Archive of ‘academic dishonesty’ category
Death threats, ghost researchers and sock puppets: Inside the weird, wild world of dodgy academic research
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-01-31/on-the-trail-of-dodgy-academic-research/100788052
More than 46 of Shadi Riahi’s publications with Dr Nazari have now been retracted for plagiarism, duplication of data and forged authorship.
“People try and fake everything,” said Ivan Oransky, who has spent years researching scientific misconduct on his blog Retraction Watch.
investigative journalist Brian Deer, who discovered Dr Wakefield had multiple undisclosed conflicts of interest and that the study of just 12 children had been rigged.
But the damage had already been done.
Vaccination rates in the United Kingdom hit a low of 80 per cent in the early 2000s, leaving children unprotected from serious diseases. The repercussions are still being felt today, with Dr Wakefield being hailed as a hero by vaccine sceptics.
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more on peer reviewed fake papers in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=china+peer+review
https://www.chronicle.com/article/coaches-and-presidents-are-robbing-us
There are now significant numbers of administrators in America’s colleges and universities who are being paid, in real dollars, more than the highest-paid university president was receiving when I was an undergraduate, in the early 1980s — in quite a few cases, many multiples more.
he outrageous athletics salaries can even seem to justify the administrative overpay. By a kind of perverse psychological effect, paying a college football coach $10 million per year makes paying a university president $1.5 million, a provost $800,000, and various vice provosts and vice chancellors $500,000 each seem positively parsimonious by comparison.
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https://www.facebook.com/Interfacultyorganization/posts/2940666006209784
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2021-11-19-automated-proctoring-swept-in-during-pandemic-it-s-likely-to-stick-around-despite-concerns
a law student sued an automated proctoring company, students have complained about their use in student newspaper editorials and professors have compared them to Big Brother.
ProctorU, which has decided not to sell software that uses algorithms to detect cheating
A recent Educause study found that 63 percent of colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada mention the use of remote proctoring on their websites.
One reason colleges are holding onto proctoring tools, Urdan adds, is that many colleges plan to expand their online course offerings even after campus activities return to normal. And the pandemic also saw rapid growth of another tech trend: students using websites to cheat on exams.
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More on proctoring in this blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=proctoring
Is Scientific Communication Fit for Purpose?
problems is scientific misconduct and fraud, which, it is important to note, is perpetuated by scientists themselves. This category includes scientists who use fraudulent data, inappropriately manipulate images, and otherwise fake experimental results. Publishers have been investing increasingly to block bad contributions at the point of submission through editorial review and more is almost certainly needed, likely a combination of automated and human review. Another form of misconduct is the failure to disclose conflicts of interest, which, notwithstanding efforts by publishers to strengthen disclosure guidelines, have continued to be disclosed “too little too late,”
Beyond individual misconduct, there are also organized and systematic challenges. We are seeing “organized fraud” and “industrialized cheating” to manipulate the scientific record to advance self-interests. These choreographed efforts include citation malpractice, paper mills, peer review rings, and guest editor frauds. And, even if it does not rise to the level of misconduct, we have seen the use of methods and practices that make substantial portions of at least some fields impossible to reproduce and therefore of dubious validity. Whether individual, organized, or systematic, all these are threats to scientific integrity.
Online Cheating Isn’t Going Away. Use It as a Teachable Moment for Students and Educators
By Wade Tyler Millward Jul 27, 2020
https://www.edsurge.com/news/2020-07-27-online-cheating-isn-t-going-away-use-it-as-a-teachable-moment-for-students-and-educators
my note:
Nothing new in this article. It has been wildly known for a long time that the larger part of students commit academic dishonesty because they are not educated on that issue.
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More on Online cheating the same as blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cheating
A peer-reviewed journal published hundreds of them. Why?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-did-a-peer-reviewed-journal-publish-hundreds-of-nonsense-papers
One clue is that the overwhelming majority of the papers were ostensibly written by authors who claim to be affiliated with Chinese institutions. Universities in China often reward researchers for publishing in notable journals listed on the Science Citation Index, in some cases paying them cash bonuses, though China’s science and education ministries have recently tried to crack down on the practice. It’s also long been a requirement that doctoral students at many Chinese universities publish a paper before they graduate.
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China’s Plagiarism Problem
https://www.forbes.com/2010/05/26/china-cheating-innovation-markets-economy-plagiarism.html
Plagiarism and the lack of academic integrity it engenders are intricately connected to the larger debate about intellectual property rights (IPR) in China and the government’s promoted idea of a harmonious society to support stability.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/onlinelearningcollective/permalink/761389994491701/
“What the invention of photography did to painting, this will do to teaching.”
AI can write a passing college paper in 20 minutes
Natural language processing is on the cusp of changing our relationship with machines forever.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/ai-can-write-a-passing-college-paper-in-20-minutes/
The specific AI — GPT-3, for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 — was released in June 2020 by OpenAI, a research business co-founded by Elon Musk. It was developed to create content with a human language structure better than any of its predecessors.
