Cheating

It's depressing that I have a whole blog category called "Cheating," but there you go.

From BusinessWeek:

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."

Read the rest of the article here.

A story broke yesterday about a University of Chicago Law School alum who got busted for fudging the grades on his law school transcript when he was applying for law firm jobs. Apparently, the complaint to the Illinois bar also alleges that he fudged his law school application materials by failing to disclose that he had flunked out of medical school.

I take particular interest in this story not just because I too am a UofC law school alum, but because, based on his graduation year, there's a very high likelihood that I admitted him when I was an admissions officer there.

Every year that I have been counseling applicants, multiple people ask me: "Do I really have to disclose that? How will they ever find out?" And my answer is always the same: "Yes, you have to disclose, first because it would unethical not to when it's a mandatory disclosure, and second because you might get caught."

Some people are very, very good liars, and it's hard for admissions officers to catch every lie, especially lies of omission. But this incident is a powerful reminder that one way or another, these things can come back to bite you. If these allegations are true, he might be disbarred.

Incidentally, some commenters at Above the Law are asking why he would have had to disclose flunking out of medical school when he was applying to law school. Law school applications require you to list every undergraduate and graduate institution you have ever attended, whether or not you received credit or a degree. You also have to submit all of those transcripts with your applications. Those disclosures are mandatory, not discretionary. For details, see page 22 of the LSAT and LSDAS Information Book.

It's peak admissions season and I'm a bad, bad blogger as a result -- lots of client work to turn around (bless them!). But... in the meantime, I have to share the weirdest, juiciest story I've read in a long time. The opening paragraph:This is the story in which you learn how a graduate of Columbia Law School—that’s me—and almost 80 other people, who really should have known better, got suckered into giving away all our personal details as well as up to two months of our lives for “jobs” that never actually existed. And then you learn why it all happened the way it did.Read on here.

True story? Fiction? Who cares? I want more.

What a weird story. The LA Times reports that an 18-year-old impostor named Azia Kim successfully passed as a student at Stanford for eight months:

The Stanford Daily, quoting one of Kim's former roommates, said the deception started in September, the day before Stanford's orientation for new students.

Two sophomores agreed to let Kim stay in their room after she told them she did not like the roommate she had been assigned.

During the fall and winter terms, Kim allegedly slept in the other women's room or the lounge of the 210-resident dorm. Last month, she moved into another dorm after being referred to another student who needed a roommate.

Residence hall associates became suspicious after comparing conflicting statements Kim allegedly gave and contacting the student housing office. Kim was confronted Monday and escorted from campus, according to the Stanford Daily.

Amy Zhou, Kim's roommate in the second dorm, said Kim apparently got into the room through the window because she never had a key.

Kim told other students she was a sophomore majoring in human biology and bought textbooks and studied with friends.

"Personally, I don't feel safe now that Stanford allowed this to happen and that they're not doing anything to ensure the safety of their students," Zhou said. "I think something's definitely wrong with the system if this could happen."

No word yet on whether she took classes, ate at the cafeteria, etc. (Not that it matters, but I wonder if she was a dinged applicant who decided she was going to attend Stanford anyway?)

It's disturbing that she got away with this for eight months. That several students let this stranger move in with them, no questions asked, serves as a caution. Having to climb through the window to get in and out of the room because she never had a key? I hate to tell people that they are too trusting, but there is such a thing.  (See here for my posting about an experiment in which college students easily let themselves be lured into a stranger's van and tied up with duct tape.)

And while the (real) Stanford student quoted above is right that there are obviously some problems with the current "system" if this was able to happen, students also need to take responsibility for their own safety, and for each other's safety. All the security in the world isn't going to help if you let an impostor climb through your window for eight months. It can be embarrassing to confront someone you suspect of being a fraud, or to yell for help when you suspect someone may be trying to harm you. What if you're wrong? What if they're actually harmless, nice people? It's an embarrassment we need to get over.

So far there's a happy ending in the sense that no one got hurt, but it's a nice reminder that there are a lot of strange ducks out there, both on campus and off, and we need to be careful.

Duke's Fuqua School of Business has disciplined 34 first-year MBA students (including expulsion for nine) who were caught when a professor spotted similarities in their answers on a take-home test. That's almost 10% of the class of 2008.

This story comes on the heels of the scandals in 2005 when Harvard Business School and MIT's Sloan School rejected 150 applicants who had hacked their way into admissions office databases to find out whether they had been accepted.

Can ethics be taught in the classroom? Business schools seem to think so -- they all trumpet the ethics components of their curricula. I tend to think ethics is one of those things you have to learn at home long before you get to grad school.

It's also an interesting time for higher ed to be wagging its finger at applicants and students, given recent revelations about graft among financial aid officers and con artist Marilee Jones, former dean of admissions at MIT.

See more Ivey Files postings on cheating here and here.

An op-ed in this morning's Boston Globe reminds me why I avoid reading that paper until I have some food in my stomach.

The Globe's take on Marilee Jones's fall from grace?No doubt, Marilee Jones did the wrong thing. Decades ago, she claimed to have earned three academic degrees when she applied for a job as an administrative assistant at MIT. She rose through the ranks and became well known as an admissions dean with a heart.

This week, however, she was exposed. Someone questioned her
credentials. And an inquiry revealed that she held none of the degrees
on her resume.

Jones has resigned, leaving some MIT students and
colleagues in shock. Still, she deserves credit for her straightforward
apology.

"I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first
applied to MIT 28 years ago," she said in a statement, "and did not
have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job
or at any time since."

