely Mr. Hauser who was responsible for
the problems he observed. The former research assistant also hoped that more
information might help other researchers make sense of the allegations.
It was one experiment in particular that led
members of Mr. Hauser's lab to become suspicious of his research and, in the
end, to report their concerns about the professor to Harvard administrators.
The experiment tested the ability of rhesus monkeys
to recognize sound patterns. Researchers played a series of three tones (in
a pattern like A-B-A) over a sound system. After establishing the pattern,
they would vary it (for instance, A-B-B) and see whether the monkeys were
aware of the change. If a monkey looked at the speaker, this was taken as an
indication that a difference was noticed.
The method has been used in experiments on primates
and human infants. Mr. Hauser has long worked on studies that seemed to show
that primates, like rhesus monkeys or cotton-top tamarins, can recognize
patterns as well as human infants do. Such pattern recognition is thought to
be a component of language acquisition.
Researchers watched videotapes of the experiments
and "coded" the results, meaning that they wrote down how the monkeys
reacted. As was common practice, two researchers independently coded the
results so that their findings could later be compared to eliminate errors
or bias.
According to the document that was provided to The
Chronicle, the experiment in question was coded by Mr. Hauser and a research
assistant in his laboratory. A second research assistant was asked by Mr.
Hauser to analyze the results. When the second research assistant analyzed
the first research assistant's codes, he found that the monkeys didn't seem
to notice the change in pattern. In fact, they looked at the speaker more
often when the pattern was the same. In other words, the experiment was a
bust.
But Mr. Hauser's coding showed something else
entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern—and,
according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his
coding was right, the experiment was a big success.
The second research assistant was bothered by the
discrepancy. How could two researchers watching the same videotapes arrive
at such different conclusions? He suggested to Mr. Hauser that a third
researcher should code the results. In an e-mail message to Mr. Hauser, a
copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, the research assistant who
analyzed the numbers explained his concern. "I don't feel comfortable
analyzing results/publishing data with that kind of skew until we can verify
that with a third coder," he wrote.
A graduate student agreed with the research
assistant and joined him in pressing Mr. Hauser to allow the results to be
checked, the document given to The Chronicle indicates. But Mr. Hauser
resisted, repeatedly arguing against having a third researcher code the
videotapes and writing that they should simply go with the data as he had
already coded it. After several back-and-forths, it became plain that the
professor was annoyed.
"i am getting a bit pissed here," Mr. Hauser wrote
in an e-mail to one research assistant. "there were no inconsistencies! let
me repeat what happened. i coded everything. then [a research assistant]
coded all the trials highlighted in yellow. we only had one trial that
didn't agree. i then mistakenly told [another research assistant] to look at
column B when he should have looked at column D. ... we need to resolve this
because i am not sure why we are going in circles."
The research assistant who analyzed the data and
the graduate student decided to review the tapes themselves, without Mr.
Hauser's permission, the document says. They each coded the results
independently. Their findings concurred with the conclusion that the
experiment had failed: The monkeys didn't appear to react to the change in
patterns.
They then reviewed Mr. Hauser's coding and,
according to the research assistant's statement, discovered that what he had
written down bore little relation to what they had actually observed on the
videotapes. He would, for instance, mark that a monkey had turned its head
when the monkey didn't so much as flinch. It wasn't simply a case of
differing interpretations, they believed: His data were just completely
wrong.
As word of the problem with the experiment spread,
several other lab members revealed they had had similar run-ins with Mr.
Hauser, the former research assistant says. This wasn't the first time
something like this had happened. There was, several researchers in the lab
believed, a pattern in which Mr. Hauser reported false data and then
insisted that it be used.
They brought their evidence to the university's
ombudsman and, later, to the dean's office. This set in motion an
investigation that would lead to Mr. Hauser's lab being raided by the
university in the fall of 2007 to collect evidence. It wasn't until this
year, however, that the investigation was completed. It found problems with
at least three papers. Because Mr. Hauser has received federal grant money,
the report has most likely been turned over to the Office of Research
Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The research that was the catalyst for the inquiry
ended up being tabled, but only after additional problems were found with
the data. In a statement to Harvard officials in 2007, the research
assistant who instigated what became a revolt among junior members of the
lab, outlined his larger concerns: "The most disconcerting part of the whole
experience to me was the feeling that Marc was using his position of
authority to force us to accept sloppy (at best) science."
Also see
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Harvard-Confirms-Hausergate/26198/
"Harvard Clarifies Wrongdoing by Professor," Inside Higher Ed,
August 23, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/08/23/qt#236200
Harvard University announced Friday that its
investigations had found eight incidents of scientific misconduct by Marc
Hauser, a prominent psychology professor who recently started a leave,
The Boston Globe reported. The university
also indicated that sanctions had been imposed, and that Hauser would be
teaching again after a year. Since the Globe reported on Hauser's
leave and the inquiry into his work, many scientists have called for a
statement by the university on what happened, and Friday's announcement goes
much further than earlier statements. In a statement sent to colleagues on
Friday, Hauser said: "I am deeply sorry for the problems this case has
caused to my students, my colleagues, and my university. I acknowledge that
I made some significant mistakes and I am deeply disappointed that this has
led to a retraction and two corrections. I also feel terrible about the
concerns regarding the other five cases."
“There is a difference between breaking the
rules and breaking the most sacred of all rules,” said Jonathan Haidt, a moral
psychologist at the University of Virginia. The failure to have performed a
reported control experiment would be “a very serious and perhaps unforgivable
offense,” Dr. Haidt said.
"Harvard Researcher May Have Fabricated Data," by Nicholas Wace,
The New York Times, August 27, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/28/science/28harvard.html?_r=1&hpw
Harvard authorities have made available information
suggesting that Marc Hauser, a star researcher who was put on leave this
month, may have fabricated data in a 2002 paper.
“Given the published design of the experiment, my
conclusion is that the control condition was fabricated,” said Gerry Altmann,
the editor of the journal Cognition, in which the experiment was published.
Dr. Hauser said he expected to have a statement
about the Cognition paper available soon. He
issued a statement last week saying he was “deeply
sorry” and acknowledged having made “significant mistakes” but did not admit
to any scientific misconduct.
Dr. Hauser is a leading expert in comparing animal
and human mental processes and recently wrote a well-received book, “Moral
Minds,” in which he explored the evolutionary basis of morality. An inquiry
into his Harvard lab was opened in 2007 after students felt they were being
pushed to reach a particular conclusion that they thought was incorrect.
Though the inquiry was completed in January this year, Harvard announced
only last week that Dr. Hauser had been required to retract the Cognition
article, and it supplied no details about the episode.
On Friday, Dr. Altmann said Michael D. Smith, dean
of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, had given him a summary of the part of
the confidential faculty inquiry related to the 2002 experiment, a test of
whether monkeys could distinguish algebraic rules.
The summary included a description of a videotape
recording the monkeys’ reaction to a test stimulus. Standard practice is to
alternate a stimulus with a control condition, but no tests of the control
condition are present on the videotape. Dr. Altmann, a psychologist at the
University of York in England, said it seemed that the control experiments
reported in the article were not performed.
Some forms of scientific error, like poor record
keeping or even mistaken results, are forgivable, but fabrication of data,
if such a charge were to be proved against Dr. Hauser, is usually followed
by expulsion from the scientific community.
“There is a difference between breaking the rules
and breaking the most sacred of all rules,” said Jonathan Haidt, a moral
psychologist at the
University of Virginia. The failure to have
performed a reported control experiment would be “a very serious and perhaps
unforgivable offense,” Dr. Haidt said.
Dr. Hauser’s case is unusual, however, because of
his substantial contributions to the fields of animal cognition and the
basis of morality. Dr. Altmann held out the possibility of redemption. “If
he were to give a full and frank account of the errors he made, then the
process can start of repatriating him into the community in some form,” he
said.
Dr. Hauser’s fall from grace, if it occurs, could
cast a shadow over several fields of research until Harvard makes clear the
exact nature of the problems found in his lab. Last week, Dr. Smith, the
Harvard dean, wrote in a
letter to the faculty that he had found Dr. Hauser
responsible for eight counts of scientific misconduct. He described these in
general terms but did not specify fabrication. An oblique sentence in his
letter said that the Cognition paper had been retracted because “the data
produced in the published experiments did not support the published
findings.”
Scientists trying to assess Dr. Hauser’s oeuvre are
likely to take into account another issue besides the eight counts of
misconduct. In 1995, Dr. Hauser published that cotton-top tamarins, the
monkey species he worked with, could recognize themselves in a mirror. The
finding was challenged by the psychologist Gordon Gallup, who asked for the
videotapes and has said that he could see no evidence in the monkey’s
reactions for what Dr. Hauser had reported. Dr. Hauser later wrote in
another paper that he could not repeat the finding.
The small size of the field in which Dr. Hauser
worked has contributed to the uncertainty. Only a handful of laboratories
have primate colonies available for studying cognition, so few if any
researchers could check Dr. Hauser’s claims.
“Marc was the only person working on cotton-top
tamarins so far as I know,” said Alison Gopnik, a psychologist who studies
infant cognition at the
University of California, Berkeley. “It’s always a
problem in science when we have to depend on one person.”
Many of Dr. Hauser’s experiments involved taking
methods used to explore what infants are thinking and applying them to
monkeys. In general, he found that the monkeys could do many of the same
things as infants. If a substantial part of his work is challenged or
doubted, monkeys may turn out to be less smart than recently portrayed.
But his work on morality involved humans and is
therefore easier for others to repeat. And much of Dr. Hauser’s morality
research has checked out just fine, Dr. Haidt said.
“Hauser has been particularly creative in studying
moral psychology in diverse populations, including small-scale societies,
patients with brain damage, psychopaths and people with rare genetic
disorders that affect their judgments,” he said.
Why did Harvard take three years on this one?
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/HauserHarvard/26308/
Bob Jensen's threads on this cheating scandal are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#SocialScience
Also see
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm#SocialScience
August 21, 2010 reply from Orenstein, Edith
[eorenstein@FINANCIALEXECUTIVES.ORG]
I believe a
broad lesson arises from the tale of Professor Hauser's monkey-business:
"It
is
unusual
for a scientist as
prominent
as Hauser - a
popular
professor and
eloquent communicator of
science whose work has often been featured on television and in newspapers
- to be named in an
investigation
of scientific
misconduct."
Disclaimer: this
is my personal opinion only,
and I believe these lessons apply to all professions, but since this is an
accounting listserv, lesson 1 with respect to accounting/auditing
research is:
1.
even the most
prominent, popular, and eloquent
communicator professors'
research, including but not limited to the field of accounting, and
including for purposes of standard-setting, rule-making, et al, should not
be above third party review and questioning (that may be the layman's
term; the technical term I assume is 'replication'). Although it can be
difficult for less prominent, popular, eloquent communicators to raise such
challenges, without fear of reprisal, it is important to get as close to the
'truth' or 'truths' as may (or may not) exist. This point applies not only
to formal, refereed journals, but non-refereed published research in any
form as well.
And, from the world of accounting
& auditing practice, (or any job, really), the lesson is the same:
2.
even the most
prominent, popular, and eloquent
communicator(s) -
e.g. audit clients....should
not be above third party review and questioning; once again, it can be
difficult for less prominent, popular, and eloquent communicators (internal
or external audit staff, whether junior or senior staff) to raise challenges
in the practice of auditing in the field (which is why staffing decisions,
supervision, and backbone are so important). And we have seen examples where
such challenges were met with reprisal or challenge (e.g. Cynthia Cooper
challenging WorldCom's accounting; HealthSouth's Richard Scrushy, the Enron
- Andersen saga, etc.)
Additionally, another lesson here, (I repeat
this is my personal opinion only)
is that in
the field of standard-setting or rulemaking, testimony of 'prominent'
experts and 'eloquent communicators'
should be judged on the basis of substance
vs. form, and others
(i.e. those who may feel less 'prominent' or 'eloquent') should step up to
the plate to offer concurring or counterarguments in verbal or written form
(including comment letters) if
their experience or thought process leads them to the same conclusion as the
more 'prominent' or 'eloquent' speakers/writers - or in particular, if it
leads them to another view.
I wonder sometimes, particularly
in public hearings, if individuals testifying believe there is
implied pressure to say what one thinks the sponsor of the hearing expects
or wants to hear, vs. challenging the status quo, particular proposed
changes, etc., particularly if they may fear reprisal. Once again, it is
important to provide the facts as one sees them, and it is about substance
vs. form; sometimes difficult to achieve.
Edith Orenstein
www.financialexecutives.org/blog
Bob Jensen's threads on professors who cheat
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Bob Jensen's threads on the need for replication are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Why Even Renowned Scientists Need to Have Their Research Independently
Replicated
"Author on leave after Harvard inquiry Investigation of scientist’s work
finds evidence of misconduct, prompts retraction by journal," by Carolyn Y.
Johnson, The Boston Globe, August 10, 2010 ---
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2010/08/10/author_on_leave_after_harvard_inquiry/
Harvard University psychologist Marc Hauser — a
well-known scientist and author of the book “Moral Minds’’ — is taking a
year-long leave after a lengthy internal investigation found evidence of
scientific misconduct in his laboratory.
The findings have resulted in the retraction of an
influential study that he led. “MH accepts responsibility for the error,’’
says the retraction of the study on whether monkeys learn rules, which was
published in 2002 in the journal Cognition.
Two other journals say they have been notified of
concerns in papers on which Hauser is listed as one of the main authors.
It is unusual for a scientist as prominent as
Hauser — a popular professor and eloquent communicator of science whose work
has often been featured on television and in newspapers — to be named in an
investigation of scientific misconduct. His research focuses on the
evolutionary roots of the human mind.
In a letter Hauser wrote this year to some Harvard
colleagues, he described the inquiry as painful. The letter, which was shown
to the Globe, said that his lab has been under investigation for three years
by a Harvard committee, and that evidence of misconduct was found. He
alluded to unspecified mistakes and oversights that he had made, and said he
will be on leave for the upcoming academic year.
In an e-mail yesterday, Hauser, 50, referred
questions to Harvard. Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal declined to comment on
Hauser’s case, saying in an e-mail, “Reviews of faculty conduct are
considered confidential.’’
“Speaking in general,’’ he wrote, “we follow a well
defined and extensive review process. In cases where we find misconduct has
occurred, we report, as appropriate, to external agencies (e.g., government
funding agencies) and correct any affected scholarly record.’’
Much remains unclear, including why the
investigation took so long, the specifics of the misconduct, and whether
Hauser’s leave is a punishment for his actions.
The retraction, submitted by Hauser and two
co-authors, is to be published in a future issue of Cognition, according to
the editor. It says that, “An internal examination at Harvard University . .
. found that the data do not support the reported findings. We therefore are
retracting this article.’’
The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’
ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had
been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The
paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that
this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’
ability to learn language. In doing such experiments, researchers videotape
the animals to analyze each trial and provide a record of their raw data.
The work was funded by Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and
Behavior program, the National Science Foundation, and the National
Institutes of Health. Government spokeswomen said they could not confirm or
deny whether an investigation was underway.
The findings have resulted in the retraction of an
influential study that he led. “MH accepts responsibility for the error,’’
says the retraction of the study on whether monkeys learn rules, which was
published in 2002 in the journal Cognition.
Two other journals say they have been notified of
concerns in papers on which Hauser is listed as one of the main authors.
It is unusual for a scientist as prominent as
Hauser — a popular professor and eloquent communicator of science whose work
has often been featured on television and in newspapers — to be named in an
investigation of scientific misconduct. His research focuses on the
evolutionary roots of the human mind.
In a letter Hauser wrote this year to some Harvard
colleagues, he described the inquiry as painful. The letter, which was shown
to the Globe, said that his lab has been under investigation for three years
by a Harvard committee, and that evidence of misconduct was found. He
alluded to unspecified mistakes and oversights that he had made, and said he
will be on leave for the upcoming academic year.
In an e-mail yesterday, Hauser, 50, referred
questions to Harvard. Harvard spokesman Jeff Neal declined to comment on
Hauser’s case, saying in an e-mail, “Reviews of faculty conduct are
considered confidential.’’
“Speaking in general,’’ he wrote, “we follow a well
defined and extensive review process. In cases where we find misconduct has
occurred, we report, as appropriate, to external agencies (e.g., government
funding agencies) and correct any affected scholarly record.’’
Much remains unclear, including why the
investigation took so long, the specifics of the misconduct, and whether
Hauser’s leave is a punishment for his actions.
The retraction, submitted by Hauser and two
co-authors, is to be published in a future issue of Cognition, according to
the editor. It says that, “An internal examination at Harvard University . .
. found that the data do not support the reported findings. We therefore are
retracting this article.’’
The paper tested cotton-top tamarin monkeys’
ability to learn generalized patterns, an ability that human infants had
been found to have, and that may be critical for learning language. The
paper found that the monkeys were able to learn patterns, suggesting that
this was not the critical cognitive building block that explains humans’
ability to learn language. In doing such experiments, researchers videotape
the animals to analyze each trial and provide a record of their raw data.
The work was funded by Harvard’s Mind, Brain, and
Behavior program, the National Science Foundation, and the National
Institutes of Health. Government spokeswomen said they could not confirm or
deny whether an investigation was underway.
Gary Marcus, a psychology professor at New York
University and one of the co-authors of the paper, said he drafted the
introduction and conclusions of the paper, based on data that Hauser
collected and analyzed.
“Professor Hauser alerted me that he was concerned
about the nature of the data, and suggested that there were problems with
the videotape record of the study,’’ Marcus wrote in an e-mail. “I never
actually saw the raw data, just his summaries, so I can’t speak to the exact
nature of what went wrong.’’
The investigation also raised questions about two
other papers co-authored by Hauser. The journal Proceedings of the Royal
Society B published a correction last month to a 2007 study. The correction,
published after the British journal was notified of the Harvard
investigation, said video records and field notes of one of the co-authors
were incomplete. Hauser and a colleague redid the three main experiments and
the new findings were the same as in the original paper.
Science, a top journal, was notified of the Harvard
investigation in late June and told that questions about record-keeping had
been raised about a 2007 paper in which Hauser is the senior author,
according to Ginger Pinholster, a journal spokeswoman. She said Science has
requested Harvard’s report of its investigation and will “move with utmost
efficiency in light of the seriousness of issues of this type.’’
Colleagues of Hauser’s at Harvard and other
universities have been aware for some time that questions had been raised
about some of his research, and they say they are troubled by the
investigation and forthcoming retraction in Cognition.
“This retraction creates a quandary for those of us
in the field about whether other results are to be trusted as well,
especially since there are other papers currently being reconsidered by
other journals as well,’’ Michael Tomasello, co-director of the Max Planck
Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, said in an
e-mail. “If scientists can’t trust published papers, the whole process
breaks down.’’
This isn’t the first time Hauser’s work has been
challenged.
In 1995, he was the lead author of a paper in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that looked at whether
cotton-top tamarins are able to recognize themselves in a mirror.
Self-recognition was something that set humans and other primates, such as
chimpanzees and orangutans, apart from other animals, and no one had shown
that monkeys had this ability.
Gordon G. Gallup Jr., a professor of psychology at
State University of New York at Albany, questioned the results and requested
videotapes that Hauser had made of the experiment.
“When I played the videotapes, there was not a
thread of compelling evidence — scientific or otherwise — that any of the
tamarins had learned to correctly decipher mirrored information about
themselves,’’ Gallup said in an interview.
In 1997, he co-authored a critique of the original
paper, and Hauser and a co-author responded with a defense of the work.
In 2001, in a study in the American Journal of
Primatology, Hauser and colleagues reported that they had failed to
replicate the results of the previous study. The original paper has never
been retracted or corrected.
Continued in article
August 10, 2010 reply from Jagdish Gangolly
[gangolly@CSC.ALBANY.EDU]
Bob,
This is a classic example that shows how difficult
it is to escape accountability in science. First, when Gordon Gallup, a
colleague in our Bio-Psychology in Albany questioned the results, at first
Hauser tried to get away with a reply because Albany is not Harvard. But
then when Hauser could not replicate the experiment he had no choice but to
confess, unless he was willing to be caught some time in the future with his
pants down.
However, in a sneaky way, the confession was sent
by Hauser to a different journal. But Hauser at least had the gumption to
confess.
The lesson I learn from this episode is to do
something like what lawyers always do in research. They call it Shepardizing.
It is important not to take any journal article at its face value, even if
the thing is in a journal as well known as PNAS and by a person from a
school as well known as Harvard. The other lesson is not to ignore a work or
criticism even if it appears in a lesser known journal and is by an author
from a lesser known school (as in Albany in this case).
Jagdish -- J
Jagdish Gangolly (gangolly@albany.edu)
Department of Informatics College of Computing &
Information
State University of New York at Albany 7A, Harriman Campus Road, Suite 220
Albany, NY 12206
August 10, 2010 message from Paul Williams
[Paul_Williams@NCSU.EDU]
Bob and Jagdish,
This also illustrates the necessity of keeping records of experiments. How
odd that accounting researchers cannot see the necessity of "keeping a
journal!!!"
"Document Sheds Light on Investigation at Harvard," by Tom Bartlett,
Chronicle of Higher Education, August 19, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Document-Sheds-Light-on/123988/
Ever since word got out that a prominent Harvard
University researcher was on leave after an investigation into academic
wrongdoing, a key question has remained unanswered: What, exactly, did he
do?
The researcher himself, Marc D. Hauser, isn't
talking. The usually quotable Mr. Hauser, a psychology professor and
director of Harvard's Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, is the author of Moral
Minds: How Nature Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong (Ecco,
2006) and is at work on a forthcoming book titled "Evilicious: Why We
Evolved a Taste for Being Bad." He has been voted one of the university's
most popular professors.
Harvard has also been taciturn. The public-affairs
office did issue a brief written statement last week saying that the
university "has taken steps to ensure that the scientific record is
corrected in relation to three articles co-authored by Dr. Hauser." So far,
Harvard officials haven't provided details about the problems with those
papers. Were they merely errors or something worse?
An internal document, however, sheds light on what
was going on in Mr. Hauser's lab. It tells the story of how research
assistants became convinced that the professor was reporting bogus data and
how he aggressively pushed back against those who questioned his findings or
asked for verification.
A copy of the document was provided to The
Chronicle by a former research assistant in the lab who has since left
psychology. The document is the statement he gave to Harvard investigators
in 2007.
The former research assistant, who provided the
document on condition of anonymity, said his motivation in coming forward
was to make it clear that it was solely Mr. Hauser who was responsible for
the problems he observed. The former research assistant also hoped that more
information might help other researchers make sense of the allegations.
It was one experiment in particular that led
members of Mr. Hauser's lab to become suspicious of his research and, in the
end, to report their concerns about the professor to Harvard administrators.
The experiment tested the ability of rhesus monkeys
to recognize sound patterns. Researchers played a series of three tones (in
a pattern like A-B-A) over a sound system. After establishing the pattern,
they would vary it (for instance, A-B-B) and see whether the monkeys were
aware of the change. If a monkey looked at the speaker, this was taken as an
indication that a difference was noticed.
The method has been used in experiments on primates
and human infants. Mr. Hauser has long worked on studies that seemed to show
that primates, like rhesus monkeys or cotton-top tamarins, can recognize
patterns as well as human infants do. Such pattern recognition is thought to
be a component of language acquisition.
Researchers watched videotapes of the experiments
and "coded" the results, meaning that they wrote down how the monkeys
reacted. As was common practice, two researchers independently coded the
results so that their findings could later be compared to eliminate errors
or bias.
According to the document that was provided to The
Chronicle, the experiment in question was coded by Mr. Hauser and a research
assistant in his laboratory. A second research assistant was asked by Mr.
Hauser to analyze the results. When the second research assistant analyzed
the first research assistant's codes, he found that the monkeys didn't seem
to notice the change in pattern. In fact, they looked at the speaker more
often when the pattern was the same. In other words, the experiment was a
bust.
But Mr. Hauser's coding showed something else
entirely: He found that the monkeys did notice the change in pattern—and,
according to his numbers, the results were statistically significant. If his
coding was right, the experiment was a big success.
The second research assistant was bothered by the
discrepancy. How could two researchers watching the same videotapes arrive
at such different conclusions? He suggested to Mr. Hauser that a third
researcher should code the results. In an e-mail message to Mr. Hauser, a
copy of which was provided to The Chronicle, the research assistant who
analyzed the numbers explained his concern. "I don't feel comfortable
analyzing results/publishing data with that kind of skew until we can verify
that with a third coder," he wrote.
A graduate student agreed with the research
assistant and joined him in pressing Mr. Hauser to allow the results to be
checked, the document given to The Chronicle indicates. But Mr. Hauser
resisted, repeatedly arguing against having a third researcher code the
videotapes and writing that they should simply go with the data as he had
already coded it. After several back-and-forths, it became plain that the
professor was annoyed.
"i am getting a bit pissed here," Mr. Hauser wrote
in an e-mail to one research assistant. "there were no inconsistencies! let
me repeat what happened. i coded everything. then [a research assistant]
coded all the trials highlighted in yellow. we only had one trial that
didn't agree. i then mistakenly told [another research assistant] to look at
column B when he should have looked at column D. ... we need to resolve this
because i am not sure why we are going in circles."
The research assistant who analyzed the data and
the graduate student decided to review the tapes themselves, without Mr.
Hauser's permission, the document says. They each coded the results
independently. Their findings concurred with the conclusion that the
experiment had failed: The monkeys didn't appear to react to the change in
patterns.
They then reviewed Mr. Hauser's coding and,
according to the research assistant's statement, discovered that what he had
written down bore little relation to what they had actually observed on the
videotapes. He would, for instance, mark that a monkey had turned its head
when the monkey didn't so much as flinch. It wasn't simply a case of
differing interpretations, they believed: His data were just completely
wrong.
As word of the problem with the experiment spread,
several other lab members revealed they had had similar run-ins with Mr.
Hauser, the former research assistant says. This wasn't the first time
something like this had happened. There was, several researchers in the lab
believed, a pattern in which Mr. Hauser reported false data and then
insisted that it be used.
They brought their evidence to the university's
ombudsman and, later, to the dean's office. This set in motion an
investigation that would lead to Mr. Hauser's lab being raided by the
university in the fall of 2007 to collect evidence. It wasn't until this
year, however, that the investigation was completed. It found problems with
at least three papers. Because Mr. Hauser has received federal grant money,
the report has most likely been turned over to the Office of Research
Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
The research that was the catalyst for the inquiry
ended up being tabled, but only after additional problems were found with
the data. In a statement to Harvard officials in 2007, the research
assistant who instigated what became a revolt among junior members of the
lab, outlined his larger concerns: "The most disconcerting part of the whole
experience to me was the feeling that Marc was using his position of
authority to force us to accept sloppy (at best) science."
Also see
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Harvard-Confirms-Hausergate/26198/
Bob Jensen's threads on the need for replication are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
"Journal Review Process Increasingly Includes Check for Plagiarism,"
by Sophia Li, Chronicle of Higher Education, July 9, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Journal-Review-Process/25420/?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en
Thank you David Albrecht for the heads up.
A growing number of journal publishers are checking
papers for possible plagiarism as part of their review process.
That's according to the makers of CrossCheck, a
service that checks articles submitted to scholarly journals against
already-published work for possible plagiarism. Over 80 publishing companies
have adopted CrossCheck since its debut in June 2008,
Nature News reported, and the service's increasing
use has sniffed out high rates of plagiarism in the submissions to some
journals.
The anti-plagiarism service uses software from
iParadigms, the California-based company behind Turnitin, which checks
student papers for plagiarized work. CrossCheck compares submitted materials
with the full text of the 25.5 million articles in its database, a
collection of articles pooled by the publishers that subscribe to the
service.
The service, which has been adopted by publishers
including Nature Publishing and Sage, has turned up plenty of copycat work,
including articles that would have been published otherwise. Taylor &
Francis, a publishing company based in the United Kingdom, found that 23
percent of submissions to one of its journals were rejected because they
contained plagiarism,
Nature News reported. (The journals that were
selected to test CrossCheck had seen incidents of plagiarism in the past.)
After using CrossCheck on submissions, one journal
from Mary Ann Liebert, a publisher based in New Rochelle, N.Y., rejected
about 7 percent of articles that had been peer-reviewed and accepted for
publication, said Adam Etkin, assistant vice president and the director of
online and Internet services for the publishing company. On the other hand,
some of the publisher's other journals, out of the dozen or so that have
begun using CrossCheck, have not uncovered any incidents of plagiarism.
After CrossCheck has detected passages that are
identical or similar to work that has already been published, journal
editors must decide what to do next.
This depends on the incident's severity and intent,
Mr. Etkin said. CrossCheck sometimes flags passages as plagiarized when they
have been improperly cited, and, in some instances, there are few ways to
describe methods or materials differently. Editors at his company's journals
sometimes contact authors to ask them to revise their work or correct their
citations.
The consequences are much more severe when
plagiarists are caught: Authors have been banned from Mary Ann Liebert's
journals after they were caught plagiarizing—in one instance, for three
years. In some cases, the violations have been reported to the author’s
institution.
"Study Linking Vaccine to Autism Broke Research Rules, U.K. Regulators Say
MMR/Autism Doctor Acted 'Dishonestly,' 'Irresponsibly'," by Nicky Broyd,
WebMD, January 29, 2010 ---
http://children.webmd.com/news/20100129/mmr-autism-doctor-acted-dishonestly-irresponsibly
The British doctor who
led a study suggesting a link between the
measles/
mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine and
autism acted "dishonestly and irresponsibly," a
U.K. regulatory panel has ruled.
The panel represents the U.K. General Medical Council
(GMC), which regulates the medical profession. It ruled only on whether
Andrew Wakefield, MD, and two colleagues acted properly in carrying out
their research, and not on whether
MMR vaccine has anything to do with autism.
In the ruling, the GMC used strong language to
condemn the methods used by Wakefield in conducting the study.
In the study, published
12 years ago, Wakefield and colleagues suggested there was a
link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Their
study included only 12 children, but wide media coverage set off a panic
among parents. Vaccinations plummeted; there was a subsequent increase in
U.K. measles cases.
In 2004, 10 of the study's 13 authors disavowed the
findings. The Lancet, which originally published the paper, retracted
it after learning that Wakefield -- prior to designing the study -- had
accepted payment from lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers for causing
autism.
Fitness to Practice
The GMC's Fitness to Practise panel heard evidence
and submissions for 148 days over two and a half years, hearing from 36
witnesses. It then spent 45 days deciding the outcome of the hearing.
Besides Wakefield, two former colleagues went before the panel -John
Walker-Smith and Simon Murch. They were all found to have broken guidelines.
The disciplinary hearing found Wakefield showed a
"callous disregard" for the suffering of children and abused his position of
trust. He'd also "failed in his duties as a responsible consultant."
He'd taken blood samples from children attending
his son's birthday party in return for money, and was later filmed joking
about it at a conference.
He'd also failed to disclose he'd received money
for advising lawyers acting for parents who claimed their children had been
harmed by the triple vaccine
Continued in article
"U.S. Finds Scientific Misconduct by Former Nursing Professor,"
Inside Higher Ed, January 29, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/01/29/qt#218825
A former nursing professor at Tennessee State
University falsified data and results in federally sponsored research on
sexual risk behaviors among mentally ill homeless men, the Office of
Research Integrity at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
announced Thursday. The agency, in a statement in
the Federal Register, said that James Gary Linn, who was a professor
of nursing at Tennessee State, had provided falsified data to the university
and to a journal that published an article on his research in Cellular
and Molecular Biology. He will be barred from involvement in any federal
studies for three years.
Professors Who Cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Bob Jensen's threads on the absence of replication and validity studies in
accountics research are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
Epilogue
Jensen Question to Steve Kachelmeier, Senior Editor of The Accounting Review
(TAR)
Have you ever considered an AMR-type (“Dialogue”) invitation to comment?
These are commentaries that do not have to extend the research findings but may
question the research assumptions.
Steve's Reply
I have not considered openly soliciting comments on a particular article
any more than I have considered openly soliciting research on “X” (you pick the
X). I let the community decide, and I try to run a fair game. By the way, your
idea regarding an online journal of accounting replications may have merit – I
suggest that you direct that suggestion to the AAA Publications Committee.
My guess, however, is that such a journal would receive few submissions, and
that it would be difficult to find a willing editor.
Jensen Comment
In other words, the accounting research academy purportedly has little interest
in discussing and debating the external validity of the accountics research
papers published in TAR. Most likely it's too much of a bother for accountics
researchers to be forced to debate external validity of their findings.
The :"Shields Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave" will remain in
place long after Bob Jensen has departed from this earth.
That's truly sad!
Shielding Against Validity Challenges in Plato's Cave ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryTAR.htm
"Embellished Biography for Opera Educator at BU," Inside Higher Ed,
December 18, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/12/18/qt#215865
Boston
University's Web site biography of
Sharon Daniels, head of the university's
Opera Institute, has significantly
embellished her career,
The Boston Globe
reported. The
biography said she had starring roles
with several top companies that either
have no record of her performing or that
say she played only minor roles. The
Globe reported that the university
was aware of the errors as long ago as
January, but corrected them only this
week, after being contacted by the
newspaper for an article. Daniels blamed
the errors on the way her C.V. was
condensed, and said she thought the
mistakes had been fixed before this
week.
Jensen Comment
The question is how do embellishments get added while her resume was being
"condensed."
"Universities Help Companies Bypass Earmark Ban," Inside Higher Ed,
July 6, 2010 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/07/06/qt#231647
The House of Representatives has banned earmarks of
funds directly to companies, but many corporations that have received
earmarks in the past and that want to keep them coming are working through
nonprofit groups -- including colleges and universities -- to do so,
The New York Times reported. The earmarks
technically go to the nonprofit group, which then subcontracts much of the
work to a corporate entity. Among the universities cited in the article are
Eastern Kentucky University, Pennsylvania State University and the
University of Toledo.
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
In one of the rare surveys conducted about
plagiarism, two University of Alabama asked 1,200 of their colleagues if they
believed their work had been stolen. A startling 40 percent answered yes.
Thomas Bartlett and Scott Smallwood, "Professor Copycat," The
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2004, Page A8.
The number of articles in this particular issue of the Chronicle make it
a must reference for anybody studying plagiarism by college faculty.
In Germany and other parts of Europe, professors get credit for passages or
even entire works written by their students citing the original author and, in
most cases, without giving any form of credit whatsoever. The work of the
student, including that student's writing, is deemed the property of his or her
professor. Although this practice is not ver botten in Europe, it is
considered unethical in North America. But is does happen on this side of
the globe and is sometimes not punished as heavily as plagiarism if the original
writer is a student assistant.
