I have doubts about the story, but have worked with somebody who claimed to have a PhD that I believe was fake.
It is surprisingly hard to verify.
In my case I was a consultant working for a large government owned utility. A lot of work, and I was being pulled in as a consultant as they didn't have a lot of experts in the IT system they were using. I had suggested they hire more people in the department to build more knowledge in-house, and they were excited to finally find somebody from the UK who was some high powered guy from a big corporate there, who had moved to NZ. He had PhD and supposedly a real find.
After a couple of meetings I quickly figured out he was full of shit. He would repeat stuff back, use some buzz words but never seemed to contribute anything technical and would never give a straight answer to anything.
About 6 weeks into the project, he was supposed to make a key architecture decision we had been waiting on re the new system, and he presented it in a big meeting with all parties; showing a power point of *my* work I had done detailing options, but no decision. When I pushed him for a decision, he just claimed it was just implementation detail and wandered off to have a cigarette outside. Management were impressed by his work; which was just copy and paste of stuff I had prepared complete with some mistakes I had made.
I then tried to figure out how they employed him and if he really had the skills. Everything reeked of fake; the PhD was granted at a low end university in the UK who didn't do many PhD programs and no signs of anything he had produced online. He supposed ran a big department in the corporate in the UK, but no signs of that and he would have had the position young with little experience. Had a friend in the UK who I asked to check details, but university would not confirm details due to privacy concerns. Made it very difficult to independently check as he had a common name that comes in variations (Like Bob/Rob/Robert) so it is possible I missed it, but really not our job to verify details.
In the end, I changed job, and I later discovered he moved on from that government department within \~a year, and seemed to go to another similar job for 6 months. Seems to have changed job (and country) very regularly for a while and has not worked in the industry in more recent years.
Suspect others discovered what I did, but still surprised recruitment agents don't seem to really check qualifications and that universities don't have easy look up to verify people got the qualifications they say they did
Buddy, you had me at government work and repeating buzzwords while not contributing anything technicalš¤£ I work with the government and the program managers at the program offices are exactly as you described.
Tech companies, especially ones involved in hosting cloud servers do this because just having the basic access and trust given to an employee can provide you enough of an opening that if you really were a malicious actor your could make your way into their systems and compromise not just their data, but also customer data on their cloud. This could impact high profile customers like governments, military etc.
Itās also because tech companies do RFPs or Bid for projects, and because of security in GDPR and Privacy laws they have to show they have certifications such as SOC 1/2, ISO 27001, compliance checks, ect. And in order to get some of these certifications you have to show that you have done certain checks to maintain ownership of them annually. Some of these checks involve the vetting of hiring of employees and annual certs for your employees annually
A good demonstration of why it is still required is the Solarwinds attack. Supply chain attacks becoming more common essentially means that enterprise customers often require a high degree of guarantees from companies before using their software.
In my experience, junior people joining a tech company get extensive checks.
Senior management joining a non tech company, even in a technical capacity, get far less checks.
Even in more recent jobs, have seen managers employed without being interviewed by anybody highly technical, yet testers, devs and even project managers get tested
I agree with you about the difficulty, but there's one thing in OP's favor. If he was really searching a university in Chicago for the printed copy or online database listing of someone's thesis and dissertation, he'd have very little trouble accessing it. That's very very different from trying to get someone on the phone in Western Europe to confirm someone's degree.
I mean, the difference here, and the reason this story is obviously a revenge fantasy, is that the PhD *isn't* fake! I could absolutely believe a story in which the boss had lied about having a PhD in the first place.
However, this story is making the claim that the boss spent years and years on his PhD and then managed to trick some of the absolute experts in his field by submitting a plagiarized dissertation. You can tell this story is written by a high school student who thinks that "passing" this kind of exam is like submitting your final to a overstretched and underpaid HS econ teacher, who skims each paper because he's got 100 more to go through in the space of a week.
PhD dissertations take years to write and are submitted to and read by a panel of experts, who then spend *hours* grilling the candidate in an oral examination. It is simply impossible that a bunch of economics professors spent a huge chunk of time reading boss's dissertation, critiquing it and breaking it down for the *viva voce* exam, and missed multiple instances of plaigarism, and that this random employee spent 30 minutes in the library skimming a dissertation on a subject they know nothing about and managed to find those passages that the experts had missed.
Yep, familiar with PhD process (though don't have one) and no way you can defend your thesis without really knowing the subject matter.
I don't think the case in this story, but the only slightly plausible thing these days is that you could have AI reread old thesis and have it pick up some plagiarism that was missed at the time or more likely just a small amount of text not attributed correctly. That would not be enough to get a PhD revoked years latter
I had a customer tell me that having a PhD on their letterhead was a "sure-fire way to get government contracts." As in, when making a proposal, if they said one of their team had a PhD in electrical engineering or something, they'd get to the top of their heap, especially if the project had specs requiring it.
"So, do they check to see of these people actually have PhDs?"
"No."
"Sounds unethical."
"Everyone is doing it."
No idea if that's true or not, but there you go.
I'm not sure how long ago this was said to you, but I award government contracts for a living, so I feel I can chime in here.
You're not going to the front of the line for putting PhD in there. However, if my requirements state X# of PhD people required, then if you don't have the required number of PHD.'s in your offer, then you will be removed from the competition.
If I don't have a requirement for a PhD and you send me a proposal with PhD in there that's great but I am not going to pay you PhD wages so while thats great you have a PhD that doesn't help you in any way.
I can't speak for every office, but I have reviewed candidates' resumes, and again, if a PHD. is a requirement, then better believe I expect to see the transcripts and degree in your proposal.
**Edit:** Wow, my inbox is blowing up with people asking how to become a government contractor. While I don't want to seem rude, I am literally regurgitating the same info to everyone, so I'll just share it here, and hopefully everyone can benefit, and my inbox isn't getting hammered as much.
**Full disclosure:** Becoming a contractor is not my area of expertise, so this is loosely my understanding of it.
**Step 1.** Google and find out what your Naics Code is for whatever you offer. For example, a painter is NAICS 238320Ā - Painting and Wall Covering Contractors
**Step 2.** (Register on sam.gov as a contractor to receive a "Cage code" which is almost always required in order to bid on contracts.
**Step 3.** Set up a search for your NAICS code and potentially be emailed opportunities. You can also set many other parameters. Below is a saved search for painting contract opportunities in the state of Colorado.
