I'm a College Professor Who Faked Dissertation Data on the Side

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nea8bx/im-a-college-professor-who-faked-dissertation-data-on-the-side

by danso • 7 years ago

108 123 7 years ago

socrates19985• 7 years ago

Sadly, it's insanely common to have advanced degrees plagiarized. I worked as a high school teacher and the number of co-workers who phoned it in for advanced degrees just to get the pay increase was insane.

I can't think of one person who did it to actually learn anything.

The worst was a couple of "Doctors", who essentially bought their way to getting EdD's. It was just disgusting. Our admins and leaders CHEATING their way to getting advanced degrees and then expecting us to respect them as educators.

And they had the gall to make people call them "doctor". One of the many reasons why I quit working for them.

tvanantwerp• 7 years ago

When I was in high school, the county's highest paid teacher (on account of the credentials) worked there. She taught typing. TYPING! And she wasn't even very good at it! I don't think a single student really respected her.

I was friendly with the school's IT guys. One of them told me the story of her mouse "breaking", and him going to fix it. Somebody had just put some scotch tape over the sensor. He silently removed it, told her it was fixed, and went back to his office for a good laugh.

povertyworld4• 7 years ago

People only get the EdD because it's required to be a superintendent in most places. I'm scraping by on a part time higher ed gig, and it's just depressing how the full time staff just see degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise not a path to growth and learning. The average American already thinks higher ed is a scam. At least the people who work in it could try to believe in their own product, but even they don't.

linuxftw7• 7 years ago

This is a symptom they believe they're under paid. Plus, you don't need an advanced 'degree' to learn much of anything anymore. The wealth of human knowledge that is available online, for free, is astounding.

BurningFrog2• 7 years ago

it's just depressing how the full time staff just see degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise not a path to growth and learning. The average American already thinks higher ed is a scam

I think an unbiased look at the evidence might say they're right.

linuxftw7• 7 years ago

Teaching should be qualified on certifications only, of which a degree is not a qualifier. Good teachers are under paid, bad teachers are over paid, why support the system? Don't use public schools.

I would say that most 4 year degrees are mostly 'useless' knowledge. I would say most high schools are mostly useless knowledge. I don't know what society is optimizing for, I think it's optimizing for more and more expensive education.

povertyworld4• 7 years ago

As much as I like to believe people can teach themselves anything, if you look at places like Kaggle, there are really no self-taught people. It's just a parade of Phd holders and grad students. I'm sure there are one or two, but clearly for most people coughing up the dough for a Computer Science / Data Science degree is indeed worth it.

socrates19985• 7 years ago

Don't use public schools? What do you propose instead? What should teenagers do instead of learn how to read, write and do math?

matz1• 7 years ago

I can't think of one person who did it to actually learn anything

I don't think this is the goal.

If I can just for example pay for like $15k in order to get $15k pay increase, then to me its a good deal.

fuzz4lyfe2• 7 years ago

Good deal for the person getting the 15k sure, a terrible deal for the people paying property taxes to fund that raise.

everdrive• 7 years ago

You might get more earnest learners if the degree weren't tied to pay or prestige. Everyone wants pay and prestige, but only some people want to learn.

uxp1002• 7 years ago

I have a friend who has a Doctorate and teaches some high school teachers, and is a high school teacher/administrator herself, and she always complains about teachers doing things like taking phone calls in the middle of lecture, or just never showing up and complaining to the colleges administration if she gives a poor grade. The older they are the worse they behave, so she says.

Of course, her side job teaching them in the summer probably wouldn't exist if they didn't get pay increases for degrees, so...

uxp1002• 7 years ago

Just anecdotes from one person, but she also said that those perusing degrees were more engaged and less likely to just be taking calls etc. than those who were doing continuing education credits.

austincheney• 7 years ago

This is the most high profile case that comes to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/11/us/boston-u-panel-finds-p...

JakeStone3• 7 years ago

You just sadly reminded me of when I was an undergrad taking a grad class on "History of Mathematics".

Two undergrads taking the class because it just sounded neat, and the professor made things interesting. 10 graduate students who were teachers taking the class for the increased salary. An evening seminar of three hours per week after work where we examined as much as possible over how people did math through the ages and through time.

You could tell these grads were bored. But, fine, dealing with kids all day, then having to learn something new that isn't likely to ever be more than a trivia point in a lecture might not be a great thing.

Then... We get to a point where it looks like Archimedes came this close to discovering integral calculus. [insert appropriate WOW! meme here]

A couple of grunts from the grads. Me and the other undergrad were gobsmacked.

There were other examples, but that's the one that always sticks in my head. It's also what contributed to me not being very impressed by some of the grade school teachers I met as my kids were enrolled.

chengiz• 7 years ago

I dont understand what you're trying to convey. I like history but someone almost discovering something holds no appeal for me; what actually happened does. And these people were not interested in the course in the first place.

katzgrau• 7 years ago

I mean this is the most positive way: you are a bona-fide nerd.