See Thomas Bartlett and Scott Smallwood, "Mentor vs. Protégé," The
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 17, 2004, Page A14
Faculty Plagiarism at Central Michigan University
Central Michigan University has
agreed to return $619,489 to the National
Science Foundation
after concluding that two members of its mathematics
department plagiarized material both in a grant application and in the
resulting project,
which was intended to help improve the education of
secondary-school math teachers3
"Finding Plagiarism, Central Michigan U. Will Return $619,000 Grant to
NSF," Chronicle of Higher Education, November 3, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Finding-Plagiarism-Central/8698/
Ghost writers for the halls of academe
Sen. Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican who has
been investigating financial conflicts of interest
in medicine,
is now urging the National Institutes of Health to
combat the practice of university researchers' signing their names to scientific
papers that were actually
prepared by ghostwriters working for
drug companies. At least three Columbia University
researchers signed their names to articles financed by the pharmaceutical maker
Wyeth,
The New York Times reported.
Chronicle of Higher Education,
August 19, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Sen-Grassley-Presses-NIH-Over/7741/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Update about a professor of psychology
"Professor at Canada's McGill U. Admits Signing Research Generated by Drug
Maker," by Paul Basken, Chronicle of Higher Education, August 24, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/McGill-U-Professor-Admits/48164/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's Fraud Updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on ghost students on campus are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#GhostWriters
Bloggers won't quit as easily as Jacksonville State University
Bloggers are embarrassing the plagiarism investigators at Jacksonville
State University:
Do investigators have any standards at JSU or the university that awarded the
doctorate?
The sad part is that in addition several articles by this man were subsequently
and admittedly plagiarized
That’s the question that resurfaced Tuesday, when a
compelling graphic popped up on
Internet blogs illustrating “what plagiarism looks
like.” The graphic shows dozens of instances where a
dissertation
written by William Meehan, now president of Jacksonville State University, used
verbatim passages from another professor’s research. Meehan has denied any
wrongdoing, and he's backed by Jacksonville State officials who say they've
reviewed the work.
"In Living Color," by Jack Stripling, Inside Higher Ed, June 3, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/06/03/plagiarism
Question
What message is this sending to our students?
Meehan's in big trouble if the unrelenting
Nancy Grace picks up on this.
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Where does responsibility for plagiarism stop?
Is a sole author responsible for the plagiarism of assistants?
Are all co-authors responsible for the plagiarism of one of the co-authors?
Is a student responsible for plagiarism caused by the student's hired assistant?
(one of Bob Jensen's former students offered this line of defense)
Ward Churchill, who is suing the University of
Colorado at Boulder to get his job back, admitted on Tuesday that portions of a
book he edited and wrote parts of were plagiarized, but he said he wasn't
responsible for doing so,
9 News reported. "Plagiarism occurred," Churchill said
in reference to the writings. But Churchill (who prefers to be called "Doctor"
Churchill) said that others who were involved in the project did the
plagiarizing and that he was unaware of it. Churchill has generally not
admitted that any plagiarism occurred in his work, arguing that minor errors
have been stretched by the university to fire him for his controversial
political views. University of Colorado officials also asked Churchill on
Tuesday why he had indicated that he wanted to be called "Dr. Churchill" when he
has only a master's degree. Churchill responded that he has an honorary
doctorate and asked the lawyer, "You wish to dishonor it?"
The
Denver Post noted that while there were some sharp
exchanges in the testimony, much of it was detailed discussion of sources and
the details of scholarly writing, and that the judge had to call a recess at one
point when a juror appeared to be having difficulty staying awake.
"Churchill: 'Plagiarism Occurred' (But He Didn't Do It)
Jensen Comment
If Doctor Churchill pursues this babe-in-the woods line of defense it seems to
me he should name the plagiarists who led him on.
One of the most liberal academic associations is the highly liberal Modern
Language Association. However, even the MLA could not muster up a vote critical
of the firing of Ward Churchill by the University of Colorado.
While material distributed by those seeking to condemn
Churchill’s firing portrayed him favorably, and as a victim of the right wing,
some of those who criticized the pro-Churchill effort at the meeting are
long-time experts in Native American studies and decidedly not conservative.
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
December 31, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/31/mla
Question
What does a leading Native American scholar think of Ward
Churchill's scholarship and integrity?
And this
was the judgment of Churchill's academic peers. UCLA professor
Russell Thornton, a Cherokee tribe member whose work was
misrepresented by Churchill, said "I don't see how the
University of Colorado can keep him with a straight face,"
calling his material on smallpox a "fabrication" of history, and
accusing him of "gross, gross scholarly misconduct." Real
American Indian history, he told the Rocky Mountain News, is
vitally important, not "a bunch of B.S. that someone made up."
R.G. Robertson, author of Rotting Face: Smallpox and the
American Indian and another scholar who has accused Churchill of
misrepresenting his work, says that he's "happy that [he was
fired], that he's been found out, and by his peers—meaning other
university people—and been called what he is, a plagiarizer and
a liar." Thomas Brown, a professor of sociology at Lamar
University who has also investigated Churchill's smallpox
research, said his work on the subject is "fabricated almost
entirely from scratch."
Michael C. Moynihan, "Ward of the State: Why the
state of Colorado was right to sack Ward Churchill," Reason
Magazine, August 1, 2007 ---
http://www.reason.com/news/show/121682.html
A huge factor in the granting of tenure to Ward
Churchill was purportedly his affirmative action claim of being Native American.
Bob Jensen's threads on Doctor Churchill, the "Cherokee Wannabe" who most likely
does not have drop of Native American blood, are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HypocrisyChurchill.htm
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Center for Academic Integrity ---
http://www.academicintegrity.org/
Plagiarist Punished (severely) at Florida," by Jack Stripling,
Inside Higher Ed, January 15, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/15/plagiarism
James Twitchell, a University of Florida English
professor, was sanctioned for plagiarism.
A University of Florida professor who confessed
this spring to committing plagiarism was suspended for five years without
pay, and opted to retire shortly after the punishment was handed down,
university officials confirmed Wednesday.
The professor, James Twitchell, was a longtime
faculty member who was highly regarded for his writings about consumerism
and popular culture. He was frequently quoted by national media
organizations, including The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal. But when confronted with a significant body of evidence, collected
by The Gainesville Sun, Twitchell admitted that he had “cheated by using
pieces of descriptions written by others.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The punishment runs counter to the hand slapping that is more frequent faculty
punishment for plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
It's Rare for Universities to Fire Tenured Professors Who Plagiarize
"Columbia U. Says It Will Fire Professor Accused of Plagiarizing a Former
Colleague and Students," by Thomas Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher
Education," June 24, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/06/3520n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"President of U. of Texas-Pan American, Accused of Plagiarism, Will Retire,"
by Katherine Mangan, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 20, 2009 ---
Click Here
The embattled president of the University of
Texas-Pan American announced today that she would retire at the end of the
month, saying the pressures of the job had taxed her health, the Associated
Press reported.
The president, Blandina Cárdenas, faced anonymous
accusations last year that she had plagiarized parts of her 1974 doctoral
dissertation. She has denied the accusations, which the university system
had been investigating.
David B. Prior, the system’s executive vice
chancellor for academic affairs, said this afternoon that the system had
dropped the investigation, now that Ms. Cárdenas has announced her plans to
retire.
Ms. Cárdenas explained her decision in a written
statement posted on the university’s Web site. It said, in part: “The
pressures of the last several months have seriously taxed my health and
well-being, and impaired my ability to lead the university with the
intensity and focus I believe necessary.” She added that, after four and a
half years as president, “it is time for me to move on.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
You would’ve thought that she would insist on completing the investigation just
to clear her name and save her reputation. If she’s innocent the investigation
will be all benefit and no cost to her since she resigned.
Bob Jensen's threads on controversies in higher education are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
Fraud in Science
Please Say it Isn't So!
"Science Fraud at Universities Is Common -- and Commonly Ignored," by Jeffrey
Brainard, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 19, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/06/3450n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Acts of scientific fraud, such as fabricating or
manipulating data, appear to be surprisingly common but are underreported to
university officials, says a report published today in the journal Nature.
And the institutions may have investigated them far too seldom, the report's
authors write.
The Nature report draws on the largest and
most-systematic survey to date about research misconduct as defined by the
federal government—namely, fabrication, falsification, and plagiarism. The
Office of Research Integrity, a federal agency that oversees misconduct
cases, sponsored the study. It was carried out with the help of the Gallup
Organization, which collected responses from 2,212 federally financed
scientists about apparent misconduct that they had directly witnessed among
colleagues.
Extrapolating from the survey findings, the authors
offered a "conservative" estimate of 2,325 possible instances of illegal
research misconduct nationally per year. Of those only 58 percent, or
roughly 1,350 incidents, were reported to institutional officials. The
authors call this small percentage "alarming."
Based on the volume of observed misconduct, the
authors argue that the number investigated by universities is too low.
Federal rules give institutions that receive federal grants the lead
responsibility for probing allegations against their researchers, but
universities and other institutions have reported an average of only 24
investigations annually to the Office of Research Integrity. The office has
the power to disbar scientists from participating in federally financed
studies.
"Our study calls into question the effectiveness of
self-regulation," the authors write in a peer-reviewed commentary in Nature.
"We hope it will lead individuals and institutions to evaluate their
commitment to research integrity."
The authors are Sandra L. Titus, an official in the
research-integrity office, Lawrence J. Rhoades, the emeritus director of its
education division, and James A. Wells, director of research policy at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison. Mr. Wells previously worked for Gallup,
where he directed the survey on research misconduct.
Their estimated incidence of misconduct is in line
with those in a handful of previous studies. (The authors reported the
incidence rate as at least 1.5 observed cases per 100 researchers annually.)
Questions About Methodology
But some observers criticized those previous
estimates as seemingly too high and the studies' methodologies as flawed. So
the research-integrity office designed the survey and its study to respond
to the criticism. For example, members of the authors' research team
evaluated whether the apparent misconduct described by the scientists
surveyed appeared to meet the federal definition of research misconduct.
The leader of a previous major study on the topic
called the latest one "sound and rigorous." Brian C. Martinson, a senior
research investigator at HealthPartners Research Foundation, a nonprofit
organization in Minneapolis, led a 2005 study, also published in Nature,
that found an even broader incidence of ethically questionable research
practices, not just the federally proscribed kind (The
Chronicle, June 9, 2005).
At least one university official still had
questions about the new study in Nature. Robert R. Rich, the medical-school
dean at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said that, although he had
not seen the study, the reported incident rate seemed high.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
A College President Investigated for Thesis Plagiarism
University of Texas System officials are
investigating allegations that Blandina Cardenas, president of University of
Texas-Pan American, plagiarized parts of her dissertation, the
Associated Press reported. An packet sent to the
university and to the AP claimed to identify 100 examples of plagiarism. The
materials were sent by anonymous faculty members. The AP said that the samples
it received included some statements that appeared to be historical fact, but
also cases of direct language matches without attribution. The Pan American
campus referred all questions to the system office, which confirmed that the
allegations were under investigation.
Inside Higher Ed, October 29, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/10/29/qt
"Have We Lost the Moral Values That Undergird a Commercial Society?"
by Richard Posner, The Becker-Posner Blog, June 9, 2008 ---
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/
David Brooks is one of the most thoughtful
newspaper columnists. In a recent op-ed ("The Great Seduction," New York
Times, June 10, 2008, p. A 23), he argues that the founders of the nation
"built a moral structure around money. The Puritan legacy inhibited luxury
and self-indulgence. Benjamin Franklin spread a practical gospel that
emphasized hard work, temperance and frugality…For centuries, [the nation]
remained industrious, ambitious and frugal." But, Brooks continues, over the
past 30 years much of that legacy "has been shredded," while "the
institutions that encourage debt and living for the moment have been
strengthened.”"And here he mentions "an explosion of debt that inhibits
social mobility and ruins lives," because of "people with little access to
401(k)'s or financial planning but plenty of access to payday lenders,
credit cards and lottery agents." Among other "agents of destruction" are
state lotteries--"a tax on stupidity," which tells people "they don't have
to work to build for the future. They can strike it rich for nothing." Other
culprits are the astronomical interest rates charged by payday lenders; and
the aggressive marketing of credit cards by banks and other financial
institutions, as a result of which by the time college students are in their
senior year more than half of them have at least four different credit
cards. The cures that Brooks offers include "rais[ing] consciousness about
debt," encouraging foundations and churches to offer short-term loans in
competition with payday lenders, strengthening usury laws, and taxing
consumption rather than income, thus encouraging saving.
All this is very interesting, but is it correct? I
have my doubts, except about the desirability of eliminating double taxation
of savings, a problem with our income tax.
Max Weber argued convincingly in his famous book
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism that the frugality and
industriousness promoted by the early Protestants in opposition to the
opulence of the Roman Catholic Church were values conducive to and perhaps
critical in the rise of commercial society. Protestants who believed in
predestination wanted to show by their modesty, austerity, and avoidance of
lavish display that they were predestined for salvation.
But saving plays a less important role in economic
progress today than it did in the sixteenth century. Its role in powering
economic growth has been taken over, to a large extent, by technology. The
great rise in standards of living worldwide is due far more to technological
progress than to high rates of savings, that is, to deferring consumption.
At the same time, now that we have efficient debt
instruments that in former times did not exist or were extremely costly, the
role of personal debt (Brooks does not criticize corporate or government
debt) in human welfare is more apparent than it was. Apart from its role in
solving short-term liquidity problems resulting from delay in the receipt of
income, debt enables consumption to be smoothed over the life cycle. Without
debt, a family might have to wait 20 years before it could afford to buy a
house. Of course, debt creates risk for both lender and borrower, as the
subprime mortgage crisis has dramatically illustrated. But if the risks are
understood, it is unclear why the assumption of them should be thought
harmful to personal or social welfare. At worst, debt leads to bankruptcy,
but bankruptcy is not the end of the world either for the borrower or for
the lender.
In situations of desperate poverty, one can expect
a heavy debt load; but such a load can also be positively correlated with
prosperity, which cushions the risks that debt creates. It is especially odd
to suggest as Brooks does that taking on debt is antithetical to hard work;
on the contrary, it increases the incentive to work hard by making it at
easier for people to obtain the goods and services they want by borrowing
the money they need to pay for them, yet at the same time increasing the
risk of bankruptcy should they slack off on their work and so let their
income fall.
The very high interest rates for payday loans tell
us that many people will pay a very high premium to shift consumption from
future to present. As long as they understand what interest rates are and
what interest rates they are paying, it is hard to see why their preference
for present over future consumption, and hence for spending and borrowing
rather than saving, should have social implications. People who take out
payday loans are unlikely to be potential savers (i.e., lenders); and by
taking on heavy debt they force themselves to work very hard; and I have
suggested that saving is not as important as it once was.
I particularly do not understand how, if high
interest rates for payday loans are a problem, loans by foundations and
churches are a solution. If, as I assume Brooks must mean, these loans are
to made be at lower interest rates than payday loans, the former payday
borrowers will borrow more. If to try to prevent this the charitable lenders
ration their credit tightly, the payday borrowers will borrow what they can
from those lenders and top off with a payday loan; their total debt burden
is unlikely to fall.
As for the "tax on stupidity," it is of course
irresistible to finance as much as government as possible by a system of
voluntary taxation, which is what a state lottery is. And I don’t think
"stupid" is the right word to describe all or even most of the people who
buy lottery tickets. I do think that some of them consider themselves
"lucky" and so in effect recalculate the odds in their favor. That is
stupid; in a game of chance, "luck" is randomly distributed. Some people,
though, simply enjoy risk. Others like to daydream, and a daydream is more
realistic if there is some chance it may come true, even if a very small
chance. And finally and most interestingly, there are people whose marginal
utility of income is U-shaped rather than everywhere declining. Usually we
think of it as declining: my second million dollars confers less utility on
me than my first million, and that is why I would not pay a million dollars
for a lottery ticket that gave me a 50.1 percent or probably even an 80
percent probability of winning $2 million. But maybe I lead a rather drab
life, and this might make such a gamble rational even if it were not
actuarially fair. Suppose that for a $2 lottery ticket I obtain a one in a
million chance of winning $1 million. It is not a fair gamble because the
expected value of $1 million discounted by .000001 is $1, not $2. But if
having $1 million would transform my life, the expected utility of the
gamble may exceed $2, and then it is rationally attractive.
Brooks complains that government sponsorship of
lotteries sends an official and therefore authoritative message that a
person can strike it rich for nothing. But of course that is true, even when
there are no lotteries. (And he gives no indication of wanting to forbid
private lotteries.) You can inherit great wealth. More commonly, you may be
able to leverage modest talents into great wealth by the luck of being in
the right job at the right time. Brooks himself complains in his op-ed about
the message sent by the fact that hedge fund managers often make more money
than people who "build a socially useful product." Only the latter, he
believes, should earn fortunes. But he doesn't propose an excess-profits tax
on hedge fund managers; he accepts the legitimacy of their fortunes at the
same time that he attributes those fortunes to luck. There is also an echo
of the traditional but erroneous suspicion of speculation as an activity
that does not create social wealth but merely shifts it around. That is
incorrect. Speculation aligns prices (whether commodity prices or the prices
of companies) with values and so creates more accurate signals for
production and investment. It is a vital economic service. That is not to
say that speculators "deserve" higher incomes than ditch diggers. Desert
doesn't enter. Incomes are determined by supply and demand.
What is true is that easy credit facilitates
bubbles, such as the housing bubble and the related mortgage-financing
bubble, and the bursting of a bubble can, as we have been relearning
recently, cause economic dislocations. This may require some regulatory
adjustments; it does not require a return to Calvinism.
Jensen Comment
Richard Posner was a well-received plenary session speaker at the 2007 American
Accounting Association annual meetings.
Journal publishers are increasingly using plagiarism detection software
Plagiarists beware. A group of 12 publishers have begun
using CrossCheck, software that ferrets out plagiarized articles submitted for
publication in scholarly journals. The software was created by CrossRef, a
publishing industry association, and iParadigms, a company that sells Turnitin,
software that checks student papers for plagiarized material. CrossCheck is
targeted at scholars. It flags passages that a submitted journal article may
have in common with published journal articles. The publishers will contribute
more than 29 million articles to the CrossCheck database, according to a
statement released Monday
by Elsevier. It and eight other publishers
tested the service for six months. "By creating a
pooled database of articles from multiple publishers and tested tools, we can
provide assistance to the scholarly community on an unprecedented scale," Martin
Tanke, Elsevier's managing director of science-and-technology journal
publishing, said in the statement. Other publishers contributing to the
CrossCheck database are: the Association of Computing Machinery, American
Society of Neuroradiology, BMJ Publishing Group, International Union of
Crystallography, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, The Journal of
the American Medical Association, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University
Press, Sage, Informa UK, and Wiley Blackwell.
Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3124&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
She's In the Doghouse Now: Professors Who Cheat
A former assistant professor of accounting at the
University of Tampa has pleaded guilty to stealing $120,000 from the American
Spaniel Club.
She was accused of writing 71 Spaniel Club checks to herself between July 2006
and March 2007 to feed an Internet gambling addiction. Instead of doing jail
time, Lippincott, now a part-time accounting professor at Nova Southeastern
University in Ft. lauderdale, FL, was sentenced to 15 years' probation. During
that time, she is required to pay $500 a month until June 2009 and $1,000 a
month after that until her probation ends, the Tampa Tribune reported. Some of
the money will go directly to the spaniel club; the rest will be used to repay
the club's insurance carrier.
AccounitngWeb, May 16, 2008 ---
http://www.accountingweb.com/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=105175
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
She's Joined by Another Dog: Professors Who Cheat
This link appeared in the Financial Rounds blog on May 22, 2008 ---
http://financialrounds.blogspot.com/
"F**k I Hate Plagiarizers," by Jacqueline Passey, Jacqueline Gets Her Geek
On, May 7, 2008 ---
http://www.jacquelinepassey.com/2008/05/fuck-i-hate-peo.html
So, I finished my marketing project slides and have
begun work on finishing the accounting project
(an analysis of The Gap's financial reports).
It turns out that one of my accounting project
group members --
yup, you guessed it -- plagiarized her
contribution to our paper!
The other group member and I initially were
suspicious because of the three pages she sent us, the third page was
written in the first person plural and thus was obviously taken from the
company's annual report. However, the plagiarizer wrote in her original
email, "The financial information is in draft form right now," so we decided
to give her the benefit of the doubt that perhaps this part was just her
research notes and she planned to rewrite and properly cite the information.
So, my reply to her email included the question,
"Is what you sent us so far a draft that you wrote or is it notes copied
from somewhere else or what?"
She replied, "the first 2 pages i wrote and the
bottom is info i found."
OK, so far, so good. She was not claiming to have
written the part that she very obviously hadn't written. Since I had the
much more pressing marketing project to deal with and the accounting project
isn't due until the 15th, I put off doing anything else with it for a week.
Well, I just started working on the accounting
project again, and since I still don't trust her, I started plugging phrases
into Google. It turns out that the entire two pages she claims to have
written herself are ripped off from Hoover's:
The Gap Company Description: She copied this
paragraph word-for-word with only the following minor changes:
- replaced "ubiquitous" with "ever-present"
- deleted the reference to poplin
- updated 3,100 to 3,150
- deleted the word "iconic"
- deleted the word "budgeteer"
- deleted the fragment "each also has its own
online incarnation"
So of the 112 words in the paragraph, she changed
only 13 of them. This does not count as adequate paraphrasing.
Industry Overview: Clothing Stores: She copied the
"Industry Overview" and "Competitive Landscape" paragraphs word-for-word
with NO changes.
Industry Forecast: She copied the opening sentence
of the "Industry Forecast" section word-for-word with NO changes.
I'm not sure where she got her "Comparison to
Industry & Market" and "Top Competitors" tables from, but the weird
formatting strongly suggests that they were not created by her in Word (it's
a Word document) but were copy/pasted off a website as well.
She does cite the source she ripped off, "Hoover's
Handbook of World Business 2008", at the end of her document, but in no way
does changing only 13 out of 286 words (thus copying 95% of the source
word-for-word) count as "writing" something.
I am so fucking pissed. Because *I* would have
gotten an F on the project too (the professor has emphasized that plagiarism
would not be tolerated) if I'd believed her and turned in the paper with her
section left as is. This woman is not some stupid little freshman who
doesn't know better, she's on her last 12 credits of her MBA. She fucking
knows better and she decided to take the risk anyway and fuck the rest of us
over because she's too fucking lazy to ethically research and write two
fucking pages.
I AM TURNING THE BITCH IN. I'm certain that my
other group member will support me on this and we will just complete the
project by ourselves.
Update: What really fucking sucks
is the plagiarizer is the one who picked The Gap as our paper topic. I
don't want to write a paper analyzing the fucking Gap. I don't even shop
there. I'd rather do Amazon. But the non-plagiarizer and I already have
1/3 to 1/2 a paper about The Gap so it'll take us less time to finish the
stupid thing than to start on a new company.
Update II: I heard back from the
professor: "Thank you very much for telling me this. You did the right
thing in breaking away into a separate group. There is nothing further that
you need to do." Dude, what are you doing up at 4am?
Jensen Comment
Jacqueline Passey changed the title of her blog. Now I think she should change
the title of some of her tidbits. Why's the F-word so popular in the media these
days? It must've been used 50 times in one of Harrison Ford's movies (Presumed
Innocent) that I watched a couple of days ago (courtesy of
NetFlix). The F-word is
getting tiresome!
Professors Who Cheat
"Charges of Insider Trading for a Wall Street Luminary," by Louise
Story, The New York Times, May 30, 2008 ---
Click Here
John F. Marshall spent decades teaching at business
schools and watching his students parlay his lessons into fortunes on Wall
Street. But when he and another professor reached for some of those riches
themselves, events took a startling turn, the authorities say.
Dr. Marshall, a retired professor at St. John’s
University and a fixture on the Wall Street lecture circuit, was accused by
the Securities and Exchange Commission in March of passing inside
information about a multibillion-dollar corporate takeover to a professor at
Pace University. The Pace professor, Alan L. Tucker, made more than $1
million trading on the tips in 2007, according to the S.E.C. The Justice
Department has filed criminal charges.
The developments have stunned Dr. Marshall’s former
colleagues and students, who describe him as a meticulous scholar and a
generous, unassuming teacher. The accusations have also jolted Wall Street,
where Dr. Marshall is considered one of the wise men of financial
engineering.
“I am just shocked beyond belief,” said Jennifer
Kim, a St. John’s graduate who was taught by Dr. Marshall. “If he wanted to,
he could have made money — lots of money — years ago.”
Suspicious trading has set off alarms at the S.E.C.
during the record rush of corporate takeovers in recent years. Since 2006,
the agency has filed more lawsuits related to insider trading than during
the entire decade of the 1990s.
But the usual suspects are bankers, analysts and
executives — not academicians like Dr. Marshall, the author of books like
“Financial Engineering: A Complete Guide to Financial Innovation.”
Yet, like many business school professors, Dr.
Marshall, 56, and Dr. Tucker, 47, built twin careers by hopscotching from
teaching to consulting. Dr. Marshall’s stature in the field of finance
eventually lead a board position at a fledgling electronic exchange for
stock options — a position the S.E.C. said he had used to pass illegal tips
to Dr. Tucker, a friend and business associate. The men declined to comment
for this article.
It’s a remarkable turnabout for Dr. Marshall, who
co-founded the leading professional society for practitioners of financial
engineering, the International Association of Financial Engineering, the
math-heavy discipline that revolutionized Wall Street in recent years.
Ms. Kim recalled how her former professor gave away
complex computer software to his students. Dr. Marshall helped establish a
graduate program in financial engineering at Polytechnic University in
Manhattan and fostered the explosive growth of financial derivatives. He
also became a popular lecturer at banks like Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank
and Merrill Lynch.
Few people on or off Wall Street moved in such
rarefied financial circles. During a long, distinguished career, Dr.
Marshall mixed with Nobel laureates like Myron S. Scholes, Fischer Black and
Franco Modigliani — whose pioneering theories transformed the world of
finance — while he himself lived modestly on Long Island.
“Everybody loves Jack Marshall” said David F.
DeRosa, president of DeRosa Research and Trading and a former Wall Street
trader. “He is like the uncle of derivatives.”
In an essay published in the 2007 book, “How I
Became a Quant,” Dr. Marshall wrote that his work on Wall Street had
informed his academic research.
“What I was seeing during the day in the Street was
growing increasingly at odds with what I saw being taught in business
schools,” Dr. Marshall wrote. “Most of academia was missing the great
transformation that was taking place in finance.”
He recruited Dr. Tucker to help edit the financial
engineering society’s journal, and together they proposed new types of
options that companies might use to protect themselves from economic
downturns. The pair also opened a small consulting firm in Port Jefferson,
N.Y.
Their work was notable for its real-world
applications, professional colleagues said.
“A lot of academics publish papers that have very
little to do with practical applications,” said Anthony Herbst, a retired
finance professor at the University of Texas in El Paso. “Jack Marshall
bridges the gap.”
Dr. Marshall retired from St. John’s in 2000 and
went on to help form the International Securities Exchange, the electronic
options exchange. He later became a member of its board and the chairman of
its finance and audit committee.
The trouble began in late 2006, when Eurex, a
German exchange, expressed interest in buying the I.S.E. According to the
S.E.C., Dr. Marshall tipped off Dr. Tucker about the deal, sharing insider
details of the proposed transaction through multiple phone calls.
Dr. Tucker later bought options giving him the
right to buy I.S.E. stock, as well as shares in the American exchange,
through an Ameritrade account, the S.E.C. said in its complaint. In e-mail
exchanges, Dr. Tucker referred to the scheme as “the program,” according to
the S.E.C. Dr. Marshall’s brother-in-law, Mark R. Larson, 45, bought shares
of I.S.E. stock based on the tips, S.E.C. says.
When Eurex agreed to buy I.S.E. for $67.50 a share
in 2007, the value of the I.S.E. stock and options soared, producing a
profit of $1.1 million. It is unclear if Dr. Marshall profited personally.
But the options trades set off alarms with market regulators because Dr.
Tucker was the only person buying some of the instruments just before the
takeover.
Since the S.E.C. filed its complaint in March, the
men have fallen out of touch with friends and colleagues, longtime
acquaintances said. Dr. Tucker finished out the spring term teaching at Pace
but did not turn up at a recent finance conference he was scheduled to
attend in China. Dr. Marshall has resigned from the I.S.E.’s board. Recent
calls placed to his consulting firm on Long Island were unanswered.
At universities and on Wall Street, people who know
Dr. Marshall are dumbfounded.
Manuchehr Shahrokhi, a finance professor at
California State University at Fresno, said he was so surprised to hear
about the allegations that he looked up the S.E.C. complaint to
double-check. He could not reconcile the accusations with the man knew —
someone he once heard speak on ethics in the derivatives markets.
“You know, sometimes greed takes over your
knowledge and your skills and everything else. But he is not a greedy man,”
Dr. Shahrokhi said. “Really, the only conclusion I can come up with is it
must have been an accident. I do not believe that a person of his stature
would do this.”
Professors Who Cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
"Arguing Against Free-Market Plagiarism Prevention," by Doug Lederman,
Inside Higher Ed, December 17, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/12/17/econ
Most academic disciplines largely trust a
decentralized approach to policing potential instances of plagiarism,
counting on scholars to report situations when they occur, and journal
editors or academic administrators to respond to and punish breaches upon
learning about them. The assumption that wrongdoing will eventually become
known, and that a cheater’s reputation will be destroyed (along, not
unimportantly, with fears of legal dangers for getting involved) has led
most scholarly societies to avoid playing a direct role in policing academic
misconduct. (One disciplinary group that did investigate charges of
plagiarism, the American Historical Association,
gave up doing so in 2003.)
That approach makes sense if the appropriate people
are fulfilling their appropriate roles in that informal system, says Gary A.
Hoover, an associate professor of economics at the University of Alabama at
Tuscaloosa. But Hoover, whose personal experiences as a victim of academic
piracy have led him to study the state of plagiarism within his chosen
field, argues that the system falls down if incidents don’t get reported to
those with the power to punish the perpetrators, or if those with that power
don’t act.
And too often they don’t, Hoover argued in a
presentation made to a group of government economists in Washington on
Friday, based on a series of surveys and papers he has produced on the
subject of economics plagiarism.
At the core of Hoover’s
argument
to the Society of Government Economists are data
from two surveys he conducted with Walter Enders, a fellow economist at
Alabama. One, conducted in 2004, was of about 110 editors of economics
journals; the other, from 2006, sought the views of about 1,200 rank and
file economists, about 80 percent of them academics. While there was
significant overlap on many points, the views of the editors and of likely
authors diverged in a few key ways. As seen in the table below, for example,
64.7 percent of rank and file economists said that using another scholar’s
idea without attribution was “likely” or “definitely” plagiarism, compared
to 52.4 percent of journal editors.
Proportion of Journal Editors and Economists Who
View Certain Practices as Plagiarism
Practice |
Not at All |
Not Likely |
Likely |
Definitely |
|
Economists |
Editors |
Econ. |
Editors |
Econ. |
Editors |
Econ. |
Editors |
Unattributed sentences |
2.8% |
1.8% |
16.6% |
19.8% |
41.7% |
44.3% |
38.9% |
34% |
Unattributed proof from working paper |
2.5% |
0% |
16.6% |
9.3% |
41.7% |
32.4% |
38.9% |
58.3% |
Unattributed proof from published paper |
2.2% |
0% |
4.8% |
4.6% |
27.5% |
29.4% |
65.5% |
66.1% |
Unattributed idea |
3.0% |
3.9% |
32.3% |
43.7% |
46.1% |
35.9% |
18.6% |
16.5% |
Use of privately collected data |
7.7% |
2.8% |
16.8% |
16.8% |
31.4% |
32.7% |
44.0% |
47.7% |
And when asked for the appropriate responses when
clear cases of plagiarism are identified, nearly three-quarters of rank and
file economists said they thought a plagiarist’s department chair, dean or
provost should be notified, while fewer than half of journal editors thought
so, as seen in the following table:
Proportion of Economists and Editors Who See
Certain Responses to Plagiarism as Appropriate
Practice |
Not at All |
Not Likely |
Likely |
Definitely |
|
Economists |
Editors |
Econ. |
Editors |
Econ. |
Editors |
Econ. |
Editors |
Notify original author (if possible) |
1.8% |
1.8% |
4.1% |
8.2% |
24.5% |
19.1% |
69.2% |
70.9% |
Notify department chair, dean, provost |
4.0% |
11% |
21.9% |
42% |
43.3% |
23% |
30.1% |
24% |
Ban future submissions to journal by
plagiarist |
4.9% |
1% |
23.0% |
21.5% |
39.9% |
35.5% |
32.2% |
42.1% |
Public notice of plagiarism |
9.3% |
19.2% |
41.0% |
50.5% |
32.0% |
17.2% |
17.8% |
13.1% |
Hoover sees it as a problem that journal editors,
who are arguably most likely to be in a position to come across potential
instances of plagiarism, are less likely to view the theft of ideas as
plagiarism and to see it as appropriate to report potential wrongdoing to
the superiors of someone they caught.
“If we as a profession are going to say, we’re not
going to have an overall policy, so the way we’re going to police this is
through reporting, you have to be able to hurt somebody’s reputation” if
they get caught, Hoover said. “But if editors are not willing to [report to
someone’s bosses], where’s the bite? Where’s the fear of damage to
reputation if nobody’s going to find out about it?”
(If Hoover sounds passionate about the subject,
that may be because he encountered it personally. In 2003, he says, he and
Enders were surprised when they were asked to referee a paper that applied
time-series econometrics to poverty research. It was remarkably similar to a
paper they had co-written that was awaiting publication in another journal —
which had been disseminated via the Social Science Research Network — and to
previous papers they had published separately. When they raised the issue
with the editor of the journal that had asked them to peer review the
offending paper, the editor checked with colleagues and lawyers and reported
back “they and I are both concerned about possible liability for the journal
of any aggressive course of action.” The editor ultimately sent the
plagiarizing scholar an e-mail message rejecting the paper but inviting him
to submit materials to the journal in the future.)
Continued in article
Do as I say, not as I do: Professor who criticizes Wikipedia
plagiarizes from Wikipedia
"University chief lifted text from Wikipedia," by Mark Sainsbury, The
Australian, April 26, 2008 ---
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23600451-12332,00.html
GRIFFITH University vice-chancellor Ian O'Connor
has admitted lifting information straight from online encyclopedia Wikipedia
and confusing strands of Islam as he struggled to defend his institution's
decision to ask the repressive Saudi Arabian Government for funding.
Professor O'Connor also appears to have breached
his own university's standards on plagiarism as they apply to students'
academic work - a claim he denies. And he appears to have ignored his own
past misgivings about Wikipedia and internet-based research.
In September, The Australian revealed that the
Queensland university had accepted a grant of $100,000 from the Saudi
Government. Last week, it was revealed that Griffith had asked the Saudi
embassy in Australia for a $1.37million grant for its Islamic Research Unit,
telling the ambassador that certain elements of the controversial deal could
be kept a secret.