According to a 2019 paper by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, machines fundamentally lack commonsense reasoning — the ability to understand what they’re writing. That finding is based on a critical reevaluation of standard tests to determine commonsense reasoning in machines, such as the Winograd Schema Challenge.
Which makes the results of the EduRef experiment that much more striking. The writing prompts were given in a variety of subjects, including U.S. History, Research Methods (Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy), Creative Writing, and Law. GPT-3 managed to score a “C” average across four subjects from professors, failing only one assignment.
Aside from potentially troubling implications for educators, what this points to is a dawning inflection point for natural language processing, heretofore a decidedly human characteristic.
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more on artificial intelligence in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=artificial+intelligence
more on paper mills in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=paper+mills
Cheating Companies Hacked Websites at MIT, Stanford, Columbia And More Than 100 Other Schools
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2021/02/25/cheating-companies-hacked-websites-at-mit-stanford-columbia–and-more-than-100-other-schools/
Jim Ridolfo at the University of Kentucky and William Hart-Davidson at Michigan State University have found that more than 100 websites of American colleges have been hacked or otherwise compromised by essay mills, the contract cheating providers that improperly sell academic work to students.
“If you Google something like essay help and Stanford,” Ridolfo said, “you’ll get school content injected by essay mills or find pages that redirect you to their services.”
block the SQL injections and to set regular scans for additional paper mill intrusions.
hese intrusions were from just 14 known cheating providers when there are probably hundreds of them.
this pattern of hacking legitimate university property to sell cheating services could get much more complex and much more dangerous.
Since cheating is a billion-dollar, global dark market, it’s not surprising. It’s just awful. And schools should move quickly to address it, not just with patches, but with policy and policing.
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more on plagiarism in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=plagiarism
https://www.dailyemerald.com/news/students-cheat-with-online-learning-service-professors-hope-to-identify-users/article_552d56f4-5a31-11eb-98ae-879264ec0299.html
Services like Chegg have become more accessible to students during unproctored exams in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, causing what UO chemistry professor Shannon Boettcher believes is a “huge problem with academic dishonesty across the nation in the light of remote learning and COVID-19.”
he Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice and takedown process requires that service providers remove material that a copyright owner identifies on their website through a valid notice of copyright infringement or become subject to potential secondary liability for assisting with copyright infringement, according to Copyright Alliance.
Chegg Inc. has been sued twice in federal court for claims of copyright infringement, denying allegations in both instances.
Apart from its subscription services, Chegg rents and sells textbooks. The publishing company John Wiley & Sons Inc. filed a lawsuit against Chegg on Dec. 18, 2018, in Manhattan U.S. District Court, alleging that Chegg sold counterfeit versions of its textbooks.
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This $12 Billion Company Is Getting Rich Off Students Cheating Their Way Through Covid
https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2021/01/28/this-12-billion-company-is-getting-rich-off-students-cheating-their-way-through-covid
Chegg is based in Santa Clara, California, but the heart of its operation is in India, where it employs more than 70,000 experts with advanced math, science, technology and engineering degrees. The experts, who work freelance, are online 24/7, supplying step-by-step answers to questions posted by subscribers (sometimes answered in less than 15 minutes).
Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig has profited handsomely. His holdings in Chegg plus after-tax proceeds from stock sales add up to $300 million. Rosensweig, who declined to speak to Forbes, has said that Chegg Study was “not built” for cheating. He describes it instead as the equivalent of an asynchronous, always-on tutor, ready to help students with detailed answers to problems. In a 2019 interview, he said higher education needs to adjust to the on-demand economy, the way Uber or Amazon have.
Throughout the pandemic, schools have spent millions on remote proctoring, a controversial practice in which colleges pay private companies like Honorlock and Examity to surveil students while they take tests.
Chegg Study was enjoying steady growth and little competition. Its only serious rival, privately held Course Hero, is a much smaller operation, valued at $1.1 billion, that generates most of its answers from students.
My note:
such proliferation would not have been possible, if the middle and upper administration has been more supportive of faculty when misconduct is detected. If the administration turns blind eye due to “enrollment” and “retention” priorities and curbs faculty reports regarding academic dishonesty, the industry naturally fills out the gap between a mere syllabus statement and inability to act upon it.
There is plenty of lipservice regarding “personalized learning,” but the reality is overworked faculty, who do not have the opportunity to spend sufficient time with students, less to educate them about plagiarism, cheating and similar “auxiliary” trends besides the content of the course.
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more on cheating in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cheating
Message to SDSU students regarding RESPONDUS software. #1 We will not rely solely on faculty interpretation of video evidence from Respondus when evaluating claims of academic dishonesty. #2 – Beginning in Jan 2021, IT will not support the campuswide use of Respondus by faculty. pic.twitter.com/I2Ssim4LVW
— Dr. Luke Wood (@DrLukeWood) December 8, 2020
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more on proctoring in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=proctorio
more on proctoring in the Higher Ed Learning Collective
https://www.facebook.com/groups/539260760037960/search/?q=proctor