Academic corruption

I attended the 7th Prague Forum - “Towards a Pan-European Platform on Ethics, Transparency and Integrity in Education” sponsored by the Council of Europe on October 1-2, 2015.  I was invited to speak about “Plagiarism in Medical Dissertations in Germany” to the working group on plagiarism.

The Council of Europe (not to be confused with the European Union) is a human rights organization that has 47 members and 3 affiliated members. In the 2013 session in Helsinki they called for a Pan-European platform to be established "to study the possibility of developing a framework instrument on the ethical principles of good conduct and professionalism for teachers. Such an instrument would as a consequence also higher the status of the teaching profession."

Supranational European Bodies

Wdcf, The Emirr, NikNaks93,
CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The initiative was launched at the Prague meeting. The meeting began, after the usual ceremonies that included the Minister of Education, Youth, and Sports of the Czech Republic, with a plenary session. Christian Manquet first presented the work of the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO). Then Ian Smith and Tom Hamilton from Scotland presented their work done to the present on ethics, transparency and integrity in education.

I was surprised by the use of the term "academic corruption" that seems to be the umbrella term for referring to a vast number of improper behaviors in the academic world. It encompasses not only plagiarism, ghostwriting, and falsifying data, but it also includes diploma mills, taking bribes or requests for sexual favors in an academic environment, and many other issues. By the end of the conference I was convinced that this is, indeed, the proper term, especially as plagiarism is often not just something one person does, but many factors from the environment enable the behavior and prevent detection and appropriate sanctions.

The second session was focused squarely on academic corruption and included Haldis Holst, from the Global Federation of Teacher's Unions, Education International; Boris Divjak from the anti-corruption resource center U4; Muriel Poisson from the UNESCO International Institute for Educational Planning; and the head of Transparency International in Russia, Elena Panfilova. The latter gave a powerful speech with much insight. For example, she noted that Europe is facing massive migration of people from parts of the world where people expect to have to bribe officials in order to get their children into a good school.  We have to explain to them that this is not how our society works [Or does it? There are reports in Berlin of security guards at the asylum application office taking bribes for good places in line...]. Panfilova noted wryly that there is much plagiarism in the theses of Russian officials, suggesting that one check the Russian Dissernet pages before shaking the hand of one and calling him or her "Dr."

Other issues touched on:

• One needs to differentiate not just public from private education, but particularly for-profit from non-profit entities.
• Financial transparency is vital for discovering ghost teachers on payrolls who get paid without teaching, ghost schools that do not exist, and ghost students or inflated student numbers given in existing schools in order to obtain additional funding.
• The first step is to publicly acknowledge that there is corruption as well as violence against women in education.

On this last point I joked at dinner that this rather reminds me of the one of the 12 steps in Alcoholics Anonymous, the governments must start admitting that they have a problem and are currently powerless to control what is going wrong, so they must come together and talk about how to make amends for the past and resolve to do better in the future. The more I think about it, though, the more appropriate it seems. In many countries, academic corruption is the pink elephant in the room that no one is speaking about

As a short-list of actions it was suggested that:

• the new online platform ETINED - Pan-European Platform on Ethics, Transparency and Integrity in Education organize information;
• example teacher codes-of-ethics be developed;
• educational courses be organized;
• working complaint channels be established;
• "critical friends" who are able to explain that you have a problem or can ask difficult questions without getting an angry and defensive response be cultivated; and
• the corrupt politicians be brought to justice.

Okay, that's a mighty tall order.

In the afternoon working group on plagiarism Irene Glendinning presented the results of her investigations into plagiarism policies across the EU member states, IPPHEAE. As was perhaps to be expected, there is a very wide difference of opinion on what plagiarism is, what should be done about it, and what is actually being done about it. There is an individual report for each of the EU countries investigated, as well as a summary report. She also presented her adapted Academic Integrity Maturity Model that is a tool for comparing institutions or countries, showing how mature their procedures are for dealing with academic misconduct.

I spoke about medical dissertations in Germany and the plagiarism that VroniPlag Wiki has documented in over 80 cases, giving a few brazen examples. I spoke of the patterns of plagiarism discovered that can lead to uncovering academic corruption, for example chains of plagiarism found in theses by the same advisor. In one example, at the University of Münster in Germany, there is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a plagiarism of a thesis that could possibly also be plagiarized, except that no one felt like continuing the documentation. Just the day before my talk, the university announced that it is suggesting to the disciplinary board that the professor in question have all of the perks he has been awarded discontinued and that he be reduced to minimum pay scale. That's about as far as a university can go in Germany, and to date this is only a suggestion, the final decision has not yet been reached.