Griffith - described by Professor O'Connor as the
"university of choice" for Saudis - also offered the embassy a chance to
"discuss" ways in which the money could be used.
Professor O'Connor's response to The Australian's
revelations, which was published as an opinion article in the newspaper on
Thursday, contained whole passages of text "cut and pasted" from Wikipedia.
"The primary doctrine of Unitarianism is Tawhid, or
the uniqueness and unity of God," Professor O'Connor wrote. "Wahhab also
preached against a perceived moral decline and political weakness in the
Arabian peninsula and condemned idolatry, the popular cult of saints, and
shrine and tomb visitation."
The Wikipedia entry for Wahhabism reads: "The
primary doctrine of Wahhabism is Tawhid, or the uniqueness and unity of God
... He preached against a 'perceived moral decline and political weakness'
in the Arabian peninsula and condemned idolatry, the popular cult of saints,
and shrine and tomb visitation."
Professor O'Connor, whose academic credentials are
in social work and juvenile justice, appears to have substituted the word
Unitarianism for Wahhabism.
Continued in article
"Columbia U. Professor Denies Plagiarism, Saying Accusers Instead Stole Her
Work," by Thomas Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher Education, February
22, 2008 --
-
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/02/1798n.htm
A Columbia University professor who was found to
have committed numerous acts of plagiarism struck back at her accusers on
Thursday, saying it was they who stole her work and accusing administrators
of blackmail and intimidation.
In a lengthy interview with The Chronicle, Madonna
G. Constantine, a professor of psychology and education at Columbia's
Teachers College, spelled out her side of the story. She said she believes
that her accusers are motivated by professional envy and possibly racism.
Ms. Constantine also contended that the president of Teachers College, Susan
H. Fuhrman, is biased against her.
As for the alleged plagiarism itself, Ms.
Constantine insisted that her work was finished first and that she was the
victim of academic fraud. In a written statement, she said she had
"documentary proof that my scholarly work under question was started and
completed well before the accusers' own work."
Ms. Constantine promised to provide that proof once
all the materials had been gathered. She plans to submit her evidence to a
faculty appeals committee, which will then make a nonbinding recommendation
to the president of the Teachers College.
A law firm hired by the university concluded, after
an 18-month investigation, that Ms. Constantine had plagiarized the work of
two former students and a former colleague. As part of that investigation,
Ms. Constantine was allowed to submit a rebuttal to the complaints against
her. The law firm investigating the matter, Hughes Hubbard & Reed LLP, found
that the evidence she presented was not credible.
As a result of the investigation, the university
reduced her salary and, according to Ms. Constantine, asked for her
resignation, which she declined to give. A university spokeswoman could not
confirm that the university asked for the professor's resignation.
Ms. Constantine, however, argues that the
investigation was biased and that she was not given a full opportunity to
make her case. She also questions the neutrality of the investigation
because her three accusers were given indemnity—a fact, she argues, that
proves that they received favorable treatment.
But, according to Christine Yeh, a former associate
professor at Teachers College whose work Ms. Constantine was found to have
copied, she and the two former students insisted on such protections in case
Ms. Constantine filed a lawsuit—which she had previously threatened to do.
The agreement with the university did not protect them from charges of
plagiarism, had the law firm discovered that they were to blame. But
Columbia did agree to defend them if they were to be sued.
Who Saw What When?
Untangling the opposing allegations is difficult.
The two former students both say Ms. Constantine stole their unpublished
work and published it as her own. Ms. Constantine says it was the other way
around.
In the case of the accusation by Ms. Yeh, who now
teaches at the University of San Francisco, Ms. Constantine's paper was
published in 2004, several months before Ms. Yeh's. Both papers focused on
indigenous healing. Ms. Yeh's research has long centered around indigenous
healing, and drafts of her paper had circulated as early as 2001 in the
department of counseling and clinical psychology, where both women taught..
In addition, Ms. Yeh's co-authors had presented a version of the paper at a
meeting of the American Psychological Association in 2002.
It would have been easy, Ms. Yeh says, for Ms.
Constantine to get a copy of an earlier draft.
Ms. Constantine says Ms. Yeh must have obtained a
copy of a proposal she sent to the editor of the journal that published her
paper. She did not know how Ms. Yeh might have obtained that proposal.
For Ms. Yeh, the study of indigenous healing has
been a lifelong endeavor. Her father, now deceased, was a professor at
Villanova University and studied indigenous healing himself. When he was
ill, she used energy-healing techniques to help him. "The idea that I would
make this up or steal her work when I have been doing this for so long is
ridiculous," she said.
Nearly Identical Language
One of the former graduate students, Tracy Juliao,
says Ms. Constantine borrowed a number of passages from her dissertation on
the multiple roles of women for a paper the professor published in 2006 in
the journal Professional School Counseling. The two documents share many of
the same ideas, along with examples of identical or near-identical language.
For instance, here is an excerpt from Ms. Juliao's
dissertation, which was completed in 2004 and published the following year:
"The theory acknowledges that different roles might
come into conflict with one another, but proposes that adjusting the entire
system of roles to accommodate the conflicts will produce more rewarding
results."
And here is a passage from Ms. Constantine's 2006
paper:
"Role balance theory acknowledges that different
roles might come into conflict with each other, but women's ability to
adjust their entire system of roles to accommodate potential conflicts will
likely produce more rewarding results."
Several other examples of parallels between the two
documents were provided to The Chronicle. And Ms. Yeh confirmed that Ms.
Juliao had been working in the area of multiple roles of women since 2000.
For a time, Ms. Constantine was Ms. Juliao's academic adviser, and the two
discussed her research. And, as a faculty member, Ms. Constantine would have
had access to student dissertations before they were published.
Ms. Constantine says she did not see Ms. Juliao's
dissertation until the fall of 2006, after her paper was published. She says
they both talked about their ideas freely. Ms. Constantine could not explain
how Ms. Juliao would have been able to copy her paper several years before
it was published.
Ms. Juliao says she had no clue, until she saw the
paper, that Ms. Constantine might be copying her work. "This is very
personal to me," she said. "I have pictures of her playing with my daughter
on graduation day. Just looking at that makes me sick to my stomach now."
Assertions About the Role of Race
The accusations and the resulting investigation are
part of what Ms. Constantine terms a "conspiracy" and a "witch hunt."
"There are people working behind the scenes
collectively, as a unit, to create distress and dissension and to bring
people down," Ms. Constantine said on Thursday.
Among those people, according to Ms. Constantine,
is Ms. Fuhrman, the president of Teachers College. Ms. Constantine said she
did not know why Ms. Fuhrman disliked her. However, she cited a memorandum
about the plagiarism investigation that was sent to faculty members earlier
this week as proof of animus from the administration. The fact that the memo
was hand-delivered, rather than being sent through the campus mail, shows
that the president is trying to intimidate her, she said.
According to a spokeswoman for the university,
Marcia Horowitz, Ms. Fuhrman barely knows Ms. Constantine.
Ms. Constantine said she believes that one reason
she is being accused of plagiarism is that she African-American. Race, she
said, plays a major role in the investigation.
. . .
Professors at the Teachers College also received an
e-mail message from Karen Cort, the other graduate student whose work Ms.
Constantine was found to have copied. In the message, Ms. Cort says that Ms.
Constantine, who was her mentor, had told her that her work was not good
enough to be published. She later saw portions of that same work in print,
under Ms. Constantine's name.
Ms. Cort, who is African-American, says Ms.
Constantine's claim that the investigation is motivated by race is "what
pains me the most."
In the e-mail message, Ms. Cort calls her former
mentor "the most hypocritical person I ever met in my life."
Update 1
"CONTEMPTIBLE COLUMBIA," New York Post, February 25, 2008 ---
Click Here
Teachers College claims to be independent of
Columbia University - but when it comes to moral cowardice, it's hard to
tell them apart.
To wit, Teachers College revealed last week that an
18-month investigation has determined that Professor Madonna Constantine had
lifted the work of a colleague and several students.
Now, plagiarism is a firing offense at Morningside
Heights, right?
Amazingly, no.
Teachers announced that it had merely imposed
secret "serious sanctions" against Constantine.
Continued in article
An outside spokeswoman for Teachers College of
Columbia University on Monday confirmed that a Manhattan grand jury has issued a
subpoena for records related in part to Madonna Constantine, a professor there.
Teachers College in February found Constantine had
repeatedly used the work of others without attribution —
a conclusion she disputes and calls a “witch hunt” against
her.
Inside Higher Ed, April 1, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/21/constantine
Jensen Comment
When a university conducts a special investigation and discovers that a
professor has plagiarized parts or all of some of his/her published papers and
books, it puts the university between a rock and a hard place regarding
disclosures to the publishers themselves and the authors whose works were stolen
about the plagiarism. For example, should a prestigious academic journal be
notified that Author X published the term paper of a student in that journal
without attribution? Or should a book publisher be notified that it has been
sending royalties to the wrong author? A university is thus ethically torn
between protecting the privacy of an employee who cheated versus respecting the
rights of the victims of this cheating and fraud.
In this case it appears that the courts will have to intervene to get Columbia
University to respect the rights of the victims.
The comments from both Constantine and Fuhrman may
be read differently now. For the reality is that some of Constantine’s students
in fact had filed complaints against her a year before the noose incident,
charging her with publishing their work as her own. A professor (who has since
left Teachers College, in part because the situation) filed a similar complaint.
This week, Teachers College announced that an investigation had backed up the
complaints and found “numerous instances in which she used others’ work without
attribution in papers she published in academic journals over the last five
years.” An outside spokeswoman handling questions about the case said that there
were 24 such instances documented in a report prepared for Teachers College by a
law firm, and reviewed and approved by four current and former faculty members.
The spokeswoman said that when Fuhrman spoke of “accolades,” she meant only what
she heard about Constantine’s classroom performance . . . Teachers College
confirmed that it “sanctioned” Constantine but would not describe the form of
that punishment, which she has the right to appeal. Both the college and
Constantine’s lawyer confirmed that the tenured professor remains a professor
there. The spokeswoman said that to her knowledge, Columbia had not informed
publishers of the situation, and that no articles or books by Constantine had
been withdrawn or amended. The spokeswoman also declined to name the journal
articles that the college believes contain the work of others. Brent
Mallinckrodt, editor of the Journal of Counseling Psychology, where Constantine
has published at least seven articles and serves as an associate editor, said he
knew nothing of the charges against her. Asked if he was concerned about having
as an associate editor someone found by her college to have repeatedly used the
work of others, he said he would consult with the American Psychological
Association, the journal’s publisher, to find out its procedures for such a
case.
Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed,
February 21, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/02/21/constantine
Jensen Comment
As I've said previously, colleges through bricks at students who plagiarize and
powder puffs at professors who plagiarize ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Jensen Comment
How would you like
to be the colleague who is hereafter forced to go on day to day on the job with
someone who stole your work in progress and published it as her own work?
Professor Constantine sounds very street smart but foolhardy when it comes to
plagiarizing. I mean if you’ve going to plagiarize it does not seem smart to
steal writings of your students and colleagues and later claim they stole it
from you. Odds are that some of your sources can prove they wrote it first! This
is indeed what happened to Professor Constantine.
Think of the convoluted reasoning. If Student S turned in a paper that really
plagiarized Professor P’s writing, what grounds does Professor P have for giving
S an A grade for the project and then later claiming S plagiarized Professor P’s
earlier writings? Get real!
The fact of the matter is that students who plagiarize place themselves in
jeopardy of being suspended or expelled. At many universities with honor codes
the fate of a plagiarizing student is in the hands of a student court that is
more likely to inflict severe punishment than instructors.
There are a number of precedents now that indicate faculty who plagiarize are
in less jeopardy than their students because their universities are so lenient
in punishing plagiarizing faculty. How likely is it that a tenured professor who
gets caught plagiarizing will get fired? My contention is that the odds of
firing a professor are much, much lower than the odds of expelling a student.
I’ve mentioned this story before, but it’s worth repeating. I worked at a
university where my Department Chair, a tenured professor, was asked to return
to the prestigious University X where he was being accused of plagiarism in his
doctoral dissertation years earlier. If found guilty of plagiarism his doctoral
diploma was going to be revoked. Although he was not an accounting professor
(his field was management), he was being accused of plagiarizing the printed
articles of a tenured accounting professor at University X. As it turned out in
the investigation, it was really the accounting professor at University X who
plagiarized the dissertation of this doctoral student.
The bottom line is that the doctoral student at University X was 100% certain
to have his doctoral diploma withdrawn if he’d plagiarized portions of his
thesis. But the accounting professor who published plagiarized passages from
that student’s thesis was allowed to carry on as a tenured professor, teach
courses, supervise doctoral dissertations, and apparently received no punishment
other than embarrassment in front of a few sympathetic colleagues who were ready
to hang the doctoral student.
To this day, I think I’m the only accounting professor in the world, other
than University X accounting professors, who knows the name of the accounting
professor at University X who plagiarized from a doctoral student’s thesis. And
I know about it only because that student eventually became my boss and was
called back to University X while I was working for him. By the way, he was only
my boss for a short while before he moved on to become the youngest president in
history of a university. He moved from Department Chair of one university to
President of another university in one step. That’s almost unheard of in the
academy.
Unfortunately Professor Constantine’s fate after having been caught
plagiarizing is the rule rather than the exception. The academy is hypocritical
when it comes to plagiarism by one of its own. See
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
One of the dirtiest forms of plagiarism is when journal referees reject
submitted works and later publish those ideas under different wording.
See
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Update 2
It's Rare for Universities to Fire Tenured Professors Who Plagiarize
"Columbia U. Says It Will Fire Professor Accused of Plagiarizing a Former
Colleague and Students," by Thomas Bartlett, Chronicle of Higher
Education," June 24, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/daily/2008/06/3520n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
A Columbia University professor has been suspended
and will be fired for plagiarism and for obstructing the university's
investigation into her case, a spokeswoman said on Monday.
The allegations against Madonna G. Constantine, a
tenured professor of psychology and education at Columbia's Teachers
College, first came to light in February after an investigation, conducted
by a law firm hired by the university, found that Ms. Constantine had
plagiarized the work of a former colleague and two former students (The
Chronicle, February 21). This month a faculty
committee accepted the administration's ruling.
In February, university officials reduced her
salary and asked for her resignation, which she did not give.
A spokeswoman for the university confirmed that a
memorandum was delivered to faculty members on Monday informing them of the
decision to suspend Ms. Constantine, pending dismissal.
The spokeswoman declined to give further details.
In an interview last February, Ms. Constantine
vigorously defended herself against allegations of plagiarism, and argued
that it was she instead who had been plagiarized. She also contended that
the university is biased against her and that her accusers are motivated by
envy and racism (The
Chronicle, February 22).
Ms. Constantine did not respond to an interview
request Monday afternoon. But her lawyer, Paul J. Giacomo Jr., said the
university had ignored information that would clear her. "The evidence that
was offered by her accusers is highly questionable and is belied by evidence
in Teachers College's own records," he said. Mr. Giacomo said that his
client was keeping all options open and that she may appeal her termination
to a faculty committee.
As for the university's assertion that the
professor had obstructed its investigation, Mr. Giacomo said that accusation
was based on letters Ms. Constantine sent to her accusers, warning them that
they could face legal action. Mr. Giacomo said those letters were perfectly
appropriate. He also said that his client would "absolutely" file a lawsuit.
In October, Ms. Constantine, who is
African-American, said that a noose was found outside her office door. She
told The Chronicle in February that she believed someone from Columbia
placed it there.
Jensen Comment
Ms. Constantine accused one of her students for being racially motivated to
accuse her of plagiarism of a term paper. The student is African-American such
that Constantine's accusations lost a lot of credibility.
This case raises another suspicion. If you knew you, as a professor, were
being investigated for plagiarism of the works of your own colleagues and
students and you had little personal integrity what would you do. I might turn
it into a legal lottery by hanging a noose on my own door, wait to get fired,
and then hire Guard Dog Associates, the meanest law firm in New York City. If
you suspect you will be fired for misdeeds why not win the legal lottery on your
way out the door?
Bob Jensen's earlier threads about Madonna Constantine are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Center for Academic Integrity ---
http://www.academicintegrity.org/
Professors Who Cheat ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#ProfessorsWhoPlagiarize
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating and plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Plagiarist Punished (severely) at Florida," by Jack Stripling,
Inside Higher Ed, January 15, 2009 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/01/15/plagiarism
James Twitchell, a University of Florida English
professor, was sanctioned for plagiarism.
A University of Florida professor who confessed
this spring to committing plagiarism was suspended for five years without
pay, and opted to retire shortly after the punishment was handed down,
university officials confirmed Wednesday.
The professor, James Twitchell, was a longtime
faculty member who was highly regarded for his writings about consumerism
and popular culture. He was frequently quoted by national media
organizations, including The New York Times and The Wall Street
Journal. But when confronted with a significant body of evidence, collected
by The Gainesville Sun, Twitchell admitted that he had “cheated by using
pieces of descriptions written by others.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
The punishment runs counter to the hand slapping that is more frequent faculty
punishment for plagiarism.
Confronting — and Not Confronting — Plagiarism
A central problem, participants said, is that however
much plagiarism may offend scholars and make professors look silly to the public
when famous authors are exposed, the law takes a different approach. “From the
point of view of the law, defamation of character is a very live issue, but
plagiarism is really marginal,” said Alan Lessoff, professor of history at
Illinois State University and editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and
Progressive Era. During the discussion, several editors shared horror stories
(generally without names) of the kinds of plagiarism issues that have come their
way — generally prior to publication, when a reviewer calls to say that the book
or article that was sent for consideration is awfully familiar, because it comes
from something the reviewer wrote. Other complaints go further, such as what to
do about a reviewer who — in violation of a confidentiality agreement — shared
unpublished research in a piece he was reviewing with one of his graduate
students, denying the author a scholarly scoop.
Scott Jaschik, "Confronting — and Not Confronting — Plagiarism," Inside Higher
Ed, January 7, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/01/07/plagiarism
Jensen Comment
I had a somewhat similar problem one time that was really unbelievable. I
submitted a paper one time to a journal called Mathematical Modelling. My
paper contained a proof of a theorem in eigenvector scaling. The paper was
rejected. Later on a paper was submitted to me for refereeing that contained my
proof line for line. I could tell who the author was in the submission by the
article's wording (he was a renowned scholar in Analytical Hierarchy Processing)
I suspected that the referee on my submission plagiarized my proof on his own
submission. I informed the journal editor and when the renowned scholar's paper
was eventually published he inserted a credit to me for the proof. I didn't get
my paper published by that journal but I at least got credit for the proof.
Plagiarism: Judge Posner Builds a Reputation Cutting and Pasting Opinions
Written by Others
THE club of people accused of plagiarism gets ever larger. High-profile members
include Stephen Ambrose, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kaavya Viswanathan — of chick-lit
notoriety — and now even Ian McEwan, whose best-selling novel “Atonement” has
recently been discovered to harbor passages from a World War II memoir by
Lucilla Andrews. Plagiarism is apparently so rife these days that it would be
extremely satisfying to discover that “The Little Book of Plagiarism,” by
Richard A. Posner, has itself been plagiarized. The watchdogs have been caught
before. The section of the University of Oregon handbook that deals with
plagiarism, for example, was copied from the Stanford handbook. Mr. Posner,
moreover, is a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh
Circuit and a law professor at the University of Chicago who turns out books and
articles with annoying frequency and facility. Surely, under deadline pressure,
he is tempted every now and then to resort to a little clipping and pasting,
especially since he cuts members of his own profession a good deal of slack on
the plagiarism issue. In the book he readily acknowledges that judges publish
opinions all the time that are in fact written by their clerks, but he excuses
the practice on the ground that everyone knows about it and therefore no one is
harmed. What he doesn’t consider much is whether a judge who gains a reputation
for particularly well-written opinions or for seldom being reversed — or, for
that matter, who is freed from his legal chores to do freelance writing —
doesn’t benefit in much the same way as a student who persuades one of the smart
kids to do his homework for him.
Charles McGrath, "Plagiarism: Everybody Into the Pool," New York Times Book
Review, January 6 2007 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/07/education/edlife/07books.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Jensen Comment
My question is why it is so inconvenient for Judge Posner to add citations to
his plagiarisms?
"Yale Professor at Peking U. Assails Widespread Plagiarism in China,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, December 21, 2007 ---
http://chronicle.com/news/article/3678/yale-professor-at-peking-u-assails-widespread-plagiarism-in-china
A Yale University professor has written a stern
letter expressing concern about widespread plagiarism by students he taught
at Peking University this fall.
“The fact that I have encountered this much
plagiarism … tells me something about the behavior of other professors and
administrators here,” Stephen Stearns, a professor of ecology and
evolutionary biology, wrote to his students. “They must tolerate a lot of
it, and when they detect it, they cover it up without serious punishment,
probably because they do not want to lose face. If they did punish it, it
would not be this frequent.”
Plagiarism and other forms of academic corruption
have been
common in Chinese higher education for years, even
as the authorities try to raise academic standards.
Mr. Stearns went on to attack the lack of
protection for intellectual-property rights in China, even citing the
pirating of his own textbook by Peking University itself, a premier Chinese
institution that is often called Beida. “Disturbingly, plagiarism fits into
a larger pattern of behavior in China,” he wrote. “China ignores
international intellectual-property rights. Beida sees nothing wrong in
copying my textbook, for example, in complete violation of international
copyright agreements, causing me to lose income, stealing from me quite
directly.”
Chinese translations of the strongly worded letter,
titled “To My Students in Beijing, Fall 2007,” quickly spread around the
Chinese-language Internet. It was also published on
New Threads, a Chinese Web site that reports cases
of plagiarism in China. (The English original follows the Chinese
translation.)
Continued in article
"Faculty Theft," by Carolyn Foster Segal, Inside Higher Ed, November
6, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/11/05/segal
Thus, just as the
final decision regarding Glenn Poshard,
president of Southern
Illinois University (yes, he plagiarized;
no, he won’t be fired) was setting off yet
another round of blogging, I found myself
starting the day with The Great Gatsby
and ending with Oedipus Rex, thus
neatly pairing a novel in which “Everybody
lies” (the line is Gregory House’s, although
it might easily be Nick Carraway’s) and a
play in which the tragic hero — driving the
plot toward his own destruction — argues
that “the truth must be made known.”
About a year
or so ago, I put out a call at an online forum for tales
about faculty plagiarists. What was driving my interest was
the sneaking suspicion that in the case of plagiarism,
colleges
often have a double standard: one standard for students and
another for faculty and administrators.
If it is sometimes amusing (note that I said sometimes —
more often it is disheartening and aggravating) to listen to
the excuses that students will argue in defense of their
cheating ways, it is nothing less than appalling to hear a
tenured administrator plead that he wasn’t adequately
schooled in the meaning of plagiarism or to listen to a
faculty member justify her appropriation of another’s work
under the headings of forgetfulness, ignorance, or the
impossibility of original thought in the 21st century. If
one has already committed one egregious act — that of
stealing — is it surprising that he or she would attempt to
lie his or her way out of it? And most appalling of all is
how many instances of faculty plagiarism are simply left
alone by administrators.
My
correspondents in the forum answered my query with examples
of faculty plagiarists great and small: some offenders had
been outed and severely penalized; still other perpetrators
of the crime had triumphed with no punishment at all. A
number of forum participants advised against becoming
involved in bringing any sorts of charges, and, based on the
sagas of revenge cited by several individuals, this began to
seem like very good advice.
Formal
grievances filed against them, bad teaching schedules, being
shrouded by other departmental members, seeing no recourse
but to leave: These are some of the repercussions not for
faculty members who cheat, but for those who uncover the
evidence. Having once or twice stolen the good work of
others, some plagiarists’ line of defense is to go after the
good names of those who cried “foul.”
Plagiarism,
I was beginning to understand, was only part of the story.
This fact was reinforced for me by one of the final postings
(readers having already begun to move on to other forums and
forms of discontent). Why not, my anonymous source
proposed, broaden the topic to faculty theft? Why not
indeed? As the writer — a veteran of academe, who gave me
permission to quote his response — pointed out:
“Plagiarism” is a somewhat narrowly-understood term — i.e.
the verbatim incorporation of another’s words without
acknowledgment — and the more general defining principle,
theft, sometimes gets lost in the parsing. I would argue
that other academic thefts — in particular the hijackings of
ideas, proposals, (co-)credit, publishing opportunities,
support funds, courses, students, lab space — are equally —
if not more pernicious.
The writer
was indeed correct: plagiarism is just one category of the
theft that’s practiced within the halls of academe. I’ve
also observed that individuals rarely commit one isolated
act of thievery — there’s usually a pattern. And to my
generous correspondent’s catalog, I would add the losses of
time, concentration, reputation, joy, and friendships with
colleagues.
What
explains the lists above? Is it simply, as in the maxim
attributed to Henry Kissinger, that university politics are
so vicious because the stakes are so small? Do academic
departments breed this behavior, or is there something in
the makeup of the offender that led him or her to choose —
and abuse — this line of professional work? In an outside,
follow-up e-mail, my anonymous correspondent continued: “I
think you will find that the most egregious serial offenders
in academe fall under the DSM-IV category of Narcissistic
Personality Disorder.... The essence of the disorder is an
inability to distinguish between substance and grandiose
facade.”
If that’s
the case, then a proposal regarding the faculty
self-evaluation form at my college would be of even less use
that it originally appeared to be. Several years ago, a
provost and subcommittee of the curricular/academic policy
committee suggested that we add a question involving a
statement of ethics: Faculty members would be asked to
describe and assess in detail their ethical performance. The
introduction of this question provoked a lively debate. The
conundrum it posed was similar to that of the sink-or-swim
test for witchcraft. If a faculty member composed a lengthy
screed on his/her ethical behavior, wasn’t he/she protesting
too much? If, on the other hand, a faculty member refused to
answer the question, was that an indication that he/she was
in fact guilty of unethical behavior? Wasn’t the question an
insult to anyone striving to live a moral, ethical life? And
finally, what would a serial offender do with this
opportunity? How likely was it that a faculty member who had
misbehaved would seek atonement on the front page of the
yearly self-evaluation?
As for
what constituted unethical behavior, our discussion never
reached the heights or depths of plagiarism. The one example
that I can recall went something like this: If you bring
cookies for your students on the day that they fill out the
course evaluations, is that ethical? It’s certainly food for
thought — and we reflected on that dilemma for a bit, while
gazing at the plates of cookies that are always provided for
faculty meetings. (We were, in fact, ahead of our time, at
least on this issue — see
“Sweetening the Deal” and the
accompanying commentary on Inside Higher Ed.)
The question
on ethics was cut from the faculty evaluation forms — not
for any philosophical reason but because the subcommittee
had neglected to follow the procedure for such revisions
that is mandated by the faculty handbook. When the topic
surfaced several months later, there was general agreement
that just as the students must follow an honor code, so too
do faculty members everywhere have an implicit code. We all
know, however, that there is no honor among thieves.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Manipulated Journal Rankings?" by Jerry A. Jacobs, Inside Higher
Ed, July 1, 2016 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2016/07/01/examination-whether-academic-journal-rankings-are-being-manipulated-essay?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=e7c759e754-WNU20160701&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-e7c759e754-197565045
Are
editors manipulating citation scores in order to inflate the status of their
publications? Are they corrupting the rankings of scholarly journals?
While any allegations about cheating or other academic chicanery are cause
for concern, journal rankings to date continue to offer one rough but useful
source of information to a wide variety of audiences.
Journal rankings help authors to answer the omnipresent question “Where to
publish?” Tenure review committees also use rankings as evidence for
visibility, recognition and even quality in the academic review process,
especially for junior candidates. For them, journal ranking becomes a proxy
when other, more direct measures of recognition and quality are not
available. Given that many candidates for tenure have recent publications,
journal rankings become a surrogate measure for the eventual visibility of
that research.
Yet
it is easy to rely unduly on quantitative rating scores. The trouble arises
when journal rankings becomes a stand-in for the quality of the research. In
many fields, research quality is a multifaceted concept that is not
reducible to a single quantitative metric. For example, imposing a single
rule -- for example, that top-quartile journals count as “high-quality”
journals while others do not -- assigns more weight to journal rankings than
they deserve and generates the temptation to inflate journals’ scores.
In
an
editorial in the journal Research Policy,
editor Ben R. Martin voiced his concern that the manipulation of journal
impact factors undermines the validity of Thompson/Reuters Journal Citation
Reports (JCR). He concludes that “… in light of the ever more devious ruses
of editors, the JIF [journal impact factor] indicator has lost most of its
credibility.” A journal’s impact factor represents the average number of
citations per article. The standard, one-year
impact factor is calculated by summing up
citations to articles published in a journal within the last year, divided
by the number of articles published.
Continued in article
One way journals manipulate their rankings and reputations is to actively
organize in ways such that their authors are nominated for awards
Bob Jensen's
Recommendations for Change on the American Accounting Association's
Notable Contributions to Accounting Literature Award
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/TheoryNotable.htm
March 28, 2016 reply
from Paul Williams
Bob,
Hurray for you!! The AAA is still the last remaining Politburo on earth.
Like Russian generals with medal strewn chests, the Notable awards
process is truly a farce. The same applies to the Seminal Contribution
award; does anyone know how that process works? It mustn't work very
well because if we are to believe in the wisdom of the process nothing
of any worth was written before 1968. The two Notable exceptions were
the result of selection committees that were put together by the AAA to
create the appearance that it was taking diversity seriously. For the
Notable Contribution why do we need a Nominating Committee and a
Selection Committee? Because the nominating committee is a way to let
the peons participate but deny them any power to actually decide what is
or is not noteworthy (as if within a five year period that is possible).
Here is a study for someone to do. Two awards, the Horizons and Issues
best papers, are by a vote of the membership. All of the others are by a
committee whose members are selected, I assume, by the "Board. My sense
is that there is a dramatic contrast between who wins by vote and who
wins by committee. Tony Tinker and Tony Puxty published a book a number
of years ago titled Policing Accounting Knowledge, which documents with
actual cases of how the review and awards process at AAA worked in the
past. Until the bylaws are changed to allow a more democratic selection
of directors of research and publication nothing is going to happen. In
former AAA president Gregory Waymire's white paper "Seeds of Innovation"
he made the following assessment of the status of the U.S. academy's
premier research: "As a result, I believe our discipline is evolving
towards irrelevance within the academy and the broader society with the
ultimate result being intellectual irrelevance and eventually
extinction." That assessment is spot on, but when a leader of the
academy apparently is powerless to alter the course, it indicates how
firmly entrenched and institutionalized the intellectual mindset of the
AAA is. Until it takes the view that the purpose of research and writing
is not to garner politically correct academic reputations but to address
serious and interesting questions then we will become extinct and no one
will even notice. Our plenary speaker the last time our meeting was in
Anaheim was Diedre McCloskey whose message was the message that Bob has
been harping on for years -- the mindlessness of regressions and
obsession with p values. Did it have any effect? Just look at the
content of our so-called U.S. based premier journals. One huge linear
model after another utilizing data completely ill-suited to the task.
Bob: Guess when we get old the Don Quixote in us comes out. I wish you
well.
Bob,
Addenda to my previous rant. Your point about replication is more
significant than some seem to appreciate. No archival study that I know
of has ever been literally replicated. Even worse none of those studies
can be replicated because the people who did them violate one of the
fundamental "ethics" of science. Every laboratory scientist must
maintain a log book which describes in great detail how the result of a
particular experiment was produced, i.e., a complete recipe that permits
an independent scientist to actually replicate the study in its entirety
to simply validate the knowledge claim being made by the scientist.
Without that capacity, the claim being made is merely an anecdote (think
of the Jim Hunton affair). It should be sobering to an academy to
realize that the corpus of its knowledge is simply a collection of
anecdotes. "Anecdotal evidence"-- the ultimate put-down, yet most of our
evidence is little more than anecdotes.
Media Sources Who Let Journalists Cheat and Go Unpunished for Cheating
Plagiarism Goes Unpunished in the Liberal Press
"Slate Attacks Plagiarizing Journalists," by Todd Huston, NewsBusters,
July 30, 2007 ---
Click Here
Slate
is no tool of the "vast right wing conspiracy," for sure
(and neither is its parent company the Washington Post), so
it is pretty amazing to see a Slate contributor take his
fellow liberal journalists to task in so stark a manner.
But, for once,
Slate is dead right on this one,
folks. The "Journalism" biz never takes their plagiarizing
miscreants to task and never makes them pay, but Jack Shafer
sure did last Friday.
This time
Shafer's ire is leveled at writer Michael Finkel who is
famous for having invented a story that appeared in National
Geographic about the slave labor of a small boy purportedly
living on an Ivory Coast cocoa plantation. Yet here he is
getting work once again in the MSM as if he was trustworthy
and professional.
Shafer rips Finkel to pieces saying at one
point, "If I had the constitution of a
hanging judge, which I don't, I'd have sent
Finkel directly to the gallows for his
[slave story] lies."
But, more important than his ripping of
writer Finkel, Shafer gives us a great
reference to a study that proves that hardly
any writer caught stealing others'
words or making stories up out of whole
cloth ever gets held to account in the MSM.
Despite its
self-image as a profession that
excommunicates and banishes those who
violate its ethical codes, journalism
routinely grants its miscreants second
chances. For example, a 1995
Columbia Journalism Review piece about
plagiarism
documented
the low price Nina Totenberg, Michael
Kramer, Edwin Chen, Fox Butterfield, and
16 other journalists paid after being
accused of nicking the words of other
writers.
Author Trudy Lieberman found that nearly
all of them were still in the business,
and some of them had even kept their
original jobs. As it turns out, not many
publications force journalists to pay
their debts to their profession and
their readers. Often, they don't even
send the bill.
If this doesn't prove that the media cares
more about the agenda and the message than
the truth, what does? And, if it doesn't
prove that, it certainly proves that the
word "professional" should never appear in
conjunction with "journalism", nor that what
they present should be trusted in any way.
In the past, Jack Shafer has claimed to be
of a libertarian viewpoint and he has
written about the failings of the media, so
this attack on journalism isn't too far out
of the ordinary, at least for him. Still,
what he has to say here is something that we
should see more often. On the other hand,
maybe wide reporting on plagiarism in the
media is something we should see less
of because the media would consider truth
and originality as an important concept?
Well, we can dream, can't we?
"In Defense of Cheating," by Donald A. Norman, UBIQUITY, vol. 6,
issue 11, April 5-12, 2005 ---
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i11_norman.html
(Dr. Norman is a well-known computer scientist and author who often challenges
common thinking --- http://www.jnd.org/ )
In a recent issue of Ubiquity, Evan Golub examined
the implications for cheating of allowing students to use computers during
examinations (Golub, E. (2005). PCs in the classroom & open book exams.
Ubiquity, 6(9).
