
I'm a College Professor Who Faked Dissertation Data on the Side - danso
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nea8bx/im-a-college-professor-who-faked-dissertation-data-on-the-side
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socrates1998
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.

~~~
JakeStone
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
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.

~~~
AlexCoventry
What would the world look like, if the calculus had been discovered two
millenia earlier?

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tombert
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 :) .

~~~
PopeDotNinja
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
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.

~~~
xwdv
“Basic requirements for living” though isn’t a pile of cash; it’s food, water,
shelter, clothing and some form of transportation. I’ve yet to see a UBI
scheme proposed that provides those things to people so they can spend their
time pursuing other ventures.

~~~
horsawlarway
I understand where you're coming from, but the idea that every person has the
_same_ basic requirements falls flat immediately.

Take just a small sample of different folks

Person A: Single 35yo female with high blood pressure

Person B: Married 62yo with dementia

Person C: 14yo with Type 1 diabetes

Person D: Married 36yo with a knee replacement

Person E: Single 21yo attending college

That's 5 people. Not a one of them is all that rare. They each require some
form of the goods you've described, but the actual needs of each person vary A
LOT.

The 21yo in college probably doesn't need a car. The guy with dementia
probably can't have a car. The 36yo will need a form of transportation that
accommodates the knee. The food requirements of the person with diabetes and
the person with high blood pressure are specific and different. The meds those
two people need are specific and different.

And that's just 5 people with relatively common situations. Once you actually
start trying to get those "basic requirements for living" to work for the
entire populace you quickly realize that "basic" is not actually basic, and
usually the person best able to decide what they need is... drumroll... that
person.

So instead of a condescending, authoritarian approach where the government
strictly provides goods, UBI tries to give each person the ability to choose
for themselves what they need, and how they'd like to prioritize it.

\-----

Now, I still have a lot of problems with UBI, and I'm fairly convinced it
won't work. But I do strongly believe that the "pile of cash" approach is the
most egalitarian and efficient solution to meet the specific needs of the
incredibly varied population if UBI is something we're going to try.

~~~
lasagnaphil
But the dilemma is, that the privatization of social services in favor of UBI
might increase the costs for those services (We’ve observed over the past that
unregulated competition doesn’t lead to more competitive prices and rather
monopolization and exploitation), up to the point that people who really need
those services wouldn’t afford it even with UBI. That is why I think UBI
should be done in adjunction to existing public social services (such as
healthcare).

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grenoire
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
> _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 :-)

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MiroF
"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..

~~~
jrochkind1
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.

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

~~~
omarhaneef
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."

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

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

~~~
OrgNet
is it that widespread?

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SubiculumCode
online accredited phd program? Really. Unimaginable.

~~~
asdf21
Why is that unimaginable? Seems very imaginable to me, depending on the field.

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

Stop reading + its vice.

~~~
fishtacos
Pathetic^

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phist_mcgee
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.

~~~
Legogris
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
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!