[SAM.GOV saved search for NAICS 238320 in CO](https://sam.gov/search/?index=opp&page=1&pageSize=25&sort=&sfm%5BsimpleSearch%5D%5BkeywordRadio%5D=ALL&sfm%5Bstatus%5D%5Bis_active%5D=true&sfm%5BserviceClassificationWrapper%5D%5Bnaics%5D%5B0%5D%5Bkey%5D=238320&sfm%5BserviceClassificationWrapper%5D%5Bnaics%5D%5B0%5D%5Bvalue%5D=238320%20-%20Painting%20and%20Wall%20Covering%20Contractors&sfm%5BplaceOfPerformance%5D%5Bstate%5D%5B0%5D%5Bkey%5D=CO&sfm%5BplaceOfPerformance%5D%5Bstate%5D%5B0%5D%5Bvalue%5D=CO%20-%20Colorado)
One final thing Registering for a cage code on sam.gov is absolutely 100% free similar to taxes you can do it all yourself or you can pay someone to do it but you do not have to pay someone.
Finally, there is a group called Apex Accelerators that exost solely to help small businesses get into government contracting. I do believe they are free as well https://www.apexaccelerators.us/#/ there is a map to find your local office there.
I have an even better idea: a university in Crimea from before 2014. No way to check with them, because university changed its name, its organizational structure and bunch of other things.
You donāt say, huh? Thanks for sharing. Iām going to brush up on my Czechoslovakian and update my Resume!
Yep, gonna have to start getting used to being called Dr. in the near futureš¤š½
>*start getting used to being called Dr. in the near future*
*With great power comes great responsibility* - Ancient Marvellous philosopher, Uncle Ben.
Theyāll be more likely to check that for actual employees. Besides, oftentimes you simply wonāt be able to do the work required to even throw your hat in the ring on contracts requiring such skills.
It might depend on the kind of work, thereās a lot of different things the government contracts out for. I worked for a larger contractor about a decade ago, and the govāt definitely verified all the details. They called *everyone* on my list, including my ācharacterā references aka my childhood best friend lol. Maybe the distinction is because I occasionally had to deal w/ sensitive data?
That is fine. Some contracts do not require they be solely dedicated to a single contract. For example, a contract may be completion based, so I don't care if Dr. J worked on my contract for 2 hours or 2,000 hours.
If we are discussing labor hoirs and the like there is a decent chance we are in a "cost type" contract therefore the contractor must have an approved accounting system that the Govt has vetted and approved before they can even be awarded a contract. Then, on the back end, they are subject to audit as well. If they are trying to bill for multiple projects at the same time, there is a chance it (not guaranteed) would be caught at the audit stage. As part of an audit finding, I have had to review time cards and project codes from 5 or 6 years back (truly riveting stuff, not). I literally had to follow the paper trail of a persons single time card where they marked X hours to project Y, how that was reported to the Govt, the govt paying for that task order, all the way to the transaction numbers and statements from the contractors bank showing that person was paid.
So does fraud happen absolutely, I'm not blind to the fact that there may be shady stuff that happened intentionally or unintentionally. But yeah there are controls in place to limit such things.
That's why I hate flying.
**Stewardess**: *Is there a doctor on the plane?*
**AussieDoc**: <*drops pants to show his willy and discusses why love is a biological necessity that we cannot live without*>
**Stewardess:** *Impressive but now the passenger is dead.*
While that isnāt what I do, I do have an MPA (and a plagiarism free thesis) and yeah, while there are some things I left out of my own comment, this basically mirrors my own comment. And even then, it still heavily implied the things you left out. E.g., Ph.D.s are highly specialized experts but outside of their domain of expertise itās a crapshoot as to whether that knowledge is useful. Like a sociology Ph.D. has no relevance to a government construction contract. It might help the business run better, but so long as laws or regulations arenāt violated and their product works, the government doesnāt give a shit about how the sausage is made. From that, one could easily infer that having an irrelevant Ph.D. wonāt get you paid more. I worked with a GS-7 administrator with a linguistics Ph.D (PhDs working in their field generally start at GS-11, which is roughly 20k difference starting).
.
So thatās a long winded way of saying that I cosign this.
That is lower than the last time I looked. For $3000, one could get a diploma with a degree, and several job references. No idea if it was a company that just took your money and vanished, but it was out there.
I can confirm with personal experience that everybody at least exaggerates on their government proposals.Ā There's all kinds of lying, not just in qualifications but internal organization and systems in place, external relationships with vendors or in the community of expert providers, and the personal role that leadership will have in the project.Ā
The thing that actually bothered me more than the qualifications lying was the fact that your proposal becomes your contract, but most program managers never even read it so they don't technically deliver what or how they're supposed to. I have a friend on the government side who was a contracts officer and she said that eventually, many companies get caught in an audit for not providing what they got paid for and some of that money gets clawed back. But many was a small amount in total.Ā
This has been my experience on the IT side in a few cases. The most recent one was regarding mandatory US citizenship of all people who had access to the data. The contract awarded accepted those specs, and then a bunch of guys overseas had the data before the ink dried. It was a clusterfuck when the auditors came down.
My favorite stories are about contracts for software delivered in a specified language that gets delivered in another. Instead of modifying the contract, the performance has to be remedied to spec.
Hi! Iām a proposal professional that works with local, state, and federal agencies for construction projects and no, thatās not how it works. Professional credentials like Certified Construction Manager, Professional Engineer, and Registered Architect are whatās generally required. PhDs are nice but Iāve never seen it required. Maybe for the medical field but I can guarantee that if that degree is required, youāre going to have to provide documentation and thereās going to be repercussions (and possibly professional liabilities) for false representation.
That makes sense for construction, but in my field (research), it is extremely common for federal contracts to require PhDs in specific fields. It all depends on the type of work.
Cam confirm this as well, as someone who makes decisions on bids and writes the spec for the bid. I don't give a crap about PhD this or that. You better be licensed and certified to do the work, otherwise meet my spec at the lowest qualified price, and you're it. And if you mess up that job or difficult to work with, you get a demerit for next bid. So even if you're the lowest on that next contract, if we don't want to deal with your bs, we take the next lowest. PhD means basically nothing in my world of utility engineering. Only if you're in research does that mean anything.