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i9_golub.html
)
I was disturbed by Golub's article because the
emphasis was on cheating by students and possible counteractive measures.
Never did he ask the more fundamental questions: What is the purpose of an
examination; Why do students cheat? Instead, he proposed that faculty become
police enforcers, trying to weed out dishonest behavior. I would prefer to
turn faculty into educators and mentors, guiding students to use all the
resources at their disposal to solve important problems.
Golub takes as a given our current educational
methods that test by requiring students to prove that they can regurgitate
the information presented in class without assistance from others (although,
thankfully, he does allow them to consult books, reference notes, and even
internet sources). But in real life, asking others for help is not only
permitted, it is encouraged. Why not rethink the entire purpose of our
examination system? We should be encouraging students to learn how to use
all possible resources to come up with effective answers to important
problems. Students should be encouraged to ask others for help, and they
should also be taught to give full credit to those others. So, the purpose
of this contribution to Ubiquity is to offer an alternative approach: to
examine the origins of cheating, and by solving the root cause, to
simultaneously reduce or eliminate cheating while enhancing learning. (This
essay is adapted from an unpublished posting on my website: In defense of
cheating, www.jnd.org)
Continued in article
"Our most original compositions are composed exclusively of expressions
derived from others."
When
Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism after the publication of her
autobiography,
The Story of My Life (public
library), Mark Twain sent her
a note of solidarity and support, assuring her that "substantially
all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a
million outside sources." Shortly thereafter, Alexander Graham
Bell – father of the telephone – wrote Annie Sullivan, Keller's
teacher, a
letter with a similar sentiment. Bell argued that it is "difficult
for us to trace the origin of our expressions" and "we are all of
us … unconscious plagiarists, especially in childhood" – a notion
neurologist Oliver Sacks has affirmed more than a century later with his
recent insights on
memory and plagiarism, and one the poet Kenneth Goldsmith has
institutionalized with his
class on "uncreative writing."
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I think in the case of students, most plagiarism investigations center around
verbatim or nearly-verbatim passages without attribution. Sometimes, as in the
case of dissertation research, focus may be placed upon suspected and non-cited
earlier ideas and possibly mathematical proofs that are sometimes relatively
easy to reformulate in slightly different ways.
The non-cited verbatim plagiarisms of other writers and composers of course
are much more difficult to justify on ethical or legal grounds. So are the
reformulated plagiarisms of ideas, although these are much more difficult to
detect and prosecute in court.
MBAs most likely (among graduate students) to cheat and make their own
rules
Question
Where is academic cheating most likely to take place on campus?
May 6, 2007 message from Donald Ramsey
[dramsey@UDC.EDU]
For those who missed it, here is the URL for a
report that ran yesterday on NPR, identifying MBA students among the most
common cheaters. Very disturbing.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10033373
Do you remember the old days of the CPA exam, with
partitions on the tables between candidates?
Donald D. Ramsey, CPA,
Department of Accounting, Finance, and Economics,
School of Business and Public Administration,
University of the District of Columbia,
Room 404A, Building 52 (Connecticut and Yuma St.), 4200 Connecticut Ave., N.
W., Washington, D. C. 20008.
(202) 274-7054.
"MBAs most likely to cheat," India Times, September 22, 2006 ---
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/2018004.cms
BOSTON: Graduate business students in the United
States and Canada are more likely to cheat on their work than their
counterparts in other academic fields, the author of a research paper said
on Wednesday.
The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United
States and Canada found that 56 per cent of graduate business students
admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because
they believed it was an accepted practice in business.
Following business students, 54 per cent of
graduate engineering students admitted to cheating, as did 50 per cent of
physical science students, 49 per cent of medical and health-care students,
45 per cent of law students, 43 per cent of liberal arts students and 39
percent of social science and humanities students.
"Students have reached the point where they're
making their own rules," said lead author Donald McCabe, professor of
management and global business at New Jersey's Rutgers University. "They'll
challenge rules that professors have made, because they think they're
stupid, basically, or inappropriate."
McCabe said it's likely that more students cheat
than admit to it.
Jensen Comment
Since lawyers have a worst reputation for lack of integrity later in life, this
begs the question of where lawyers go bad if it's not in law school. Any
suggestions?
D-Schools Are Also Cheating
The Southern Illinois University dental school, which
is affiliated with the Edwardsville campus, is withholding grades of all
first-year students, because of questions raised about the academic merit and
integrity of the students. A university spokesman declined to provide details,
citing the need to preserve confidentiality and the presumption of innocence,
but said that all 52 first-year students would be interviewed as part of the
inquiry. Ann Boyle, dean of the dental school, issued a statement: “This matter
raises questions about the integrity and ethical behavior of Year I students and
is, therefore, under investigation. We will follow our processes as outlined in
our Student Progress Document to resolve the situation as quickly as we can.”
KMOV-TV quoted students at the dental school,
anonymously, as saying that the investigation concerned students who had tried
to memorize and share information from old exams that instructors let them see,
so the students did not consider the practice to be cheating. The Southern
Illinois incident follows two other scandals this year involving
professional school cheating: one at Duke
University’s business school and one at Indiana University’s dental school.
Inside Higher Ed, June 27, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/06/27/qt
54% of Accounting Students Admit to Cheating
SmartPros, August 31, 2007 ---
http://accounting.smartpros.com/x58970.xml
Accounting majors are just as
likely to cheat in college as other business students, according to a new
study.
The academic study -- titled
Do Accounting Students Cheat? A Study Examining Undergraduate Accounting
Students' Honesty and Perceptions of Dishonest Behavior --
surveyed 569 undergraduate business majors, including 294 undergraduate
accounting students, from seven universities in Georgia, Mississippi and
Texas.
The
study set out to find out if students who were accounting majors were as
likely to cheat or act in an academically dishonest manner as were students
with other business majors.
The
authors of the study, David E. Morris of North Georgia College & State
University, and Claire McCarty Kilian of the University of Wisconsin at
River Falls, found that 54 percent of the accounting students they surveyed
admitted to cheating, compared to 52 percent of business majors overall.
The
study also found significant disagreement among accounting majors as to what
constitutes dishonest behavior. Students were asked to review case studies
and report if the individuals involved engaged in dishonest behavior. In
three of the case studies, students disagreed on what constituted cheating
or academically dishonest behavior. Interestingly, there was also
disagreement among the accounting educators who reviewed the case studies.
Finally,
82 percent of accounting students who admit cheating in college also said
they cheated in high school.
A copy
of the questionnaire distributed to the students is available in the final
report.
MBAs most likely (among graduate students) to cheat and make their own
rules ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm#MBAs
Most of this section was moved to
Academic Fraud for Athletes ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm#Athletics
Academic Fraud for Athletes
Forwarded by Diane Graves
Copyright issues and concerns:
"…Not every use, even every educational use,
is likely to be defined as fair use. Higher education institutions need to
develop up-to-date, reliable, consistent, and clear copyright related
standards for use. "Who uses what" and "how they use it"
have become pressing issues, in large part because new media sources and the
emergence of the Web allow for the widespread dissemination of material. As
such, they raise the stakes considerably from the days when distribution was
limited to students physically enrolled in classes.
Institutions must accompany these standards with a
campaign to energize and educate the community about copyright, an issue that
is complex and often seems as though it should be someone else's problem.
Faculty, staff, and students should know when they can use material under
"fair use," when they must obtain permission (and how to obtain it),
and when and how they can obtain alternative sources of the material (e.g.,
through commissioned works or from the public domain.).
Institutions must decide how much and what kinds of
risks are worth taking with regard to use. …. Institutions that take a
liberal position regarding fair use risk exposing themselves to litigation and
the financial costs associated with it.
Regardless of the specific position taken regarding
fair use, institutions need to nurture a culture of compliance with copyright
law. This culture requires education and resources. If a coherent use policy
is created but faculty, staff, and students lack access to the resources
needed to comply (e.g., easy copyright clearance, alternative sources for
copyright material, help finding things in the public domain), the policy will
be ignored.
Excerpted from: James Hilton, "Copyright
Assumptions and Challenges," EDUCAUSE Review, November/December 2001,
pp.48-55.
Helpful web sites:
Friends of Active Copyright Education: http://www.law.duke.edu/copyright/face/
Copyright Clearance Center: http://www.copyright.com/
Copyright Management Center at Indiana
University-Purdue University at Indianapolis (Includes link to Fair Use
Checklist) http://www.iupui.edu/~copyinfo/
CREDO: Copyright Resources for Education Online
(Columbia University) http://www.ilt.columbia.edu/text_version/projects/copyright/ILTcopy0.html
Also see
The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Undermines Public Access and Sharing
(Included Copyright Information and Dead Link Archives)
Teaching Students How to Cheat — and Fail
---
https://townhall.com/columnists/pauljacob/2017/12/03/teaching-students-how-to-cheat-and-fail-n2417300?utm_source=thdaily&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=nl&newsletterad=
"Scientists behaving
badly," by Jim Giles , Nature, March 4, 2004 --- http://www.nature.com/nsu/040301/040301-9.html
They lie, they cheat and they steal. Judging by the
cases described by a group of medical journal editors, scientists are no
different from the rest of us.
Last week's annual report1
of the Committee on Publishing Ethics details the misdemeanours that the group
of journal editors grappled with in 2003. Although the number of cases - 29 -
is tiny compared with the tens of thousands of papers published in medical
journals every year, the cases cover a wide range of unethical activity, from
attempted bribery to potential medical malpractice.
Many of the tricks will be familiar to
schoolchildren. Two complaints concern cases where researchers were accused of
copying someone else's work. When editors investigated, they agreed that the
papers were almost identical versions of previously published material, and
that plagiarism was the most likely explanation.
Confronted with the evidence, researchers behind one
paper insisted that their paper contained only 5% overlap with the original.
Another author, when eventually reached by mobile phone, admitted some
similarities; but at that point the call ended abruptly.
Duplicate publication, where the same paper is
printed twice in different journals to boost publication records, is the most
common offence, accounting for seven of 29 cases. This fits with previous
studies of the practice.
A 2003 survey of opthalmology journals estimated that
at least 1.5% of all papers are duplicates2. Some
researchers seem to have perfected the art: a study released last month
identified two papers that had each been published five times3.
Compulsory action
Conflicts of interest also rear their head in the
report. One journal ran a paper on passive smoking from authors who omitted to
mention that they had received funding from the tobacco industry. Further
probing revealed that the author had received tobacco company money throughout
his career and even lobbied for the industry.
In cases where the misconduct concerns medical
treatments, the report becomes more disturbing. The editors discuss several
studies where medical procedures were run by researchers who did not have
proper ethical clearance.
One paper revealed that blood samples were taken from
healthy babies to set up a control group for a study. This was a painful
procedure that the paper's authors later said wouldn't normally be sanctioned
for research purposes. The nature of their ethical approval for the procedure
was never cleared up.
When confronted with such issues, journal editors
usually contact the researchers' employers or ethics committees, who may take
action. But this is not compulsory.
The publishing committee wants to formalize this
course of action in a code of ethical conduct for editors. It has published a
draft of such a code alongside its report, and a final version should be ready
in the next few months. The committee wants all editors of medical journals,
including its 180 or so members, to sign up to the code and agree to be bound
by the associated disciplinary procedures.
Such a code should clarify editors' duties. It should
also make clear, if it is not already, which activities are inappropriate. The
report describes one bid to persuade an editor to accept a manuscript, in
which an anonymous caller offered to buy 1000 reprints of the published paper.
"And," the caller added, "I will buy you dinner at any
restaurant you choose."
Wow Multimedia Site
An Award Winning Copyright Website --- http://www.benedict.com/
Includes MP3 Audio, MPEG Video, an online service for obtaining a copyright for
your Website materials, and advice for copyrights of software.
This portal provides
real world, practical and relevant copyright information for anyone navigating
the net. Launched on May Day '95, the Copyright Website strives to lubricate
the machinations of information delivery. As spice is to Dune, information is
to the Web; the spice must flow. Or, if you prefer another metaphor, take the
blue pill and I'll show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes...
The University of Virginia has expelled one student for plagiarism after a
computer program caught him in the act. More than 100 cases are still
pending
"Plagiarist Booted; Others Wait," by Katie Dean--- http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,45802,00.html
One student has been expelled, and more than 100
cases of plagiarism remain to be resolved at the University of Virginia after
a physics professor used a computer program to catch students who turned in
duplicate papers, or portions of papers that appeared to have been copied.
The school's student-run Honor Committee spent the
summer investigating a fraction of the cases, and will continue to do so
through the fall semester.
The committee's work has been slow over the summer
break since many students are away. Thomas Hall, chairman of the committee,
said he hopes to complete the remaining investigations by the end of October,
and finish the trials by the end of the fall semester
See
also:
Bob Jensen's
threads on plagiarism
Program
Catches Copycat Students
Catching
Digital Cheaters
Cheaters
Bow to Peer Pressure
New
Toys for Cheating Students
Get schooled in Making
the Grade
Comparing Two Documents for Possible Plagiarism
February 8, 2010 message from Hossein Nouri
[hnouri@TCNJ.EDU]
I am looking for a software
that could compare two documents (pdf files) and tell me percentages of
similarities and differences. In addition, The software could point to
similar sentences, etc. The documents are written by different individuals
and most likely not plagiarized. For example, suppose I want to compare two
chapters of two different managerial accounting books on CVP analysis
written by two different authors. What would be a good software to do this?
Hossein Nouri
February 9, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Hossein,
There are a number of document comparison software
vendors that mostly focus on plagiarism detection in databases of documents.
Most plagiarism detection programs feature enormous databases of articles
and search algorithms for comparing a given document with one that is
already in print in the database. I summarize some of the major vendors
later on in this module.
The real trick is to catch a plagiarist who has the
good sense not to copy verbatim. Changes made in the plagiarized item can
include substitution of synonyms or changing English letters to Cyrillic
lettering. Sophisticated document comparison is becoming a real science.
But there also software (usually not free) for
document comparison of two or more submitted pieces. I've not used any of
these and cannot make recommendations other than to note they exist.
Examples can be found at the following sites
http://www.surfwax.com/technology/plagiarism.htm
http://www.plagiarismdetect.com/features.php
http://checkforplagiarism.net/
http://www.checkforplagiarism.net/mnucompare.html
There are many other such services.
Probably the hardest thing to detect is the
borrowing of ideas or portions of writings by completely rewriting the
passages. What we admire greatly in the academy are expert scholars who can
read a passage and identify earlier points in time where ideas originated.
Indeed the greatest challenge for computer
scientists is to write programs where computing machines can perform as well
or better at detecting earlier patterns than human experts. Much of the
experimenting here as been done with the game of chess when trying to get
computers to identify earlier game patterns that grand masters can somehow
still recall better than the machines --- although Big Blue is getting quite
good at comparing patterns of chess moves with the history of chess play.
Gary Kasperov has a fascinating new book on this subject:
"The Chess Master and the Computer," By Garry Kasparov, New York Books,
February 11, 2010 ---
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592
Sometimes rewriting can be turned into a positive
learning experience and is done with full permission and transparency ---
http://www.white.k12.ga.us/Intervention/Interventions-Written-Expression.html
There are also some interesting group communications
experiments discussed in Duncan Luce's autobiography at
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/imbs/personnel/luce/pre1990/1989/Luce_Book%20Chapter_1989b.pdf
The Cheating Culture
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
[Paperback]
by David Callahan (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/The-Cheating-Culture-Americans-Doing/dp/0156030055/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
Customer Reviews
Review by Stephen A. Lajoie (Seattle, WA USA)
I was interested in this book because I have
observed increased incidents of cheating on college campuses. Cheating has
become bold, blatant and unpunished.
The author makes the case that cheating has
increased since 1974. The thesis of the author is that the greed of the
political conservatives has caused the epidemic of cheating, and the author
even cites a sound-bite from President Reagan, where Reagan says that he
hopes that people can still get rich in this country, to support this claim.
The book is an interesting read for the data on how
cheating has become socially acceptable among the middle class, but the
author's thesis that political conservatives, due to their greed, have
caused it is not well made. I would accuse him of neglectful induction:
he doesn't examine non-capitalist countries like the former Soviet Union for
examples of cheating. He claims that there was a golden age of honesty,
and as an example of that points to big law firms that use to only hire the
all white upper class sons of wealthy members of the law firm, but now, due
to diversity laws, hire the top graduates out of law school. The new high
pressure work environment and the drive to get to the top is the cause of
cheating in billing. The author claims this is due to post 1974 conservative
greed. Yet, the author ignored that sweat shop conditions have existed in
the past, and that this law firm is nothing more than a yuppie sweat shop.
Further, isn't hiring only the white upper class son's of the partners a way
of cheating as well? The author does not address that.
The idea that corporate greed has caused cheating
in schools is simply backwards, a confusion of cause and effect. One cheats
in school and then goes into the business world, where one cheats in
business. People do not, generally, go from cheating in business to cheating
in high school.
Cheats have done well in big business since
forever; this is nothing new since the Reagan administration. The author
does not examine the relationship between the decline of religion and the
increase in cheating, either; which is very neglectful induction. It simply
does not follow that corporate greed is the root cause of the increase in
cheating among the middle class.
Jensen Comment
There are many nations where students cheat much more commonly and blatantly
than the United States. Plagiarism is extreme in the Soviet Union where even
President Vladimir Putin plagiarized his entire Ph.D. thesis ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Celebrities
It's not clear that Vladimir Putin even read his own thesis
Large parts of an economics thesis written by President
Vladimir Putin in the mid-1990s were lifted straight out of a U.S. management
textbook published 20 years earlier, The Washington Times reported Saturday,
citing researchers at the Brookings Institution. It was unclear, however,
whether Putin had even read the thesis, which might have been intended to
impress the Western investors who were flooding into St. Petersburg in the
mid-1990s, the report said. Putin oversaw the city's foreign economic relations
at the time.
"Putin Accused of Plagiarizing Thesis," Moscow Times, March 27, 2006 ---
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2006/03/27/011.html
The Psychology of Plagiarism in Russia ---
http://psychologyinrussia.com/volumes/pdf/2009/27_2009_voiskunskii.pdf
2012 Harvard Cheating Scandal ---
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Harvard_cheating_scandal
"Dozens of students withdraw in Harvard cheating scandal." Reuters,
February 1, 2013 ---
http://www.reuters.com/assets/print?aid=USBRE9101AF20130201
As many as 60 students have been forced to withdraw
from Harvard University after cheating on a final exam last year in what has
become the largest academic scandal to hit the Ivy League school in recent
memory.
Michael Smith, Harvard's Dean of the Faculty of
Arts and Sciences, sent an email on Friday saying that more than half of the
students who faced the school's Administrative Board have been suspended for
a time.
Roughly 125 undergraduates were involved in the
scandal, which came to light at the end of the spring semester after a
professor noticed similarities on a take-home exam that showed students
worked together, even though they were instructed to work alone.
The school's student newspaper, The Harvard
Crimson, has reported that the government class, Introduction to Congress,
had 279 students enrolled.
"Somewhat more than half of the Administrative
Board cases this past fall required a student to withdraw from the College
for a period of time," Smith wrote. "Of the remaining cases, roughly half
the students received disciplinary probation, while the balance ended in no
disciplinary action."
The cases were resolved during the fall semester,
which ended in December, Smith said. Suspensions depend on the student, but
traditionally last two semesters and as much as four semesters.
In the last few months, the university has also
worked to be clearer about the academic integrity it expects from students.
"While all the fall cases are complete, our work on
academic integrity is far from done," Smith added.
"Half of students in Harvard cheating scandal required to withdraw from
the college," by Katherin Landergan, Boston.com, February 1, 2013 ---
http://www.boston.com/yourcampus/news/harvard/2013/02/half_of_students_in_harvard_cheating_scandal_required_to_withdraw_from_the_college.html
In an apparent disclosure about the Harvard
cheating scandal, a top university official said Friday that more than half
of the Harvard students investigated by a college board have been ordered to
withdraw from the school.
In an e-mail to the Harvard community, Dean of the
Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith wrote that more than half of
the students who were brought before the university's Administration Board
this fall were required to withdraw from for a period of time.
Of the remaining cases, approximately half the
students received disciplinary probation, while the rest of the cases were
dismissed.
Smith's e-mail does not explicitly address the
cheating scandal that implicated about 125 Harvard students. But a Harvard
official confirmed Friday that the cases in the email solely referred to one
course.
In August, Harvard disclosed the cheating scandal
in a Spring 2012 class. It was widely reported to be "Government 1310:
Introduction to Congress."
“Consistent with the Faculty’s rules and our
obligations to our students, we do not report individual outcomes of
Administrative Board cases, but only report aggregate statistics,” the
e-mail said. "In that tradition, the College reports that somewhat more than
half of the Administrative Board cases this past fall required a student to
withdraw from the College for a period of time. Of the remaining cases,
roughly half the students received disciplinary probation, while the balance
ended in no disciplinary action.''
Smith wrote that the first set of cases were
decided in late September, and the remainder were resolved in December.
The e-mail said that "The time span of the
resolutions in this set had an undesirable interaction with our established
schedule for tuition refunds. To create a greater amount of financial equity
for all students who ultimately withdrew sometime in this period, we are
treating, for the purpose of calculating tuition refunds, all these students
as having received a requirement to withdraw on September 30, 2012."
In a statement released when the cheating scandal
became public, Harvard president Drew Faust said that the allegations, “if
proven, represent totally unacceptable behavior that betrays the trust upon
which intellectual inquiry at Harvard depends. . . . There is work to be
done to ensure that every student at Harvard understands and embraces the
values that are fundamental to its community of scholars.”
As Harvard students returned to classes for the
current semester, professsors included explicit instructions about
collaboration on the class syllabus.
On campus Friday afternoon, students reacted to the
news.
Michael Constant, 19, said he thinks the college
wanted to make a statement with its decision. But when over half of the
students in a class cheat, not punishing them is the same as condoning the
behavior.
“I think it’s fair,” Constant said of the board’s
disciplinary action. “They made the choice to cheat.”
Georgina Parfitt, 22, said the punishment for these
students was too harsh, and that many students in the class could have been
confused about the policy.
Parfitt said she does not know what the college is
trying to achieve by forcing students to leave.
Continued in article
Jensen Question
The question is why cheat at Harvard since almost everybody who tries in a
Harvard course receives an A. We're left with the feeling that those 125 or so
students who cheated just did not want to try?
The investigation revealed that 91 percent of
Harvard's students graduated cum laude.
Thomas Bartlett and Paula Wasley, "Just
Say 'A': Grade Inflation Undergoes Reality Check: The notion of a decline
in standards draws crusaders and skeptics," Chronicle of Higher Education,
September 5, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/weekly/v55/i02/02a00104.htm?utm_source=wb&utm_medium=en
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
The first thing I recommend trying if you find a somewhat unique phrase in a
document that you think was plagiarized in whole or in part is as follows:
- Place that unique phrase on the clipboard of your computer
- Open Google at <http://www.google.com/>.
- Click on the "Advanced Search" option in Google Paste the unique
phrase into the "with exact phrase" option
- Click on Google Search
- If you do not find any useful hits try one or two other search engines
that you see recommended at <http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/searchh.htm>
If the above steps fail, then look into the options discussed below.
Reply from Roger
As is increasingly common, NTU has a subscription to
the full text version of ABI-Inform. We have several other full text databases
as well, but ABI-Inform is the database that our students seem to use. This
database is a more productive source of information for students to prepare
their essays or to plagiarise. If I suspect that a portion of an essay has
been lifted directly from elsewhere, I search the ABI-Inform database in much
the same way as Bob recommends searching Google.
BTW, last semester I used Eve 2.2 but found it a
complete waste of time. It just seemed to sit there and think for hours on
end, giving no feedback on its progress. Very frustrating. This time around,
I'm going to convert all Word documents to text to see if that speeds things
up, and then just let Eve work overnight.
Roger Debreceny [rogerd@NETBOX.COM]
Plagiarism Resources (For Students & Teachers in 2019) ---
https://www.websitehostingrating.com/plagiarism/
Turnitin ---
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turnitin
There's
Huge Value in Plagiarism Detection Using Artificial Intelligence
Turnitin to Be Acquired by Advance Publications for $1.75B ---
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2019-03-06-turnitin-to-be-acquired-by-advance-publications-for-1-75b
Turnitin was started by four students and emerged as a leading plagiarism
detection system
The Purdue Owl: Preventing Plagiarism ---
https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/section/3/33
The Latest Thing in Cheating: Use Google Translate to Plagiarize
Google Translate ---
https://translate.google.com/
Stacey Guney, assistant vice president for academic
affairs at Aims Community College, in Fort Collins, Colo., wrote that students
may use Google Translate to avoid plagiarism-detection software. Students start
by translating the text into another language, and then back to English. After
they clean up the result a bit, the text will be different enough to evade the
software.
Chronicle of Higher Education Newsletter on September 1, 2017
Jensen Comment
Having grown up in Munich my wife speaks German. Yet whenever we went back to
Germany years later she never could explain what I did for a living to her
relatives (who don't speak English).
My point here is
that it may be easier to get a decent translation of a history article in Google
Translate than to get a translation of an accounting article. The reason is that
translation software and even human translators generally have trouble
translating articles where the vocabulary is quite technical and specialized. I
speculate that college admissions essays are more apt to be plagiarized using
Google Translate than will articles on accounting for interest rate swaps and
other hedging transactions.
As for me I have a terrible time writing a mystery novel. Today I'm going to
start translating my new novel.
Claims of Cheating in Online Courses at Iowa
---
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2016/05/23/claims-cheating-online-courses-iowa?utm_source=Inside+Higher+Ed&utm_campaign=3bae57df2e-DNU20160523&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-3bae57df2e-197565045
Respondus and other online tools for
monitoring and exam cheating monitoring ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/assess.htm#OnlineOffCampus
Jensen Comment
Security video proctoring can sometimes be more preventative than onsite
proctoring. For example, if there is an onsite proctor students can see when the
proctor is distracted and cheat during the distraction such as pass answers or
use a cell phone when the proctor is looking elsewhere. If they are being
watched continuously by a proctoring camera they cannot be certain if and when
their cheating will be detected if they are cheating in a way that can be
detected by reviewing a video much like stores use videos to detect shoplifting.
Of course not all forms of cheating can be detected by a camera.
If the facial images on camera are quite good this will also help detect when
an unauthorized student is taking an exam.
"What Is Detected?" by Carl Straumsheim, Inside Higher Ed, July
14, 2014 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/07/14/turnitin-faces-new-questions-about-efficacy-plagiarism-detection-software
Jensen Comment
It's hardly surprising that most student plagiarism goes undetected. As
detection tools get more sophisticated so do the criminals in general except for
the ones that are probably too stupid to get into college or crazed out of their
minds with drug addiction.
One way to beat the plagiarism detection tools is to take the time to
cleverly rewrite and paraphrase that which is essentially copied.
Another reason that students get away with plagiarism is that in most
instances their writings are not read by many people other than a weary
professor who is probably grading their writing along with the submissions of 30
or more other students.
For professors who plagiarize the risks are greater due, in large part, to a
wider audience of readers who are also experts on the subject matter. Professor
plagiarism rewritings and paraphrasing of copied works need to be much more
clever than those of students. History Professor Matthew C. Whitaker at Arizona
State University rewrote/paraphrased and may have gotten away with it had he not
done so much of it in a book that would be carefully read by experts on the
subject matter.
Professor Whitaker got caught! But I doubt that credit can be given to
plagiarism detectors like Turnitin. I suspect he was much too clever for that
type of detection.
From Full to Associate Professor: A Rare Demotion in the Academy
"Anonymous Charges Vindicated," by Scott Jaschik, July 13, 2015 ---
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/07/13/arizona-state-demotes-history-professor-after-investigation-his-book
When an anonymous blog last year accused
Matthew C. Whitaker of plagiarizing portions of
Peace Be Still: Modern Black America from World War II to Barack Obama,
he said that he wouldn't respond to charges
presented in that way. His publisher, the University of Nebraska Press,
backed him.
The anonymous nature of the charges bothered
some at Arizona State University, where Whitaker was a full professor
and led a research center. But after the university conducted an
investigation and found misconduct, Whitaker now says that he agrees
that he made significant mistakes in the book.
Mark S. Searle, Arizona State's interim
provost, last week sent an email message to history faculty members in
which he said an investigation into the book had "identified significant
issues with the content of the aforementioned book." Searle went on to
say that "as a result of the outcomes from that investigation, Dr.
Whitaker has accepted a position as associate professor without a
Foundation Professorship [an honor he previously held], and now
co-directs his center."
Searle also forwarded a letter from Whitaker,
in which he admitted wrongdoing. Both letters were forwarded by someone
other than the authors to Inside Higher Ed.
"I have struggled to overlook the personal
nature of the criticisms, and to evaluate and recognize that there was
merit to some of them. I alerted ASU administration to the fact that the
text contained unattributed and poorly paraphrased material. I accept
responsibility for these errors and I am working with my publisher to
make the appropriate corrections," he wrote.
Continued in article
"New Book, New Allegations," by Colleen Flaherty, Inside Higher Ed,
May 13, 2014 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/05/13/arizona-state-professor-accused-plagiarism-second-time#sthash.OmcGllGb.dpbs
"A Booming Business Based on Plagiarism," by Lawrence Biemiller,
Chronicle of Higher Education, February 5, 2014 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/quickwire-a-booming-business-based-on-plagiarism/50197?cid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Turnitin.com
has conducted a “research study” of its own
effectiveness in discouraging plagiarism, and perhaps not surprisingly it
reported on Wednesday that
it’s doing a great job.
“Colleges and universities using Turnitin reduced
unoriginal writing by 39 percent over the course of the study,” the company
said. The report is vague, however, about whether there was a lot of
plagiarism to start with, or just a little. All it says for sure is that
there’s less now.
What’s more interesting is that students at some
1,000 American colleges and universities where the plagiarism-detection
service is in use submit 3.8 million assignments a year to Turnitin’s
library, which in the past five years has added 55 million papers from
American colleges. By any standard, that’s a whole lot of writing—and a
whole lot of licensing revenue for Turnitin’s owner, iParadigms, which in
2012 said
worldwide revenue reached $50-million.
The report also says, by the way, that instructors
who use the site to grade papers digitally spend about 30 percent less time
on grading than they would if they were grading on paper. So the eight
million papers in the study that were digitally graded, the company claims,
saved instructors a total of 91 years’ worth of grading time.
For good measure, the company also says that
submitting papers digitally saved nearly 20,000 trees.
New tools to prevent high tech cheating
http://online.qmags.com/TJL0813?sessionID=4CB36C8DBEEC3C846A1D7E17F&cid=2399838&eid=18342#pg1&mode1
See the article beginning on Page 213
Plagiarism Detection
"My Love-Hate Relationship With TurnItIn," by Marcattilio-McCracken,
Chronicle of Higher Education, September 8, 2015 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/My-Love-Hate-Relationship-With/232887/?cid=cr&utm_source=cr&utm_medium=en
I ’ve fully
embraced the benefits and strictures of being a professor in the digital
age. In both my online courses and live ones, I have come to rely upon our
online classroom portal to disseminate course information, post reminders,
log grades, and to serve as the primary method by which students turn in
their papers. I don’t know if it is necessarily sounder to do everything
electronically, but it’s a system that’s been honed course after course and
seems to work well for both sides of the lectern. Still, there are aspects
of it that trouble me.
Every paper turned
in to my class Dropbox gets automatically run against TurnItIn’s
plagiarism-detection tool. I detest plagiarists; they are the bane of my
professional existence. I’ve done my best to stamp out plagiarism with
antiformulaic assignment prompts, rotating exams, and gentle reminders
through the semester that committing plagiarism invites the devil into your
soul. Still, I get students who, either from Machiavellian overconfidence or
through abject laziness, plagiarize.
And so if asked,
I’ll not pretend otherwise — I love TurnItIn. It’s painless, effective, and
just as important, already there for me to use. It saves me some relatively
significant number of hours each term, agonizingly Google-searching the
paper of an unremarkable student who has suddenly turned into David Foster
Wallace on the final exam. And when I am forced to pursue an instance of
academic dishonesty, it provides a nice, tidy, official-looking report that
tends to convince students of the authority and weight behind the meeting we
are currently having. So I use it, happily.
But recently I got
an email from a student concerned about TurnItIn on dual grounds. The
student was nontraditional, and this was his first college course in some
years. He was concerned first about accidentally plagiarizing, and wondered
(naïvely, but completely understandably) if TurnItIn let students run their
work through free to make sure this didn’t happen. Second, the student
didn’t like the idea of being forced to surrender his work to a company that
would make money from it. He was articulate, respectful, and tentative.
My knee-jerk
reaction, which thankfully lasted only a minute or so, was to throw up
shields. Tell the student that such antiplagiarism tools were clearly
spelled out on our syllabus and that by staying in the course each student
was assenting to such measure in the name of academic integrity. But in
typing this into Outlook I decided I should probably be sure this was
actually the case, and so I called our university’s academic-integrity
coordinator, who said she had never gotten a question like this before, but
confirmed: So long as it was in my syllabus, I could do what I wanted.
I went back to
click "send," and discovered I was ambivalent about it. It must have taken
some guts from the student to send that email to his professor, and at the
very beginning of the semester no less. Plus, the fact that there was no
standing university policy pertaining to what was a potentially explosive
issue made the "it’s in the syllabus" argument seem astoundingly soft. Its
reliance on student ignorance rather than legal standing made me curious if
anyone had challenged it.
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism
---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
\
Question
How would you treat the issue of plagiarism below?
I received this
featured message below from one of those wearisome for-profit college promotion
sites that tries to hide behind a link to an accounting history essay at
http://www.onlineaccountingdegree.net/resources/luca-pacioli-the-father-of-accounting/
Suppose that we pretend that one of your students (Jaime) submitted this essay
to you as part of an assignment in your course.
Without taking the time and trouble to find the original source of this essay
using plagiarism detection software, suppose that you performed a simple text
stream check on Google --- as I often did when I was still teaching.
Further suppose that one of the text stream hits led to
http://www.robertnowlan.com/pdfs/Pacioli, Luca.pdf
Firstly, are the essays similar enough to call Jaime to your office to discuss
the possibility of plagiarism?
How likely is it that both essays were plagiarized?
Actually, when backing up the Robert Nowlan link it appears that the Robert
Nowlan site is likely to be legitimate
http://www.robertnowlan.com/
http://www.robertnowlan.com/contents.html
Would you pursue a charge of plagiarism against your student who submitted the
essay at
http://www.onlineaccountingdegree.net/resources/luca-pacioli-the-father-of-accounting/
Note that these two essays are not duplicates. But there are terms that lead to
suspicion in my devious mind --- terms and phrases like the following:
"vernacular"
"came under the influence of the artist Piero della Francesca from whose
work he freely"
"Pacioli went to Venice to become a tutor to the sons of a wealthy merchant.
