Michael Leddy posted this note about a bit of a stir that is on at Jacksonville State University in Alabama, USA. The president of the university, William Meehan, was granted his doctorate from the University of Alabama. There has been determined that there is an enormous amount of, shall we say, correspondence, between that dissertation and the dissertation of Carl Boening, who was granted a doctorate a few years earlier from the same institution. Meehan's thesis does admit that it is duplicating a research method with a different population. But just duplicating the method does not warrent word-for-word copying from the text.

Interestingly, there are three professors who were on both dissertation commitees. Apparently, Meehan's committee approved the duplication of the method. It does seem strange that they did not pick up on over a third of the thesis being a copy.

The case was published in USA Today in April 2009. They report that the investigation was started because Meehan had seized a large plant sample collection from another professor and his lawyer is accusing Meehan of having a history of stealing academic work.

This same president was also caught with some plagiarized material in his regular column in the local newspaper in 2007. But he wasn't to blame, that was his ghostwriter doing the plagiarizing:

The Committee has found no discernable evidence that President Meehan knew or had reason to know that articles written and released over his name and office contained plagiarized material.

At least that cost him a job at a fancy Georgia Football College, Valdosta. The University of Alabama reviewed the similar dissertations, USA Today reports, and is not taking action because one professor from the committee is at another institution and one has passed away. Case closed. Ignore. Water over the mill.

The Tuscaloosa News reports, however, that the dissertation adviser was not involved in any sort of University of Alabama "review".

It does somehow smell of something getting swept under the carpet.

Simultaneous Translation

Sorry I haven't been blogging much lately, I've been giving many talks on plagiarism. Today's talk on plagiarism was for a real crowd. About 200 had been my largest crowd to date, but today I had about 260 listeners! There was no protesting that I don't need a microphone - without it, I would not have been to be heard. Luckily, I had a suit jacket on with pockets, so I had a place to park the microphone unit.

And I had, for the first time, simultaneous translation of my talk - into sign language! I was speaking to all of the new teachers in Hamburg, who have to attend mandatory training (which probably explains their faces,
they were arranged in a I-don't-really-want-to-be-here scowl). Hamburg has a school for the deaf, and they have a new teacher who is deaf herself. Since the University of Hamburg has a program in sign language, there were
two eager signers who spelled each other every 15 minutes, so that the deaf teacher could follow what I was saying.

I am used to owning the stage - I park my laptop, whip out my remote control, and pace about as necessary, gesturing a lot as I go. But there was always a woman next to me, and I couldn't see the eighth of the crowd
that was blocked out by the signer.

I eventually retreated to the lecturn, but it wasn't really that good. One of the signers then realized the situation, and took a step backwards when she took her position center stage. Now I could see everyone.

I do think that it would have been better for the deaf teacher and the signers to position themselves off to one side of the room, instead of taking center stage. But it seemed to work, and I spoke with the signers afterwards how
they signed the word plagiarism.

They held up their right hand, fingers streched and thumb at the side: this is writing. With the left hand they "pulled" a copy off the page, do it is writing-copying. Okay, I asked was it not perhaps writing-stealing? They signed the question to the deaf teacher, she replied very insistently, that writing-stealing was a much better sign, it was similar to the copying motion, but was very clearly a "taking" motion.

So now I know the word plagiarism in one more language!

Parents organize alternative graduation for cheaters

Bizarre. An Ohio high school discovered that a student had hacked into the school computer system and stolen the final exams. Half of the student body either cheated or knew of the cheating and said nothing. So the adminstration cancelled the graduation ceremonies. For such a widespread scandal, I would say that was a good reaction. They sent the diplomas home to the parents.

The parents, however, set up an alternative graduation ceremony. With all the trappings. Teaching their kids that getting caught cheating is just a little annoyance, a bump in the road. Nothing to get worked up about.

The comments make me sick. There seems to be a lot of supporters for the cheaters. I suppose this class of '09 will be using the paper mills to get their bachelor's degree and get their Master's from one of those sham colleges.