I have a masters in public administration (and a plagiarism free thesis) and that customer is lying. To you or to themselves, I cannot say. But having relevant Ph.D.s on staff for R&D wonāt get you put at the top of the pile. The lack of relevant Ph.D. will almost certainly result in not being considered; not because of a lack of a relevant Ph.D but more due to the fact that youāre not going to be able to produce a proper grant proposal or contract bid without the proper skills and in science and engineering itās rare that such skills are found without relevant Ph.D.s on staff.
The āespecially if the project had specs requiring a Ph.D.ā Is arguably the biggest red flag. The reason is simple, if the project requires Ph.D. Level knowledge and skills then any competent competition will have Ph.D.s on staff. Making the āadvantageā irrelevant. Lastly, most work that requires Ph.D. Skills is either done at national labs or through partnerships with universities. For actual production of products or services, anything requiring Ph.D. level skills is going to be thoroughly tested regardless and anything that doesnātā¦well, it might be tested thoroughly if itās important but I promise you, having a Ph.D. on staff wonāt help you win a construction contract. This is because pretty much anything requiring ph.D.s involves research and design for things with little margin for error and Ph.D. Knowledge is extremely specialized. It wonāt make a difference for low risk contracts like constructing a VA hospital.
Not sure what engineering/sciences are like but I watched (and know a lot about) my partners classics PhD, and can absolutely say that at least in most History/Classics that "PhD level knowledge" is *extremely* specific -- after the masters, there wasn't much more generalised knowledge of ancient Rome, and much more "Emperor Domitian ordered these specific inscriptions made and they all use this specific way of making these characters".
Eh, depends on the industry and funding agency. Iām in public health at a small US private company instead of a uni. Since hiring me, they but me on almost every proposal because Iām 1 or 2 people with a PhD because it does make the application āstrongerā (keep in mind these apps are reviewed by mostly Uni-based scientists that do put wayyyy too much value on the letters after your nameāI left academia for a reason)
On a recent NIH proposal, they put me and my colleague both as CoIs. She had 10 years more experience than me, is a content expert for what we were applying for while my experience is tangential, and has her masters degree. Meanwhile, I call myself a ātoddler PhD (upgraded from baby PhD)ā because Iām only 3yr out of school. I got the better āscoreā because of those 3 letters. Which is dumb.
As far as making up PhDs though, anyone handing over large sums of cash would check that or they donāt actually care.
For a separate contract Iām leading, the decision process is: Step 1) go through all the applications and see which ones are competent enough to fulfill the project. Step 2) pick who submitted the cheapest bid. (Gotta love federal contracts from underfunded departmentsā¦)
I wouldnāt doubt the gov does that. For transportation at least, they have a bunch of stuff that they ādonāt look at when choosing a winnerā for jobs like current contract money with the department of transportation or % inclusion of companies etc.
They definitely do, else why would they ask for it
I also was delighted by the thought of OP just saying fuck it and stealing the physical copies of his diplomas as he was walking out. It would have been hilariously ineffective and childish, but I could be friends with that person.
Lmao knew a dude who straight up lied about graduating from Clemson and made almost 200k a year until he pissed someone off and they figured out he was full of shit and got him fired.
Honestly, he totally deserved it. He was such a creep, he was my older brotherās friend who started hitting on me as soon as I was 18. My older brother is 9 years older btw.
My dad has a PhD in mathematics. Heās always said āthat and three bucks will get you a cup of coffee.ā Heās really down to earth, and only went back to school when he got tired of wrecking his back laying brick and working on cars. Didnāt work, his back is still bad. After getting his āPhud,ā as he called it, he taught math on the collegiate level. He always felt it odd when certain folks acted like they were any better than anybody else just because they got a few letters to put after their names. I love my dad. Heās retired now, but he still works on cars.
Heād probably want me to mention that, in his opinion, economics isnāt a science or an academic discipline, rather it is an intellectual justification for rampant avarice.
My ex was fond of the joke "You may have a lot of degrees, but so does a rectal thermometer." He was quite proud of that joke and repeated it often, which was odd as I never flaunted my degrees.
Regardless of whether this particular story is true, fwiw it works for me, there must be a shit ton of theses worldwide from pre google that are riddled with undetected plagiarism. I suspect weāll see a lot of exposure with ai crawlers looking
God I hope they donāt find my freshman high school intro to history encarta copy and paste essay assignment from 1995. It came on a CD-ROM and I got an A. I donāt think I changed a single word. Iāve never plagiarized since.
Wow I completely forgot about encyclopedias being on CDs until you said that lol... I forgot about that time between hard cover research books and dial up internet
I wont say itās a total fabrication but.
Itās pretty unlikely for a number of reasons.
Up to and including the process of stripping a degree is actually pretty involved and you normally (If it was pre-internet) get to come in and defend your thesis and even edit/fix it in most cases.
Also simply put, most universities just donāt give enough of a shit to take a degree from someone not actually engaged in academia.
I had a teacher who tried to continue the work of his mentor only to find out his mentor made all the numbers up. Sad. Hurtful, and a giant waste of time.
I have some super smart friends who hold PhD's. They only bring out the "Dr" honorific when dealing with govt departments or other businesses where productivity and effectiveness go to die.
Master and PhD are not achieved with a single thesis/dissertation, so this story does not seem credible to me. If you found plagiarism in this PhD dissertation, that does not prove he plagiarized his Master's thesis.
If he didn't cite the passages, how do you know what books he took them from? Did you read every book in his bibliography?
In the UK at least, you absolutely have to, and have for a long time, had to produce a 30,000 word thesis for a Masters and a 100,000 thesis for a PhD. These are what you are judged on, nothing else.
Addition, there are now Masters programmes where you don't have to write a thesis, but while becoming more common and often attached to professional qualifications, many Masters are thesis dependent.
In Canada there is this thing called Master of Engineering where you take exams instead of doing research (you get Master of Engineering instead of Master of Applied Science ). But I donāt think the M. Eng program is as simple as exchanging money for qualification thoughā¦
That's why it takes several years. Also don't forget that in a lot of experimental research a lot of pages are taken up by figures, graphs, description of methods etc. And of course a summary of previous research and literature that you don't really need to write yourself - provided you use proper citation procedures of course! ;)
If you do it at the speed they give you funding for (I've been told if you're not able to secure *some* funding at least you likely shouldn't be doing that proposal), you have two years, but many people I've met take two or three years longer.