In 1471 he arrived in Rome and entered the brotherhood of St. Francis.
Pacioli traveled extensively, wandering through Italy and possibly to the
Orient and lectured on mathematics at Perugia, Rome, Naples, Pisa, and
Venice. He was at the court of Ludovico Sforza, known as the Moor, at Milan
with Leonardo da Vinci. It was here, at the most glittering court in Europe,
that Pacioli became the first occupant of the chair of mathematics. Pacioli
spent the last years of his life in Florence and Venice, returning to the
place of his birth to die.."
I think that by now you probably get the picture.Bob Jensen's threads on
Pacioli are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Theory01.htm#AccountingHistory
Respectfully,
Bob Jensen
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jaime
Date: Mon, Jun 4, 2012 at 3:05 PM
Subject: Broken link on your page
To: Bob <rjensen@trinity.edu>
"First Trial of Crowdsourced Grading for Computer Science Homework: The
latest online crowdsourcing tool allows students to grade their classmates’
homework and receive credit for the effort they put in ," MIT's
Technology Review, September 4, 2013 ---
Click Here
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/519001/first-trial-of-crowdsourced-grading-for-computer-science-homework/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130904
The new tool is called CrowdGrader and it is available at
http://www.crowdgrader.org/.
Jensen Comment
I remember that in K-12 school students traded papers and checked answers. Now
we're coming full circle in distance education in the 21st Century. But there's
a huge difference between grading answers for work done in a classroom versus
work done remotely by distance education students. For example, an algebra or
calculus problem solved in class has controls on cheating when each student is
observed by other students and a teacher. Remotely, what is to prevent a student
from having Wolfram Alpha solve an algebra or calculus problem? ---
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
When distance education small in size (say less than 30 students) there are
alternatives for cheating controls on examinations ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Assess.htm#OnsiteVersusOnline
But when a MOOC or SMOC has over 10,000 students I have difficulty imagining
how cheating can be controlled unless students are required to take examinations
under observation of a trusted person like the village vicar or a K-12 teacher
who is being paid to observe a student taking a MOOC or SMOC examination. Having
many such vicars or teachers attest to the integrity of the examination is both
expensive and not aperfect solution. But it sounds much better to me than having
remote students grading each other without being able to observe the examination
process.
The CrowdGrader software sounds like a great idea when students are willing
to help each other. I don't buy into this tool for assigning transcript grades.
Bob Jensen's threads on OKIs, MOOCs, and SMOCs are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/updateee.htm#OKI
I suspect video cameras and Webcams deter shoplifting in much the same way
--- if the odds of getting caught increase then many potential violators are
deterred by the fear of being caught!
"Cheaters Find an Adversary in Technology," by Tripp Gabriel, The
New York Times, December 27, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/28/education/28cheat.html?_r=1&hpw
Mississippi had a problem born of the age of
soaring student testing and digital technology. High school students taking
the state’s end-of-year exams were using cellphones to text one another the
answers.
With more than 100,000 students tested, proctors
could not watch everyone — not when some teenagers can text with their
phones in their pockets.
So the state called in a company that turns
technology against the cheats: it analyzes answer sheets by computer and
flags those with so many of the same questions wrong or right that the
chances of random agreement are astronomically small. Copying is the almost
certain explanation.
Since the company, Caveon Test Security, began
working for Mississippi in 2006, cheating has declined about 70 percent,
said James Mason, director of the State Department of Education’s Office of
Student Assessment. “People know that if you cheat there is an extremely
high chance you’re going to get caught,” Mr. Mason said.
As tests are increasingly important in education —
used to determine graduation, graduate school admission and, the latest,
merit pay and tenure for teachers — business has been good for Caveon, a
company that uses “data forensics” to catch cheats, billing itself as the
only independent test security outfit in the country.
Its clients have included the College Board, the
Law School Admission Council and more than a dozen states and big city
school districts, among them Florida, Texas, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta —
usually when they have been embarrassed by a scandal.
“Every single year I’ve been in testing there has
been more cheating than the year before,” said John Fremer, 71, a Caveon
co-founder who was once the chief test developer for the SAT.
Exposing cheats using statistical anomalies is more
than a century old. James Michael Curley, the so-called rascal king of
Massachusetts politics, and an associate were shown to have copied each
other’s civil service exams in 1902 because they had 12 identical wrong
answers.
Probability science has come a long way since then,
and Caveon says its analysis of answer sheets is the most sophisticated to
date. In addition to looking for copying, its computers, which occupy an
office in American Fork, Utah, and can crunch up to one million records,
hunt for illogical patterns, like test-takers who did better on harder
questions than easy ones. That can be a sign of advance knowledge of part of
a test.
The computers also look for unusually large score
gains from a previous test by a student or class. They also count the number
of erasures on answer sheets, which in some cases can be evidence that
teachers or administrators tampered with a test.
When the anomalies are highly unlikely — their
random occurrence, for example, is less than one in one million — Caveon
flags the tests for further investigation by school administrators.
Although its data forensics are esoteric and the
company operates in the often-secretive world of testing, Caveon’s methods
are not without critics. Walter M. Haney, a professor of education research
and measurement at Boston College, said that because the company’s methods
for analyzing data had not been published in scholarly literature, they were
suspect.
“You just don’t know the accuracy of the methods
and the extent they may yield false positives or false negatives,” said Dr.
Haney, who in the 1990s pushed the Educational Testing Service, the
developer of the SAT, to submit its own formulas for identifying cheats to
an external review board.
David Foster, the chief executive of Caveon, said
the company had not published its methods because it was too busy serving
clients. But the company’s chief statistician is available to explain
Caveon’s algorithms to any client who is curious.
Other means that the company uses to stop cheating
are not based on statistics.
For the Law School Admission Council, which
administers the LSAT four times a year to a total of more than 140,000
people, Caveon patrols the Internet looking for leaked questions on sites it
calls “brain dumps,” where students who have just taken an exam discuss it
openly.
“There’s all kinds of stuff on the blogs after the
test trying to guess which stuff will show up in the future; there’s a whole
cottage industry,” said Wendy Margolis, a spokeswoman for the council.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
It would seem that one means of discouraging cheating would be to video test
takers during an entire examination much like stores videotape shoppers as they
move about a store. If the text takers know they are on camera the entire time
and the videos will be examined in a serious way, will this discourage them from
some common types of cheating (like using cell phones or passing notes) --- I
think so. Of course they must be discouraged from leaving the classroom during
an examination --- let them turn in their examinations early or pee their pants.
Grandfather was explaining price inflation to his grandson. Gramps
asserted he could go into the the grocery store in the 1940s and, for one
dollar, bring home three quarts of milk, five loaves of bread, three pounds of
ground beef, six pork chops, a carton of cigarettes, three tomatoes, a head of
lettuce and two bits in change. Later he admitted that he'd never try such a
fete today because of "all the f**king video cameras."
ProctorU ---
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OHqItx6uz8
Hi Les,
Thank you for the link to this link to Proctor U.
.
I have two concerns initially with this proctoring service.
.
Firstly, I think students should probably take an examination at the same
time to avoid any possible leakage that advantages late takers of the
examination. Exams may vary such as having three sets of exams that are
chosen at random for each test taker. But there can still be leakages of
information that advantages late takers of the exam such as knowing what
essay questions appear on each of the three versions of the examinations.
Also note that in this day of modern communication, proximity of the
students physically is probably irrelevant. Having two students reside in
Baltimore is probably not any different than having one distance education
student reside in Baltimore and the other student reside in Miami.
Secondly, I think the Webcams should be placed in the ceiling of a room in a
manner where both the desk top is visible and the student's computer screen
is visible. Preferably there is one camera for close viewing of one or a few
students. Then there should be cameras that provide coverage of the entire
room.
For example, having the woman in the video pan her Webcam around the room
before the examination begins is wasted effort. A helper in cheating could
either be hidden for that moment in the room or enter the room after the
panning takes place and then flash answers from a corner of the room
throughout the examination.
And lastly we must face up to one of the greatest risks of all which is the
risk that a top student takes an examination for weaker student. This is
particularly a problem in distance education where Student A hires Student B
to take an examination or an entire course or maybe even all courses in a
degree program.
Perhaps a thumb print should be required for each examination and each
course. That print should also placed upon a transcript. Nothing is
completely foolproof, but when more controls are put in place the more
students are discouraged from attempts to cheat.
Bob Jensen
Statalist Protocol for Questions on the Web
And how to resist helping with homework for students who are complete strangers
November 12, 2010 message from Amy Dunbar
Re: cheating by asking questions in an online
venue, I subscribe to statalist, and, at first, I didn’t always recognize
when questions were homework questions. Like this list, a core of people
answer almost all the questions. I have learned so much from them. They must
have a sixth sense about homework posts because some posts never get a
response. And if someone posts again, the poster is sent to the stata FAQ,
which tells the poster not to double post! Truly a great FAQ and a great
listserv.
http://www.stata.com/support/faqs/res/statalist.html#comment
Amy Dunbar
UConn
"Duke Begins Checking MBA Applications for Plagiarism," by Erin Ziomek,
Bloomberg Businessweek, April 12, 2013 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-12/duke-begins-checking-mba-applications-for-plagiarism
Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business is the
latest MBA program to report using plagiarism detection software to check
applicant essays during the admissions process. It’s the highest-ranked
program by Bloomberg Businessweek to come forward about using the service.
Fuqua rejected one applicant for “blatant
plagiarism” but was cautious about turning away others because the 2012-13
school year was a pilot period for using IParadigms’ Turnitin detection
system, the school said. No details on the rejected applicant were
available.
“We chose to review a large number of applications
to understand what threshold would be appropriate to use in the future to
investigate for plagiarism,” Liz Riley Hargrove, Fuqua’s associate dean for
admissions, said in an e-mail. ”We are still in the process of fine-tuning
the system and understanding what the scores mean and how we will leverage
it next year and what our investigative process will be.”
Riley Hargrove says the school had received
information that led the admissions team to believe some applicants did not
write their essays. There’s no way “to catch every single thing that’s been
manufactured, but we thought this was one step we could take to help,” she
says.
UCLA’s Anderson School of Management has rejected
about 115 applicants on the grounds of plagiarized admissions essays since
it began using Turnitin heading into the 2011-12 school year. Penn State’s
Smeal College of Business has denied about 87 since 2009 for the same
offense.
Other Turnitin users include the business schools
at Wake Forest University and Northeastern University. Most schools don’t
disclose that they are using the service, however, and the company keeps its
client roster private.
UCLA has consistently found that about 2 percent of
its MBA applicants plagiarize their essays and has traced lifted passages
back to the websites of nonprofit organizations as well as websites that
advertise free essays or help with editing essays. The school expects that
pattern to continue into its third application round this year, which means
it may find additional cases of plagiarism before fall.
“Potential” cases of plagiarism at Northeastern’s
business school were expected to double to about 100 cases by April 15,
Evelyn Tate, the school’s director of graduate recruitment and admissions,
told Bloomberg Businessweek in February.
For the 2012-13 school year, Penn State’s Smeal
reports that 40 applicants were flagged for plagiarizing essays,
representing about 8 percent of its applicant pool.
“Over the years it just feels like there is a lot
of pressure among applicants to manage perfect essays,” says Duke’s Riley
Hargrove. “This felt like the right thing to do.”
Of Course a Professor Who Does Not Check for Plagiarism Would Not Detect
Horrific Plagiariasm
The other day, a student came into the writing center with an essay that she had
"written" for her final project. I was a page into it when I understood that it
had been horrendously plagiarized, and that I was being used as a preliminary
screening service to see if the blatant theft would pass her professor's eye
unnoticed. Of course, I knew it would. The professor wasn't particularly
perceptive about such things ...
"Successful Plagiarism 101," by Brooks Winchell, Chronicle of
Higher Education, April 11, 2013 ---
http://chronicle.com/article/Successful-Plagiarism-101/138413/
The other day, a student came into the writing
center with an essay that she had "written" for her final project. I was a
page into it when I understood that it had been horrendously plagiarized,
and that I was being used as a preliminary screening service to see if the
blatant theft would pass her professor's eye unnoticed.
Of course, I knew it would. The professor wasn't
particularly perceptive about such things, and, frankly, almost every
research paper that I had seen for his course had been plagiarized to one
degree or another. He taught in the business school and knew a great deal
about managing people and businesses but practically nothing about writing
or the proper use of sources.
Perhaps he didn't really care. He once asked me to
"look over" a manuscript and "check it for grammar." When I found serious
structural and content inconsistencies, I felt obligated to inform him. But
he self-published the manuscript anyway in its original, unadulterated
format.
Still, the professor's student was in front of me
with her beautifully articulated copy-and-pasted essay that had undoubtedly
originated from some poor doctoral student's dissertation and contained
words like "adjudicated" and "prevaricates." I had been tutoring her for
weeks at the writing center. I would have loved to believe that the essay
was her own work, and that she had made astonishing progress in her writing,
due mostly to my own impeccable instruction. However, I had to admit that
the leap was, in fact, impossible given the condition of her previous week's
work—a narrative essay that had been filled with confused articles, mixed
prepositions, sentence fragments, and nonparallel structures, among other
problems.
So I had a dilemma. As an educator, I knew there
was no earthly way this student could produce a genuine five-page research
essay (by tomorrow) with her current skill set. But as a fellow human, I
also felt sorry that she had been passed along and never adequately prepared
for college-level writing, never shown how to read, how to summarize, or how
to select quotes.
What was my responsibility here as her tutor?
Clearly, the only reasonable thing to do was to give her a lesson on
plagiarism and sternly explain how she might be a better plagiarist in the
future.
To start with, I told her, her theme seemed curious
to me because it dealt with the inner workings of "lean manufacturing" as it
applied to the mass production of bioelectronics. I warned her that the
complexity of her topic choice might raise an astute professor's brow. More
than one student plagiarist has been apprehended trying to pass off as his
own work a Marxist reading of Willy Loman, or a metrical analysis of Yeats's
"Among School Children," when the student should have been describing Loman
as a pathetic loser or comparing Yeats to a jelly doughnut.
Worse, she had plagiarized a source that was well
beyond her syntactical command. It was obvious from word choice and sentence
construction that the essay had been written by someone with a profound
understanding of the Efficiency Movement of the early 20th century. A
professor attuned to plagiarism, I told her, would immediately pick up on
obscure words and phrases as signs of plagiarism, and would retrieve the
evidence from the Web.
A properly plagiarized essay, however, would
contain no obscure Latinate terminology. Every word would be three syllables
or less. The sentences would be basic, with maybe a few of the compound
variety, but no complex ones under any circumstances, and absolutely no
idioms. Not only did her use of obscure language make the offense more
glaring, but it also made reworking the paper a near impossibility as no
contemporary thesaurus would be helpful in suggesting alternate wording for
technical phrases.
The student agreed and promised to avoid any
syntactically complicated sources in future plagiarisms. However, that was
only the tip of her problem, as I went on to inform her, because even if she
had chosen a source with a somewhat basic paragraph and sentence structure,
she would still need to rearrange the lexicon to make it mirror her own
vernacular so that the professor wouldn't be alarmed by the disparity
between her speech and her writing style.
For that reason, certain portions of the essay
needed to be altered regardless of their grammatical correctness. In fact, I
advised her, a grammatical inconsistency would go a long way toward boosting
her credibility as an "original author" and dispel any hints of plagiarism.
I suggested that she misspell every few words or remove an occasional
article, out of principle.
In addition, the quotations must not be seamlessly
integrated into the research. To give the essay more authenticity, I
suggested she remove the introduction to every third quote, and neglect
explanations altogether so that the quotes would stand out like little
quarantined strangers in her essay. Better yet, she could replace every
fifth quote with a line from Disney's Fantasia, or at the very
least, with a text message so as to create the impression of authorial
distraction or perhaps technological interlude. Maybe she could insert a "2"
for "too," a "B" for "be," or an emoticon or an LOL in place of a genuine
emotional response.
Still, no matter how she reworded it, an entirely
plagiarized essay would always appear as a unified whole and, thus, raise
suspicion in an alert professor due to its very consistency. The professor
would ask: "Where are the essay's digressions? Where are its disconnected
paragraphs?"
And so I told her that to be truly thorough in her
plagiarism, she actually needed to copy from a variety of sources so that
the inconsistency in voice would appear genuine to the academic reader. In
addition, since structuring such a sophisticated act of plagiarism would be
a near impossibility for the student, the inevitable mixed bag that resulted
would undoubtedly replicate with accuracy a struggling student's writing.
Continued in article
"Plagiarism, Profanity, Fraud, and Design,"
by Josh Keller, Chronicle of Higher Education, November 4, 2011 ---
Click Here
http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/crosstalk-plagiarism-profanity-fraud-and-design/34119?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Plagiarism: A study of 24 million college papers by
Turnitin, which makes plagiarism-detection software, finds that
college students are
most likely to lift copy from Wikipedia, Yahoo Answers, and
Slideshare. The study counted all
suspiciously similar language and did not consider whether students
cited the sources they lifted from. Via the Scholarly Kitchen, where
Phil Davis
noted some of the study’s limitations.
Profanity: A Web site
promoting Oberlin College co-created by its social media
coordinator,
Why the F*** Should I Choose Oberlin?,
drew varied reactions and plenty of attention
last week. The site, which notes it is not officially affiliated
with Oberlin, collects profanity-laced quotes about why Oberlin is
great. Georgy Cohen
interviews the co-creator, Ma’ayan
Plaut, who says she has “tacit and unofficial approval” from her
boss. On Higher Ed Marketing, Andrew Careaga says his inner
15-year-old thought the site is brilliant, but his 51-year-old
“shook his jaded head.”
Fraud:
Educause offers advice on how colleges can
respond to a Dear Colleague letter from
the U.S. Department of Education that asks colleges to limit
student-aid fraud in online programs.
Design: Keith Hampson argues that good
design will play an increasingly important role
in the college student experience as college
move online. “Somehow, though, digital higher education—both its
software and content—has managed to remain untouched by good design.
Design is not even on the agenda,” he says.
Bob Jensen's threads on higher education
controversies are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/HigherEdControversies.htm
"Rooting Out Plagiarism in MBA Admission Essays," by Louis Lavelle,
Business Week, December 14, 2011 ---
http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2011/12/rooting_out_plagiarism_in_mba_admission_essays.html
Don’t say you haven’t been warned. For some time
now Bloomberg Businessweek has been reporting on a new service
offered by Turnitin that checks admissions essays for
signs of possible plagiarism. One business school
in particular, Penn State’s
Smeal College of Business,
has been at the forefront of the effort to
root out the problem. Smeal’s admissions director,
Carrie Marcinkevage, signed on with Turnitin after her team discovered 29
cases of plagiarism in a batch of 360 essays. Irony alert: the essays were
on “principled leadership.”
More business schools are signing on all the time.
According to Turnitin spokesman Jeff Lorton, there are now between 10 and 20
schools currently using the service—the exact number, which includes
third-party sales and b-schools covered under their institutions’ licenses,
is hard to determine. The schools include Brandeis University’s
International Business School,
Iowa State’s College of Business,
Northeastern’s College of Business Administration, UCLA’s
Anderson School of Management, the
Wake Forest Schools of Business, and of course
Penn State’s Smeal.
The Turnitin service was launched by iParadigms in
December 2009. It scans admissions essays and compares them to a huge
database containing billions of pages of web content, books and journals, as
well as student work previously submitted to Turnitin for a plagiarism
check. Turnitin looks for instances of matching text, but leaves it to the
individual schools to determine whether it’s plagiarism or an innocent
mistake.
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I wonder what happens when parts of that essay that you wrote as a sophomore
that also helped you get a high grade in two other courses before you graduated
will turn up in the Trunitin database and signal that you might be plagiarizing
yourself.
A good essay can sometimes go a lot of miles before the warranty expires.
Years later it might even help get you tenure.
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Plagiarism: An Administrator’s Perspective," by Nels P.
Highberg, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 17, 2011 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/plagiarism-an-administrator%E2%80%99s-perspective/31775?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Jensen Comment
One of the best pieces of advice in the above article:
"Do assign projects that students cannot find already done in other places."
Accounting courses have somewhat of an advantage in that many topics in
accounting theory are not as likely as those in psychology and sociology and
literature to be covered by term paper mills and thesis writing mills. And
hiring specialists to write milled papers on such topics as accounting for
Contango Swaps is too expensive given the demand by term paper mill customers
for Contango Swap accounting term papers.
However, those of us that make materials available free on the Web about such
specialized technical topics as Contango Swap accounting most likely get
plagiarized now and then. And we cannot search for plagiarisms on the Web
because student term papers rarely get posted on the Web. However, to the extent
that faculty participate in the building of plagiarism term paper databases like
the Tournitin database ---
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm#Detection
Comparisons of Leading Plagiarism Detection Services
May 13, 2010 message from JustFit Studio
[admin@justfitstudio.com]
Hi Bob!
I have recently reviewed your threads on plagiarism here:
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm and
was impressed by how many sides of plagiarism it covers. It is very-very
good material both as a source for any further research and as a general
knowledge.
So, I simply wanted to say thank you for a good job researching the topic
and attract your attention to the article I recently posted on my website:
"Top 10 Tools to Detect Plagiarism Online". I saw
you posted the comparison of plagiarism detection services on your web page
and wanted to advice you have a look at my article. It is fresh and has
researched all the services available on the Internet and evaluated top 10
on a set of criteria. I mean maybe you will find any more information
valuable for your further research in it.
I also would really appreciate if you put a reference (link) to my article
from the web page of your threads.
Here is the link to it:
http://www.justfitstudio.com/articles/plagiarism-detection.html
Anyway I would love to read your feedback on the
article of mine. Just in case you'll have a minute to drop a line.
Thanks and regards,
Christian Farela
"To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery," by Trip Gabriel,
The New York Times, July 5, 2010 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/education/06cheat.html?hp
Thank you David Albrecht for the heads up.
The frontier in the battle to defeat student
cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central
Florida.
No gum is allowed during an exam: chewing could
disguise a student’s speaking into a hands-free cellphone to an accomplice
outside.
The 228 computers that students use are recessed
into desk tops so that anyone trying to photograph the screen — using, say,
a pen with a hidden camera, in order to help a friend who will take the test
later — is easy to spot.
Scratch paper is allowed — but it is stamped with
the date and must be turned in later.
When a proctor sees something suspicious, he
records the student’s real-time work at the computer and directs an overhead
camera to zoom in, and both sets of images are burned onto a CD for
evidence.
Taylor Ellis, the associate dean who runs the
testing center within the business school at Central Florida, the nation’s
third-largest campus by enrollment, said that cheating had dropped
significantly, to 14 suspected incidents out of 64,000 exams administered
during the spring semester.
“I will never stop it completely, but I’ll find out
about it,” Mr. Ellis said.
As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has
gone high-tech — not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the
Internet and sharing of homework online like music files — educators have
responded with their own efforts to crack down.
This summer, as incoming freshmen fill out forms to
select roommates and courses, some colleges — Duke and Bowdoin among them —
are also requiring them to complete online tutorials about plagiarism before
they can enroll.
Anti-plagiarism services requiring students to
submit papers to be vetted for copying is a booming business. Fifty-five
percent of colleges and universities now use such a service, according to
the Campus Computing Survey.
The best-known service, Turnitin.com, is engaged in
an endless cat-and-mouse game with technologically savvy students who try to
outsmart it. “The Turnitin algorithms are updated on an on-going basis,” the
company warned last month in a blog post titled “Can Students ‘Trick’
Turnitin?”
The extent of student cheating, difficult to
measure precisely, appears widespread at colleges. In surveys of 14,000
undergraduates over the last four years, an average of 61 percent admitted
to cheating on assignments and exams.
The figure declined somewhat from 65 percent
earlier in the decade, but the researcher who conducted the surveys, Donald
L. McCabe, a business professor at Rutgers, doubts there is less of it.
Instead, he suspects students no longer regard certain acts as cheating at
all, for instance, cutting and pasting a few sentences at a time from the
Internet.
Andrew Daines, who graduated in May from Cornell,
where he served on a board in the College of Arts and Sciences that hears
cheating cases, said Internet plagiarism was so common that professors told
him they had replaced written assignments with tests and in-class writing.
Mr. Daines, a philosophy major, contributed to
pages that Cornell added last month to its student Web site to bring
attention to academic integrity. They include a link to a voluntary tutorial
on avoiding plagiarism and a strongly worded admonition that “other
generations may not have had as many temptations to cheat or plagiarize as
yours,” and urging students to view this as a character test.
Mr. Daines said he was especially disturbed by an
epidemic of students’ copying homework. “The term ‘collaborative work’ has
been taken to this unbelievable extreme where it means, because of the ease
of e-mailing, one person looking at someone else who’s done the assignment,”
he said.
At M.I.T., David E. Pritchard, a physics professor,
was able to accurately measure homework copying with software he had
developed for another purpose — to allow students to complete sets of
physics problems online. Some answered the questions so fast, “at first I
thought we had some geniuses here at M.I.T.,” Dr. Pritchard said. Then he
realized they were completing problems in less time than it took to read
them and were copying the answers — mostly, it turned out, from e-mail from
friends who had already done the assignment.
About 20 percent copied one-third or more of their
homework, according to a study Dr. Pritchard and colleagues published this
year. Students who copy homework find answers at sites like Course Hero,
which is a kind of Napster of homework sharing, where students from more
than 3,500 institutions upload papers, class notes and past exams.
Another site, Cramster, specializes in solutions to
textbook questions in science and engineering. It boasts answers from 77
physics textbooks — but not Dr. Pritchard’s popular “Mastering Physics,” an
online tutorial, because his publisher, Pearson, searches the Web for
solutions and requests they be taken down to protect its copyright.
“You can use technology as well for detecting as
for committing” cheating, Dr. Pritchard said.
The most popular anti-cheating technology,
Turnitin.com, says it is now used by 9,500 high schools and colleges.
Students submit written assignments to be compared with billions of archived
Web pages and millions of other student papers, before they are sent to
instructors. The company says that schools using the service for several
years experience a decline in plagiarism.
Cheaters trying to outfox Turnitin have tried many
tricks, some described in blogs and videos. One is to replace every “e” in
plagiarized text with a foreign letter that looks like it, such as a
Cyrillic “e,” meant to fool Turnitin’s scanners. Another is to use the
Macros tool in Microsoft Word to hide copied text. Turnitin says neither
scheme works.
Some educators have rejected the service and other
anti-cheating technologies on the grounds that they presume students are
guilty, undermining the trust that instructors seek with students.
Washington & Lee University, for example, concluded
several years ago that Turnitin was inconsistent with the school’s honor
code, “which starts from a basis of trusting our students,” said Dawn
Watkins, vice president for student affairs. “Services like Turnitin.com
give the implication that we are anticipating our students will cheat.”
For similar reasons, some students at the
University of Central Florida objected to the business school’s testing
center with its eye-in-the-sky video in its early days, Dr. Ellis said.
But recently during final exams after a summer
semester, almost no students voiced such concerns. Rose Calixte, a senior,
was told during an exam to turn her cap backward, a rule meant to prevent
students from writing notes under the brim. Ms. Calixte disapproved of the
fashion statement but didn’t knock the reason: “This is college. There is
the possibility for people to cheat.”
A first-year M.B.A. student, Ashley Haumann, said
that when she was an undergraduate at the University of Florida, “everyone
cheated” in her accounting class of 300 by comparing answers during quizzes.
She preferred the highly monitored testing center because it “encourages you
to be ready for the test because you can’t turn and ask, ‘What’d you get?’ ”
For educators uncomfortable in the role of
anti-cheating enforcer, an online tutorial in plagiarism may prove an
elegantly simple technological fix.
That was the finding of a study published by the
National Bureau of Economic Research in January. Students at an unnamed
selective college who completed a Web tutorial were shown to plagiarize
two-thirds less than students who did not. (The study also found that
plagiarism was concentrated among students with lower SAT scores.)
The tutorial “had an outsize impact,” said Thomas
S. Dee, a co-author, who is now an economist at the University of Virginia.
“Many instructors don’t want to create this kind of
adversarial environment with their students where there is a presumption of
guilt,” Dr. Dee said. “Our results suggest a tutorial worked by educating
students rather than by frightening them.”
Only a handful of colleges currently require
students to complete such a tutorial, which typically illustrates how to
cite a source or even someone else’s ideas, followed by a quiz.
The tutorial that Bowdoin uses was developed with
its neighbor colleges Bates and Colby several years ago. Part of the reason
it is required for enrollment, said Suzanne B. Lovett, a Bowdoin psychology
professor whose specialty is cognitive development, is that Internet-age
students see so many examples of text, music and images copied online
without credit that they may not fully understand the idea of plagiarism.
As for Central Florida’s testing center, one of its
most recent cheating cases had nothing to do with the Internet, cellphones
or anything tech. A heavily tattooed student was found with notes written on
his arm. He had blended them into his body art.
Bob Jensen's threads on cheating are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
"Students Reach Settlement in Turnitin Suit," by Erica Hendry,
Chronicle of Higher Education, August 3, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Students-Reach-Settlement-in/7569/?utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
A two-year battle over copyright infringement
between four students and Turnitin, a commerical plagarism-detection
service, came to an apparent end last Friday in a settlement that prohibits
either party from taking further legal action.
The high-school students
first sued iParadigms, Turnitin's parent company,
in 2007 for copyright infringement, saying the company took their papers
against their will and then made a profit from them.The students' high
schools required them to use the service, which scans papers for plagarism
and then adds them to its database, which students argued could easily be
hacked.
But the students and their lawyers were handed two
decisions against them -- first from the U.S. District Court in Alexandria,
Va., in March 2008 and again this April from the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the Fourth Circuit.
The Chronicle reported in March 2008 that
the district-court judge said Turnitin's actions fell under fair use, ruling
that the company “makes no use of any work’s particular expressive or
creative content beyond the limited use of comparison with other works." He
also said the new use “provides a substantial public benefit.”
The April
opinion
from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit
upheld the lower court's decision, and sent back to the lower court a
complaint by iPardigm under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act that stated
that one of the students had gained unauthorized access to Turnitin.
Friday's settlement puts an end to that complaint
as well as any further legal action by the students -- including an
anticipated Supreme Court appeal. But
a blog post on Anon-a-blog suggests that one of
the lawyers for the students, Robert A. Vanderhye, could take up the issue
with a different group of students.
"Now the search goes out for any student who has a
paper that's being held by TurnItIn that they did not upload themselves,"
the post said.
"Students Lose, Fair Use Wins in Suit Targeting Anti-Plagiarism Tool,"
by Marc Parry, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 20, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3722/students-lose-fair-use-wins-in-suit-targeting-anti-plagiarism-tool?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
Students
have suffered another defeat in their legal fight against the
company that runs a plagiarism-detection tool popular among
professors.
A federal
appeals court last week affirmed a lower court’s decision that
the
Turnitin service does not violate the
copyright of students, even though it stores digital copies of
their essays in the database that the company uses to check
works for academic dishonesty.
The
opinion
from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit “will be
cheered by digital fair-use proponents,”
says the E-Commerce and Tech Law
blog.
Last
year’s decision in the plagiarism case — and I’m plagiarizing
here from
The Chronicle’s account of it —
was seen as carrying wider implications for other digital
services, such as Google’s effort to scan books in major
libraries and add them to its index for search purposes.
The legal battle
began in 2007, when four high-school students sued iParadigms,
the company that runs Turnitin, arguing that the company took
their papers against their will and profited from using them.
The students’ high schools required papers to be checked for
plagiarism using Turnitin. The service adds scanned papers to
its database.
U.S. District
Court Judge Claude M. Hilton had found that scanning the student
papers to detect plagiarism is a “highly transformative” use
that falls under the fair-use provision of copyright law. Mr.
Hilton ruled that the company “makes no use of any work’s
particular expressive or creative content beyond the limited use
of comparison with other works,” and that the new use “provides
a substantial public benefit.”
Steven J.
McDonald, general counsel at the Rhode Island School of Design,
reacted to the latest development in the case by calling the
fair-use analysis unsurprising “but welcome.”
“In particular,”
Mr. McDonald wrote in an e-mail message to The Chronicle
on Monday, “it underscores that the copyright owner’s rights are
simply not absolute and that ‘transformative’ uses deserve
protection themselves.”
More than
450,000 educators and millions of high school and college
students use Turnitin, according to a company fact sheet.
Last week’s
opinion also reversed and sent back for further consideration
the lower court’s decision on counterclaims made by iParadigms.
The company had put forward a claim against one of the
plaintiffs under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or
CFAA. iParadigms said it was forced to
launch an investigation — spending numerous man-hours in the
process — after the student allegedly gained unauthorized access
to Turnitin.
The E-Commerce
and Tech Law blog called attention to the reversal, saying it
“could leave Web users open to getting smacked with a large
CFAA award whenever a company suspects
someone has gained improper access to its Web site.”
Robert A.
Vanderhye, the plaintiffs’ pro bono lawyer, acknowledged that
the bulk of the opinion was a “stinging defeat.” But the lawyer
has not surrendered yet. He plans to petition for a rehearing.
He argued that
the court did not decide the issue of Turnitin sharing papers
with third parties. If a student’s paper is flagged as
unoriginal based on an earlier paper, he said, the company will
turn over that earlier paper to an instructor upon request.
“This is
not a complete, total defeat on the copyright issue,” he argued.
“That issue is still outstanding,” he said, referring to the
question of whether Turnitin infringes a copyright if it sends a
complete paper to a third party. “They didn’t decide that
issue.”
|
NY Times probes reporter's lifting from other news sources,"
Breitbart, February 15, 2010 ---
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.4e9dabc2cc4c91405b490a1b8900b36d.e1&show_article=1
The New York Times is conducting an investigation
after a Wall Street and finance reporter was found to have improperly used
wording and passages from other news organizations. Zachery Kouwe, who
joined the Times in 2008 from the New York Post, "reused language from The
Wall Street Journal, Reuters and other sources without attribution or
acknowledgement," the Times said in an editors' note.
The Times said Kouwe appeared to have "improperly
appropriated wording and passages published by other news organizations" in
a number of business articles over the past year and in posts on
NYTimes.com's DealBook blog.
According to his biography on the Times website,
the New York-based Kouwe worked from 2005 to 2008 at the New York Post,
where he was chief mergers and acquisitions reporter.
The Wall Street Journal alerted the Times to
similarities between a Journal story and a Times story of February 5, the
newspaper said.
"A subsequent search by The Times found other cases
of extensive overlap between passages in Mr. Kouwe?s articles and other news
organizations,'" the Times said.
"Copying language directly from other news
organizations without providing attribution -- even if the facts are
independently verified -- is a serious violation of Times policy and basic
journalistic standards," the newspaper said.
"It should not have occurred. The matter remains
under investigation by The Times, which will take appropriate action
consistent with our standards to protect the integrity of our journalism."