I would would also be really intrigued/interested to learn that. But my experience with teachers is that most of them are not nerds - the ones that are tend to have that beaten out of them by the profession. Not all though.

awillen2• 7 years ago

It wasn't until I dated a middle school teacher for a while that I realized how crazy the pay scale is there. Her pay would automatically go up for any grad degree. She was teaching middle school science, but she could have gotten an online Master's in sociology and received a pay bump.

I absolutely would have gone online and done the absolute minimum in the easiest possible program I could find, and I wouldn't have thought twice about it. The fact that any Master's degree would do already tells me that it's irrelevant to the school district whether the degree improves teaching (and let's be honest, even getting a Master's in bio won't really help a third grade science teacher), so what difference does it make if it's a total BS degree?

barbecue_sauce3• 7 years ago

This all depends on the school district and/or state. Many places, you have to actually get degrees in Education rather than random subjects. (And you are expected to do this to stay employed, rather than to get pay bumps).

Alex63• 7 years ago

I was taught (as a Canadian from an English family) that the only people who should be addressed as "doctor" in normal conversation are MDs and active/retired college/university professors. What is common etiquette today?

cgh• 7 years ago

Still the same I think, except in certain provinces such as BC chiropractors and naturopaths can unfortunately refer to themselves as "doctors" and do so at every opportunity. But maybe that doesn't fall under the definition of "normal conversation".

gnicholas• 7 years ago

I wouldn't call anyone "doctor" in normal conversation. Also, at least in my experience (several friends/family are professors), it can be seen as disrespectful to refer to a professor as "doctor" because that is the title that you get when you finish your PhD, but before you have a job as an actual professor.

For reference, I live in Palo Alto and went to universities in the US.

MaysonL• 7 years ago

My mother worked for years as secretary for an EdD who was unable to draft a coherent paragraph: she wrote all of his business letters for him. He did, I believe, enjoy being referred to as "Doctor".

qrbLPHiKpiux• 7 years ago

My 5th grader referred to her principal as “doctor” so and so... I told her he is not a doctor.

Now, on the other hand, I am one. With a license to practice and I never demand anyone use it. That’s just absurd!

barry-cotter2• 7 years ago

An Ed.D. is not an advanced degree. It is an abomination. You cannot cheapen an Ed.D. or an M.Ed. by cheating to get it because no one with any familiarity with them respects them. Degrees in education have no effect on teaching effectiveness, they’re among the clearest possible examples of pure credentialism and gatekeeping.

grenoire• 7 years ago

That was much milder than expected, but not particularly surprising. I made this point recently in an unrelated thread; having taught academic skills classes at a research university and talking to many of my friends who didn't go to research universities, the one big problem is that people don't know what research entails. They don't know how to conduct it, how to express it, and (a fundamentally problematic one) why it's done.

This is partially a problem with unethical students who just want their degree or title, but that's just one part of it. There's a problem with research education. That's why we have students who are just dumbfounded at the effort needed to write research papers worth reading and studying.

nosianu• 7 years ago

That was much milder than expected,

Just keep scrolling and reading. There's cheating story after cheating story, maybe one of the other ones gets you more excited :-)

phist_mcgee• 7 years ago

Can we all agree that the author of that article wrote incredibly unsparingly, and did not presenT any form of an interesting narrative, for something that could have been a quite interesting topic/personal story. In fact, it felt like I was reading the work of someone who was not interested in writing whatsoever, which is funny considering that they are a professor at a liberal arts college.

skrebbel• 7 years ago

No, we can't. I enjoyed reading it. It was light, honest and I liked the differences in pace.

mark259• 7 years ago

It would be very funny indeed, except that the writing is done by a journalist.

Legogris• 7 years ago

Personally I abhor the trend of needing to create a complete personal story out of every experience. I am not interested in several paragraphs of where the author happens to be in life, how their morning went and all their personal relationships and thoughts where I am really interested in the topic they're supposed to be talking about.

I read to expand my views, not to feel artificially connected to whomever the author is.

I prefer the writing style in this piece over most articles on Vice, TBH.

homonculus1• 7 years ago

I too hate long-form writing, I cannot bear to read it ever ever ever. If you need to flex your imagery chops on the reader that badly then write fiction, otherwise get to the damn point!

tasubotadas• 7 years ago

"It was an early Sunday morning when I've first met X while he was holding his hand full of bagels. Only later that day I would learn that it was actually for his dog as he is a big and naughty fan of them"

Articles that start like this make me puke. Go and write a book if you want to be a writer.

mindcrime• 7 years ago

In fact, it felt like I was reading the work of someone who was not interested in writing whatsoever, which is funny considering that they are a professor at a liberal arts college.

Remember, you're not reading the words written by the original author... you're reading a (possibly heavily) edited version that reflects as much on the editor as the author. As the disclaimer at the bottom says The above has been edited and condensed for clarity.