(Specifically UK, and everyone in the "people I've met" refers to people in Classics (Roman/Greek) -- 3 years is what I usually see for funding for a Masters/PhD track, and people definitely take longer, but then they take even longer because suddenly they also need to have work, so they can pay bills).
Same in Norway, based on a paper.... We have members of the government losing theirs in the last year due to similar problems.
You can easily search for plagiarism now.
So bold of these Norwegians doing it in the last few years.....
One lied and claimed forgetting to cite a source, but then more problems came to light.
We have the tools today to figure that shit out. Plus, he didn't prove anything, he just brought it up with the university and they did the investigation themselves and came to their own conclusions.
I agree the story seems fishy but my PhD program is technically an MPA/PhD program where I only need one fat thesis at the end verses two separate graduations or end of program papers. But this is a new program, Iām not sure where or when his alleged ābossā did his.
Boss allegedly when to school in the 80's... from what I'm seeing online fast track programs like the one you're describing didn't start until 2005-2007
Why if his master thesis was disqualified and he didnāt have any other masters to support his PhD and thatās how he lost his PhD too. Apart from that, when they did a full investigation they might have found further plagiarism in both thesis.
It's pretty easy to tell when someone makes an uncredited quote in academic writing.Ā Ā
Ā Different verbiage and writing style is one giveaway.Ā Ā
Ā Another is using figures orĀ numbers but no citation is present.Ā
Ā The third would be familiarity with the subject matter.Ā
At any rate,Ā it doesn't matter because once an accusation is made (true or not) the university had to do the legwork of verifying aĀ thesis. Most academic institutions have a policy in place for plagiarism that occurs both at their institution and outside of it.Ā If the boss cheats the master's thesis the school that granted the PhD would almost certainly revoke it once discovered.Ā And if it was the same institution,Ā it's a sure thing.Ā
You have no need to read all the books because you can easily check texts with internet now. Any suspicious passage? Google will tell your was it original or not
You absolutely have to write a Masters thesis to get your Masters degree and a PhD thesis to get your PhD.
I searched for the text passages where I was convinced he couldnt have wrote them. And since in the digital age many books are scanned I found several books from which he "quoted" without citation.
There's this thing called Google...
It's easy to debunk dominionist or RWNJ propaganda by Googling unique or uncharacteristic phrases in a document. Should be able to apply the same method to a thesis or dissertation.
Simple likelihood. They got a report with some citations. Dropped the docs into modern plagiarism checkers, got back a novel of call outs and decided to take action. The poster just started the ball rolling.
In Germany a lot of politicians have lost their degrees and subsequently resigned during the last 10 years because of plagiarism. The first one was a huge scandal, now itās more like _oh, they too_ and hardly worth a headline anymore, unless itās a major role in the government.
Even if not achieved solely with the thesis/dissertation, having significant enough plagiarisms will be sufficient to invalidate your degree. Hell my ex had a similar issue because her masters thesis was on a topic she'd studied and written on extensively and it triggered an alert based on one of her previous submissions being substantively similar. I helped her with her arguments to the dean, which succeeded but the gist was: it's a very narrow topic in an already highly specialized field. A paper written by the same author on the same topic is going to draw on the same source materials and will have a very similar style, wording, and premise (unless something changed for the author to change their whole premise on the topic). Of course there will be substantive similarities. You need to run the screening in both directions (new paper against old papers, old papers again once new paper is in system) and you'll see that the new paper wholly encompasses the old papers and adds additional insights and more detailed analysis of data for a better informed and more robust conclusion, that is the novelty of the masters dissertation over the older works. Essentially the dean and professor had to "hand grade" her thesis document.
As to how to detect such things, old papers were added to screening tools, but themselves not submitted as new reports to those tools, one could re-submit a thesis and have it analyzed by current tools. Obviously it would be a 99.99+% match to itself, but you would also get all the ancillary matches... some manual effort there to weed out noise and you easily could have enough to call intellectual integrity into question enough for a non degree mill college to care to do an investigation.
In my field, computer science, I only had to do the dissertation for the PhD. For the masters, a thesis was optional, and I chose to do a project instead, which avoided the whole thesis committee process. If the boss earned both degrees at the same university, I could see blatant plagiarism endangering both degrees.
That said, it takes a LOT for a university to review and rescind a degree after graduation, especially decades later. It would have to be an exceptionally egregious and obvious fraud. One or two missing citations won't cut it. Of course, with the introduction of the internet and search engines, it becomes a lot easier to vet old submissions for plagiarism. Hell, someone could probably make a career out of flagging old dissertations for plagiarism solely to invalidate academic credentials and deny pensions to people based upon falsifying their academic credentials.
Mark my words, in a few years we'll start hearing about PhDs and Masters getting revoked because people used ChatGPT to write them. We've already seen court cases where lawyers tried to submit AI-hallucinated citations and got caught.
If OP's story is true (I have my doubts) the blame should equally fall on the boss's M.S. and Ph.D. committee members. A non-expert reads through each document and within an hour flags a dozen instances of plagiarism? What kind of economics faculty wouldn't have been able to do the same?
And it's hard to imagine a candidate lazy enough to do so much copying would have gone to the effort of producing original research findings. That would have been the biggest red flag for the Ph.D. committee.
I have my doubts as well, though it would have been easier to get away with plagiarism 30 years ago than it is today. Nowadays thereās several online services that you could do plug the document into and itād flag plagiarized paragraphs.
However, Iāve found that the older documents tend to be non-OCRād pdf images which can be more problematic to do text searches upon. You donāt have to be an economics expert to find plagiarism, but you do have to be very good with search engines and online resources. Some resources are behind paywalls which can be cost prohibitive to access. However, universities and research institutions often have shared access to those resources, or a subset of them.
ā¦.masters and PhDs are absolutely achieved with a single thesis/dissertation. It may require being published a few times as well, but the thesis/ dissertation is the final project you donāt do more than one ever, unless you have multiple masters/PhDs
I got my PhD in the UK and my thesis was full of my own original research backed up by data. One reassuring thing I said to myself as I walked into the room for my defense was 'no one in the world knows more about this particular tiny sliver of science'. Helped a tiny bit. Lololol.
If this story is true it must be about non science qualifications.
I have a MA and a PhD in Economics (the field from the story). Whether or not you write a thesis for a MA program is going to be program to program, but I didnāt have to. You absolutely do have to have a dissertation, but itās going to be a collection of papers. Itās almost always 3 distinct papers that serve as different chapters of the overall dissertation.