According to the Times website, Kouwe covers hedge
funds, mergers and acquisitions, private equity, investment banking and
other subjects.
Nearly seven years ago, New York Times reporter
Jayson Blair resigned over what the newspaper at the time called "widespread
fabrication and plagiarism."
Comparing Two Documents for Possible Plagiarism
February 8, 2010 message from Hossein Nouri
[hnouri@TCNJ.EDU]
I am looking for a software
that could compare two documents (pdf files) and tell me percentages of
similarities and differences. In addition, The software could point to
similar sentences, etc. The documents are written by different individuals
and most likely not plagiarized. For example, suppose I want to compare two
chapters of two different managerial accounting books on CVP analysis
written by two different authors. What would be a good software to do this?
Hossein Nouri
February 9, 2010 reply from Bob Jensen
Hi Hossein,
There are a number of document comparison software
vendors that mostly focus on plagiarism detection in databases of documents.
Most plagiarism detection programs feature enormous databases of articles
and search algorithms for comparing a given document with one that is
already in print in the database. I summarize some of the major vendors
later on in this module.
The real trick is to catch a plagiarist who has the
good sense not to copy verbatim. Changes made in the plagiarized item can
include substitution of synonyms or changing English letters to Cyrillic
lettering. Sophisticated document comparison is becoming a real science.
But there also software (usually not free) for
document comparison of two or more submitted pieces. I've not used any of
these and cannot make recommendations other than to note they exist.
Examples can be found at the following sites
http://www.surfwax.com/technology/plagiarism.htm
http://www.plagiarismdetect.com/features.php
http://checkforplagiarism.net/
http://www.checkforplagiarism.net/mnucompare.html
There are many other such services.
Probably the hardest thing to detect is the
borrowing of ideas or portions of writings by completely rewriting the
passages. What we admire greatly in the academy are expert scholars who can
read a passage and identify earlier points in time where ideas originated.
Indeed the greatest challenge for computer
scientists is to write programs where computing machines can perform as well
or better at detecting earlier patterns than human experts. Much of the
experimenting here as been done with the game of chess when trying to get
computers to identify earlier game patterns that grand masters can somehow
still recall better than the machines --- although Big Blue is getting quite
good at comparing patterns of chess moves with the history of chess play.
Gary Kasperov has a fascinating new book on this subject:
"The Chess Master and the Computer," By Garry Kasparov, New York Books,
February 11, 2010 ---
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23592
Sometimes rewriting can be turned into a positive
learning experience and is done with full permission and transparency ---
http://www.white.k12.ga.us/Intervention/Interventions-Written-Expression.html
There are also some interesting group communications
experiments discussed in Duncan Luce's autobiography at
http://www.socsci.uci.edu/imbs/personnel/luce/pre1990/1989/Luce_Book%20Chapter_1989b.pdf
Journal publishers are increasingly using
plagiarism detection software
Plagiarists beware. A group of 12 publishers have begun
using CrossCheck, software that ferrets out plagiarized articles submitted for
publication in scholarly journals. The software was created by CrossRef, a
publishing industry association, and iParadigms, a company that sells Turnitin,
software that checks student papers for plagiarized material. CrossCheck is
targeted at scholars. It flags passages that a submitted journal article may
have in common with published journal articles. The publishers will contribute
more than 29 million articles to the CrossCheck database, according to a
statement released Monday
by Elsevier. It and eight other publishers
tested the service for six months. "By creating a
pooled database of articles from multiple publishers and tested tools, we can
provide assistance to the scholarly community on an unprecedented scale," Martin
Tanke, Elsevier's managing director of science-and-technology journal
publishing, said in the statement. Other publishers contributing to the
CrossCheck database are: the Association of Computing Machinery, American
Society of Neuroradiology, BMJ Publishing Group, International Union of
Crystallography, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, The Journal of
the American Medical Association, Nature Publishing Group, Oxford University
Press, Sage, Informa UK, and Wiley Blackwell.
Andrea L. Foster, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 27, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3124&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
Scholarly Journals Using Plagiarism
Detection Software
Students may not be the only ones being checked
electronically for plagiarism. The company that offers the popular detection
service Turnitin announced this week a new service
to be used by scholarly journals.
Inside Higher Ed, April 18, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/18/qt
Also see
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/04/2546n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
"Preventing Plagiarism," by Amy Cavender, Chronicle of Higher
Education, June 11, 2010 ---
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Preventing-Plagiarism/24695/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
In the ideal world, none of us would ever have to
write a note on a student's paper like the one in this photo. Since this
isn't the ideal world, we're likely to have to deal with plagiarism
every now and again. Dealing with instances of plagiarism will be the topic
of my post for next week.
This week, I'd like to float a few ideas on
preventing plagiarism.
The way we approach writing assignments can
certainly make a difference. Most faculty are well aware that reusing the
same essay prompts from one year to another is a bad idea, and asking
students to submit longer papers in stages is useful for catching potential
problems before they get a student into real trouble. (Incremental
due dates may also reduce the temptation for students to plagiarize, since
they force students to get started earlier.)
There are some good suggestions for instructors at
pages maintained by the
The University of Texas and
The University of Alberta Libraries.
Further, I'm convinced that a lot (certainly not
all) of the plagiarism committed by undergraduates is less than fully
intentional, and that much of it stems from poor information-management
practices.
That conviction has persuaded me that I need to
change my approach to teaching students how to use
Zotero. Some
time ago, I wrote a post on
teaching tech in Political Science. In that post,
I mentioned introducing students to Zotero in order to emphasize the
collaborative nature of scholarship and to make it easy for students to
format their citations properly.
But Zotero is also a marvelous
information-management system, and is therefore well-suited to avoiding the
accidental plagiarism that results from not keeping good track of one's
sources. If students get into the habit of keeping both their sources
and their notes in Zotero, they're much less likely to inadvertently
neglect to cite a source, or to accidentally cite something as a paraphrase
or summary when it's really a direct quote.
Question
Have you considered asking your students to turn in two term papers
simultaneously, one of which is mostly plagiarized and one that is pledged to be
not plagiarized in any way with proper citations?
"Winning Hearts and Minds in War on
Plagiarism," by Scott Jaschik, Inside Higher Ed, April 7, 2008 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/04/07/plagiarism
That’s what Kate Hagopian, an instructor in the
first-year writing program at North Carolina State University, does. For one
assignment, she gives her students a short writing passage and then a prompt
for a standard student short essay. She asks her students to turn in two
versions. In one they are told that they must plagiarize. In the second,
they are told not to. The prior night, the students were given an online
tutorial on plagiarism and Hagopian said she has become skeptical that
having the students “parrot back what we’ve told them” accomplishes
anything. Her hope is that this unusual assignment might change that.
After the students turn in their two responses to
the essay prompt, Hagopian shares some with the class. Not surprisingly, the
students do know how to plagiarize — but were uncomfortable admitting as
much. Hagopian said that the assignment is always greeted with
“uncomfortable laughter” as the students must pretend that they never would
have thought of plagiarizing on their own. Given the right to do so, they
turn in essays with many direct quotes without attribution. Of course in
their essays that are supposed to be done without plagiarism, she still
finds problems — not so much with passages repeated verbatim, but with
paraphrasing or using syntax in ways that were so similar to the original
that they required attribution.
When she started giving the assignment, she sort of
hoped, Hagopian said, to see students turn in “nuanced tricky
demonstrations” of plagiarism, but she mostly gets garden variety copying.
But what she is doing is having detailed conversations with her students
about what is and isn’t plagiarism — and by turning everyone into a
plagiarist (at least temporarily), she makes the conversation something that
can take place openly.
“Students know I am listening,” she said. And by
having the conversation in this way — as opposed to reading the riot act —
she said she is demonstrating that all plagiarism is not the same, whether
in technique, motivation or level of sophistication. There is a difference
between “deliberate fraud” and “failed apprenticeship,” she said.
Hagopian’s approach was among many described at
various sessions last week at the
annual meeting of the Conference of College
Composition and Communication,
in New Orleans. Writing instructors — especially those
tasked with teaching freshmen — are very much on the front lines of the war
against plagiarism. As much as other faculty members, they resent plagiarism
by their students — and in fact several of the talks featured frank
discussion of how betrayed writing instructors feel when someone turns in
plagiarized work.
That anger does motivate some to use the software
that detects plagiarism as part of an effort to scare students and weed out
plagiarists, and there was some discussion along those lines. But by and
large, the instructors at the meeting said that they didn’t have any
confidence that these services were attacking the roots of the problem or
finding all of the plagiarism. Several people quipped that if the software
really detected all plagiarism, plenty of campuses would be unable to hold
classes, what with all of the sessions needed for academic integrity boards.
While there was a group therapy element to some of
the discussions, there was also a strong focus on trying new solutions.
Freshmen writing instructors after all don’t have the option available to
other faculty members of just blaming the problem on the failures of those
who teach first-year comp.
What to do? New books being displayed in the
exhibit hall included several trying to shift the plagiarism debate beyond a
matter of pure enforcement. Among them were
Originality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching
Writing in the Digital Age,
just published by the University of Michigan (and
profiled on
Inside Higher Ed), and
Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts,
Pedagogies, released in February by
Boynton/Cook.
Like Hagopian, many of those at the meeting said
that they are focused on trying to better understand their students, what
makes them plagiarize, and what might make them better understand academic
integrity. There wasn’t much talk of magic bullets, but lots of ideas about
ways to better see the issue from a student perspective — and to find ways
to use that perspective to promote integrity.
Continued in article
February 10, 2007 message from Mark McCrohon
Dear Bob,
I have developed a plagiarism detection tool called
DOC Cop that may be of interest to you and your colleagues.
DOC Cop does NOT take ownership or copyright of
your material. It does not retain your material beyond the time it takes to
generate your report.
DOC Cop is lightning fast:
* When processing documents, DOC Cop scans a
document of up to 500 words against the web in minutes.
* When processing a corpus, DOC Cop scans one
million words, a thousand thousand-word documents or Homer's Odyssey
against Joyce's Ulysses within 20 minutes.
DOC Cop is on the web at
http://www.doccop.com
and processes your material free of charge.
Featuring:
* 8-hour turnaround
* Create and submit your own corpus
* Detailed reports
* Entirely web based, no installation necessary
* Exclude repetitious text (e.g. the question itself)
* Include your own material (e.g. lecture notes)
* Online support * SSL Security (128 Bit)
Thank you very much for your consideration of DOC
Cop.
Sincerely, Mark McCrohon
DOC Cop Plagiarism Detection
ABN: 97 815 799 245
doccop@doccop.com
* DOC Cop Plagiarism Detection guarantees that
no submission is copied, retained elsewhere, passed on to others or
sold. DOC Cop Plagiarism Detection guarantees to delete every submission
once processing is complete.
* Mark McCrohon developed software for the
Department of Economics, the Department of Accounting and Business
Information Systems and the Teaching and Learning Unit in the Faculty of
Economics and Commerce at The University of Melbourne from 1998 to 2005.
Throughout 2006, Mark devoted himself to the
development and deployment of DOC Cop Plagiarism Detection.
Software Strives to Spot Plagiarism Before Publication
After a series of damaging newspaper scandals involving
plagiarism in recent years, a new piece of software looks to help editors stop
wrongdoers before their articles go to print. The LexisNexis data collection
service has introduced CopyGuard, a program aimed at exposing plagiarists or
spotting copyright infringement. According to John Barrie, chief executive of
iParadigms, the company that developed the program with LexisNexis, CopyGuard
can generate a report that calculates the percentage of material suspected of
not being original, highlights that text and pinpoints its possible original
source, all within seconds.
Tania Ralli, "Software Strives to Spot Plagiarism Before Publication," The
New York Times, September 5, 2005 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/technology/05plagiarism.html
September 2, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]
INTELLECTUAL HONESTY IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE
"[T]echnology also adds new vistas to in-class
cheating. Cell phones and PDA's provide a platform to share real time text
messaging, adding a new angle to a note tossed not only from one side of a
room to another, but also from one side of the campus or further beyond. With
programmable calculators, PDA's and other handheld intelligent devices,
students can store notes, access websites, send e-mail, or grab ready-made
formulas to ease calculations. Camera phones have also been reported as
potential devices for cheating by scanning a test’s contents for later
review. No gum wrapper or note tucked into a sleeve can compare to the storage
and intelligence of these devices."
In the conference paper "Intellectual Honesty in
the Electronic Age" (presented at the University of Calgary) John Iliff
and Judy Xiao, College of Staten Island, CUNY, give an overview of why
students cheat and provide several ways, including technological solutions,
for preventing cheating. The paper is available online at http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/~jiliff/iliff_xiao.htm
See also:
"Combating Cheating in Online Student Assessment" CIT INFOBITS,
July 2004 http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjul04.html#3
For more information about the annual University of Calgary's Best
Practices in e-Learning Online Conference, held August 23-27, 2004, go to http://elearn.ucalgary.ca/conference/
"Federal
Judge Rules That Plagiarism-Detection Tool Does Not Violate Students' Copyrights,"
by Jeffrey R. Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, March 28, 2008 ---
http://chronicle.com/free/2008/03/2250n.htm
A federal judge ruled this month that a commercial
plagiarism-detection tool popular among professors does not violate the
copyright of students, even though it stores digital copies of their essays
in the database that the company uses to check works for academic
dishonesty. The decision also has wider implications for other digital
services, such as Google's effort to scan books in major libraries and add
them to its index for search purposes.
The lawyer for the students who sued the company
said he plans to appeal.
Judge Claude M. Hilton, of the U. S. District Court
in Alexandria, Va., found that scanning the student papers for the purpose
of detecting plagiarism is a "highly transformative" use that falls under
the fair-use provision of copyright law. He ruled that the company "makes no
use of any work's particular expressive or creative content beyond the
limited use of comparison with other works," and that the new use "provides
a substantial public benefit."
The case has been closely watched by the thousands
of colleges who use the plagiarism-detection tool, called Turnitin, as well
as by opponents of the service who hope to prevent professors from becoming
anticheating police.
Last March four high-school students—two in
Virginia and two in Arizona—sued iParadigms, the company that runs Turnitin,
arguing that the company took their papers against their will and profited
from using them. The students' high schools required papers to be checked
for plagiarism using Turnitin, and the service automatically adds scanned
papers to its database. The company boasts about the size of its database as
a selling point, and colleges pay thousands of dollars per year to use it.
The students sought $900,000 as compensation for six papers they had
submitted.
Judge Hilton seemed unmoved by nearly all of the
students' arguments. "Schools have a right to decide how to monitor and
address plagiarism in their schools and may employ companies like iParadigms
to help do so," he said in his 24-page ruling.
More Issues to Explore
"I'm definitely appealing," said Robert A.
Vanderhye, a retired lawyer in Virginia who took on the students' case pro
bono. "I am positive that the appellate court will reverse" on the fair-use
issue, he added.
The judge, he continued, "copied" the company's
brief. "He didn't even consider any of our arguments," said Mr. Vanderhye.
Specifically, Mr. Vanderhye said, the judge did not
address whether or not Turnitin violated federal student-privacy laws by
allowing users of the service to see papers that show students' names along
with the names of their instructors and other personal information. If the
tool finds that a newly submitted paper contains material that matches
papers already in the database, it gives the instructor the option of
retrieving the old paper for a detailed comparison.
Katie Povejsil, vice president of marketing for
Turnitin, said the company was "delighted" by the ruling.
"This was a very important case for us," she said.
"This clears up some questions" in customers' minds about the legality of
the product.
Peter A. Jaszi, a law professor at American
University, said the judge's argument that the plagiarism tool is covered by
fair use because it is transformative may well stand up to an appeal.
"However, I would expect that, on appeal, the
lawyers for the plaintiffs might explore a wrinkle that the judge doesn't
really address in the opinion," he said. "That is whether or not a new use,
a use of copyrighted material for a new purpose, is an effective or
promising use." Mr. Jaszi said previous courts have argued that how
beneficial a use of copyrighted material is helps determine whether it is
covered by fair use.
"The big debate about Turnitin, as far as I can
tell," said Mr. Jaszi, "is about whether it's a good tool."
The decision could bode well for Google. The
company has been sued by groups representing publishers and authors who
argue that the company is violating their copyrights by digitizing their
books without express permission. Google contends that, because its digital
copies are for the purpose of providing an index, it is essentially
transforming the material.
"If this opinion, as it stands, were to be endorsed
on appeal, it can only help the cause of Google Library," said Mr. Jaszi.
Also see
The U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act Undermines Public Access and
Sharing
(Included Copyright Information and Dead Link Archives)
Jensen
Comment
How many high school and undergraduate students did you ever teach who took the
time and trouble to copyright term papers? This is even rare for graduate
students except in the case of doctoral dissertations.
Newspapers,
attorneys and police use software that detects writers who steal content, as
"text piracy" threatens to become the next digital windfall for
attorneys.
"Electronic Snoops Tackle Copiers," by Randing Dotinga, Wired News,
April 2, 2004 --- http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,62906,00.html?tw=newsletter_topstories_html
New markets are finally opening up for
plagiarism-detection software, a mainstay of academia that has struggled to
expand its reach beyond term papers.
The scandal-plagued newspaper industry is
considering whether to adopt the technology to crack down on copycats, while
the New York Police Department is testing it as an investigative tool.But
experts say the biggest potential market might be the publishing industry,
which one day may find itself coping with the same kind of piracy that
bedevils movie makers and music producers.
Some law firms are already using one type of
technology "to essentially troll the Internet for the next Stephen
Ambrose," said plagiarism-detection software developer John Barrie,
referring to the late historian accused of peppering his bestsellers with
snippets stolen from other people's work.
Barrie, whose privately held iParadigms
company reports annual revenue of $10 million, is trying hard to woo new
clients beyond its 3,500 current customers. Every college and university in
the United Kingdom has already signed on for the service.
At campuses from the University of California to
the University of Florida, students must submit term papers to iParadigms' Turnitin,
a service that checks their content against huge databases of books,
websites and other students' term papers.
Turnitin, by far the most popular brand of
plagiarism-detection software, charges universities $1,000 for a license and
an annual fee of 60 cents per student.
The software has had its share of critics,
including students who worry about submitting their work to a giant database
without compensation or recognition of their copyrights.
Some prestigious universities, including Harvard,
Yale and Stanford, refuse to adopt the software. Meanwhile, students at
universities with honor codes point out that there's no sense in pledging to
be honest if administrators and professors figure some of them are lying.
"It raises all kinds of funny issues in that
sense," said Rutgers University professor of management Donald McCabe,
who studies college cheating and thinks schools should emphasize plagiarism
prevention instead of trying to bust plagiarists.
Barrie, however, claimed the copyright concerns are
overblown, and earlier this year told
Court TV that students could still "take their Macbeth essay to the
market and make millions."
News coverage of Turnitin has fallen over the last
few years after its debut in the late 1990s, but the latest batch of
journalism scandals has resurrected the media's interest.
First, The
Hartford Courant newspaper in Connecticut announced it would
consider using the technology after Turnitin software discovered that the
president of a state university campus had plagiarized
some of an op-ed commentary from three sources, including The New York
Times, which suffered its own plagiarism scandal last year during the
notorious Jayson
Blair affair. (The university president later resigned.)
April 1, 2005 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
COMPUTERS IN THE CLASSROOM AND OPEN BOOK EXAMS
In "PCs in the Classroom & Open Book Exams" (UBIQUITY, vol. 6, issue 9,
March 15-22, 2005), Evan Golub asks and supplies some answers to questions
regarding open-book/open-note exams. When classroom computer use is allowed
and encouraged, how can instructors secure the open-book exam environment?
How can cheating be minimized when students are allowed Internet access
during open-book exams? Golub's suggested solutions are available online at
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v6i9_golub.html
Ubiquity is a free, Web-based publication of the
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), "dedicated to fostering critical
analysis and in-depth commentary on issues relating to the nature,
constitution, structure, science, engineering, technology, practices, and
paradigms of the IT profession." For more information, contact: Ubiquity,
email: ubiquity@acm.org ; Web:
http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/
For more information on the ACM, contact: ACM, One Astor Plaza, 1515
Broadway, New York, NY 10036, USA; tel: 800-342-6626 or 212-626-0500; Web:
http://www.acm.org/
"Probing for Plagiarism in the Virtual Classroom," by
Lindsey S. Hamlin and William T. Ryan, Syllabus, May 2003 --- http://www.syllabus.com/article.asp?id=7627
Virtual learning in higher education has seen
enormous progress in both public and private universities. Has the growth of
online education made it difficult for educators to ensure that the student
who earns the credit for the course is the one who actually did the work?
Colleges venturing into online education face a great
deal of scrutiny among educators over the question of academic integrity. They
often assume that Internet technology and online classrooms provide students
with new and easier ways to cheat. However, the potential for cheating in
online courses is about equal to that in traditional courses. In fact, with
the Web sites and software now available, educators have a better ability to
detect and battle plagiarism and cheating in virtual and traditional
classrooms alike. And various online assessment tools, assignments, and
activities available within a virtual course, including threaded discussions,
chats, quizzes, and group presentations, are by their very nature a deterrent
to cheating.
Virtual vs. Traditional Cheating
Unfortunately, cheating has always existed and will continue as long as there
is temptation to do so. In 2002, 47 students at Simon Frasier University
turned in nearly the same economics paper. According to a 1999 study conducted
by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, of 2,100 students
surveyed on 21 campuses across the country, about one-third of the
participating students admitted to serious test cheating, and half admitted to
one or more instances of serious cheating on written assignments.
(Portion of article not quoted here)
Selected Anti-Plagiarism Sites
Plagiarism.org
Self-described "online resource for educators concerned with the
growing problem of Internet plagiarism."
www.plagiarism.org
and www.turnitin.com
Plagiarized.com
"The Instructors Guide to Internet Plagiarism."
www.plagiarized.com
EVE (Essay Verification Engine)
A downloadable application that performs complex searches against
text, Microsoft Corp. Word files, and Corel Corp. WordPerfect files.
www.canexus.com
The Center for Academic Integrity
An association of more than 225 institutions that provides a forum
for identifying and promoting the values of academic integrity.
www.academicintegrity.org
What is Plagiarism?
Guidelines from the Georgetown University Honor Council.
www.georgetown.edu/honor/plagiarism.html
Avoiding Plagiarism
Guidelines from the Office of Student Judicial Affairs at the
University of California, Davis.
http://sja.ucdavis.edu/avoid.htm
|
Detecting Plagiarism
Plagiarism.org maintains a database of thousands of digitally
"fingerprinted" documents including papers obtained from term paper
mills. When an instructor uploads a student's paper to the site, the
document's "fingerprint" is cross-referenced against the local
database containing hundreds of thousands of papers. At the same time,
automated Web crawlers are released to scour the rest of the Internet for
possible matches. The instructor receives a custom, color-coded
"originality report," complete with source links, for each paper.
For a fee, this service will detect papers that are entirely plagiarized,
papers that include plagiarism from different sources, or papers that have
bits and pieces of plagiarized text.
Web-based Internet detection services, both fee-based
and non-fee-based, are on the rise. Many educators would find this growth
positive. However, a March 2002 article in The Chronicle of Higher Education
reported that two plagiarism-detection Web sites, PlagiServe.com and
EduTie.com, appeared to have ties to Web sites that sell term papers to
students. Apparently, the company that was checking student papers for
plagiarism was also selling those same papers through its term paper mill.
Although the allegations were denied by both companies, the possible conflict
of interest is a reminder to educators to be cautious in submitting student
papers to unsubstantiated sites.
Many software companies have developed innovative
programs for detecting plagiarism. Glatt Plagiarism Services Inc. produces the
Glatt Plagiarism Screening Program, which eliminates every fifth word of the
suspected student's paper and replaces the words with a blank space. The
student is asked to supply the missing words. The number of correct responses,
the amount of time intervening, and various other factors are considered in
assessing the final Plagiarism Probability Score. This program is based on
Wilson Taylor's (1953) cloze procedure, which was originally used to test
reading comprehension.
Educators may also find the more popular Internet
search engines to be a useful tool in plagiarism detection. Google, Yahoo!,
Excite, AskJeeves, HotBot, GoTo, AltaVista, and MetaCrawler are just a few of
the search engines that can aid an instructor in detection.
When an instructor suspects a student of copying text
or notices an inconsistency in a student's writing style, he or she can enter
the suspected phrase into the search engine. The search engine will return a
listing of all Web sites that contain an exact match of the entered text.
Instructors can broaden their results by searching a few different search
engines. A simple search can summon up more than 50 sources for papers that
students can copy and present as their own, according to a New York Times
report. If a student copied text from the Internet, there is a good
possibility that the instructor will locate the source by using an Internet
search engine.
Deterring Cheating
Maintaining academic integrity is a challenge for educators in both the
traditional and virtual classroom. Although it is nearly impossible to
eliminate cheating in either type of classroom, educators can deter it by
using the tools available to them. Instructors who advise their students that
writing samples will be collected, term papers will be filtered through
plagiarism-detecting software, pop quizzes will be given throughout the
semester, and weekly participation in the discussion boards is a class
requirement are setting up a virtual environment that will deter cheating.
Continued in the article.
I am forwarding this interesting
message forwarded by the Reference Librarian at Trinity University.
Note in particular the quote:
"But since
students often get their material through a Google search, it makes sense that
that's a first port of call in detection."
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are
at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
Bob
-----Original
Message-----
From: Nolan, Chris
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 7:34 PM
To: Jensen, Robert Subject:
FW: Instructions for Google as Plagiarism Checker
Bob,
I thought you might
find this interesting...
Chris
-----Original
Message-----
From: Edward J. Leach [mailto:leach@LEAGUE.ORG]
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 4:19 PM
To: COLLIB-L@ns1.WOOSTER.EDU
Subject: Re: Instructions for Google as Plagiarism Checker
Along that same line,
the course below is one of the many sessions on this topic being presented at
the 2002 Conference on Information Technology.
http://www.league.org/2002cit/index.html
Say It Isn't So:
Plagiarism in the Digital Age Participants in this interactive, hands-on
session explore the prevalence of plagiarism in academia and learn ways in
which modern technology can be used to commit and deter plagiarism. Strategies
for preventing plagiarism, such as designing effective assignments, as well as
strategies for detecting plagiarism, such as using free and commercial
detection services, will be examined. Real-life examples are used, including
opportunities to identify problem assignments that might trigger student
plagiarism, guidelines for providing assignments that reduce the likelihood of
plagiarism, and a comparison of plagiarism detection services. This session
will benefit anyone involved in assigning and grading students' written work,
as well as those educators involved in enforcing academic honesty policies.
Carla Levesque,
Librarian; Melisandre Hilliker, Head Librarian, St. Petersburg College, FL
-----Original
Message-----
From: mchijiok@GUILFORD.EDU
Sent: Thursday, September 26, 2002 2:02 PM
To: COLLIB-L@ns1.WOOSTER.EDU
Subject: Re: Instructions for Google as Plagiarism Checker
It's amazing how
often a specific phrase produces results. Very often the suspicion of
plagiarism is triggered by an usual phrase using terminology and/or
constructions that would not be expected from a particular student. Several of
our faculty have in fact had great success with a well-chosen Google search
(using a "[string]" + [word] search in the basic search mode). That
doesn't mean that old-fashioned means aren't still relevant. In one case last
year, the professor recognized the writing and pulled the book from the shelf.
But since students often get their material through a Google search, it makes
sense that that's a first port of call in detection.
Our faculty
development committee is sponsoring a panel next week that includes
representation from the Academic Dean's Office, the Library, the Academic
Skills Center, honor board, and classroom faculty who have worked on designing
personalized assignments that make plagiarism difficult. I'll be sharing a
handout with a lot of wisdom from librarians (all fully cited, of course!)
It's another example
where a partnership between librarians and classroom faculty pays off.
Mary Ellen Chijioke
Director,
Hege Library Guilford College
5800 W. Friendly Ave. Greensboro, NC 27410
Phone: (336) 316-2129 Fax: (336) 316-2950 mchijiok@guilford.edu
"Charles T.
Kendall"
To: COLLIB-L@ns1.WOOSTER.EDU
Subject: Re: Instructions for Google as Plagiarism Checker
Sent by: COLLIB-L <COLLIB-L@ns1.WOO STER.EDU>
The specific programs
would be more precise, but I think what some professors are doing is just to
type a chosen phrase from a suspect paper into Google to see if the search
pulls up a hit.
On 26 Sep 2002 at
16:14, paul wiener wrote:
> I'd be
interested too. My guess is that it's impossible. There are > specific
programs written for tracing plagiarized material. I know > Google can
point you to them.
-- <ckendall@sterling.edu>
Charles T. Kendall, Director of Library Services
Mabee Library Sterling College (125 West Cooper) P.O. Box 98 Sterling Kansas
67579 Telephone: 620-278-4233 Fax: 620-278-4414
"Where is the
knowledge we have lost in information? Where is the wisdom we have lost in
knowledge?" T.S. Eliot, "The Rock," Chorus 1.
"Plagiarism: IT-Enabled Tools for Deceit?" by Phillip D. Long, Syllabus
Magazine, January 2002, Page 8 --- http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5916
The other day, a call came in to a faculty support
team from an instructor with what has become an increasing concern: a paper
submitted for a class assignment didn’t seem representative of the student’s
prior work. Red flags were raised. Was this a case of plagiarism? How could
the professor check?
Faculty fear of plagiarism is, sadly, legitimate. Web
sites continue to proliferate offering term papers, short essays, and reports
of one sort or another at anywhere from $7 to $30 per page. Their increasing
availability certainly suggests there is a market.
While we condemn submitting the words of others in
place of one’s own, we fail to look at why this happens. The answer is not
so simple. Some of the transgressions collected under the plagiarism banner
include failure to attribute the source of an extensive quotation, not
formally recognizing the originator of an idea, using phrases of others
without indicating so with quotation marks, and, of course, wholesale
downloading of term papers. Some transgressions are omissions, others a
failure to understand the ethics of copyright.
No faculty member should tolerate a downloaded paper.
There are software tools that can help. Send the text of a student’s paper
to one of a number of services that will search the Internet for matches. A
handful are free, but the majority, like the paper sites, are commercial
ventures, and their effectiveness varies. Depending on the sophistication of
the comparison tool, subscription paper sites may be inaccessible. But they
assuage some faculty anxiety and catch those students whose laziness extends
not just to writing the paper but to the method of procuring it.
How do they work? Most rely on statistically based
vocabulary cross-checking and comparison of structural recurrences in text
passages. For example, www.turnitin.com
uses a plagiarism-checking algorithm that appears to rely on word similarity
or identity. This assumes that most students will not bother to make wholesale
lexical or structural changes to the material they copy.
Other services develop a digital “fingerprint”
that is used to search across a wider swath of possible Web sources. But they
do so at a cost of their own. The submitted papers may be added to the
plagiarism-checking databases, violating the student’s intellectual property
rights in the process.
Plagiarism isn’t limited to text, however. The
increasing complexity of software programs makes it harder to detect the use
of computer code copied from one program and inserted into another. Alex Aiken
at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed an open source
software program for comparing software code for similarity ( www.cs.berkeley.edu/~aiken/moss.html
).
Continued at http://www.syllabus.com/syllabusmagazine/article.asp?id=5916
Anti-Plagiarism Sites and Resources
Selected Anti-Plagiarism Sites
Plagiarism.org Self-described “online resource for educators
concerned with the growing problem of Internet plagiarism.” www.plagiarism.org
and www.turnitin.com
Plagiarized.com “The Instructors Guide to Internet Plagiarism.” www.plagiarized.com
PaperBin.com A commercial service that checks student papers against
its paper database. It bills itself as a plagiarism-prevention service. www.paperbin.com
HowOriginal.com A free service that checks a 1K chunk of text against
Internet resources for plagiarism. Written samples are not added to
their database. www.howoriginal.com
EVE (Essay Verification Engine) A downloadable application that
performs complex searches against text, Microsoft Corp. Word files, and
Corel Corp. WordPerfect files. www.canexus.com
PlagiServe A free site that checks against paper mill sites to find
copied text. www.plagiserve.com
Anti-Plagiarism Resources
The Center for Academic Integrity An association of more than 225
institutions that provides a forum for identifying and promoting the
values of academic integrity. www.academicintegrity.org
What is Plagiarism? Guidelines from the Georgetown University Honor
Council. www.georgetown.edu/honor/plagiarism.html
Avoiding Plagiarism Guidelines from the Office of Student Judicial
Affairs at the University of California, Davis. http://sja.ucdavis.edu/avoid.htm
|
Chris Nolan forwarded the following link to turnitin.com --- http://www.turnitin.com/services.html
I did link to this previously in my New Bookmarks to www.plagiarism.org,
but you should also know about turnitin's expanded portfolio of services:.
Turnitin.com is the educational branch of the
Internet company iParadigms, Inc., which was founded in 1997 by a group of UC
Berkeley computer scientists and researchers concerned with the growing
problem of intellectual property theft in the Internet. They developed a
series of new, algorithm-based pattern matching techniques able to turn any
text document into a virtual 'digital fingerprint', which, with the help of a
series of automated web robots, could then be used to track sensitive
information online. iParadigms is presently using these technologies to help a
variety of organizations protect their intellectual property, ranging from
patents and other proprietary information to every form of digital media. More
information on iParadigms can be found at our corporate website, www.iparadigms.com
.
Since the researchers who developed the technologies
at the heart of iParadigms were teachers as well, it seemed the next logical
step to apply those technologies to help ensure that their own students were
not abusing Internet resources and submitting work taken from sites in the
Web. Initial tests in large classes at UC Berkeley produced disturbing
results: in one large class it was found that 45 out of 320 students--
approximately 15%-- had turned in papers either partially or completely lifted
from one or more sites online. Subsequent tests at other institutions produced
similar results, and a very recent test conducted at UC Berkeley has confirmed
that the problem, unfortunately, is only getting worse. We at Turnitin.com
are alarmed at the downward trend in academic honesty that has accompanied the
growth of the Internet, and feel our service provides invaluable assistance to
educators and students seeking to reverse this trend and ensure a level
playing field for all students. Additional information on these tests, in
addition to detailed analyses of the various techniques employed by digital
plagiarists, can be found at our informational site, www.plagiarism.org
.
Our aspiration at Turnitin.com is, ultimately, to
provide a whole portfolio of services
designed to tap the Internet's potential as a unique educational resource. We
do not see ourselves as a 'policing force' intent on punishing students, nor
as a barrier to students wishing to make full use of the educational
possibilities the Internet provides. Conversely, we also understand-- if the
Internet is ever to reach its full potential as an educational tool-- that
certain controls need to be implemented to ensure that this foreseeably
limitless resource remains an asset rather than a detriment to learning. The
first step is already being taken by the numerous subscribers to Turnitin.com
around the world. We intend to further this process by expanding our services
in the coming months to include a digital archiving system for the efficient
storage and retrieval of academic documents, and in the near future plan to
launch a sophisticated, online classroom management system available to all
Turnitin.com subscribers. A final goal will be to open our vast and growing
database of papers to members of the entire academic community, where it will
serve as a forum for both teachers and students to exchange their ideas freely
and without risk of theft. This final goal, however, is only realizable in an
Internet environment insured against intellectual property theft in any of its
many forms; as such we encourage any educator concerned with the deterioration
of academic integrity in our institutions to help us realize this goal and
become a member of the Turnitin.com educational community.