FWIW, I've had a handful of articles published online (mainly at Infoworld) and I can attest that the editing process can, at times, be pretty severe in terms of how much the original text is altered.

omarhaneef2• 7 years ago

If this is widespread, it might explain the absolutely bonkers survey results that I see from time to time.

As an aside, it is sad that lurking just under the surface of so many academic stories is that strong undercurrent of scarcity.

12elephant• 7 years ago

what do you mean by "strong undercurrent of scarcity"?

omarhaneef2• 7 years ago

I mean, a contributing factor to the author's actions was the sense that he wasn't getting paid much.

"It's definitely the lowest pay available at the college, and our school is one of the lowest paid ones in the state."

FloatArtifact2• 7 years ago

Take this in context but I think this is partly due to the overinflation education requirements for employment.

mannykannot• 7 years ago

... which is, in part, driven by the devaluation of credentials through this sort of thing.

OrgNet• 7 years ago

is it that widespread?

tombert4• 7 years ago

I took partial differential equations as an undergrad, which thoroughly kicked my ass. There was a lot of stuff that I found confusing, and so once I finally understood it, I made a Youtube video explaning separation of variables for the clamped heat equation, and posted it hoping that either I or someone else could benefit from that.

A few weeks later, I got a private Youtube message from someone claiming that he was a PhD student that was willing to pay me $600 to do his PDE homework for him. As a broke college kid, $600 might as well have been $600,000 to me at the time, so I eagerly agreed, but shortly after realized that this was incredibly unethical and I started feeling guilty. Before he could send me the money, I came up with an excuse saying something like "my computer caught on fire".

Looking back, it was sort of a surreal thing; I wouldn't have thought that a PhD'd person would need a lot of help from some gauky undergrad making a crappy tutorial with Mathtype and screen recording software. I guess this stuff must be pretty prevalent though...maybe if I had known about it I wouldn't have dropped out of school the next semester :) .

PopeDotNinja2• 7 years ago

I superficially like the idea of a meritocracy, where hard work and success move you up the in the order of things. Then I remember cheating, the difficulty of quantifying success, the shifting nature of what kind of success we want to reward, yada yada. Now I am more in the egalitarian camp, where I want everyone to have enough to be comfortable, but I still want there to be rewards for being successful. Some sort of egalitarian free for all, where everyone is a winner, but some win more than others.

I have this thought that keeps popping into my head. N people are on an island. On the island is a tree that makes enough X units of food, where X is greater than N, and each unit of food is enough to sustain one person. The N people work together to make sure that everyone gets at least 1 unit of food, and X - N units left over are split up by some fair enough competition.

ergothus• 7 years ago

One argument in favor of UBI I found particularly thought-provoking (paraphrasing): "UBI isn't anti-capitalist, UBI enables capitalism. By providing the basic requirements for living, it allows everyone to actually participate in the competition instead of keeping the poor too busy and too at-risk to attempt business ventures."

I'm still undecided on UBI, but that argument definitely made me think of things from some different angles.

daveFNbuck5• 7 years ago

If there's enough food to sustain everyone, why is competition necessary? Is everyone just fighting over the chance to get fat, or would the winners have better nutrition and gain a permanent advantage, even if they won initially due to luck?

What makes the competition fair? The guy who's good at chess wants a chess competition. The ex-basketball player wants a jumping competition. Would a fair competition be one that plays to existing strengths, or one that everyone is equally likely to win? If it's the first, how do you decide whose merits are most worthy of being rewarded? If it's the second, where does merit come in?

daveFNbuck5• 7 years ago

When I was an undergrad, I too struggled with PDEs. If I hadn't taken it in undergrad and it became a requirement in grad school, it wouldn't have been any easier for me.

PhD students are just people who stayed in school longer and started doing research. Someone who is still taking classes like PDEs probably hasn't done much research yet.

tombert4• 7 years ago

Yeah, that's fair enough; I guess as an undergrad (and even now, though to a lesser extent), it's easy to have this romanticized idea of "PhDs are the best of the best of the best", especially in the coolest field ever (math); I guess it was easy for me to forget that these are still people.

Still, kind of unethical to ask some kid from Youtube to do your homework for you.

MiroF• 7 years ago

"I also didn't—and still don't—know if this woman had some sort of agreement with the school, and they were feeding her these students. For all I know they were in on it."

This section really made me realize the extent to which the mind can really rationalize anything. Something to guard against..

dylz• 7 years ago

I should point out that this is not all that crazy when certain for profit schools are involved...

jrochkind1• 7 years ago

That doesn't serve as a rationalization for doing the cheating for pay, it doesn't excuse it; it could serve as a rationalization for not telling the school about it.

I think it's also not at all an implausible suspicion.

sarcasmatwork• 7 years ago

I'm a communications professor at a small liberal arts college

Stop reading + its vice.

fishtacos• 7 years ago

Pathetic^

SubiculumCode• 7 years ago

online accredited phd program? Really. Unimaginable.

asdf21• 7 years ago

Why is that unimaginable? Seems very imaginable to me, depending on the field.

I'm a College Professor Who Faked Dissertation Data on the Side

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