My Cheatin Heart?

Proves my point?

On the basis of these revelations I think its is safe to say:
"In God we trust, all others shall be invigilated"

 

I don't believe that U.S. universities will ever move significantly towards independent invigilation and external examiners (as employed in the UK -- and in South Africa when I was an undergraduate there). These practices are simply seen as too onerous (for the academic staff). And too slow. I wrote exams for a University of London (Birkbeck) program starting back in September, and results will not be available until December (due to external examiners, and something called the "exam board").

 

It should be noted that DETC requires proctored final examinations for all degree programs.

 

David Boyd: "It should be noted that DETC requires proctored final examinations for all degree programs."

John: The question, always, is who does the proctoring. Some schools say things like, "A clergyman, principal, or bank president..." [Sign right here, Dr. Swaggart, or Mr. Boesky, or whatever your name is.]

 

The scary, sad thing is when an instructor doesn't believe that the slacker, the daydreamer, or the obviously disinterested student receives a good grade on an exam. The teacher, many times, wrongfully assumes something funny is going on. Yet, some students are vocally against anything that questions their integrity. I tend to see proctoring as a safeguard of mine.

Tony

 

Professor Kennedy: "Proves my point. On the basis of these revelations I think its is safe to say: "In God we trust, all others shall be invigilated"

John Bear:
Heriot-Watt/Edinburgh Business School was as vigilant as any program I've seen, for exam security . . . and yet, and yet.

Some day, over a glass of Glayva, I'll be glad to tell stories from the seven years when our US office did marketing -- and indeed helped arrange exam sites.

[There was, early on, the distressed call from the woman in charge of such things in Edinburgh, saying "What's wrong with American schools. I've asked dozens of them about providing exam sites, and almost none has responded."

She faxed me a copy of her request. It said, "Scottish university requires invigilation of examination diet." Can you imagine a clerk at the University of Montana getting that?]

But in the early days, and perhaps subsequently, people were testing the system -- more in Asia, Africa and Europe, I think, than in the US. (I don't think the university ever quite understood how frequently the various national agents communicated with one another.) Some big time chicanery in Scandinavia, Singapore, Japan, and even England, where one of the authorised agents was the very same Jeff Wooller who, even at the time, was running a bunch of dreadful schools, like Wooller International University and Irish International University. He clearly had a "bait and switch" operation going, as did two of the Asian agents, each of whom also represented at least one dreadful school in addition to the excellent Heriot-Watt.

Some of the attempted fraud dealt with having 'ringers' take the exams. Yes, photo ID was required, ostensibly to match the photos provided at the time of enrolling -- but (a) no one ever confirmed that that the initially-provided photo was actually the person enrolling, and (b) Can you imagine the level of accuracy when the agent in Japan, an Arab, had to determine if the Japanese gentleman in front of him was in fact the one in the photo.

I doubt very much that anyone ever earned the MBA entirely through fraud but there almost certainly were individual exam passes that were questionable.

I remember, for instance, the man who petitioned for an exam site closer to home, presenting a note from a doctor saying he could not travel for more than a few minutes in a car due to painful arthitic knees.

The university (ah, those compassionate Scots) granted the request.

He later reported that he had managed to fit the exam in between his morning round of golf and his afternoon game of tennis. And, the proctor reported, he had attempted to bribe her to give him additional time. (No she didn't, and Yes, we reported all this to the university, and yes, they did not honor his future requests. But the man did eventually pass all his exams, including six in one week, and earned the degree.)

 

I had one class in computer science at Berkeley that was taught by a strange fellow from an eastern european country. In our first test he accussed a fourth of the class of cheating. He tried to get them all in trouble but it turns out that a fourth of the tests he had handed out asked a slightly different question than the rest of the tests.

His tests from then on had absolutely nothing to do with the subject matter that we were supposed to be learning. As a matter of fact, most of the questions didn't even have anything to do with computers.

This was his first class teaching and he wanted to get hired on to teach more. I was naive and thought that maybe I should try to help the fellow out. I went to talk to him about how he might make his class better. It turns out that he was so paranoid about the students cheating, he didn't want to ask questions that would allow them to cheat by looking in their notes or the text book. He then told me that I was a trouble maker and that he would be watching me extra close in the future.

The sad part of the story is that this was the only computer science class that I took at Berkeley where on the last day they didn't ask the students to fill out a questionaire on what they thought of the class. The happy part of the story is that the reason they didn't hand out the questionaire is that they had already decided for a long time that he wasn't going to be hired back.

 

Bill Huffman: "a strange fellow from an eastern european country," indeed!
Watch the redundancy, buster.

The Carpathian Peasant

 

Re: Re: My Cheatin Heart?

Ted Kennedy is expelled from Harvard for cheating, then enters congress as a Democratic Senator. Do I see a pattern here?

 

Exam systems in the UK

Gert: "These practices are simply seen as too onerous (for the academic staff). And too slow. I wrote exams for a University of London (Birkbeck) program starting back in September, and results will not be available until December (due to
external examiners, and something called the "exam board").