Other patterns include intra-institutional plagiarism in which a thesis is spliced together from doctoral work done at other institutions, and extra-institutional plagiarism that relies on the Wikipedia (yes, really) or textbooks or fun stuff found on the web. For example, this is from a dissertation that still has Wikipedia links embedded in the PDF:

Dental dissertation Al, University of Münster, page 13

The first commentator summed it up rather nicely: Horrifying! It became clear that software and seminars for PhDs will not solve this problem. The theses documented are not just isolated singularities, but the result of underlying, systemic problems. Thus, radical solutions will be necessary. But first the medical community in Germany has to admit that they have a problem.

There was a great discussion round after the presentations, we could have continued for at least another hour or so. The rapporteur for the group summarized the generally agreed-on points: we need to start early; involve students; set general standards; encourage professional development, but not cast rules; change funding rules from counting things to general funding for all researchers; promote the understanding that we are dealing with a public research record and not personal data; learn to respect others; understand that plagiarism is only part of the problem; encourage nations to set guidelines for quality assurance, for example as part of accreditation procedures; and strive for a holistic approach to the problem.

The second day started off with a round table that first presented the results of the working groups. The working group on professional standards was concerned with how to change the mindsets of all stakeholders in the process. Promoting professionalism instead of focusing on misconduct would be ideal, but when one is dealing with a country that has slipped badly down the slope of tolerating academic misconduct, some nasty sanctions may need to be levied.

The working group on recognition of qualifications looked both at the automatic co-recognition of degrees in the Benelux countries and the problems Sweden has been having with identifying diploma mills. There are issues both with faked diplomas, which are real ones with forged names on them, and fake diplomas, which are issued by a non-accredited body. They find it frustrating that students spend more time evaluating items they want to purchase than the schools they will attend.

The internet platform was then officially launched, ETINED. 

The conference closed with a talk given by Bertrand de Speville. He is the former solicitor general of Hong Kong, who cleaned up the corruption in the Hong Kong police force. He had some wise words for those dealing with corruption:

• Fight tough, but fight fair and for as long as it takes
• Prepare for pain
• Have the will to win
• Cast values into law
• Have a fight plan that includes educating people, enlisting support, enforcement of the rules and prevention means
• Put the plan in action by involving a community
• Collect the resources you need
• Stick with it

Fighting corruption means first encouraging people to trust you and to come forward with stories of corruption. Ultimately, you want to change the community's attitude to the corruption charges. There are no quick fixes, however. He closed by noting that just because you are in a corrupt system, it is never a justification to be corrupt yourself.

It was quite educational listening to the discussions between these highly educated and professional people who are dead serious about getting a handle on academic corruption. I do hope that they are able to get things moving in at least some of the member states.

Update 2015-10-10: The first version of this article included an illustration with a non-medical dissertation. It has now been replaced by one from a dissertation about retinas awarded to a candidate in dentistry.

Interesting links on fake conferences

While researching that last posting on fake conferences I found a number of interesting sites I want to link to here:

• Diploma Mill News, a blog dedicated to "[e]xposing scammers of every ilk: diploma mills, fake diplomas, fabricated transcripts, bogus accreditation, plagiarism, cheating, essay mills, identity theft, impersonation of licensed professionals, and more."
• The State of Oregon has a long list of unaccredited schools
• Academic Spam, a blog that collects the solicitations ("If you are a pseudoscientist, then a new bogus conference is calling you to send fake papers")
• A scientific paper:  Zhuang, Z., Elmacioglu, E., Lee, D., and Giles, C. L. 2007. Measuring conference quality by mining program committee characteristics.  In Proceedings of the 7th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Vancouver, BC, Canada, June 18 - 23, 2007). JCDL '07. ACM, New York, NY, 225-234. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1255175.1255220
• Some Japanese guy has plagiarized my first article on fake conferences...
• A blacklist of conferences and journals
• A 10-page paper from CERN that has 3469 authors (!) [Did they all get money from their institutions for this publication?]

Professors and purchased titles

There seems to be quite a flurry of articles about professors who at some time purchased a title. Here are two that I still have around:

• The Chicago Sun-Times reporter Dave Newbart writes: "A professor granted tenure by Northeastern Illinois University got his  doctorate from a school the federal government later labeled a 'diploma mill', but the state university says it granted him the lifetime job security under a rule that allows 'exceptional' teachers to be hired without a doctorate."
  
  He appears to be a good teacher, so why not just get rid of the doctorate pre-requisite for university teachers? Or just get rid of titles, period?
  