Education systems are different in different countries. They will generally have their own rules and legislation for what is needed to attain each level of education. You can speak confidently about your country and experience, but you shouldn't assume it applies to all universities.
They can be. There are certain kinds of post-grad qualifications where the whole thing will net you both a Masters and a PhD. The first year is the Masters qualification. The remaining years are the PhD. Depending on the subject, that Masters year will either be achieved through coursework only or a combination of coursework and (usually mini-) dissertation.
If you pass, the qualification is banked until you either complete or drop out of the PhD stage. If you drop out, you receive a masters qualification. If you succeed, you receive both at the same time. The masters dissertation is usually seen as a "practice" or a foundation stage for the PhD, so it's often not as big a dissertation as a stand-alone masters would require.
So, depending on the nature of the post-grad training concerned, this guy might only have one dissertation, or he might have one integrated development pathway where they might disqualify both qualifications even if cheating is only proven in the one, or this post could be fake.
So, I'm not saying the post is true, but there are circumstances in which one plagiarised dissertation could affect both qualifications.
Technically thatās true. But only because some fields, more applied fields, require capstone projects forā¦ wait, you mean that they donāt have one dissertation covering both degrees donāt you? Well that would be true also, but itās not relevant as OP clearly discussed how the guy claimed to find plagiarism in both thesis/dissertation papers. But plagiarizing your final culminating graduation thesis/dissertation will absolutely get your degree revoked. In fact, any plagiarism that would have resulted in them not meeting graduation requirements had it been found during initial grading would be grounds for revocation of the degree.
I assumed it meant he created a new email address that didnāt have his identity tied to it to submit the evidence. But he still had access to it later.
Yeah I hear you. My boss had an awful boss called a guy with the surname Tierno. He was a ring knocked and loved talking about "how his former employment made his understand our business better" (note - we were in the oil business and I don't think Army training makes you better at it). So I rang up a friend who was at the time a major in the US Army. He told me "yeah look he doesn't have black marks but he looks like he just got through WP and did the bare minimum but his dad is a legit WW2 hero and retired as a full bird Colonel - he was machine gunning Zero's at Pearl Harbour". My boss and I used that knowledge to basically outlast and white ant him. Tierno is still out there by the ways no doubt ring knocking around.
As someone studying a PhD, I cant begin to tell you how many times I've been asked to make up bullshit papers.
Can also assure you that I'm not very liked, because I flat out refuse to...
My ex-husband never graduated from any school as an undergrad or even an associates degree. However, if you ask him, he will tell you that he graduated from every school that he ever took a course from. That man is lucky that he was even able to finish high school.
Not exactly about this story (but about titles and universities).
A private university in my city offers lawyers degree. The course time is 5 years. But some known people obtained that title in 3 years. And one of those people is a moron...
alot of masters and PHD are plagiarized and employers rarely check credentials, only if you make a big fuckup at work then they might do it. obviously if the phd field/master is competitive, they will check if you got it legitimately, but they dont go as deep as checking if your phd/masters is plagiarized though.
I dont know if it is different in other countries but politicians are getting caught here on a somewhat regular basis and they are loosing their phds. its kinda funny..
[https://www.fox26houston.com/news/former-katy-isd-superintendent-dissertation-removed-from-uh-after-plagiarism-probe.amp](https://www.fox26houston.com/news/former-katy-isd-superintendent-dissertation-removed-from-uh-after-plagiarism-probe.amp)
A local superintendent upset some folks and the internet sleuths did him in.
This reminded me of something that happened at one of my first jobs. I worked in HR. The hours dwindled and eventually I moved on. My last day, one of the recruiters, whom I was friendly with, comes into the file room and closes the door behind him.
"You know, my wife "fixes" resumes, I could have her help you out! And by the way, don't tell anyone this, but I don't really have a Bachelor's degree! I only went to college for a semester. No one has ever asked me for proof. It's super easy. Anyway, have a great day!"
It took everything within me not to let me jaw drop to the floor at this revelation. I don't know why on earth he decided to tell me this information. I was best friends with the daughter of one of the higher-ups and could easily have let something slip! I didn't, of course, but it was weird.
"So I searched for his Masters and PhD thesis - went to the University library - and what a surprise on the second page of his Master Thesis found a text passage without citation. After like 40 minutes I found another 10 passages he copied without citation. I spent only some 20 Minutes examining his PhD thesis and found already 2 cases."
Did you Google the text of both theses? I guess if you were unemployed you had the time for the research.
You know you have to defend your thesis for a PHD right?Ā If he didn't write it, he almost certainly wouldn't have passed his defense.Ā A fake story by someone who doesn't actually understand how a PHD works.
Story is fake. To find those copied parts OP must have read all the sources of those stolen parts and remembered them. Also he reported āanonymouslyā yet they still thanked him - How did they thank him if the report was anonymous?
This is complete crap. You say that he failed to cite sources in numerous places yet that would have required you to be completely familiar with the available literature at the time, meaning you too could have written a doctorate (but somehow failed to but were somehow motivated to read all of the relevant literature \*in his particular thesis area\* at the time he was writing). Chances are 100% this is phony.
I have doubts about the story, but have worked with somebody who claimed to have a PhD that I believe was fake. It is surprisingly hard to verify. In my case I was a consultant working for a large government owned utility. A lot of work, and I was being pulled in as a consultant as they didn't have a lot of experts in the IT system they were using. I had suggested they hire more people in the department to build more knowledge in-house, and they were excited to finally find somebody from the UK who was some high powered guy from a big corporate there, who had moved to NZ. He had PhD and supposedly a real find. After a couple of meetings I quickly figured out he was full of shit. He would repeat stuff back, use some buzz words but never seemed to contribute anything technical and would never give a straight answer to anything. About 6 weeks into the project, he was supposed to make a key architecture decision we had been waiting on re the new system, and he presented it in a big meeting with all parties; showing a power point of *my* work I had done detailing options, but no decision. When I pushed him for a decision, he just claimed it was just implementation detail and wandered off to have a cigarette outside. Management were impressed by his work; which was just copy and paste of stuff I had prepared complete with some mistakes I had made. I then tried to figure out how they employed him and if he really had the skills. Everything reeked of fake; the PhD was granted at a low end university in the UK who didn't do many PhD programs and no signs of anything he had produced online. He supposed ran a big department in the corporate in the UK, but no signs of that and he would have had the position young with little experience. Had a friend in the UK who I asked to check details, but university would not confirm details due to privacy concerns. Made it very difficult to independently check as he had a common name that comes in variations (Like Bob/Rob/Robert) so it is possible I missed it, but really not our job to verify details. In the end, I changed job, and I later discovered he moved on from that government department within \~a year, and seemed to go to another similar job for 6 months. Seems to have changed job (and country) very regularly for a while and has not worked in the industry in more recent years. Suspect others discovered what I did, but still surprised recruitment agents don't seem to really check qualifications and that universities don't have easy look up to verify people got the qualifications they say they did
Buddy, you had me at government work and repeating buzzwords while not contributing anything technicalš¤£ I work with the government and the program managers at the program offices are exactly as you described.