Reply from John D Tongren [jtongren@COACTIVECONNECTION.COM]
I've found http://turnitin.com/
very useful...
John
March 10, 2003 message from Barbara Scofield
[scofield_b@UTPB.EDU]
I have used the trial subscription to
www.turnitin.com
and was pleased with the report provided.
I understand that each document
submitted is added to their database, so it should provide student-to-student
checks as well as a check against other sources.
Barbara W. Scofield, PhD, CPA
Coordinator of Graduate Business Studies
The University of Texas of the Permian Basin
4901 E. University
Odessa, TX 79762
A University of Virginia professor uses a self-written computer program to
catch students who plagiarize term papers. Over 100 students are being
investigated and may be expelled. --- http://www.wirednews.com/news/school/0,1383,43561,00.html
A professor at the University of Virginia has nabbed
122 students for plagiarism using a computer program he wrote himself.
Louis Bloomfield, who teaches an introductory-level
physics course called "How Things Work," wrote the program after he
"heard rumors that papers were coming in more than once."
Update from Syllabus Web on May 21, 2001
Computer Programs Detect Plagiarism
A computer program, designed by University of
Virginia physics Professor Louis Bloomfield, searches for similar phrasing of
six consecutive words or more in student papers. He ran 1,500 term papers
submitted by e-mail over the last few years through the program and found 122
had suspiciously similar wording, including 60 papers that were nearly
identical. If found guilty of plagiarism, the students who turned in the
papers could be expelled or stripped of recently awarded degrees from the
school. Computer science professors are using software pro- grams to identify
suspiciously similar strings of code in programming assignments. The Measure
of Software Similarity (MOSS) program gained wide use after its creator, the
University of California, Berkeley's Alex Aiken, distributed it free to fellow
programming professors around the world in 1997. Another service, http://www.turnitin.com
, takes a digital fingerprint of the student's paper, then scans the Internet
and the group's own database looking for matches, highlighting passages that
match and providing links to the online source. Another service, http://www.findsame.com
, scans the Web for matching sentences or whole documents, instead of just
keywords.
See
also:
New
Toys for Cheating Students
Phony
Degrees a Hot Net Scam
Catching
Digital Cheaters
Get schooled in Making
the Grade
My links on plagiarism in my
Bookmarks are as follows --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/bookbob2.htm
Check out an article on Wired that covers the problem and an interesting set of
counter-plagiarism tools and sites.
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,33021,00.html
"Busting the New Breed of Plagiarist," by Michael Bugeja at http://awpwriter.org/bugeja1.htm
The Berkeley plagiarism-detection program ---
Go
to http://www.plagiarism.org/ Also
see
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9911/21/plagerism.detective/index.html
Proven
Results. Our proprietary plagiarism detection algorithms* have successfully been
used in multiple classes at U.C. Berkeley and abroad.
Powerful
Methods. Our computational processes for 'finger-printing' papers and
determining degrees of originality will detect plagiarism.
Speed.
We can 'finger-print' and evaluate thousands of papers each day.
Extensive
Database. Our extensive and growing database of term papers will deter your
students from plagiarizing other work.
Easy
To Use. We make every effort to customize the service's web page so that our
plagiarism deterring technology is a non-technical seamless addition to your
classes.
Increases
Quality. Instructors report that the quality of their students' work increases
when they know that manuscripts will be checked for originality.
Increases
Student Morale. Students themselves report that unchecked cheating and
plagiarism by others undermines their own efforts and educational enthusiasm.
The
purpose of this service is to insure that term papers, essays, and manuscripts,
which are submitted as a requirement for a university or college course, are
never plagiarized. This means that papers will never again be recirculated/recycled
every year, that papers will not be copied from one class and used for a
different class, that papers from one university will not find their way to
another university course, and that papers acquired from the Internet will NEVER
be used to fulfill a course requirement.
An
instructor registers his/her class with Plagiarism.org. Each instructor then
requests that her/his students upload their term papers or manuscripts to the
Plagiarism.org web site.
Each
student in the instructor's course accesses the Plagiarism.org web site.
From
the web site students can upload their work into our database designed
specifically for their particular class. Students can also access information
regarding plagiarism and information concerning intellectual property.
Our
proprietary technology converts each manuscript into an abstract representation;
essentially, we 'finger-print' each paper.
Each
term paper submitted for a class requirement is statistically checked against a
database of other manuscripts collected from different universities, classes,
and from all-over the Internet. Only cases of gross plagiarism are flagged. This
means that papers using some identical quotes or papers written on similar
topics will NEVER be flagged as unoriginal.
A
report is then emailed (or mailed) to the instructor detailing the degrees of
originality for each paper checked with Plagiarism.org.
The
fees, which I find reasonable for this remarkable service, are described below:
Our
offer is simple. To insure that only interested parties use our service there is
a one-time, $20.00 (US) fee to create an account with us. This account can be
used to upload 30 different manuscripts. We will email you a link to a
confidential webpage containing an exact numerical analysis of each manuscript's
originality. If any manuscripts were plagiarized you will know. After an account
has been created, there will be a small charge of $0.50 for every manuscript,
after 30, subsequently analyzed.
The links below were provided in T.H.E.
Journal, September 1999, pg. 50.
Acceptable Use
Policy Links
We require our students to submit all their
assignments in word then run a program called EVE against them - this searches
the web for Internet plagiarism and provides a nice report with an x%
plagiarised as well as the plagiarised content shown in red, together with the
web references. Refer http://www.canexus.com/eve/index.shtml
Trust this may be useful
Regards
Rodger Jamieson, University of NSW [R.Jamieson@UNSW.EDU.AU]
Hi all,
Food for thought....
Larry Crumbley (an
accounting professor) started the "The Society for A Return to Academic
Standards" (SFRTAS -- http://www.bus.lsu.edu/accounting/faculty/lcrumbley/sfrtas.html
) several years ago. The organization's primary goal is to "Provide
information and support for a return to academic standards in higher
education." More specifically, "SFRTAS encourages research on
faculty pander pollution, dysfunctional aspects of student evaluations of
teaching (SETs), misuse of SET data by administrators, dishonesty of students
on SETs, invalidity of SET information, denial of due process from use of SET,
defamation, impression management, post-tenure reviews, disappearing tenure,
and reasons for grade inflation."
Best,
Dan Stone,
Gatton Endowed Chair of Accounting,
Univ. of Kentucky, Von Allmen School of Accountancy, 355 Business &
Economics,
Lexington, KY 40506-0034 *
internet: dstone@pop.uky.edu,
www :
http://gatton.uky.edu/GattonPeople/People/DepartList/AccDeptList/AccFac/accf
ac_14.html
phone: 859-257-3043, fax: 859-257-3654, office: 355LL Business & Economics
"Colleges clamp down on
cheaters," by Karen Thomas, USA TODAY, June 14, 2001 --- http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/june01/2001-06-11-cheaters-sidebar.htm
In
a 1998 survey by Who's Who Among American High School Students, 80% of
college-bound high schoolers admitted they'd cheated at least once. According
to an ongoing survey of college students by McCabe, three out of four confess
to having cheated at least once. His new survey of 4,500 high school students
suggests cheating is even more significant there: 9th- through 12th-graders
told McCabe that teachers are "clueless" about how easy cheating has
become with new technologies, and 97% of high schoolers admit to
"questionable" activities, with more than half having copied from
the Net without citing the source.
"Professors
need some help in determining if papers are downloaded from the Web,"
says James Sandefur, honor chair at Georgetown. He was introduced to some
software offerings this school year and successfully convinced university
administration it was needed schoolwide in the coming year. "We'll have
forums over the summer to discuss whether all student work should be scanned
for plagiarism or whether it will be up to each professor."
To
students competing for academic opportunities, says McCabe, cheating
"becomes a question of fairness. 'Someone else is getting away with it,
so to keep up my GPA, I need to do it, too,' " he says.
And
it exists equally among challenged students and gifted ones. "I really
hate sending an e-mail to the dean about plagiarism," says UCLA professor
Steve Hardinger. He's among the university's first instructors to test an
anti-plagiarism Web service before it goes into schoolwide use this fall.
"Some have been A-students, good participants in class, everything you
want to see. Then they do this. It's very disappointing."
Paging
through test answers
With
advancing technologies such as the Net and wireless electronic devices,
students admit to sharing test answers and homework assignments via e-mail,
message boards and alphanumeric pagers (example: 1C2A3C4B). The growth of
computer-based testing (the first pilot groups took SATs online early this
year, and two states now administer high-school assessments via PCs) adds a
challenge: How do you deal with students proficient in computer-hacking
skills?
Clemson,
Babson College, the University of North Carolina and several private high
schools in Houston are among 19 schools to test out new cheat-proof exam
software this spring. Secureexam, by Software Secure, allows students to take
tests on exam-room computers or their own laptops, while blocking them from
other files or programs, such as a Web browser or e-mail. All 19 schools plan
to implement the program this fall.
Educational
Testing Services, which administers national tests including Advanced
Placement exams, is more concerned with ensuring test-takers are who they say
they are at computer-based testing centers. ETS is installing digital cameras,
so that student photographs become a permanent part of the test record. The
company this year field-tested iris scans for ID purposes in six centers.
"It worked very well," says Ray Nicosia, director of test security
at ETS.
Still,
the easiest and most pervasive form of cheating among students is cutting and
pasting term papers directly from Web sites, including dozens of businesses
that sell term papers online. Boston University tried in 1998 to shut down
nearly 10 term-paper mills used by students; the suit was dismissed in federal
court. University attorney Robert Smith says BU still plans to refile the suit
at the state level.
Other
schools are getting aggressive on campus with students, with software and
services designed to detect plagiarized text. "Not only do we wish to
battle plagiarism," says UCLA's Hardinger, "but also we'll be
letting students know we're using the service, and we'll nip it in the bud —
just don't do it."
Patrolling
for purloined passages
Columbia
University is among schools testing new software that automatically generates
and permanently embeds Web addresses as footnotes every time students use
information from the Net for school reports.
This
summer, textbook giant McGraw-Hill will begin distributing that software free
(Hyperfolio, by LearnTech) to all K-12 schools that use its texts.
"It enables teachers and students to take advantage of online content
responsibly and teaches quality research on the Internet," says
LearnTech's Amy Satin.
These
technologies are also "great teaching tools," says McCabe, who adds
that "a lot of plagiarism turns out to be unintentional."
Information technologies are blurring the lines between public information and
intellectual property in need of annotation.
As
today's high schoolers move to college, he says, the problem will escalate.
Students who use the Net freely as a research tool have "defined their
own rules and will take them to college." His ongoing study suggests that
in two to three years, "unless schools get aggressive," cheating
will dramatically increase.
Turnitin.com
is the most widely used of several anti-plagiarism services; others include
EVE (Essay Verification Engine), Integriguard and AbleSoft's rSchool
Detective. Turnitin founder John Barrie says that during term-paper season the
service checks about 6,000 papers daily, comparing them against more than 2
billion Web sites, 250,000 student papers on file and a growing database of
books and encyclopedias.
More
than 30% of papers tested turn out to be less than original, and more than 75%
of those are plagiarized from the Net. A 10-page paper takes about 30 seconds
to scan and is returned to the user with questionable text color-coded and
sourced.
Rather
than student policing, Barrie envisions his service as a preventive measure.
"We're not out to catch students cheating," he says. "We're out
to deter them from cheating."
Columbia University developed
software that automatically footnotes Internet sources while students are
writing papers.
TurnItIn --- http://www.turnitin.com/
Welcome to Turnitin.com, the world's leading resource for educators and
students concerned with the deterioration of academic integrity in our
schools. Our service makes it easy to find out if any homework assignment,
essay, or research paper has been copied or paraphrased from the Internet, and
ensures that students are getting the most out of their education. We also
offer several other unique features, including an online Peer Review
service, Digital Archiving, and an upcoming Online Grading System.
Click to
the right to take a look at one of our Originality Reports,
which make determining the originality of any paper a breeze. You can
also visit the services
section of our site to learn more about our other innovative features.
|
|
|
Turnitin.com
is currently helping high school teachers and university professors
everywhere bring academic integrity back into their classrooms. Our
system is already being used in almost every institution in the
country, and a large number of universities all over the world. We
encourage any educator who values academic honesty to help us take a
stand against online cheating and become a member of the Turnitin.com
educational community.
|
Intellectual Property Rights (Copyrights, Patents, Plagiarism, etc.)
IP @ The National Academies http://ip.nationalacademies.org/
From Internet content protection to human gene
patenting, IP rights in many forms have emerged from legal obscurity to public
debate. This website serves as a guide to the Academies' extensive work on
Intellectual Property and a forum to discuss ongoing work.
Some professors blame the Internet for
the rise in student plagiarism. Whether or not the Net has inflated this age-old
problem, the biggest wave of new cheaters may still be yet to come http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,45803,00.html
"Cheating's Never Been
Easier," by Kendra Mayfield, Wired News, September 4, 2001
But while some educators view the
Internet as the greatest plagiarism tool since the copy machine, others say
that the Web hasn't had a major impact in the rise in cheating -- yet.
"My research suggests the
Internet is not yet responsible for a dramatic increase in the number of
students who cheat but is responsible for a more-than-trivial increase in the
amount of cheating done by those who do cheat," McCabe said.
In a survey of 4,500 students at 25
high schools, McCabe found that over half of the students admitted they have
engaged in some level of plagiarism on written assignments using the Internet.
But the number of self-described
"new cheaters" who use the Internet is relatively low, McCabe said.
He estimates that 5 to 10 percent of students who had not previously engaged
in some form of plagiarism from written sources have been attracted by the
Internet.
That number is expected to grow as
students who grew up using computers in high school enter college.
"The problem is obviously
greater in high school, and this does not bode well, in my view, for
colleges," McCabe said. "Students growing up with the Internet as a
research tool are going to find it hard to change behaviors they acquire in
elementary and high school when they reach college. At least in terms of
plagiarism, I would predict that cheating is likely to increase at the college
level."
The rise in Internet plagiarism can
be partially attributed to the ease of downloading essays from online
term-paper sites, such as SchoolSucks.com and The Evil House of Cheat.
But cut-and-paste plagiarism -- by
students who don't attribute sources -- may be an even greater problem than
commercial term-paper mills.
In McCabe's high school survey, 52
percent said they had copied a few sentences from a website without citing the
source, while only 15 said they had submitted a paper obtained in large part
from a term-paper mill or website.
While technology has made it easier
for students to cheat, it has also made it easier for teachers to detect
cheating.
Some faculty turn to search engines
such as Google where they type in key phrases to determine the original source
of suspicious essay content.
Others use online
plagiarism-detection tools such as Turnitin.com,
CopyCatch and the Essay
Verification Engine.
Business is booming
for Turnitin.com's founder John Barrie, who calls his service "the
ultimate deterrent" and "the next-generation spell-checker."
The service digitally
fingerprints test papers and analyzes them against an internal database of
course papers and millions of other Internet sources, providing an originality
report to instructors within 24 hours.
The prospect of being
caught submitting papers to multiple classes is often enough to deter any
undergrad from cheating, Barrie said.
"Every high
school student, when going to college, will have to face us," Barrie
said.
Turnitin.com has over
20,000 registered users in 20 countries. In addition to high-profile
universities such as Duke and Rutgers, the entire University of California
system has signed up to use the service.
"By Christmas,
we'll have just about every university in California signed up," Barrie
said.
Recently, incidents
of digital plagiarism have gained national attention.
The University of
Virginia recently expelled
one student after a physics professor used a computer program to catch 130
students who turned in duplicate papers.
"If cheating is
that bad in the school with the No. 1 honor code in the country, it begs the
question: What's it like at our school?" Barrie said.
"Administrators
haven't the slightest idea what's going on. Students are using the Net as a 2
billion-page searchable, cut-able encyclopedia."
Honor code schools
that use plagiarism-detection software are often met with student backlash.
The rest of the article is at http://www.wired.com/news/school/0,1383,45803,00.html
See also:
Plagiarist
Booted; Others Wait
Program
Catches Copycat Students
Catching
Digital Cheaters
From Syllabus News on September
4, 2001
Duke to Combat
Plagiarism
Duke University, in
an effort to stop Internet plagiarism, has purchased a license for its faculty
to use turnitin.comóa Web site that seeks to determine whether papers had
been plagiarized. The new database, available at turnitin.com, will be
available to instructors who have probable cause to suspect plagiarism.
For more information, visit http://www.trainingtrack.com.
"Term Paper Mills, Anti-Plagiarism
Tools, and Academic Integrity," by Marie Goark, EDUCAUSE Review,
September/October 2001, pp. 40-48 --- http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm.html
Figures from around
the country are drawing attention to the issues of cheating, plagiarism, and
academic integrity:
At the University of
Virginia, 122 students were accused of cheating on term papers in introductory
physics; half may face expulsion or loss of degrees awarded in earlier years.
Footnote 1
Cases of suspected
cheating and plagiarism at Amherst College averaged five a year from 1990 to
1998 but increased to sixteen in 1999 and nineteen in 2000. Footnote 2
Reported occurrences
of academic dishonesty at the University of California-Berkeley doubled
between 1995 and 1999. Footnote 3
In a recent survey
conducted by Donald McCabe, founder of the Center for Academic Integrity at
Duke University, 72 percent of high school students reported one or more
instances of serious cheating on written work, and 15 percent of students
reported submissions of papers obtained "in large part" from a term
paper vendor or Web site. Footnote 4
A study by the Center
for Academic Integrity found that almost 75 percent of college students own up
to some form of academic dishonesty. Footnote 5
At Penn State,
despite the fact that faculty had discussed the consequences of cheating with
63 percent of the students surveyed, 17 percent of the students said they had
cheated on tests and 44 percent said they had cheated on class
assignments. Footnote 6
The amount of
cheating appears to be increasing. For example, at medium-to-large
universities, the percentage of students who said they collaborated on
assignments even though it was not permitted increased from 11 percent in a
1963 survey to 49 percent in 1993. For thirty-one small-to-medium
institutions, unpermitted collaboration increased from 30 percent to 38
percent between 1990 and 1995. Footnote 7
Furthermore, the ease
with which information can be copied from the Web and the emergence of term
paper vendors or "mills" on the Internet are likely adding to the
growing problem of plagiarism. For example, a neuro-biology professor at the
University of California-Berkeley found that 45 of 320 students in his class
had plagiarized at least part of their term paper from the Internet. Nearly 15
percent of his students plagiarized even after they had been warned that he
would use anti-plagiarism technology. Footnote 8
In a recent survey
commissioned by Knowledge Ventures, an education technology company, more than
90 percent of academic administrators and faculty interviewed said that
academic integrity is an issue on their campus. Most were unable to pinpoint
the extent of the problem, the source of the problem, or whether specific
departments or student groups were more at risk. In addition, of those who
stated that academic integrity is an issue, 83 percent said that it has become
more of an issue over the last three to five years, primarily due to the use
of the Internet as a research tool. Compounding the effects of the Internet
are difficulties in providing violations and a reluctance to report
violators. Footnote 9
Term Paper Mills
Term paper mills
existed long before the Internet. Companies who sell term papers have
advertised on campus and in magazines such as the Rolling Stone for several
years (Footnote 10). With the advent of Internet technology, though, the
number of places where papers are available has grown and the ease with which
papers can be obtained has increased. Some of these Web sites are operations
set up by students while others are for-profit ventures.
At term paper mills,
students can directly purchase pre-written papers. Some sites offer free
services or make money through advertising. Others act as an exchange--a
student must submit a paper to get a free paper. Most term paper mills charge
a fee, ranging from about $5 to $10 per page. Students may pay an additional
fee for immediate e-mail delivery (e.g., $15). Other sites will write a
customized paper for a much higher fee.
In most states, it is
illegal to sell papers that will be turned in as student work (Footnote
11). Thus many for-profit sites post disclaimers saying that the
information should be used only for research purposes and should not be
submitted as a student's own work. The companies will bill a student's credit
card using an unrecognizable company name.
Experts estimated
that more than 70 term paper mills were in operation in early 1998, up from 28
at the beginning of 1997 (Footnote 12). There is no current
estimate of the number of sites, although some lists of Internet paper mills
are maintained by academic groups (e.g., www.coastal.edu/library/mills2htm
). These sites attract secondary school students as well as college and
university students. They are also not exclusive to the United States.
The growing number of
term paper mill sites on the Web attest to their popularity among students.
AP Business wire
reports that traffic to these sites exceeds 2.6 million hits per month.
Cheater.com has
72,000 members and is growing by a few hundred per day.
With 9,500 papers in
its database, the Evil House of Cheat reports 4,000 visitors a day.
Schoolsucks.com,
which claims 10,000 visits to its site per day, reports being profitable
"from Day1." Footnote 13
Institutional
Attitudes toward Academic Dishonesty
Although academic
dishonesty is believed to have increased in the last two decades, it is not
clear that the number of infractions reported by professors has risen as well.
In a survey of 800 faculty members who were asked why they ignored possible
plagiarism violations, professors cited inadequate administrative support as a
primary factor. Footnote 14
Research by Donald
McCabe has indicated that there is an inverse correlation between the rate of
plagiarism and the emphasis on academic integrity by institutions or
instructors (Footnote 15). Thus a growing number of institutions
are addressing academic integrity through honor codes, pledges, and
discussions of ethics. One political science professor at Oakton Community
College, for example, gives his students a six-page letter spelling out his
expectations of them, as well as his obligations to them. In the first page he
asks: "Would you want to be operated on by a doctor who cheated his way
through medical school? Or would you feel comfortable on a bridge designed by
an engineer who cheated her way through engineering school? Would you trust
your tax return to an accountant who copied his exam answers from his
neighbor?" Footnote 16
Once an instructor
suspects plagiarism, it can be a laborious process proving that plagiarism has
actually taken place. Instructors may need to comb through old papers and
primary and secondary resources and compare the suspicious paper to these
sources. Tracking down a student's sources and proving plagiarism can take
days. Those who have used an automated plagiarism tool cite the streamlined
process as one of the primary advantages of the tool. But most important,
papers plagiarized from the Internet and identified by an anti-plagiarism tool
often provide an open-and-shut case.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES:
1. Diana Jean Schemo,
"U of Virginia Hit by Scandal over Cheating," New York Times, May
10, 2001.
2. "Cheating Is
Up at Amherst College, Data Suggest," Chronicle of Higher Education, May
11, 2001, A11, http://chronicle.com/weekly/v47/i35/35a01103.htm
(accessed July 12, 2001).
3. "Cheating
Thrives on Campus, As Officials Turn Their Heads," USA Today, May
21, 2001.
4. Donald L. McCabe,
"Student Cheating in American High Schools," May 2001, www.academicintegrity.org/index.asp
(accessed July 12, 2001).
5. See http://www.academicintegrity.org/cai_research.asp
(accessed July 12, 2001).
6. See <http:www.sa.psu.edu/sara/pulse/academic.shtml>
(accessed July 12, 2001).
7. See www.academicintegrity.org/cai_research.asp
(accessed July 12, 2001).
8. Verne G. Kopytoff,
"Brilliant or Plagiarized? Colleges Use Sites to Expose Cheaters,"
New York Times, January 20, 2000.
9. This survey was
conducted in February 2001 by PricewaterhouseCoopers on behalf of Knowledge
Ventures.
10. Peter Applebome,
"On the Internet, Terms Papers Are Hot Items" New York Times,
June 8, 1997.
11. Ibid; see also
Ronald B. Standler, "Plagiarism in Colleges in USA," www.rbs2.com/plag.htm#anchor333347
(accessed July 15, 2001).
12. John N Hickman,
"Cybercheats: Term Paper Shoping Online," New Republic 218, no. 12
(March 23, 1998): 14, http://www.www2.bc.edu/~rappleb/Plagiarism.htm
(accessed July 23, 2001).
13. Kendra Mayfield,
"Catching Digital Cheaters," Wired News, February 29, 2000, http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,33021,00.html
(accessed July 12, 2001).
14. "Why
Professors Don't Do More to Stop Students Who Cheat," Chronicle of Higher
Education, January 22, 1999.
15. "New
Research on Academic Integrity: The Success of 'Modified' Honor Codes,"
College Administration Publications, www.collegepubs.com/ref/SFX000515.shtml
(accessed July 12, 2001).
16. Bill Taylor,
"Integrity--Academic and Political: A Letter to My Students"
http://www.academicintegrity.org/pdf/Letter_To_My_Students.pdf
(accessed July 12, 2001).
For the remainder of
the article, go to http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm.html
Ghost Writing
New Definition of a Virgin Prostitute
I had to chuckle/cry that Berkley Term Papers will sell "plagiarism free"
papers and dissertations to students and professors who want to plagiarize.
Isn't that a little like paying for a virgin prostitute?
January 30, 2008 message from Jane
[webmaster@berkeley-term-papers.com]
Dear Professor Jensen
Link Exchange Request
I handle essay writing site for my client:
www.berkeley-term-papers.com;
which is in top 10 in Yahoo & MSN for their targeted
keywords and receives nice amount of traffic daily (email me for stats).
As an ongoing process to increase the link
popularity of the site, I am looking for some good quality sites to exchange
links with my client's site. I recently came across your site through search
and found it beneficial and informative for our site's visitors. I would
like to offer you a link exchange with my site.
My site details as follows :
URL:
http://www.berkeley-term-papers.com
Title: Term papers
Description: We offer term papers, essays, thesis,
book reports, dissertation and editing services. Order
plagiarism free custom written
products with Berkeley to get complete peace of mind.
Let me know once my link is added on your link page
I will add your link at:
http://www.berkeley-term-papers.com/main/resources.html
Also, please forward me the Link Text/Description
to be used while placing your links at these sites.
A positive response from you on this would be
highly appreciated.
Thanks for your time.
With Warm Regards
Tyler Chaman
Webmaster
Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm
Question
How easy is it to hire out term paper and other assignments?
Ghost Writers in the Sky
"At $9.95 a Page, You Expected Poetry?" by Charles McGrath, The New York
Times, September 10, 2006 ---
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/weekinreview/10mcgrath.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Well, no, she won’t — not if she’s enterprising
enough to enlist
Term Paper Relief to write it for her. For $9.95 to a page she can
obtain an “A-grade” paper that is fashioned to order and “completely
non-plagiarized.” This last detail is important. Thanks to search engines
like Google, college instructors have become adept at spotting those
shop-worn, downloadable papers that circulate freely on the Web, and can
even finger passages that have been ripped off from standard texts and
reference works.
A grade-conscious student these days seems to need
a custom job, and to judge from the number of services on the Internet,
there must be virtual mills somewhere employing armies of diligent scholars
who grind away so that credit-card-equipped undergrads can enjoy more
carefree time together.
How good are the results? With first semester just
getting under way at most colleges, bringing with it the certain prospect of
both academic and social pressure, The Times decided to undertake an
experiment in quality control of the current offerings. Using her own name
and her personal e-mail address, an editor ordered three English literature
papers from three different sites on standard, often-assigned topics: one
comparing and contrasting Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Orwell’s “1984”;
one discussing the nature of Ophelia’s madness in “Hamlet”; and one
exploring the theme of colonialism in Conrad’s “Lord Jim.”
A small sample, perhaps, but one sufficient, upon
perusal, to suggest that papers written to order are just like the ones
students write for themselves, only more so — they’re poorly organized,
awkwardly phrased, thin on substance, but masterly in the ancient arts of
padding and stating and restating the obvious.
If they’re delivered, that is. The “Lord Jim”
essay, ordered from
SuperiorPapers.com,
never arrived, despite repeated entreaties, and the
excuse finally offered was a high-tech variant of “The dog ate my homework.”
The writer assigned to the task, No. 3323, was “obviously facing some
technical difficulties,” an e-mail message explained, “and cannot upload
your paper.” The message went on to ask for a 24-hour extension, the
wheeziest stratagem in the procrastinator’s arsenal, invented long before
the electronic age.
The two other papers came in on time, and each
grappled, more or less, with the assigned topic. The Orwell/Huxley essay,
prepared by Term Paper Relief and a relative bargain at $49.75 for five
pages, begins: “Although many similarities exist between Aldous Huxley’s ‘A
Brave New World’ and George Orwell’s ‘1984,’ the works books [sic] though
they deal with similar topics, are more dissimilar than alike.” That’s
certainly a relief, because we couldn’t have an essay if they weren’t.
Elsewhere the author proves highly adept with the
“on the one hand/on the other” formula, one of the most valuable tools for a
writer concerned with attaining his assigned word count, and says, for
example, of “Brave New World”: “Many people consider this Huxley’s most
important work: many others think it is his only work. This novel has been
praised and condemned, vilified and glorified, a source of controversy, a
subject for sermons, and required reading for many high school students and
college undergraduates. This novel has had twenty-seven printings in the
United States alone and will probably have twenty-seven more.”
The obvious point of comparison between the two
novels is that where Orwell’s world is an authoritarian, police-state
nightmare, Huxley’s dystopia is ostensibly a paradise, with drugs and sex
available on demand. A clever student might even pick up some extra credit
by pointing out that while Orwell meant his book as a kind of predictive
warning, it is Huxley’s world, much more far-fetched at the time of writing,
that now more nearly resembles our own.
The essay never exactly makes these points, though
it gets close a couple of times, declaring at one point that “the two works
vary greatly.” It also manages to remind us that Orwell’s real name was Eric
Blair and that both he and his book “are misunderstood to this day.”
Continued in article
Jensen Comment
I wonder what it might take to have a research paper written and published so a
poor professor can get a better raise or maybe even tenure? At worst it could
give that professor with writer's block a booster paper that can be embellished.
Think of the possibilities. Maybe us retired professors should hire out, but
certainly not for ten bucks per page. This is only idle speculation since
absolutely no instructor wants a term paper on FAS 133. Sigh!
September 10, 2006 reply from Alexander Robin A
[alexande.robi@UWLAX.EDU]
The existence of term paper writing services is
evidence that the students don't see value in the process of writing the
paper other than to have it done and get a grade. Presumably, there is value
in creating a term paper or they should not be assigned.
But such assignments and student attempts to
circumvent them point to the fundamental problem with the entire educational
system: it ignores a fundamental reality that people learn when they want to
learn and are excited and/or curious about what they are learning. Schools,
through the use of forced assignments, lockstep classes rewards and
punishments methodically extinguish young people's natural curiosity so that
by the time they reach college, where I taught, I found that the desire to
learn for its own sake was almost entirely absent in most students. Thus the
popularity of finding various "easy ways" to get assignments done.
Obviously, changing this situation will require a
massive effort and a dramatic change in mindset about education. I don't
expect to see it in my lifetime.
Robin Alexander
September 10, 2006 reply from Elliot Kamlet
[ekamlet@STNY.RR.COM]
I think a more fundamental question comes from the
students - who are in one sense our customers. In speaking to a group of
students, I observed that education is an unusual commodity. The less we
supply, the happier our customers are. If a professor cancels class, no one
says it's unfair since they paid for a full semester of classes.
A student observed that perhaps the customer does
not want the education - just the course credit (with a A grade) leading to
a degree.
Elliot Kamlet
Binghamton University
September 10, 2006 reply from MacEwan Wright, Victoria University
[Mac.Wright@VU.EDU.AU]
I second Elliot's view. Students who fail will
spend more time and effort on persuading the system it is all a ghastly
mistake than they do on attempting to pass. I recently had a student
complain that I told him to come to my office prepared to convince me that
he should be given a pass in a subject. Then when he attended, he was asked
questions about the subject. This was unfair.
The only good news is that the ghosts appear to be
as bad as the students, and this despite the "Written by PhD's "A"s
guaranteed advertising. The potential legal implications are interesting.
Best wishes,
Mac Wright
Forwarded by Bob Overn
Adventures in Cheating: A guide to Buying Term
papers Online, by Seth Stevenson
Posted Tuesday, December 11, 2001, at 11:04 AM PT
Students, your semester is almost over. This fall,
did you find yourself pulling many bong hits but few all-nighters? Absorbing
much Schlitz but little Nietzsche? Attending Arizona State University? If the
answer is yes to any or (especially) all these questions, you will no doubt be
plagiarizing your term papers.
Good for you. You're all short on time these days.
Yes, it's ethically blah blah blah to cheat on a term paper blah. The question
is: How do you do it right? For example, the chump move is to find some
library book and copy big hunks out of it. No good: You still have to walk to
the library, find a decent book, and link the hunks together with your own
awful prose. Instead, why not just click on a term paper Web site and buy the
whole damn paper already written by some smart dude? Que bella! Ah, but which
site?
I shopped at several online term paper stores to
determine where best to spend your cheating dollar. After selecting papers on
topics in history, psychology, and biology, I had each paper graded by one of
my judges. These were: Slate writer David Greenberg, who teaches history at
Columbia; my dad, who teaches psychology at the University of Rhode Island
(sometimes smeared as the ASU of the East); and my girlfriend, who was a
teaching assistant in biology at Duke (where she says cheating was quite
common). So, which site wins for the best combination of price and paper
quality? I compared free sites, sites that sell "pre-written
papers," and a site that writes custom papers to your specifications.
Free Sites A quick Web search turns up dozens of
sites filled with free term papers. Some ask you to donate one of your own
papers in exchange, but most don't. I chose one from each of our fields for
comparison and soon found that when it comes to free papers, you get just
about what you pay for.
EssaysFree.com:
From this site I chose a history paper titled "The Infamous Watergate
Scandal." Bad choice. This paper had no thesis, no argument, random
capitalization, and bizarre spell-checking errors, ”including "taking
the whiteness stand" (witness) and "the registration of Nixon"
(resignation). My judge said if they gave F's at Columbia, well ... Instead,
it gots a good old "Please come see me."
BigNerds.com:
Of the free bio paper I chose from this site, my judge said, "Disturbing.
I am still disturbed." It indeed read less like a term paper than a
deranged manifesto. Rambling for 11 single-spaced pages and ostensibly on
evolutionary theory, it somehow made reference to Lamarck, Sol Invictus, and
"the blanket of a superficial American Dream." Meanwhile, it garbled
its basic explanation of population genetics. Grade: "I would not give
this a grade so much as suggest tutoring, a change in majors, some sort of
counseling " OPPapers.com:
This site fared much better. A paper titled "Critically Evaluate
Erikson's Psychosocial Theory" spelled Erikson's name wrong in the first
sentence, yet still won a C+/B- from my dad. It hit most of the important
points: ”the problem was no analysis. And the citations all came
from textbooks, not real sources. Oddly, this paper also used British
spellings ("behaviour") for no apparent reason. But all in all not
terrible, considering it was free. OPPapers.com, purely on style points, was
my favorite site. The name comes from an old hip-hop song ("You down with
O-P-P?" meaning other people's ... genitalia), the site has pictures of
coed babes, and one paper in the psych section was simply the phrase "I
wanna bang Angelina Jolie" typed over and over again for several pages.