Several points: universities should not be run for the convenience of academic staff, though they often are. The focus should be on the students and their learning.

'Too slow' I put down to the urgency for quick results common in subscribers to this board.

The pace of the exam process should be dictated by the need to get everything right - consistency in the assessment process is important beyond the impatience of those currently in it (otherwise you get 'grade inflation', near everybody awarded 'A's and the use of irrelevant indicators of achievement in outputs by the association of the candidates with inputs).

External Examiners (senior faculty from other universities) help to accredit the integrity of the internal examiners. They are normal practice in the UK.

The Examination Board is an official Board in a University, usually consisting of the Internal Examiners, External Examiners, and the University's Registrar and staff, with powers delegated by the Senate to approve candidates for their degree awards.

Again, this is to reduce the role of individual faculty on the awards of students. Personal bias, regretably, is not an unknown phenomenon - both positively (they are in a 'relationship') and negatively (they have been refused a 'relationship'!) - and the system operates to prevent prejudices that have nothing to do with performance (racist, sexist, minority, or life style, even their known personal opinions).

EBS gets its results out, through the process Gert finds to be 'slow' in 6 to 8 weeks from the exam date, for over 10,000 individual exams per Diet (twice a year, July and December) and 3,000 exams at the two smaller Diets (March and September). I don't know how this could be done much quicker and be sure that it was properly supervised, checked and correctly done.

 

John Bear is a remarkable man, much revered, and rightly so, by those in the distance learning community who are passionately concerned with high standards, affordability and recognition of outputs from learning.

His tales of early woes at Heriot-Watt when we began the dlMBA in 1991 and some of the 'horror' stories when we were naive about the ambitions of our programme are always a good read. Since John's time the EBS MBA has moved on a great deal and we have learned a great deal too about managing a student body of 8,000 active students, examining in over 300 centres around the world, processing 10,000 exam scripts a Diet and using multi-format delivery (printed books and electronic support).

We are also confident that our statistical tests of performance are sensitive enough to pick out unusual scores which prima facie indicate suspicious exam behaviours worthy of closer scrutiny. Our research reports on this work will provide refereed journal articles in due course.

No office of a distributor now searches for exam centres, that is all handled in Edinburgh, mainly through the British Council (a government agency associated with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office). All Photo IDs require to be confirmed by a responsible person and their scanning checks provide some restrictions on personation.

Our systems are not foolproof but no system ever is (we still catch fools trying to fool us). Suggestions on how to keep tightening up our procedures are always welcome. Our focus is on security not liberality.

On the issue of 'Honour Codes' we would do well to remember that the definition of security 'is the elimination of trust.' If this causes some offence to some persons, well, frankly, too bad. They can attend some other programme. People who do not cheat, or do not seek to cheat, or who do not consider it their 'human right' to cheat have no objection for conforming to rules that seek to prevent them and everybody else from cheating. Much like sensible people put up with security checks at airports.

 

I agree, and I personally don't have a concern with the time taken. But my point is that the time needed for external examiners and the like is one reason why U.S. schools are never going to be able to move towards a system that has more checks and balances than the current, deeply flawed (my opinion) system. I am thinking primarily of traditional face-to-face universities -- where students often expect to get their results before they leave at the end of a semester. When I was an undergraduate, we would have to wait a few months for the process. (Another interesting difference from U.S. is that at University of Cape Town all grades were publically posted -- name and grade of each student in each course. For some reason, grades are not publically disclosed in U.S. At least not at any of the schools that I have attended.)

 

Gert: "For some reason, grades are not publically disclosed in U.S. At least not at any of the schools that I have attended."

John: My wife once posted grades by name, and all hell broke loose. Violation of Title Something-or-other. Invasion of privacy. Policy at her college is posting grades by last four digits of social security number.

 

Re: Re: Re: My Cheatin Heart?

Yes, people in politics cheat (regardless of party). Ethically, I see little difference between the two (and am always amazed when others try to make the argument for the ethics of their party).



Tom Nixon

 

I believe that Kennedy was suspended by Harvard for getting someone else to take a Spanish exam for him. After a couple of years in the Army, he was readmitted by Harvard, and graduated with a B average.

 

This is why you should never click on the last post option. I saw the above post by Dr Bear and I thought, "Professor Kennedy, say it ain't so! "

Very much the wrong Kennedy.

 

Dr John Bear has accused me of running a university bearing my name. There never was one.

He has suggested that I was running the Irish International University which is also not correct. Several years later I became Vice Chancellor but have never controlled it.

I set up the Irish Business School in 1995 to compete with Heriot- Watt. I knew that I could offer a better service at a fraction of the cost.

However, there was no bait and switch operation as the commission I got from selling the Heriot-Watt packages was greater than the cost of the degrees from Irish Business School.

In those early days Heriot-Watt had in my view inferior reading materials and the model answers they provided were a joke. The University was cashing in on its university name.

