billso.com

The Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), which develops and administers the Graduate Management Admission Test (GMAT) that is used in the MBA admissions process, has taken over the domain name Scoretop.com as of 20 June 2008, shut down the web site, and obtained a hard drive from the ISP provider containing Scoretop subscriber information.

GMAC alleges that Lei Shi and other participants in Scoretop provided 6000 paid subscribers with access to authentic, live GMAT exam questions. GMAC has canceled one person’s GMAT score in late 2007, and may cancel other scores if a forensic examination of the drive and server logs yields a list of GMAT exam takers.

David Wilson, president and CEO of GMAC, claims the organization will not “cancel a score where we think there’s a shadow of a doubt.” But GMAC’s investigation has left some potential and current MBA students wondering if or when they will be questioned.

See these Business Week articles by Louis Lavelle called GMAT Scandal Claims First Casualty and GMAT Cheating Scandal: Answers From GMAC for more details.

The Associated Press reports that the Fuqua School of Business is punishing 34 full-time MBA students who cheated on a take-home final exam and other assignments.

The school posts its honor code in all classrooms and on the web.

Nine Duke students will be expelled. That decision will cost each expelled student US$50,000 in tuition, books, and laptop computer fees. Duke University did not release the students’ names or the name of the professor who gave the exam because of FERPA requirements.

The students can appeal the university’s decision before May 17. All students were allowed to finish their current courses.

I haven’t been able to determine if Duke faculty use TurnItIn.com to check student assignments.

Several students at Diablo Valley College (DVC) have been accused of selling grades. The accused students each had access to the college’s grade management system, and were offering other students better grades.

College officials say that the relevant procedures have been changed to prevent future problems.

Student workers at universities sometimes face potential conflicts of interest, especially if they gain access to registration, grade managemenht, and other information systems. In some cases, university managers welcome student employees because of their low pay scale.

When managers fail to considered the security and ethics issues that are involved, the university’s reputation can suffer.
According to an article in the Contra Costa Times, one DVC student feared that he would have to people that he didn’t pay for his grades.
 http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/email/news/16560143.htm

http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=1579

I’ve been thinking about the Boing Boing article that I posted yesterday at http://billso.com/2007/01/23/ets-cheating/

I used to run an information technology certification exam program when I lived in Austin. We used VUE and Prometric to deliver our exams all over the world. The program still exists, even though it’s been through a few ownership and management changes. The latest incarniation is avialable at http://ciwcertified.com

I’ve got no problems with ETS’ terms of service. It’s their copyrighted exam, and ETS has worked with the testing centers to set the rules of engagement.

No one’s forcing this anonymous coward to take a GRE exam and go to grad school.

One reason our university subscribes to TurnItIn.com is that service helps protect our students’ intellectual property.

We do have problems with academic dishonesty, and sometimes it’s hard to determine if a student doesn’t know how to paraphrase or cite correctly. I’ve seen students change a word or two in a multi-sentence passage, without quotation marks or an in-text citation. TurnItIn.com almost always catches these unattributed quotations, and the originality report provides me with links to the original work.

Our students are enthusiatic Googlers, but it’s clear that some of them haven’t Googled “how to parapharase” and found good links like these:

• http://plagiarism.dal.ca/student/paraphrase.html
• http://www.wisc.edu/writing/Handbook/QPA_paraphrase2.html
• http://library.duke.edu/research/plagiarism/cite/paraphrase.html
• http://cww.cpcc.cc.nc.us/English/researchguide/when_and_how_to_paraphrase.htm
• http://www.hpu.edu/images/Libraries/LibraryGuides/LIBR_15R_a12192.pdf

This last link is a guide from our university library that is a good discussion, even if it was written in 1995.

I’ll update my APA and reference pages later this month to include some new links about these issues.

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/01/23/gres_cheating_copyri.html

ETS requires GRE and TOEFL test-takers to sign a confidentiality agreement that is not uncommon on IT certification exams:

If I reproduce test questions in any manner I am subject to a copyright infringement lawsuit and any other action(s) ETS may take.