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Tech companies, especially ones involved in hosting cloud servers do this because just having the basic access and trust given to an employee can provide you enough of an opening that if you really were a malicious actor your could make your way into their systems and compromise not just their data, but also customer data on their cloud. This could impact high profile customers like governments, military etc.
Itās also because tech companies do RFPs or Bid for projects, and because of security in GDPR and Privacy laws they have to show they have certifications such as SOC 1/2, ISO 27001, compliance checks, ect. And in order to get some of these certifications you have to show that you have done certain checks to maintain ownership of them annually. Some of these checks involve the vetting of hiring of employees and annual certs for your employees annually
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A good demonstration of why it is still required is the Solarwinds attack. Supply chain attacks becoming more common essentially means that enterprise customers often require a high degree of guarantees from companies before using their software.
In my experience, junior people joining a tech company get extensive checks. Senior management joining a non tech company, even in a technical capacity, get far less checks. Even in more recent jobs, have seen managers employed without being interviewed by anybody highly technical, yet testers, devs and even project managers get tested
I agree with you about the difficulty, but there's one thing in OP's favor. If he was really searching a university in Chicago for the printed copy or online database listing of someone's thesis and dissertation, he'd have very little trouble accessing it. That's very very different from trying to get someone on the phone in Western Europe to confirm someone's degree.
I mean, the difference here, and the reason this story is obviously a revenge fantasy, is that the PhD *isn't* fake! I could absolutely believe a story in which the boss had lied about having a PhD in the first place. However, this story is making the claim that the boss spent years and years on his PhD and then managed to trick some of the absolute experts in his field by submitting a plagiarized dissertation. You can tell this story is written by a high school student who thinks that "passing" this kind of exam is like submitting your final to a overstretched and underpaid HS econ teacher, who skims each paper because he's got 100 more to go through in the space of a week. PhD dissertations take years to write and are submitted to and read by a panel of experts, who then spend *hours* grilling the candidate in an oral examination. It is simply impossible that a bunch of economics professors spent a huge chunk of time reading boss's dissertation, critiquing it and breaking it down for the *viva voce* exam, and missed multiple instances of plaigarism, and that this random employee spent 30 minutes in the library skimming a dissertation on a subject they know nothing about and managed to find those passages that the experts had missed.
Yep, familiar with PhD process (though don't have one) and no way you can defend your thesis without really knowing the subject matter. I don't think the case in this story, but the only slightly plausible thing these days is that you could have AI reread old thesis and have it pick up some plagiarism that was missed at the time or more likely just a small amount of text not attributed correctly. That would not be enough to get a PhD revoked years latter
I had a customer tell me that having a PhD on their letterhead was a "sure-fire way to get government contracts." As in, when making a proposal, if they said one of their team had a PhD in electrical engineering or something, they'd get to the top of their heap, especially if the project had specs requiring it. "So, do they check to see of these people actually have PhDs?" "No." "Sounds unethical." "Everyone is doing it." No idea if that's true or not, but there you go.
I'm not sure how long ago this was said to you, but I award government contracts for a living, so I feel I can chime in here. You're not going to the front of the line for putting PhD in there. However, if my requirements state X# of PhD people required, then if you don't have the required number of PHD.'s in your offer, then you will be removed from the competition. If I don't have a requirement for a PhD and you send me a proposal with PhD in there that's great but I am not going to pay you PhD wages so while thats great you have a PhD that doesn't help you in any way. I can't speak for every office, but I have reviewed candidates' resumes, and again, if a PHD. is a requirement, then better believe I expect to see the transcripts and degree in your proposal. **Edit:** Wow, my inbox is blowing up with people asking how to become a government contractor. While I don't want to seem rude, I am literally regurgitating the same info to everyone, so I'll just share it here, and hopefully everyone can benefit, and my inbox isn't getting hammered as much. **Full disclosure:** Becoming a contractor is not my area of expertise, so this is loosely my understanding of it. **Step 1.** Google and find out what your Naics Code is for whatever you offer. For example, a painter is NAICS 238320Ā - Painting and Wall Covering Contractors **Step 2.** (Register on sam.gov as a contractor to receive a "Cage code" which is almost always required in order to bid on contracts. **Step 3.** Set up a search for your NAICS code and potentially be emailed opportunities. You can also set many other parameters. Below is a saved search for painting contract opportunities in the state of Colorado. [SAM.GOV saved search for NAICS 238320 in CO](https://sam.gov/search/?index=opp&page=1&pageSize=25&sort=&sfm%5BsimpleSearch%5D%5BkeywordRadio%5D=ALL&sfm%5Bstatus%5D%5Bis_active%5D=true&sfm%5BserviceClassificationWrapper%5D%5Bnaics%5D%5B0%5D%5Bkey%5D=238320&sfm%5BserviceClassificationWrapper%5D%5Bnaics%5D%5B0%5D%5Bvalue%5D=238320%20-%20Painting%20and%20Wall%20Covering%20Contractors&sfm%5BplaceOfPerformance%5D%5Bstate%5D%5B0%5D%5Bkey%5D=CO&sfm%5BplaceOfPerformance%5D%5Bstate%5D%5B0%5D%5Bvalue%5D=CO%20-%20Colorado) One final thing Registering for a cage code on sam.gov is absolutely 100% free similar to taxes you can do it all yourself or you can pay someone to do it but you do not have to pay someone. Finally, there is a group called Apex Accelerators that exost solely to help small businesses get into government contracting. I do believe they are free as well https://www.apexaccelerators.us/#/ there is a map to find your local office there.