I know that standards have improved considerably since then and that students are much happier with the courses.

However, I believe that the distance learning degree certificates issued by the university do not state that the degree was conducted by distance learning. I understand also that students of distance learning can attend the convocations of the university.

I find this practice to be misleading.

 

Jeff Wooller: "... the commission I got from selling the Heriot-Watt packages was greater than the cost of the degrees from Irish Business School..."
--------------------------------

As I recall, the commission was around $250 a course at that time, from which all marketing costs, overhead, etc. had to come, and the average student completed two or three courses.

In any event, since Dr. Wooller is providing candid replies, I would be interested in his account of why he stopped being a Heriot-Watt agent in the mid 90s. I've heard accounts from the university, from Pearson, and from Pitman Publishing, and I'd be intrigued to hear his.

 

There were nine courses and the maximum number of exemptions was two and so every student had to take at least seven courses.

Quite simply I did not hide the fact that I had set up courses to compete with Heriot-Watt. Within a few months Pitmans said that I could no longer be their agent because of the conflict of interest.

I have continued to recommend the Heriot-Watt courses because for many student overseas they represent the best value.

Where students want advice I always tell them that if they can afford the fees of the traditional universities then that is what they should take.

In Kuala Lumpur in 2003 I was put on the spot by the IIU at a meeting of potential students. I told them that I disagreed with what the other speakers had said about distance-learning courses and that if suitable courses were available from traditional universities and they could afford them then that is what they should be taking.

Although the traditional universities do not officially recognise the Irish University Business School it is noticable that if a student goes on to take a higher degree with the traditional university that they come to us for a reference.

If you look at www.ipfm.org and look at articles in the IPFM Journal you will see that some articles are excerpts from work done by my students. Many of the students produce work that is worthy of any university.

The reason why I have responded to the threads on this Discussion Forum is because a PhD student saw it and said that I should reply because the things being said were untrue.

She did a full-time MBA with my university in the mid-nineties and she is now doing a distance-learning PhD. She is concerned with doing a degree with me because we do not offer any validation or accreditation.

I have done my best to get her to go to Southbank University in London but the responses she got from the University were not encouraging and she has continued with me. Her work has already been published in the IPFM Journal.

 

Jeff Wooller is known by name and reputation to the founders of the Heriot-Watt MBA programme like myself. It is not for me to pass judgement on somebody's ethics in a public forum, but being 'terminated' for a 'conflict of interest' is not something to be treated lightly.

"In those early days Heriot-Watt had in my view inferior reading materials and the model answers they provided were a joke. The University was cashing in on its university name."

An opinion is an opinion, to which Wooller is entitled, though his credibility is also open to opinion. Selling the wares (or snares) of a degree mill like IIU and various named others of that ilk is not the firmest of foundations for having a worthwhile opinion of a British University with a long pedigree (1821) and a Royal Charter.

It is also worth point out that our 'reading materials', allegedly a 'joke' in the early 1990s and now 'much improved', are essentially the same texts as they were when we started, updated for later examples and recent dates.

"I know that standards have improved considerably since then and that students are much happier with the courses."

Over 9,500 MBAs have graduated since 1992-3. In all that time I can recollect fewer than 20 complaints from students. Not a bad indicator of customer satisfaction, though we have worked to eliminate causing any complaints. Wooller may be justifying his later extraordinary ethical lapses - just an opinion, of course.

"However, I believe that the distance learning degree certificates issued by the university do not state that the degree was conducted by distance learning. I understand also that students of distance learning can attend the convocations of the university.

I find this practice to be misleading."

Plain silly (an opinion). The EBS has multiple modes of learning. There are on-campus programmes in Edinburgh (a real B&M university in 350 acres, not some dingy offices in a multi-pupose building somewhere that keeps moving address and cannot be taken seriously except by the gullible and those by 'gullibilise" them.

There are also Distance Learning modes of varying degrees of DL and DT; from pure independent self learners through supported self learners in Approved Support centres to fully taught Heriot-Watt MBAs in reputable universities (in Switzerland, Cairo, Shanghai, Canada and USA).

All Heriot-Watt MBA courses use exactly the same materials (published by Pearson Education), sit exactly the same invigilated examinations, graded by exactly the same faculty and are awarded exactly the same degree certificate. Obsession with the mode of learning (an input) has no bearing on the quality standards of the degree (the output).

As for people seeking references from Wooller's pretend university he is missing the point. Reference seeking is a clerical function allocated to the large staffing resources of reputable Universities. Large numbers of applicants to proper Unievrsities cause this process to be undertaken by office staff, usually of a junior nature. The responses are read by more senior staff who would recognise a dubious entity and check its credentials against the usual lists of credible institutions. It is at that point that the unfortunate applicant would be rejected if they only had Wooller's reference. It is also at that point, I surmise, that the unfortunate applicant would ask Wooller to repudiate the 'lies' from the reputable University, though in this case the 'lies' are 'lies' only if Wooller's pretentions were the truth.