Ex-UI researcher lied on résumé. This is a story about a post-doctoral researcher (since 1991) in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa. She claimed a bachelor's degree from University of Northern Iowa, two Master's degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and a PhD from the University of Iowa (the institution that later hired her as a researcher). She has NO degree at all! UI committee: Verify credentials. In this story, University of Iowa officials suggest that they should start checking credentials. The proposed first step is to use the nascent National Student Clearinghouse service called DegreeVerify.
This is a huge timebomb! Glad she was caught and it hardly seems worth it for a $44,111 annual salary. The UI folks should be embarrassed in not properly checking her credentials. John
The man who hired this person and supervised her work at the University of Iowa for ten years is quoted as saying, "I don't think there's anything that I could have done to detect the false résumé..." Here's an idea. He could have used an on-campus phone line to call the registrar's office, since she claimed her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa.
stats? The issues of falsified resumes seems to be a popular one here. How common is this in the academic world? Are there any studies of this phenomenon in academia? In business?
There are studies, but I can't cite chapter and verse just now. Last year, for ABC, I subscribed to the Monster.com website which then had 9 million resumes and a good search engine. I was searching only for indisputable diploma mills, not grey area or terrible schools. Columbia State, Harrington, Hamilton, etc. I stopped when I had found 5,000, since that was plenty from which to harvest enough big names for a month of stories. That's 5,000 totally fake, and it very likely would have been ten times that, or more. Three factors make it even worse: 1. That is only from that relatively small percentage of people who post resumes on Monster. 2. That is only from those on Monster who list the source of the degree; a great many -- ;like 3/4, do not. 3. And this doesn't address the people (and they are legion) who list the name of a real school from which they did not earn the claimed degree. Can anyone say, "Epidemic"? PS: In my book, I mention the Yale registrar (quoted in Time Magazine, on the occasion of some business executive caught falsely claiming a Yale degree) saying (and this is 20 years ago) that Yale is aware of more than 7,000 people falsely claiming their degree. Just the ones they know about, and just one school.
After following the John Davy story (and others similar), it's clear to me that if you are going to use a bogus degree, your best bet is to get a fake diploma from a legitimate school. Preferably a large and rather plebian school (e.g. Rutgers rather than Princeton), so your degree won't attract much attention.