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.

Modern Applied Science - another Fake Journal?

I got this in my email the other day, with a request to pass it on to my associates and colleagues. As a friend pointed out, the verb "focus" when applied to such a variety of topics is amusing.

Dear Sir/Madam,
I am Susan Sun, the editor of Modern Applied Science which focuses on the fields of chemistry, management and economics, physics, mathematics and statistics, geology, engineering, environmental sciences and biology. And I know you are an expert in this field, so we would like to get paper submissions from you.

Please find more details at http://www.ccsenet.org/mas/.

If you have any questions, please contact with me at: mas@ccsenet.org

It is appreciated if you could share this information with your colleagues and associates.

Thank you.

Note: We are recruiting reviewers for the journal, please find more details at: http://www.ccsenet.org/reviewer.html

Best Regards,

Susan Sun
Editor
Modern Applied Science
Canadian Center of Science and Education
*************************************
Add: 4915 Bathurst St. Unit #209-309, Toronto, ON. M2R 1X9, Canada
Tel: 1-416-208-4027
Fax: 1-416-208-4028
E-mail: mas@ccsenet.org
Website: www.ccsenet.org

The CCSE has a web site and publishes lots of journals. Its advertising page is on lots of blogs - but it is, if anything, a NGO with no official ties to the government of Canada.

The editor, Susan Sun, can be found with this gem published:

Recycling Economy and Sustainable Development
Susan Sun
Abstract

Economic development is the main theme of social progress. By recalling the economic development, the necessity and inevitability of sustainable development is fully demonstrated. With the acceleration of economic globalization, the influence for sustainable development is increasing. There is a complex opposite and united relationship between economic globalization and sustainable development. People are seeking a way to eliminate confrontation and get united. In social practice, we found that the recycling economy is the best way to achieve sustainable development, and it is an important embodiment of the economic, social and ecological sustainability.

Sounds like gobbelty-gook to me.

So how does one tell if a journal is legit? They have a web site! It's new, so no one has quoted it yet. But the very broad scope of the journal quite disturbs me and leads me to think that this is yet another fake journal. Does anyone have more information on this organization, beside their own online information that is all from March 2009 or later? Google maps points to a car lot for the address given. That would make it hard to get mail, I suppose...

Update: 2013-04-22: Link for the journals fixed

A Tongue in Cheek Plagiarism

One of the Swedish defendants in the Pirate Bay case in which the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, IFPI, took the owners of the Pirate Bay site to court and won millions of Swedish crowns) has set up a site http://www.internetavgift.se/ which is a plagiarism of the Swedish TV license site http://www.radiotjanst.se/. In many European countries you have to pay a license to watch TV, the fees are used to pay for public broadcasting. Many people feel that this is very problematic, as they do not watch public broadcasting, preferring the private channels (which have advertising).

On the page they present a very complicated formula for figuring out the tax - which amounts to one Swedish crown, which is the smallest amount that can be transferred from one account to the next. The account which is listed for payment is the account of the lawyers for IFPI.

In Sweden, your bank will charge you up to 20 crowns (about $2.50) for money put into your account. In addition, the lawyers are legally required to do all sorts of bookkeeping tasks around any money they take in. The lawyers have threatened to find some way of forcing them to take down this site.

Tour of an Essay Mill

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a video tour of an essay mill. It is great. The funniest thing for me is the notice for essay authors after logging in (mark 3:20):

Please, stop using Turnitin Software!

Since Turnitin stores the papers in its databases, if a plagiarism-free paper is checked with Turnitin and then submitted again by the student, it will be now be flagged as a plagiarism, causing much dismay for the dishonest student.

What I find dismaying is that the essay authors are only paid so little for there work. The mills are making an enormous amount of money on this operation. I find ads that charge 30$ / page for an original paper, but the authors seem to only be offered 3-5$ a page.