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


"Alexander Graham Bell on Originality, Plagiarism, Language, and Education," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, February 15, 2013
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/15/alexander-graham-bell-annie-sullivan-helen-keller/

"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 plagiarismOver 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:

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 desperation

Continued 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.


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/05/13/arizona-state-professor-accused-plagiarism-second-time#ixzz31ajydqT2
Inside Higher Ed

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."


Read more:
https://news.vice.com/article/high-stakes-testing-led-chinese-teens-to-use-spy-like-cheating-equipment#ixzz34iYm3jmJ
 

"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.

InOutrages: 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


"Alexander Graham Bell on Originality, Plagiarism, Language, and Education," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, February 15, 2013
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/15/alexander-graham-bell-annie-sullivan-helen-keller/

"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:

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 

See also:
•  Where Cheaters Often Prosper
•  Got Cheaters? Ask New Questions
•  Schools, Tech: Still Struggling

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:

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:

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.

Is That Online Student Who He Says He Is?" by Sara Lipka, Chronicle of Higher Education,
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/index.php?id=3455&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en

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

  1. Where’s the concern about whether that student in the large course on campus is who he says he is? How many schools really card students before exams are given in those courses?

    — Steve Foerster    Nov 11, 05:52 PM   

  2. My sentiments exactly, Steve! I am surprised at the shift in thinking that somehow online students are more likely to cheat than those who appear for exams onsite!

    — Born to teach    Nov 11, 06:03 PM   

  3. I’ve been teaching online for five years, and I have found cheating to be much more prevalent in the online environment. Most institutions use proctors for high stakes testing, and student identification is presented. For purely online initiatives, however, it simply doesn’t make sense to ask these students to come to campus for assessments. No LMS currently addresses this legislation to my knowledge, so it is interesting to consider the options for compliance.

 

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 keyword search through our database of more than 25,000 sample term papers, essays, and research studies... if you can't find something on your topic... then we will write one for you just as fast as you need it. Take advantage of the expertise and wealth of talent that the staff of researchers and writers have to offer at TermpapersRus.com.... They work around the clock 24 hours per day... 7 days per week... 365 days per year and do nothing but assist students with their term projects and research reports.... NO matter what the topic ..nor the time of day.. TermpapersRus is always available to assist you with all your writing needs.    

"Term Papers ‘R’ Us"! ..we assist students with Term papers... and we are THE BEST! 

Check the Termpapersrus.com database -- RIGHT NOW!! -- and you’ll see what we mean.... there are more than 25,000 example term papers listed there ...and they are all available for immediate delivery by email, fax or Federal Express!  ...each of the thousands of papers in the Term Papers ‘R’ Us database cost only $[] per page and the bibliographies are FREE??!! ...this straight-forward-no-hassle rate allows 
Term Papers ‘R’ Us to help you become "Term Papers ‘R’ Me!" Need it FAST!! then simply place a "RUSH ORDER" and receive it even faster ...
in ONLY a few hours!!! 
Click here to ORDER NOW!!

TermPapersRUs.com  is so confident in the quality of our work... that we offer you the unique opportunity to actually preview excerpts from a paper (for FREE) in order to see if it offers the appropriate direction for your research and studies.

 Didn't find anything in our database??

NO PROBLEM!!!! You can have one of the research writers complete a customized example paper for you.... and this way we can show you the very best techniques for writing your own paper and you'll learn how to approach any topic.  All customized research is ONLY $19.95 per page with a FREE bibliography and a guaranteed completion date!!  So search our database NOW.. or you can Click HERE or the purple balloon for Custom research... either way you'll have TermpapersRus.com quality staff to show you the way for all of your writing needs!!!  

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

  1. Click the AutoShape, picture, WordArt, or clip art you want to duplicate. 
  2. Click Copy and then click Paste 
  3. On the Drawing toolbar, click Draw, point to Rotate or Flip, and then click Flip Horizontal or Flip Vertical
  4. 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

When Duke University found 34 first-year business school students guilty of collaborating on a take-home test late last month, officials announced a variety of penalties: Pending appeals, nine of the Fuqua School of Business M.B.A. students would be expelled, 15 would receive a one-year suspension and a failing grade in the required course, nine would simply fail the class and one would fail the assignment alone.
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 onU.S. Classroom Culturehighlighting 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.


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/02/25/economics-department-proctor-exams-adherence-honor-code-wanes#ixzz2uLPV7WjV
Inside Higher Ed
 

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:


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."


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/lawsuit-against-unc-over-paper-classes-2015-1#ixzz3PjotWnq1
 

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.


Read more:
http://www.businessinsider.com/new-report-implicates-uncs-athletics-department-in-fake-classes-scandal-2014-10#ixzz3GtgoUiow
 

"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." 


Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/rashad-mccants-on-unc-academic-scandal-2014-6#ixzz33tDghpcI

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

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

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

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 callsforensics 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

  1. Make all raw data available to other scientists
     
  2. Hold journalists accountable
     
  3. Introduce anonymous publication
     
  4. 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

 


"MIT Tops List of College Copyright Violators," by Erica R. Hendry, Chronicle of Higher Education, June 17, 2009 ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/3833/mit-tops-list-of-college-copyright-violators

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 
open access
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 
open access
1711
 
Retraction: Financial Reporting Transparency and Earnings Management
James E. Hunton, Robert Libby and CheriL. Mazza
Citation | Full Text | PDF (358 KB) | Supplemental Material 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
1711
 
Retraction: Financial Reporting Transparency and Earnings Management
James E. Hunton, Robert Libby and CheriL. Mazza
Citation | Full Text | PDF (358 KB) | Supplemental Material 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 
open access
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 applicationand 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.


Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/05/13/arizona-state-professor-accused-plagiarism-second-time#ixzz31ajydqT2
Inside Higher Ed

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
http://aaajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.2308/accr.2010.85.3.911
 
 
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. IIncomplete 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 “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:

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:

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 attributiona 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

 


"Alexander Graham Bell on Originality, Plagiarism, Language, and Education," by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings, February 15, 2013
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/02/15/alexander-graham-bell-annie-sullivan-helen-keller/

"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
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead
http://www.amazon.com/The-Cheating-Culture-Americans-Doing/product-reviews/0156030055?pageNumber=2

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:

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>

 
Hi Bob,

I came across your website and wanted to notify you about a broken link on your page in case you weren't aware of it. The link on
http://cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/Calgary/CD/Theory/theory01.htm which links to http://acct.tamu.edu/smith/ethics/pacioli.htm is no longer working. I've included a link to a useful page on Luca Pacioli, the father of accounting that you could replace the broken link with if you're interested in updating your website. Thanks for providing a great resource!

Link: http://www.onlineaccountingdegree.net/resources/luca-pacioli-the-father-of-accounting/

Best,
Jaime

 


"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.

Some reactions to this court decision ---
http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/2844/academic-reaction-to-court-decision-about-plagiarism-detection-is-mixed
 

Bob Jensen's threads on plagiarism are at --- http://faculty.trinity.edu/rjensen/Plagiarism.htm

 

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

Term Papers on the Web
 

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 N
SW [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

Related

Term Paper From Go-Essays (September 9, 2006)

Essay From Term Paper Relief (September 9, 2006)

 

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