• The southern Sweden daily newspaper Sydsvenskan is reporting that professors applying for research grants have peppered their CVs with fascinating prizes they supposedly won: 
  
  • "International Scientist of The Year"
  • "International Professional of The Year"
  • "2000 Most outstanding Intellectuals of the Year"
    
  • "International Book of Honour"
  • "World Wide Honours List Award"  for "outstanding contribution to linguistic and cognitive sciences 2004"
  
  
  All of these titles are apparently available for purchase. One of the professors involved is the vice rector of the University of Lund. "Oh dear," he remarked, "did I forget to remove that from my CV?"  The question remains, however, as to how it found its way into the CV to start with. Apparently, he didn't realize as a young researcher that you don't have to pay for real awards that you get.
  

The latter type of "award" is one of the so-called "vanity scams" that appeal to people wanting to be recognized as someone important. Who's Who scams seem to have been one of the earliest of these scams, but they are proliferating. Pay your fee for your copy of the handbook, which was probably printed on demand with just enough copies for the people who payed up.

Note: In Sweden, every official paper must be open to public scrutiny (except for a few things of national security importance). Swedish citizens can ask to see the mail of the minister president, and the press use this power frequently to dig out nasty bits. So if there people put stuff like this on a CV in a situation where it is possible for the press to get a copy of it, how many more of these fake titles are on CVs in places where we can't see them? Our school just removed someone from a shortlist when it was discovered that their doctorate was from a diploma mill. No questions asked, just removed. But the question is: how many don't we find?

Another German Politician with Purchased Doctorate

Another German politician has been caught using a doctorate that he purchased. The Süddeutsche Zeitung reports on Dieter Jasper, who sits in parliament for the ruling CDU party.

It seems that in 2004 he "obtained" a doctorate from the "Freien Universität Teufen" in Switzerland. He said that he chose this university because he "needed" a doctorate in order to take over his father's company and this one had an "easy" doctoral degree regulation (Promotionsordnung). One does indeed wonder how he found them, as they don't even have the pretense of a home page. If you google them, you find an advertising page for purchasing degrees and a link to a "European Acadamy".

He says that he wrote a dissertation - an analysis of his father's company. How convinient.

When all the talk about purchased titles came up, he hired a lawyer to check the validity of his title. But he continued using it, as there were elections running in September 2009 and that title just looks so nice. He won, by a hair.

A fellow parliamentarian, Mario Czaja, also from the CDU, was also recently discovered to have a "doctorate" from the same illustrious institution. He was forced to resign from the committee on science. Theoretically, Jasper could be fined or even spend up to a year in prison.

Bizarrely, these ads for companies that will help you purchase a doctorate were decorating the page of the Süddeutsche....

Maybe the SZ needs to have a closer look at their Google AdSense keywords.

(Thanks to Wolf for the pointer!)

Hitting hard against diploma mills

Wired has an excellent in-depth article by David Wolman: "Fraud U: Toppling a Bogus-Diploma Empire" about the efforts of George Gollin to bring down at least one of the many diploma mills currently operating, St. Regis. The people running the operation are now currently in jail (on charges of mail trafficking and bribing and whatnot), and Gollin is pushing legislation to make it harder to set up operations like this.

Gollin keeps a looooong page on Information resources concerning unaccredited degree-granting institutions with an enormous collection of links and some tools for investigating fake degrees.

Choosing your Dissertation Writer

My plagiarism bot scours the Internet looking for new pages that show up using the word "plagiarism". A real gem showed up in my inbox this morning from a marketing organization. It is an advice page on how to obtain low-cost dissertation writers. The page begins:

Writing profession is gaining popularity now-a-days. You can find number of professional writers who can write your dissertation at low cost and less time. Writing a professional dissertation requires years of experience, professionalism and ability to do in-depth research.

How many grammar errors are in these three sentences only? I was suspecting a Far Eastern company, but the registrar of these (and two other domains, both paper mills) is in Manchester, but is a generic registrant. I still have the feeling that this is a non-native speaker of English, perhaps Indian, writing. Maybe it is one of the owners of sham colleges in England, branching out in related fields.

The advertising blunders on:

For attaining good grades in your dissertation it is essential that the dissertation you write must be non-plagiarised. Make sure the dissertation writer you hire provide completely Plagiarism-free dissertation.

Maybe it would be a good idea if your dissertation writer advertiser could also operate a spelling checker.

Kaplan University

A short film was shown this morning as an introduction to use of new media in the classroom from Kaplan University. It is a well-made film with a black professor apologizing to the class for not being media-hip - and that then being transported to all sorts of devices.

