Pakistani diploma mill

The British BBC reports that thousands of fake diplomas from a Pakistani diploma mill have been purchased by UK nationals. The company Axact is said to have set up hundreds of "universities" that only exist in their online presence, using stock photos for campus and student life imagery and including "news" stories that never happened. The telephone numbers for universities with names such as "Brooklyn Park University" and "Nixon University" are said to be connected to a call center in Karachi.

Apparently, a new side business in extortion and blackmail has opened up, with a telephone caller who is faking the caller id pretending to be the police. The caller threatens arrest unless additional documents are produced to back up the degree. Such documents appear to also be for sale at the "institutions."

The New York Times reported in 2015 on Axact, leading to a senior manager of Axact being sentenced to 21 months prison in the US in August 2017, according to the BBC. A Pakistani investigation seems to be stalled at the moment.

Keeping tabs on cheating

I tend to keep tabs open in my browser for weeks with interesting articles I want to explore in more depth. Then Firefox decides to update and crashes so miserably, that the tabs are gone. So I'll try to at least post them here. No promises that I can do this with any kind of regularity, like Retraction Watch does with its Weekend Reads.

• The Japan Times has an interesting article debunking an excuse typically used by students from the Far East: "Confcius made me do it." It seems that the difference between allusion and "literary theft" was well know many centuries ago.
  
  "If East Asian students and researchers plagiarize, it’s not because of some archaic cultural programming; it’s because modern institutional cultures tacitly condone plagiarism, or lack clear policies for explaining and combating it."
• In the New Scientist there was an interview with Shi-min Fang that published in 2012, who was awarded the Maddox prize for his work on exposing scientific misconduct in China.  It seems that there is a lot of controversy around his work.
• At the University College Cork in Ireland there was a spat about wide-spread contract cheating, as the Irish Times reports. Ireland is currently considering legislation to make advertising for or providing contract cheating services illegal.
• Down under, the weekly student newspaper of the University of Sydney, Australia,  Honi Soit reports that the university had considered using some anti-cheating software that was created by former University of Melbourne students, but have decided not to after a trial. The idea was to analyse typing patterns and use multiple login questions in order to make it harder for students to submit essays purchased from contract cheating sites. Some of the issues included the necessity to be connected to the Internet to write an essay, forcing students to write with this system and not the editor of their choice, and a massive invasion of privacy that includes tracking the locations of the users and comparing it with the location of their mobile phones. The software was felt to be impractical and invasive.
• Back in June the Daily Times reported that the doctorate of the prorector of the Comsats Institute of Information Technology has been revoked by Preston University.
• The former head of the Toronto school board lost his teaching certificate for plagiarism. According to The Globe and Mail, he has appealed the ruling and is willing to testify under oath about who helped him produce the plagiarisms.

A Confusing Pakistani Plagiarism Case

The Pakistani Express Tribune reported on March 28, 2016 that the former chair of the Pakistani HEC (Higher Education Council) in Pakistan has tendered his apology for having plagiarized a paper he co-authored with a colleague. According to the Express Tribune, an investigation committee found in 2014 that a third of the paper was taken from a European Union (EU) report.

The paper, given as ‘Study of Pakistan’s Election System – Intelligent E-Election’ in the Journal of Independent Studies and Research (Vol. 1, No 2, July 2003, pp 2 – 7), will be "withdrawn" from the author's CV, according to the Express Tribune.

There are two journals that are "JISR" journals, one on management and one on computer science. According to the online table of contents of the management issue, although seven papers were accepted, only four are linked to online. One is indeed by the former HEC chair, but on a different topic. The computing issue (Vol. 1, No 2, July 2003) includes a paper by his co-author on a different topic.  I checked the management journal on the Internet Archive and found the July 2003 issue archived in 2012 with no mention of the paper, but it can be found linked from the table of contents of the computing issue, also archived in 2012. So the paper was removed from the journal instead of being retracted.

If I google the title, however, I land at an arXiv paper by that same name and by those authors, submitted on 27 May 2004, with no mention that the paper has been published elsewhere or that it has been withdrawn. The acknowledgment of the paper is interesting:

By the grace of Allah, this independent study stands complete. However, calling it independent is not quite correct. I owe the success of this effort to my institute and my Independent study supervisor, Dr. J[...] R. L[...], without whose guidance this accomplishment would have been impossible.

So is this a colleague or a student who is the first author of the paper?

Digging a bit deeper turns up this 2013 report in Dawn stating that using Turnitin on the paper reported 78 % plagiarism. I have grave reservations about using numbers that a plagiarism detection system reports, as they are often skewed. The article notes:

According to the HEC rules, anyone found involved in plagiarism before 2007 cannot be punished but all the benefits availed because of the plagiarised thesis or research paper would be withdrawn, [an anonymous HEC official] added. The officer pointed out that the research paper was written in 2003 when there was no policy about plagiarism. “Dr [L.] just supervised that research paper so action can only be taken against [M.N.],” he said.

 L. is quoted in a 2014 article in the Express Tribune:  

[L.] added that he did not contribute to the piece and only provided the data the [N.] needed. [L.] also said that the case did not fall under the HEC plagiarism policy as it was published in a magazine, adding "I never benefited from it and the co-author included my name without my knowledge."