Hey, whaddaya want for free?
Sites Selling Pre-Written Papers There are dozens of
these. I narrowed it down to three sites that seemed fairly reputable
and were stocked with a wide selection. (In general, the selection offered on
pay sites was 10 times bigger than at the free ones.) Each pay site posted
clear disclaimers that you're not to pass off these papers as your own work.
Sure you're not. AcademicTermPapers.com:
This site charged $7 per page, and I ordered "The Paranoia Behind
Watergate" for $35. Well worth it. My history judge gave it the highest
grade of all the papers he saw a B or maybe even a B+. Why? It boasted an
actual argument. A few passages, however, might set off his plagiarism radar
(or "pladar"). They show almost too thorough a command of the
literature.
My other purchase here was a $49 bio paper titled
"The Species Concept." Despite appearing in the bio section of the
site, this paper seemed to be for a philosophy class. Of course, no way to
know that until after you've bought it (the pay sites give you just the title
and a very brief synopsis of each paper). My judge would grade this a C- in an
intro bio class, as its conclusion was "utterly meaningless," and it
tossed around "airy" philosophies without actually understanding the
species concept at all.
PaperStore.net:
For about $10 per page, I ordered two papers from the Paper Store, which is
also BuyPapers.com and AllPapers.com.
For $50.23, I bought "Personality Theory: Freud and Erikson," by one
Dr. P. McCabe (the only credited author on any of these papers. As best I can
tell, the global stock of papers for sale is mostly actual undergrad stuff
with a few items by hired guns thrown in). The writing style here was oddly
mixed, with bad paraphrasing of textbooks which is normal for a freshman side
by side with surprisingly clever and polished observations. Grade: a solid B.
My other Paper Store paper was "Typical
Assumptions of Kin Selection," bought for $40.38. Again, a pretty good
buy. It was well-written, accurate, and occasionally even thoughtful. My bio
judge would give it a B in a freshman class. Possible pladar ping: The writer
seemed to imply that some of his ideas stemmed from a personal chat with a
noted biologist. But overall, the Paper Store earned its pay.
A1
Termpaper (aka 1-800-Termpaper.com): In some ways this is the strangest
site, as most of the papers for sale were written between 1978 and '83. I
would guess this is an old term paper source, which has recently made the jump
to the Web. From its history section, I bought a book report on Garry Wills'
Nixon Agonistes for $44.75, plus a $7.45 fee for scanning all the pages the
paper was written in 1981, no doubt on a typewriter. Quality? It understood
the book but made no critique a high-school paper. My judge would give it a D.
I next bought "Personality as Seen by Erikson,
Mead, and Freud" from A1
Termpaper for $62.65 plus a $10.43 scanning fee. Also written in 1981,
this one had the most stylish prose of any psych paper and the most
sophisticated thesis, but it was riddled with factual errors. For instance, it
got Freud's psychosexual stages completely mixed up and even added some that
don't exist (the correct progression is oral-anal-phallic-latency-genital, as
if you didn't know). Showing its age, it cited a textbook from 1968 and
nothing from after 69 (and no, that's not another Freudian stage,
gutter-mind). Grade: Dad gave it a C+. In the end, A1 Termpaper.com was
pricey, outdated, and not a good buy.
With all these pre-written papers, though, it
occurred to me that a smart but horribly lazy student could choose to put his
effort into editing instead of researching and writing: Buy a mediocre paper
that's done the legwork, then whip it into shape by improving the writing and
adding some carefully chosen details. Not a bad strategy.
Papers Made To Order PaperMasters.com:
My final buy was a custom-made paper written to my specifications. Lots of
sites do this, for between $17 and $20 per page. PaperMasters.com claims all
its writers have "at least one Master's Degree" and charges $17.95
per page. I typed this request (posing as a professor's assignment, copied
verbatim) into its Web order form: "A 4-page term paper on David Foster
Wallace's Infinite Jest. Investigate the semiotics of the 'addicted gaze' as
represented by the mysterious film of the book's title. Possible topics to
address include nihilism, figurative transgendering, the culture of
entertainment, and the concept of 'infinite gestation.' "
This assignment was total hooey. It made no sense
whatsoever. Yet it differed little from papers I was assigned as an undergrad
English major at Brown. After a few tries (one woman at the 800 number
told me they were extremely busy), my assignment was accepted by Paper
Masters, with a deadline for one week later. Keep in mind, Infinite Jest is an
1,100-page novel (including byzantine footnotes), and it took me almost a
month to read even though I was completely engrossed by it. In short, there's
no way anyone could 1) finish the book in time; and 2) write anything coherent
that addressed the assignment.
I began to feel guilty. Some poor writer somewhere
was plowing through this tome, then concocting a meaningless mishmash of words
simply to fill four pages and satisfy the bizarre whims of a solitary,
heartless taskmaster (me). But then I realized this is exactly what I did for
all four years of college and I paid them for the privilege!
When the custom paper came back, it was all I'd
dreamed. Representative sentence: "The novel's diverse characters
demonstrate both individually and collectively the fixations and obsessions
that bind humanity to the pitfalls of reality and provide a fertile groundwork
for the semiotic explanation of addictive behavior." Tripe. The paper had
no thesis and in fact had no body: ”not one sentence actually advanced
a cogent idea. I'm guessing it would have gotten a C+ at Brown ”maybe even a
B-. If I were a just slightly lesser person, I might be tempted by this
service. One custom paper off the Web: $71.80. Not having to dredge up
pointless poppycock for some po-mo obsessed, overrated lit-crit professor:
priceless.
Infinite Jest Introduction Wallace's fictional
narrative Infinite Jest is an epic approach to the solicitous and addictive
nature of humanity. The novel's diverse characters demonstrate both
individually and collectively the fixations and obsessions that bind humanity
to the pitfalls of reality and provide a fertile groundwork for the semiotic
explanation of addictive behavior. Although Wallace may have actualized the
concept of the "addicted gaze" to the literal or physical response
to the viewing of Incandenza's coveted film the Entertainment [Infinite Jest],
it is manifested symbolically throughout the novel in thedistractions of its
characters.
Nihilism
It would appear that Wallace has chosen society's
most frequently rejected and denounced individuals as the vehicle for the
narrative search for and preservation of the ultimate fix, which is
illustrated by the obsession for Incandenza's film. At the same time and
despite their diversity and distinctions, these individuals will ultimately
represent the inextricable and covert characteristics of nihilistic
behavior. School-aged malcontents, drug addicts and the physically
challenged all attempt to get a hold of a copy of the film and experience its
pleasures at any cost.
Ironically, it was the film maker James Incadenza's
habit to regularly observe the depravation of Boston's crowded street milieus,
where "everyone goes nuts and mills, either switching or watching"
(620). It is not surprising therefore that he should develop a film that would
be perceived as the panacea to the entertainment addictions of the masses.
Figurative Transgendering
Wallace devotes a substantial amount of space to the
illustration of the contradictions of gender, where the adoption of gender
behavior or symbols contrary to the character's true gender can be analyzed.
The occasion of Hugh Steeply in drag as he met with Marathe to discuss the
emergence of the Entertainment's cartridge may have served the literal purpose
of the agent arriving incognito however his devotion to applying feminine
mannerisms appear to go above and beyond the call of duty (90). In spite of
his practice, Marathe nevertheless describes Steely's appearance as "less
like a women than a twisted parody of womanhood" (93).
Wallace also presents the steroid-driven objectives
of a number of the female tennis player's like Ann Kittenplan. "who at
twelve-and-a-have looks like a Belorussian shot putter" (330). It may be
fair to assume that their desire to acquire a manly physique is not entirely
confined to the advantages it offers on the tennis court. In his notes,
Wallace suggests that the "gratification of pretty much every physical
need is either taken care of or prohibited" by the tennis academy (984).
Clearly, the administration of steroids or any other drug of choice is
prohibited by the ETA considering the wide scale purchase of "clean"
urine for the academy's drug testing.
An Endless Jest
Perhaps the most significant example of the addicted
gaze is demonstrated not so much in the stationary and fixated attention to
satisfying one's obsession but in the demand for the continuous pursuit of it.
The halfway house/rehab center, Ennet House, represents the often ineffectual
and delusional pursuit of ridding oneself of addiction. A clear example of the
deceptive environment of rehab is demonstrated by Lenz's use of cocaine while
at the facility. For many of the residents like Lenz, the limitations at Ennet
House are often so unbearable that its residents are driven to the use of
drugs in order to preserve their sanity. Ironically, Lenz's stash of cocaine
works as a contrived temptation that undermines any true potential for ridding
himself of his addiction.
Conclusion
Wallace's Infinite Jest is a chaotic amalgam of
humanity and the similarly depraved behaviors that they demonstrate in the
pursuit of amusement and satisfaction. Although the restrictions to their
attainment are clearly represented by the physical entities of the Academy,
the Ennet House and the wheelchair, they are also fostered by them.
If Incandenza's "Accomplice" is any
indication of the content of the Entertainment, it only reinforces the
contention that human nature includes the inherent desire to not only view the
depravity and debauchery of human behavior but even more, to participate in
it. There is little to ponder why so many of Wallace's characters must depend
on their mind and body altering drugs of choice, if not to influence how they
are viewed by others then at the very least to make more palatable their own
perceptions of self.
John L.'s monologue delivered at one of the AA
meetings illustrates the destructive implications of either reasoning:
"all the masks come off and you all of a sudden see the Disease as it
really is and see what owns you, what's become what you are (347).
References
Nihilism. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
[online] Available
http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/n/nihilism.htm .
Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest. New
York: Little, Brown & Co., 1996.
Reply from Linda Kidwell [lak@NIAGARA.EDU]
The latest string of commentary on cheating brings us
to an obvious but difficult solution. We must do our best, in conjunction with
students themselves, to change the cheating culture. Don McCabe, who does so
much research on this issue, once wrote that 20% of students will never cheat,
20% will cheat regardless of the consequences, and the remaining 60% can be
molded through peer pressure, discussion of academic integrity, honor codes,
and the like. Thus we can't do much to stop the creativity of cheaters with
cell phones, but we can work on developing and supporting a culture on campus
that makes cheating socially unacceptable. Only this way can we really have an
impact on cheating.
Those who are interested in the subject of cheating
and how to work toward a campus culture that embraces academic integrity
should visit the website of the Center for Academic Integrity, at http://www.academicintegrity.org
.
I have personally tried to encourage discussions of
this nature on my campus through a student project, wherein groups in my
auditing class write proposals for an honor code on campus. I have found that
this really stimulates discussion and even deep thought on these issues. It
also gets them thinking about what type of behavior will be acceptable for
them as future accountants. If you are interested, I wrote a paper on the
subject: "Student Honor Codes as a Tool for Teaching Professional
Ethics" in the Journal of Business Ethics, 2001. And the good news is
that this project is having a meaningful impact on campus: Development of an
honor code has just been incorporated into the university 5-year plan.
Finally, let me solicit some interest in a fabulous
conference for students every year. The National Conference on Ethics in
America is held annually on the campus of West Point. Students from 75
universities (including but definitely not limited to the service academies)
come together for four days to discuss academic integrity, changing the
culture on their campuses, and preparing for being ethical business people
after graduation. They are mentored in small groups by faculty for two days
and CEOs for one day. I have been fortunate enough to participate as a mentor
for the past three years, and I always come away very hopeful and refreshed.
The NCEA organizers are always looking for ways to
get new universities involved in the conference. They pay all expenses except
travel, and there is no registration fee. There is an annual limit of 2
students per college, but prior year participant schools are always invited
back. Students stay for four days on campus, and all meals are provided.
Because the campus is regimented for the cadets, there is study time for those
who have to miss a few days of classes. If you believe students from your
campus would benefit from attending this conference, please e-mail me
directly, and I will pass your name on to West Point's Center organizers. I
can't tell you what a difference this has made for my students who have
attended. Again, let me know if you would like your college involved by e-
mailing me directly.
Linda Kidwell, Ph.D.
Niagara University
New Tack Against Term Paper Providers
Wednesday, a new front was opened in the campaign.
Lawyers for a graduate student named Blue Macellari filed a lawsuit in federal
court in Illinois alleging that three Web sites that sell term papers made a
manuscript she had written available without her permission. She is charging the
owner of the sites (as well as the sites’ Internet service provider) with
copyright infringement, consumer fraud and invasion of privacy, among other
things.
Doug Lederman, "New Tack Against Term Paper Providers," Inside Higher Ed,
September 2, 2005 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2005/09/02/papers
"Plagiarism and 'Atonement'," by Eugene Volokh, The Wall Street
Journal, December 12, 2006; Page A18 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB116588497688347029.html?mod=opinion&ojcontent=otep
Two nurses, both aspiring novelists, helped tend
British soldiers during World War II. Briony, the protagonist of Ian
McEwan's award-winning novel "Atonement," is fictional. The late Lucilla
Andrews is real: She became an author, pioneering romantic "hospital
fiction," and also wrote a memoir of her war years. Therein lies the latest
plagiarism scandalette to hit the news, sparked by an article in the British
press. To be a credible character in a historical novel, Briony had to do
the things wartime nurses did, and see the things they saw. It is no
surprise that Mr. McEwan read Andrews's book when researching his own; and
several passages from his book strongly resemble passages from her memoir.
"Our 'nursing' seldom involved more than dabbing
gentian violet on ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on cuts and scratches, lead
lotion on bruises and sprains," wrote Andrews (to give one example). "In the
way of medical treatments, she had already dabbed gentian violet on
ringworm, aquaflavine emulsion on a cut, and painted lead lotion on a
bruise. But mostly she was a maid," wrote Mr. McEwan.
Plagiarism? Legally actionable? Ethically
reprehensible? Bad manners? Or good research, needed to produce accurate
historical fiction?
Plagiarism is easy to condemn but
often hard to define. This is partly because the legal rules differ sharply
from the ethical ones, and the ethical rules in scholarship, journalism and
fiction differ from each other. And it is partly because the rules for using
the facts uncovered by writers of history -- whether memoirists, historians
or contemporaneous journalists -- must be different from the rules for using
the original phrases that the writers created.
Let's start with the law. It
generally bans not plagiarism as such, but rather copyright infringement.
(Trademark law might play a role in extreme plagiarism cases, but not in the
typical ones.) And copyright infringement is both broader and narrower than
what most people see as "plagiarism."
For instance, an author can be held
liable under copyright law even when he credits the original source from
which he copies. The law concerns itself more with protecting authors'
ability to profit from their works than with ensuring credit where credit is
due. So if I translate Mr. McEwan's novel into Russian without his
permission, trumpeting Mr. McEwan's authorship and saying that I am merely
the translator, I am a copyright infringer, though not a plagiarist.
On the other hand, an author is not
liable for copying the facts that others have discovered, regardless of
whether he gives credit. Copyright law doesn't give authors exclusive rights
to facts, because such a monopoly would undermine debate, scholarship and
literature. If I write a scholarly legal article that uses without
attribution historical facts uncovered by another scholar, my failure to
attribute is a serious ethical breach -- but not copyright infringement.
So on to professional ethics, which
properly differs depending on the profession. Academics have the most
stringent obligations. If I write an academic work using, without
attribution, facts uncovered by another historian, I commit two sins: First,
I falsely claim originality for my own work. Second, I wrongly deny a
scholar credit that is important to the scholar's reputation. The academic
must therefore scrupulously attribute those facts that others have
uncovered, and the long and heavily footnoted format of academic books and
articles makes this easy.
But the rules for newspaper articles
that mention historical matters are different. Such articles usually don't
claim originality of historical research; no reader would assume that
snippets of history in an article about modern-day Iraq stem from the
journalist's own archival research. The articles do not generally deny
historians due professional credit: Scholars get professional respect
chiefly based on other scholars' use of their work, not based on citations
by reporters. And because space is short, and good journalism often relies
on multiple historical sources, newspaper articles can't be expected to
acknowledge each historian whose work the journalist used.
The rules for novels are in between.
Novelists are similar to journalists, but they do have space at the end of
the book to briefly acknowledge the historical works on which they rely,
without distracting from the novel's flow. If you've relied substantially on
another's work, acknowledging this is the kind thing to do. Omitting the
acknowledgment probably isn't unethical; it's not a lie, or the denial of
the credit needed for success in the original author's profession. But it
isn't very nice.
Yet what about copying not just
facts, but also another author's words, either literally or in a close
paraphrase? Would a general acknowledgment at the end of the book be enough
to justify this? Or is such copying impermissible, at least unless you
expressly note it using quotation marks, or by writing "as Lucilla Andrews
said"? In academic work, the answer is simple: Quote the original, and
insert a footnote at the place you quote it. But what about a novel?
A historical novel, to be accurate,
must borrow those words needed to accurately reproduce the historical facts,
even when the facts were uncovered by others. If nurses treated ringworm by
dabbing gentian violet on it, that's what they did, and novelists must be
able to say so. Nor can a novelist note the borrowing using quotation marks
and footnotes, as they would interrupt the novel's flow. Writers who strive
for factual accuracy must thus remain free to closely paraphrase the factual
accounts of others.
On the other hand, when the historian
or memoirist depicted the facts in a colorful way that she herself created,
the particular words shouldn't be copied, at least without express
acknowledgment. A historical novelist is responsible for creating his own
colorful descriptions.
So where does this leave Mr. McEwan?
Likely not guilty on any of the counts, if the account in the newspaper that
first broke the story (the Nov. 26 Daily Mail) is thorough. Mr. McEwan
borrowed facts, and those words that accurately described the facts. He is
not guilty of copyright infringement, or of taking another's original
expression without specific notation. And while he did rely on Andrews's
autobiography, his acknowledgments page noted being "indebted" to Andrews
and her book. Any such acknowledgment could always be made more prominent;
but it appears to have been prominent enough.
More broadly, we should recognize
that not all use of another's words requires detailed acknowledgment. Words
represent facts; and facts, once revealed, are there to be used, including
in novelists' unfootnoted prose.
Mr. Volokh is a professor of law at UCLA School of
Law.
Confessions of a Ghost Writer
"Paper Money," by Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed, October 22, 2008
---
http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/22/mclemee
But after a while, it became clear that I had a
serious disqualification for this line of work: the lack of speed. (Speed of
production, that is; amphetamines were never part of the process.) In his
article, Mamatas reports that he could turn out a term paper in 20 minutes.
I spent longer than that just on the outline. By black-market standards,
this was highly unprofessional.
It was a matter of time before I left the business.
And then my conscience started playing catch-up.
A few months after hacking out a final paper for
some kid with more cash than brains, I met a woman who was working on her
dissertation. Its topic was something I knew just enough about to be able to
ask some questions. For a guy with no good moves, this was a good move. Word
from our mutual friends was that the interest was reciprocal. But it soon
turned out that the grapevine was only doing me just so many favors.
She mentioned having suspicions about the work
being handed in by some of her students. And — she continued — the word was
that I had first-hand information about the market for ghost-written papers.
Could I tell her more about that, at some point? (This in a tone more
curious than overtly disapproving; but still....)
Now, cheating my customers out of an education had
never seemed a cause for concern. They were doing a pretty thorough job of
that on their own. But suddenly I could picture things from the vantage
point of an earnest, hard-working instructor who would no more have gamed
the system than she would have held up a bank.
All the rationalizations fell away in a second; the
embarrassment, so long evaded, now finally hit home. The experience was
mortifying. Twenty years later, I still feel it. Regret always comes too
late to do anyone much good, but better late than never.
Continued in article
"Catching Cheaters with Their Own Computers: Anti-cheating hardware
could keep online game players honest," MIT's Technology Review, July
3, 2007 ---
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19005/?a=f .
Researchers at Intel are working on a system that
could make it much harder to cheat at online games. Unlike current
software-based anti-cheating technology, Intel's Fair Online Gaming System
would be built into a player's computer, in a combination of hardware,
firmware, and software.
Since the early days of video games, players have
cheated. Some players tried altering the game's programming, for example, to
give themselves benefits such as infinite lives or infinite ammunition. When
large groups of people began playing shared games online, these
cheats--which seemed harmless in single-player games--became a cause for
concern, especially since many of them allow players to make devastating
attacks on others.
Too many cheaters in an online game can destroy the
group atmosphere that makes online gaming fun, says Mia Consalvo, an
associate professor at Ohio University who researches cheating in video
games. Although game developers and third-party specialists are always
working to combat cheaters, the problem has continued. Some cheaters simply
want to wield more power, while others are lured by prize money offered in
tournaments.
Gamers can opt to play on servers that block those
who haven't installed anti-cheating software. Such software scans a player's
computer and alerts other players if it detects cheats. But anti-cheating
software can only catch cheats once they become known: like antivirus
software, it works by scanning for things that look like known cheats, and
the list of cheats requires constant updating.
Intel's researchers say that their system would
work without needing updates. By watching at the hardware level for cheating
strategies, the system should be able to detect current and future cheats,
says Intel research scientist Travis Schluessler.
For example, the system would go after input-based
cheats, in which a hacker feeds the game different information than he
enters through the keyboard and mouse. A cheater playing a shooting game
might use an input-based cheat known as an aimbot, for example, to point his
guns automatically, leaving him free to fire rapidly, and with deadly
accuracy. Schluessler says that the Fair Online Gaming system's chip set
would catch an aimbot by receiving and comparing data streams from the
player's keyboard and mouse with data streams from what the game processes.
The system would recognize that the information wasn't the same and alert
administrators to the cheat. In tests, Schluessler says, the system ran
without slowing the play of a game.
In addition to input-based cheats, Schluessler says
that the system would go after network-data cheats that extract hidden
information from a game's network, such as the location of other players,
and display it to the cheater. Intel's system would also target cheats that
attempt to disable anti-cheating software. Schluessler says the goal isn't
to replace anti-cheating software but to strengthen and augment it.
Tony Ray, president of Even Balance, which makes
the anti-cheating software PunkBuster, says this type of system could go a
long way toward addressing continuing problems with cheaters. "There are a
couple of things that can only be done properly with hardware," he says.
"These are things we expend considerable effort in addressing with software
... Having real-time hardware verification that PunkBuster has not been
compromised in memory after loading would go a long way toward thwarting
even the best private hack authors."
Continued in article
Bob Jensen's threads on edutainment are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/thetools.htm#Edutainment
Blackboard and the
company that owns Turnitin, the popular plagiarism-detection service, have
settled their patent dispute, agreeing not to sue one another,
Washington Business Journal reported.
Blackboard announced in July that it was
adding a plagiarism-detection feature to its course
management system.
Inside Higher Ed, August 24, 2007 ---
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/08/24/qt
Comparison of Plagiarism Detection Tools ---
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/SER07017B.pdf
"Plagiarism Detection: Is Technology the Answer?" at the 2007 EDUCAUSE
Southeast Regional Conference, Liz Johnson, Board of Regents of the University
System of Georgia, provided a chart comparing seven plagiarism detection tools:
Turnitin, MyDropBox, PAIRwise, EVE2, WCopyFind, CopyCatch, and GLATT.
August 24, 2007 message from Ed Scribner
[escribne@nmsu.edu]
Bob,
The New Mexico State University Library is hosting
a new website on plagiarism issues. The site, available at
http://lib.nmsu.edu/plagiarism , contains both
faculty and student resources.
Ed
Guidelines for Copyrighted Material on Websites
and Blackboard
This message if from the Director of the Trinity University Library.
I’m afraid to open it, so please direct all your questions to Diane or CUNY
Baruch.
Bob Jensen
-----Original Message-----
From: Graves, Diane J.
Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2005 9:22 AM
To: Trinity Faculty
A number of you have asked about the legal use of
copyrighted material on your websites and Blackboard courses. I just learned
about this site, prepared at the CUNY Baruch College, which will help. It’s
an interactive guide in a flow chart format that shows the steps you need to
take to use copyrighted media in teaching. It’s very easy to follow.
http://www.baruch.cuny.edu/tutorials/copyright/
Both the library and IMS are providing links to this
guide from our sites, but you might find it helpful to review it now and
bookmark it for later use.
Diane
Diane J. Graves, Professor & University Librarian
Elizabeth M. Coates Library, Trinity University
One Trinity Place, San Antonio, TX 78212
Bob Jensen's threads on the
education-unfriendly DMCA are at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/000aaa/theworry.htm#Copyright
Resume Lies
Credential Fraud:
Altered Grades, Manufactured Transcripts, and Store-Bought Diplomas ---
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3513634
As
Enron and Bernie Madoff once showed us the depths that people will go to
hide who they really are, there are many others out there who have created
entire academic profiles... and even careers... under false pretenses. This
is the story of only a few of them.
Most Common Resume Lies (Forbes) ---
http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml
From foolish fibs to full-on fraud, lying on your
résumé is one of the most common ways that people stretch the truth. But
think twice before you ship off your next half-baked job application. Even
if your moral compass doesn't keep you from deceit, the fact that human
resources is on to the game should.
The percentage of people who lie to potential
employers is substantial, says Sunny Bates, CEO of New York-based executive
recruitment firm Sunny Bates Associates. She estimates that 40% of all
résumés aren't altogether aboveboard.
And this game of employment Russian roulette is
getting riskier and riskier. Almost 40% of human resources professionals
surveyed last year by the Society for Human Resource Management reported
they've increased the amount of time they spend checking references over the
past three years.
View a slide show of the most common résumé
lies.
Truth of Fiction: Top Resume Lies (Strategic HR Lawyer) ---
http://www.strategichrlawyer.com/weblog/2006/07/truth_or_fictio.html
Resume lies you can't get away with (CNN) ---
http://edition.cnn.com/2007/US/Careers/01/19/cb.lies/index.html
The 10 Most Memorable and Outrageous Resume Lies (DIGG) ---
http://digg.com/business_finance/The_10_Most_Memorable_and_Outrageous_Resume_Lies
Executive Lies About His MBA from the University of Southern California
Officials at the University of Southern California --
responding to an inquiry from the Journal -- told the company it had no record
that Mr. Lanni had earned a master's degree in business administration from the
school. A corporate biography of Mr. Lanni on MGM Mirage's Web site says he
holds an MBA in finance from USC. Mr. Lanni is a longtime patron of USC, joining
boards and speaking at the school over the years, Mr. Murren and others said.
For example, he is currently a member of the Board of Overseers of USC's Keck
School of Medicine. The university contacted MGM Mirage on Wednesday following
the Journal's inquiries about a recent discovery by Barry Minkow, a private
fraud investigator in San Diego, of a discrepancy between Mr. Lanni's corporate
biography and a database of college degrees accessible to private investigators.
(Please
see related article.) Mr. Minkow said he has no
investment position in MGM Mirage, but one of his employees has bought "put"
options betting against the company's stock.
"MGM Mirage CEO to Resign Amid Questions About MBA," by Keith J. Winstein and
Tamara Audi, The Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal, November
14, 2008 ---
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB122661583489225999-lMyQjAxMDI4MjE2NDYxMTQ1Wj.html
Jensen Comment
An anonymous tip revealed that Lanni was a major fund raiser at one time for the
USC School of Accountancy. Although Lanni has claimed on his resume that he has
a BS in speech, it turns out that he does have a BS in Business (not from the
USC School of Accountancy where he was a fund raiser).
In terms of wealth Lanni can still claim he gambled and won at the MGM Mirage
in Las Vegas.
Bob Jensen's fraud updates are at
http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/FraudUpdates.htm
Update
Messages
January 6, 2006 message from Carolyn Kotlas
[kotlas@email.unc.edu]
NEW JOURNAL COVERING PLAGIARISM IN THE
UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY
The recently-launched, refereed INTERNATIONAL
JOURNAL FOR EDUCATIONAL INTEGRITY [ISSN 1833-2595] intends to provide a
forum to address educational integrity topics: "plagiarism, cheating,
academic integrity, honour codes, teaching and learning, university
governance, and student motivation." The journal, to be published two times
a year, is sponsored by the University of South Australia. For more
information and to read the current issue, go to
http://www.ojs.unisa.edu.au/journals/index.php/IJEI .
September 2, 2004 message from Carolyn Kotlas [kotlas@email.unc.edu]
INTELLECTUAL HONESTY IN THE ELECTRONIC AGE
"[T]echnology also adds new vistas to in-class
cheating. Cell phones and PDA's provide a platform to share real time text
messaging, adding a new angle to a note tossed not only from one side of a
room to another, but also from one side of the campus or further beyond. With
programmable calculators, PDA's and other handheld intelligent devices,
students can store notes, access websites, send e-mail, or grab ready-made
formulas to ease calculations. Camera phones have also been reported as
potential devices for cheating by scanning a test’s contents for later
review. No gum wrapper or note tucked into a sleeve can compare to the storage
and intelligence of these devices."
In the conference paper "Intellectual Honesty in
the Electronic Age" (presented at the University of Calgary) John Iliff
and Judy Xiao, College of Staten Island, CUNY, give an overview of why
students cheat and provide several ways, including technological solutions,
for preventing cheating. The paper is available online at http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/~jiliff/iliff_xiao.htm
See also:
"Combating Cheating in Online Student Assessment" CIT INFOBITS,
July 2004 http://www.unc.edu/cit/infobits/bitjul04.html#3
For more information about the annual University of Calgary's Best
Practices in e-Learning Online Conference, held August 23-27, 2004, go to http://elearn.ucalgary.ca/conference/
HOT TOPIC: Technology
and Cheating
Seventy percent of
the 12- to 17-year-olds who participated in an ABCNEWS Primetime poll say at
least some of their peers cheat on tests, with roughly 33% admitting that they
themselves have cheated. Two in three students say that at least some students
have handed in homework or papers copied from another student or downloaded
from the Internet. Technology appears to make cheating easier. Take our
InstantPoll: http://news.techlearning.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/egsJ0FHYLa0E2V0B7Kk0AV
to tell us what you
think about technology and cheating. Read more about the Primetime poll and
news special at http://news.techlearning.com/cgi-bin4/DM/y/egsJ0FHYLa0E2V0CV820Al
March 19, 2004
After you read the continued support from the faculty Senate, you begin to
sympathize with this 40-year academic professor and president of a college until
you read the final paragraph below (that paragraph is weird!).
"College President Is Retiring After Claim He Plagiarized," The
New York Times, March 19, 2004 --- http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/20/education/20retire.html?ex=1080622800&en=d10eeb1abea4af59&ei=5070
A Connecticut college president facing claims that he
plagiarized material for an op-ed column published in The Hartford Courant
announced his retirement on Friday.
Richard L. Judd, 66, has been president of Central
Connecticut State University in New Britain since 1996 and has worked at the
school for 40 years.
His retirement was announced four days after William
Cibes, the chancellor of the state university system, issued a report
concluding that Mr. Judd had plagiarized from three sources in an opinion
column he wrote for The Hartford Courant that was published on Feb 26. In the
report, obtained by The Associated Press, Mr. Cibes called the actions a
"clear, unacceptable case of plagiarism."
Mr. Judd apologized this week to the university's
faculty Senate, which recommended that he keep his job. In a letter Friday to
Lawrence D. McHugh, chairman of the university's trustees, Mr. Judd cited
health concerns as the reason for his retirement, which is effective on July
1.
"I am doing so after careful consideration of my
personal responsibilities and of my family and in regard to my health,"
he wrote. "It has been my honor and privilege to serve Central
Connecticut State University over the past 40 years."
Mr. Judd was hospitalized on Wednesday after
collapsing in his office. He had been scheduled to meet with the trustees on
Friday to discuss the plagiarism allegation, but that meeting was postponed
because of Mr. Judd's health.
Mr. Cibes's investigation found that the op-ed
article, about the prospects for peace in Cyprus, included unattributed
verbatim phrases from an editorial in The New York Times, a Web site of the
Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus and an article published in a London
newspaper, The Independent on Sunday.
Using the material without attribution violated the
university's policy on plagiarism, Mr. Cibes said.
Mr. Judd had an earlier run-in with university
officials in March 2002, when he was reprimanded by the board after his arrest
on charges of impersonating a police officer two months earlier. The board
voted to express its "displeasure" with Mr. Judd, who admitted he
used the oscillating headlights on his state car to pull over a motorist he
believed was speeding.
Message from Janet Flatley on January 14, 2002
To my colleagues:
Respected historian Stephen Ambrose admits that he
copied, word-for-word, from an earlier book by historian Thomas Childer. He
said the copying was "inadvertent."
Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Joseph Ellis
admitted, after he was caught in the deception, inventing a Vietnam War record
. Tim Johnson, manager of the Toronto Blue Jays, also claimed a war record
where none existed.
George O'Leary held a dream job as coach of Notre
Dame for only 5 days; he was fired after revelations that he had lied on his
resume.
Do you know what bothers me most about the above
vignettes? Not so much that they happened - human beings have lied since Adam
& Eve and nothing has changed since then. What bothers me is the follow-on
stories that begin, "well, yes, but ..."
He's a great historian. He's a winning author and
popular professor. He should only be judged on how well the team plays.
Now we learn that Andersen sent out a memo ordering
employees to destroy Enron-related workpapers. The question, of course, is
when the memo was delivered - before or after the subpoenas?
If it turns out that Andersen ordered a CYA (possibly
illegal) destruction of substantive papers, I hope no one in the profession
offers a "yes, but ..." and a learned discussion on the amount of
unnecessary paperwork generated during an audit.
But given the state of American ethics, I can't say
I'll be surprised if that's what happens.
Janet Vareles Flatley
COPYRIGHT AND "DEEP-LINKING"
TO ONLINE CONTENT
From CIT Infobits on June 26,
2002
When you provide a
direct link to an online article for a course that bypasses the content owner's
homepage, you are practicing "deep-linking." Some online publishers
are threatening legal action against websites that engage in deep-linking,
saying that it violates copyright law. Whether or not deep-linking falls within
fair use for educational purposes remains to be seen. In "'Deep-linking'
Flap Could Deep-Six Direct Links to Relevant Content for Students" (by
Corey Murray, ESCHOOL NEWS, June 11, 2002) several intellectual property lawyers
give their thoughts on this question. The article is available on the Web (by
way of deep-linking) at http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=3789
eSchool News is
published monthly by eSchool News Communications Group, 7920 Norfolk Avenue,
Suite 900, Bethesda, MD 20814 USA; tel: 800-394-0115; fax: 301-913-0119; email: info@eschoolnews.com
; Web: http://www.eschoolnews.com
/
For the record, eSchool
News encourages educators to link directly to articles and other information
posted on their website.
Bob Jensen's links on these matters
can be found at http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/plagiarism.htm
— Steve Foerster Nov 11, 05:52 PM
— Born to teach Nov 11, 06:03 PM