Apart from this depicting learning as a one-way street, i.e. the consumption of video anytime, anywhere for credit, I have long suspected that this was just another diploma mill, but have never had the time to research the topic. Let's see:

• The Wikipedia notes that this is the "doing business name of the Iowa College Acquisition Corporation, a company that owns and operates independent, private, for-profit, colleges".
• Rip-off Report no textbook to read, just exercises to hand in that always come back with a grade "A"
  
• Another Diploma Mill
• They have an online (!) nursing program "accredited" by the "Commission on Accreditation of Allied Health Education Programs". I can't find much on them, except advertising sites for online education that say that this is legit. But I don't see them on official lists (except the Wikipedia, and I don't trust it for something like this). Please drop a comment with a reference if this is in line. How can you do nursing by distance?
  
• Complaintsboard: A number of stories here.

Slick films, but I think I need more convincing that this is a legitimate university.

Sham Colleges in the UK

The Times reports extensively on May 21, 2009 about sham colleges in the UK selling letters of admission, attendance certificates, and fake degrees to students - many from Pakistan - who want to enter the UK. There appears to be a loophole in the entry process to the UK that does not check if the colleges in question are actually reputable organizations.

Many are just a few rooms and have maybe three teachers, but have a student body of over 1000 students. Fayaz Ali Khan, who owned Manchester College of Professional Studies among other schools, also gave himself fake degrees and has quite a glowing CV filled with wonderful positions such as full-time director of education at Swat College of Education (in Islamabad) at the same time he was taking a degree in computer technology at the age of 20.

The sham colleges have come under sharp scrutiny when it was discovered that eight of ten terror suspects picked up in April had degrees from sham institutions. And four of these had used these fake degrees to obtain admission to legitimate schools.

This does seem to make a case for accreditation.

German Degree Mill shut down

Spiegel online reports that a German Degree Mill that sold doctorates has been shut down.

The Institut für Wissenschaftsberatung in Bergisch Gladbach had been in business for the past 20 years. Because of a very high fine in a case of bribery, the company is now bankrupt and their home page defunct.

The degree mill boasted proudly of having paired off thousands of people who wanted doctorates and were willing to pay for it with cash-starved universities and/or greedy professors.

Of course, they were always "legal" - only offereing assistance and advice, no ghostwriting, they said.

One of the two owners was put on trial for bribing a university professor in 68 cases. In July 2008 it was revealed that they paid the professor 4200 Euros (sent to the bank account of a relative): 2100 for accepting the "doctoral student" and 2100 Euros after graduation.

The state court in Hildesheim sentenced the law professor from the University of Hanover - who had raked in over 150,000 in fees that he said that he needed to do renovations on his house - to three years in prison and 150,000 in fines. The degree mill owner was sentenced to 3 1/2 years prison and fined 75,000 Euros, although only 8 of 68 people who paid the first fee actually made it through and obtained doctorates.

The second owner of the company, fearing that he could be sentenced for criminal delay in filing, especially as a second case is still in the courts, filed for bankruptcy. The liquidator has had the web page taken down.

The University of Hanover now asks all doctoral students to swear that they have not used an "advice service".

The Mayor's Thesis

The mayor of Ruhmannsfelden, a small town of about 2000 souls in Bavaria, has a problem. The local newspaper went digging around for some dirt on this CSU politician, and found something fishy.

His Diploma-Thesis (approximately a Master's Thesis) in construction engineering, which was submitted to the Czech Technical University of Ostrava in 1999 seems to have a few problems. It is about renovating the city center of Ruhmannsfelden. They Bayerwald Wochenblatt reports that during the 90s the mayor payed an architects company (with tax money) to prepare some ideas on renovating the city center of - surprise - Ruhmannsfelden.

The thesis submitted carries his name, but it seems he was a little careless and didn't notice that every page carried a little logo on the top - the logo of the architect's company. Weeeeeel, the mayor said, but he was very involved in the project. Neeeeee, says the architects, he was not more involved than your average mayor.

The district attorney's office is now active in the case and trying to get the Czech university to initiate action, as is the engineering board. The university, however, does not really answer the letters requesting to know the admittance regulations, the course of study that the Lord Mayor followed, and the circumstances of the awarding of his degree. They don't really want to get into it.

Perhaps this is a case of someone submitting a plagiarism to a diploma mill? Germany has very little experience with diploma mills and is just now coming to terms with rampant plagiarism. The TU Ostrava seems to be above the board, except for their "Lifelong learning" program, which is unfortunately in Czech.

In Germany, foreign titles have to be officially accepted in order to be used, so the DA is accusing him of wrongfully using a title. It will be interesting to see where this goes. As one of the persons quoted said, they have never seen a case like this before.