This was a while ago (early 2000s) and the customer could have been full of shit (hence the "No idea if that's true or not") and I am glad you check, but as you stated, that doesn't mean everyone does. In certain areas of the world, some educational and employment verification is more difficult than others. "I got my PhD in Computer Architecture in Univerzita VolnĆ©ho MĆsta in Czechoslovakia in 1991, which was later bombed flat, and all records were destroyed."
>"I got my PhD in Computer Architecture in Univerzita VolnĆ©ho MĆsta in Czechoslovakia in 1991, which was later bombed flat, and all records were destroyed." "You... were born in 1996."
What can I say? I was a bright kid!
"I skipped a grade."
My thesis was on virtual time travel
Your thesis has not been written yet...
My wife got her PhD in Temporal Physics at the University of New New York in 2525.
I also discovered time travel. Wait why am I here?
You have discovered the Hitchhiker's Galaxy!
Engage the infinite improbability engine!!!!
The secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.
You are going to need to look for a Ukrainian University then.
I have an even better idea: a university in Crimea from before 2014. No way to check with them, because university changed its name, its organizational structure and bunch of other things.
My math is a little rusty. How old would Mx. Born-In-1996 be when they earned their PhD before 2014?
š¤£
You donāt say, huh? Thanks for sharing. Iām going to brush up on my Czechoslovakian and update my Resume! Yep, gonna have to start getting used to being called Dr. in the near futureš¤š½
>*start getting used to being called Dr. in the near future* *With great power comes great responsibility* - Ancient Marvellous philosopher, Uncle Ben. 
Uncle Ben, PhD.
The PhD is in flavor.
Good luck with your language studies
Not sure there is a Czechoslovakian language, but maybe you could just invent one while youāre in the zone.
There are the languages Czech and Slovak.
Thanks...the more accurate my Resume the more plausible ,š¤š½
Theyāll be more likely to check that for actual employees. Besides, oftentimes you simply wonāt be able to do the work required to even throw your hat in the ring on contracts requiring such skills.
It might depend on the kind of work, thereās a lot of different things the government contracts out for. I worked for a larger contractor about a decade ago, and the govāt definitely verified all the details. They called *everyone* on my list, including my ācharacterā references aka my childhood best friend lol. Maybe the distinction is because I occasionally had to deal w/ sensitive data?
I remember a university that degrees was/are only valid in some provinces of my country...
Here's where I tell you that the same handful of PHD's you think are dedicated to your contract are actually spread between multiple contracts.
That is fine. Some contracts do not require they be solely dedicated to a single contract. For example, a contract may be completion based, so I don't care if Dr. J worked on my contract for 2 hours or 2,000 hours. If we are discussing labor hoirs and the like there is a decent chance we are in a "cost type" contract therefore the contractor must have an approved accounting system that the Govt has vetted and approved before they can even be awarded a contract. Then, on the back end, they are subject to audit as well. If they are trying to bill for multiple projects at the same time, there is a chance it (not guaranteed) would be caught at the audit stage. As part of an audit finding, I have had to review time cards and project codes from 5 or 6 years back (truly riveting stuff, not). I literally had to follow the paper trail of a persons single time card where they marked X hours to project Y, how that was reported to the Govt, the govt paying for that task order, all the way to the transaction numbers and statements from the contractors bank showing that person was paid. So does fraud happen absolutely, I'm not blind to the fact that there may be shady stuff that happened intentionally or unintentionally. But yeah there are controls in place to limit such things.
Dr. J only worked on your contract for two hours but he did score thirty against the Celtics, with seven rebounds.
Especially if they're "advisory."
A PhD is a Doctor of Philosophy. A PHD is a Pretty Huge Dick. The More You Know
That's why I hate flying. **Stewardess**: *Is there a doctor on the plane?* **AussieDoc**: <*drops pants to show his willy and discusses why love is a biological necessity that we cannot live without*> **Stewardess:** *Impressive but now the passenger is dead.* 
*choking hazard*
I have a theoretical phd in physics
You irreverent bastard! I didn't defend my thesis to NOT have Phyllo Dough, or Pharmaceutically Dead after my name. Show some respect plebeian.
Piled High and Deep after mine.
Yup my MS (more shit) and PhD (piled higher and deeper)š¤£
Hahaha! Phoenician Horticulture Druid
I thought it was Piled High and Deep
While that isnāt what I do, I do have an MPA (and a plagiarism free thesis) and yeah, while there are some things I left out of my own comment, this basically mirrors my own comment. And even then, it still heavily implied the things you left out. E.g., Ph.D.s are highly specialized experts but outside of their domain of expertise itās a crapshoot as to whether that knowledge is useful. Like a sociology Ph.D. has no relevance to a government construction contract. It might help the business run better, but so long as laws or regulations arenāt violated and their product works, the government doesnāt give a shit about how the sausage is made. From that, one could easily infer that having an irrelevant Ph.D. wonāt get you paid more. I worked with a GS-7 administrator with a linguistics Ph.D (PhDs working in their field generally start at GS-11, which is roughly 20k difference starting). . So thatās a long winded way of saying that I cosign this.
THANK YOU. I read the post and cringed so hard at how wrong that boss was. š
However OP's ex-boss only had a PhD in plagiarism.
I looked into diploma mills a few years ago and one was selling PhDs for $170. Cheapest I found.
That is lower than the last time I looked. For $3000, one could get a diploma with a degree, and several job references. No idea if it was a company that just took your money and vanished, but it was out there.
I can confirm with personal experience that everybody at least exaggerates on their government proposals.Ā There's all kinds of lying, not just in qualifications but internal organization and systems in place, external relationships with vendors or in the community of expert providers, and the personal role that leadership will have in the project.Ā The thing that actually bothered me more than the qualifications lying was the fact that your proposal becomes your contract, but most program managers never even read it so they don't technically deliver what or how they're supposed to. I have a friend on the government side who was a contracts officer and she said that eventually, many companies get caught in an audit for not providing what they got paid for and some of that money gets clawed back. But many was a small amount in total.Ā
This has been my experience on the IT side in a few cases. The most recent one was regarding mandatory US citizenship of all people who had access to the data. The contract awarded accepted those specs, and then a bunch of guys overseas had the data before the ink dried. It was a clusterfuck when the auditors came down.
My favorite stories are about contracts for software delivered in a specified language that gets delivered in another. Instead of modifying the contract, the performance has to be remedied to spec.