Admitting to that lack of courage means
being brave enough to be oneself, even if one is short on credentials
but long on potential.

This forthright admission stands in contrast to others who have denied, delayed, or justified.

Last year, David Edmondson, chief executive of RadioShack,
said he planned to stay in his job even after it was revealed that he
had not earned two college degrees listed on his resume. Days later he
resigned.

Lower on the career chain, some people argue that
applicants have to lie to get first jobs or to go back to work after
months or years of being unemployed. They say it's a matter of
financial survival. But a better solution would be an aggressive
national public policy that creates many more programs for working
adults to earn college degrees.

Although this is a sad final
chapter for Jones's MIT career, she leaves a positive legacy. It almost
seems she converted her uneasiness over her deceit into a useful public
tool. She pressed other admissions professionals and students to step
outside the hothouse of academic competitiveness, to see the person
behind the paperwork. In 2004, this page praised her for changing MIT's
undergraduate application by adding the request: "Tell us about
something you do for the pleasure of it." It's a worthy attempt to talk
about joy.

In a March 2006 blog on MIT's admissions website,
Jones posted an entry addressing students who were waiting to see if
they would be admitted to the school. She reminded them that they would
leave a mark on the world no matter which colleges did or did not admit
them.

"Hold faith that things always work out for you and that things always happen for a reason," she wrote.

Defending
student blog entries that were criticized as being too brutally honest
about campus life, she wrote, "I'm proud to represent a place where
truth is the whole point, messy or not."

Now, Jones  has had to face her own messy truth. She has done so  in a commendable way.My Lord, where to begin?

First: This op-ed reflects the strange moral relativism of a Watergate-scarred generation that believes no underlying crime could ever be as bad as the cover-up. In that world, making up three degrees while you are serving as gatekeeper for one of the world's great universities is bad, but not as bad as the cover-ups in the evil private sector.

Newsflash: Marilee Jones covered up her fraud for decades. Nor did she suddenly experience a crisis of conscience and fess up. She was busted following an anonymous tip and effectively fired. That's leaving a "positive legacy" and exiting in a "commendable way"? Only if you have some weird bias in favor of the non-profit world, which -- another newsflash -- is just as rife with human folly and hubris as the for-profit world.

Second: Only the Globe would have the chutzpah to turn this personal disgrace into a call for a big government program to help adults earn college degrees -- as if lack of money had caused, let alone excuses, Marilee Jones's fraud against MIT, hundreds of thousands of applicants and students, the admissions community, readers of her book, and the many people she's lectured over the years about the need for applicants to chill during the admissions process. Jones is a con artist and a fraud. Period.

That's some kind of kool-aid they're drinking over at the Globe to write this kind of puff piece.

MIT Dean of Admissions Marilee Jones has just resigned: "I misrepresented my academic degrees when I first applied to MIT 28 years ago and did not have the courage to correct my resume when I applied for my current job or at any time since."

MIT demanded her resignation after her credentials were challenged ten days ago and subsequently investigated.

What an interesting development on the heels of this article about admissions officers hiring investigators ("admissions police") to verify applicants' credentials and crack down on applicant plagiarism and fraud.

I had been one of Jones's admirers for her efforts to reduce the anxiety and insanity inherent in today's college admissions process. This is a sad development.

Some moron tried to buy an advance copy of the LSAT exam from two LSAC employees by leaving a hundred dollar bill under their windshield wipers in the employee parking lot. How profoundly stupid on so many levels, not least: did he really think they'd be tempted to compromise their ethics and jeopardize their jobs for a hundred bucks? What planet does he live on? (In the sting, he upped the amount to $5,000, which changed hands in a McDonald's parking lot. Classy.) He is now being charged with four felonies.

As an admissions officer I once busted a guy after I suspected that his LSAT report looked phony. Indeed it was, although I have to give him props for the quality of his forgery. It turns out he had broken into our offices to doctor his file, and things proceeded to their sad conclusion from there. Even sadder: he likely would have gotten in without the fraud, breaking and entering, etc.

It's depressing that people do such stupid things, with such alarming consequences, all just to get into law school. Law school!

Note to would-be cheaters: If you get busted, no legitimate law school or state bar will touch you with a ten-foot pole. Your career will be over before it even starts.

I'll put this one in the "what was he thinking" file...

Thomas Kostigen reports on a study by the Academy of Management Learning and Education, which surveyed 5,300 graduate students in the US and Canada and found that "graduate students in general are cheating at an alarming rate and business-school students are cheating even more than others." Cheating was defined as "plagiarizing, copying other students' work and brining prohibited materials into exams." (I assume they mean "or" rather than "and" -- any one of those would strike me as cheating.)

The findings: "More than half (56%) of MBA candidates say they cheated in the past year." The percentage of cheaters among other graduate disciplines:

54% - Engineering50% - Physical Sciences49% - Medical and Health Care45% - Law43% - Arts39% - Social Sciences and Humanities

Interesting that Journalism was left off that list. I'd be curious about that statistic, given the slew of made-up stories at famous newspapers in the last few years (although the mother of all hoaxes may still be Janet Cooke's "Little Jimmy," the fictitious eight-year old heroin addict she invented for the Washington Post back in 1981).

Also noteworthy in this article: "what's holding many professors back from taking action on cheaters is the fear of litigation." I'd venture that fear of litigation (and plain old laziness) is also what's behind rampant grade inflation.

And finally: does this mean that people will finally stop portraying lawyers as the quintessence of ethical sleazemongering? Looks as if doctors, scientists, and engineers may be faring worse in that department.