According to the Tribune, the article was on his CV in 2014, but there is no trace of the paper in his online CV today. In an article he published in 2014 ("I am not a plagiarist") L. writes

In 2003, I helped a faculty member, [M.N.], in collecting data for a report that he was writing on electronic voting. He subsequently published the report, in 2004, without my knowledge, in a non-recognised journal, of which he was the editor and used my name as co-author. Since it was typical that authors write names of advisers in their papers, and since I was his adviser in his other work, he put my name on the paper as an acknowledgment. No one, including me, could have verified the originality of anyone’s work then, since no anti-plagiarism softwares were available at that time. The paper eventually got listed in my CV — an innocent oversight as there was no vested interest involved because the journal was not of a notable stature even by Pakistani standards.

He goes on to state that what the Express Tribune has written is misleading and quotes another academic as calling this a conspiracy, because L. has been vociferous in denouncing Pakistani fake degrees and fake universities (which he, by the way, has). And says that it isn't a problem anyway, as there was no Pakistani policy on plagiarism before 2007.

I'm confused.

L. has apologized for plagiarism in a paper he didn't write that is no longer available at the journal named but where his co-author was editor and it still ended up listed on his CV by mistake? And now it has been removed from the journal page (and is not mentioned in the CV) but it is still on arXiv? Because it was put there before the Pakistani policy on plagiarism came into effect?

This has nothing to do with there being no software around to find plagiarism (not "verify the originality") -- you only put things in your CV that you wrote, and if you wrote an article, you know that you didn't copy it from somewhere else, so there is no need for any sort of software.

It doesn't matter if the journal is "non-recognized": Software filtering systems will find them and they will be available to others. If a PDF can be obtained online for a paper that has been retracted and there is no retraction watermark on the page, other scientists will be misled into thinking that the paper has not been withdrawn. People don't compare papers they are quoting with the CVs of the authors, as far as I know. And just deleting articles that have been found to be the results of academic misconduct may remove the offending article from the reach of software, but if anyone has quoted this article, there should be a proxy page that informs the reader what's up. 

----
Thanks to @gwarynski_ for the Express Tribune link, although it ended up being far too much research necessary to try and understand what happened! 

End of Semester Roundup

Here are some links about plagiarism and academic misconduct from around the world that have been languishing in my inbox:

• A professor for African-American History at the Arizona State University in the US has been demoted from full professor to associate professor, according to the Phoenix New Times, after a second plagiarism scandal about his writing erupted. A  blog contains many more details about the plagiarism allegations. Retractionwatch also has an article about this case. The professor is said to have used, among others, sources many students find useful: Wikipedia.
• Writing in a blog at the Daily Pakistan Asif A. Malik points out a wonderful piece by physics professor Pervez Hoodbhoy from the Express Tribune from January 4, 2013. Hoodbhoy starts off with a thought experiment: "Imagine the following experiment aimed at improving Karachi’s police force: suppose that policemen are offered cash prizes for every criminal they kill in a police muqabala, given public recognition and told that promotions to higher posts hinge on their kill count." He spins the story out that, of course, the police would start shooting at anyone, just to increase their pay. That is, in essence, what is happening in academia, except that instead of a "kill count" there are the magic indicators "number of publications" and "citation index". Since 2002-2003 both the pay and promotion for professors in Pakistan depend on the number of papers published and the number of PhD and MSc students graduated. Surprise! These all increased!
  In 2012 Hoodbhoy wrote about the problem of telling the good from the bad, in the Express Tribune column in 2013 he noted that the apparent increase in quality proudly proclaimed by the Higher Education Council (HEC) "was only possible because many university teachers engaged in wholesale plagiarism, faked data and produced research that no one seems to have any use for. As academic ethics went into free fall, university administrators and the HEC turned a blind eye. The new policy — which required learning how to play the numbers game — had the effect of turning many professors into crooks and thieves."
• The Times of India writes that a professor from the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education & Research in Chandigarh has been found to have plagiarized from two US American sources. Rakesh Sehgal retracted a paper from the journal Tropical Parasitology, published by Wolters Kluwer Medknow. The retraction notice states only that the paper has been retracted, not why. In a previous article, the Times of India noted that according to Indian law, a jail sentence between 6 months and 3 years can be levied, and public servants can lose their jobs if found to have plagiarized. 
• Richard de Boer published an atricle in the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant on July 4, 2015 called "Welkom in de wereld van nepwetenschap" (welcome to the world of junk science), but the article is unfortunately behind a paywall and in Dutch. I was able to obtain it and use Google translate. The article deals with mock conferences like WASET and junk journals like those published with the OMICS group, which was removed from the PubMed list in 2013. There are a number of interviews with people attending the conferences, positive and negative, and also with a former colleague of the WASET organizer. The article discusses both Jeffery Beall's publisher black list and the Directory of Open Access Journals white list, noting problems with each. What a shame such an in-depth article is unavailable to a wider audience.
• Hatoon Kadi writes in her blog at Arab News the Memoirs of a Saudi Ph.D. student: The menace of plagiarism. She mis-believes, as many do, that "[t]here are certain programs that take a few seconds in determining the originality of any research material." No, software can only detect potential text overlap, it cannot determine plagiarism or originality, because all systems suffer from false positives (quotation not seen) and false negatives (source not stored in the database). She discusses the question of hiring a ghostwriter with friends and found to her dismay that many had no qualms about using work from others. She calls for strict laws to punish plagiarists. I don't think punishment works -- we need to educate people as to why referencing and quotation is important.

Now, back to grading exams.