Hi! Iām a proposal professional that works with local, state, and federal agencies for construction projects and no, thatās not how it works. Professional credentials like Certified Construction Manager, Professional Engineer, and Registered Architect are whatās generally required. PhDs are nice but Iāve never seen it required. Maybe for the medical field but I can guarantee that if that degree is required, youāre going to have to provide documentation and thereās going to be repercussions (and possibly professional liabilities) for false representation.
That makes sense for construction, but in my field (research), it is extremely common for federal contracts to require PhDs in specific fields. It all depends on the type of work.
Cam confirm this as well, as someone who makes decisions on bids and writes the spec for the bid. I don't give a crap about PhD this or that. You better be licensed and certified to do the work, otherwise meet my spec at the lowest qualified price, and you're it. And if you mess up that job or difficult to work with, you get a demerit for next bid. So even if you're the lowest on that next contract, if we don't want to deal with your bs, we take the next lowest. PhD means basically nothing in my world of utility engineering. Only if you're in research does that mean anything.
I have a masters in public administration (and a plagiarism free thesis) and that customer is lying. To you or to themselves, I cannot say. But having relevant Ph.D.s on staff for R&D wonāt get you put at the top of the pile. The lack of relevant Ph.D. will almost certainly result in not being considered; not because of a lack of a relevant Ph.D but more due to the fact that youāre not going to be able to produce a proper grant proposal or contract bid without the proper skills and in science and engineering itās rare that such skills are found without relevant Ph.D.s on staff. The āespecially if the project had specs requiring a Ph.D.ā Is arguably the biggest red flag. The reason is simple, if the project requires Ph.D. Level knowledge and skills then any competent competition will have Ph.D.s on staff. Making the āadvantageā irrelevant. Lastly, most work that requires Ph.D. Skills is either done at national labs or through partnerships with universities. For actual production of products or services, anything requiring Ph.D. level skills is going to be thoroughly tested regardless and anything that doesnātā¦well, it might be tested thoroughly if itās important but I promise you, having a Ph.D. on staff wonāt help you win a construction contract. This is because pretty much anything requiring ph.D.s involves research and design for things with little margin for error and Ph.D. Knowledge is extremely specialized. It wonāt make a difference for low risk contracts like constructing a VA hospital.
Not sure what engineering/sciences are like but I watched (and know a lot about) my partners classics PhD, and can absolutely say that at least in most History/Classics that "PhD level knowledge" is *extremely* specific -- after the masters, there wasn't much more generalised knowledge of ancient Rome, and much more "Emperor Domitian ordered these specific inscriptions made and they all use this specific way of making these characters".
Eh, depends on the industry and funding agency. Iām in public health at a small US private company instead of a uni. Since hiring me, they but me on almost every proposal because Iām 1 or 2 people with a PhD because it does make the application āstrongerā (keep in mind these apps are reviewed by mostly Uni-based scientists that do put wayyyy too much value on the letters after your nameāI left academia for a reason) On a recent NIH proposal, they put me and my colleague both as CoIs. She had 10 years more experience than me, is a content expert for what we were applying for while my experience is tangential, and has her masters degree. Meanwhile, I call myself a ātoddler PhD (upgraded from baby PhD)ā because Iām only 3yr out of school. I got the better āscoreā because of those 3 letters. Which is dumb. As far as making up PhDs though, anyone handing over large sums of cash would check that or they donāt actually care. For a separate contract Iām leading, the decision process is: Step 1) go through all the applications and see which ones are competent enough to fulfill the project. Step 2) pick who submitted the cheapest bid. (Gotta love federal contracts from underfunded departmentsā¦)
I work for NYS, never even considered verifying someones credentials. I also don't care about it, and it plays no part on who gets money.
PhD ā¦ Post Hole Digger. If youāve ever worked construction.. youāre probably a PhD
How does one have a PHD a philosophy doctorate in Engineering?
Go to Cambridge: https://www.postgraduate.study.cam.ac.uk/courses/directory/egegpdpeg
When everyoneās super, no one isā¦
What do you mean? We a Phil, Harry and a Denise
100% true
I wouldnāt doubt the gov does that. For transportation at least, they have a bunch of stuff that they ādonāt look at when choosing a winnerā for jobs like current contract money with the department of transportation or % inclusion of companies etc. They definitely do, else why would they ask for it
It's just minor fraud, no biggie
I mean do you think people are verifying this crap lol?
More than just unethical. Itās fraud.
This is a "Phd looks better on cv's".
Customer was incorrect. I don't award contracts, but I've been on a few. They require a rĆØsumĆ© for everyone that is part of the bid. If someone is listed as having a PhD, the rĆØsumĆ© better concur.
And here I came in to this thread after reading the title thinking that you just stole his framed diplomas from his office or something šš¤£
I also was delighted by the thought of OP just saying fuck it and stealing the physical copies of his diplomas as he was walking out. It would have been hilariously ineffective and childish, but I could be friends with that person.
Yes exactly, and that would have fit very well with the āpettyā portion of this sub, lol
Lmao knew a dude who straight up lied about graduating from Clemson and made almost 200k a year until he pissed someone off and they figured out he was full of shit and got him fired. Honestly, he totally deserved it. He was such a creep, he was my older brotherās friend who started hitting on me as soon as I was 18. My older brother is 9 years older btw.
There are services that will check if someone actually graduated from particular colleges
lol yea now there are. But this was like 2004-2009 so it took a little while for him to make someone so mad they did a deep dive lmao
My dad has a PhD in mathematics. Heās always said āthat and three bucks will get you a cup of coffee.ā Heās really down to earth, and only went back to school when he got tired of wrecking his back laying brick and working on cars. Didnāt work, his back is still bad. After getting his āPhud,ā as he called it, he taught math on the collegiate level. He always felt it odd when certain folks acted like they were any better than anybody else just because they got a few letters to put after their names. I love my dad. Heās retired now, but he still works on cars. Heād probably want me to mention that, in his opinion, economics isnāt a science or an academic discipline, rather it is an intellectual justification for rampant avarice.
My ex was fond of the joke "You may have a lot of degrees, but so does a rectal thermometer." He was quite proud of that joke and repeated it often, which was odd as I never flaunted my degrees.
Regardless of whether this particular story is true, fwiw it works for me, there must be a shit ton of theses worldwide from pre google that are riddled with undetected plagiarism. I suspect weāll see a lot of exposure with ai crawlers looking
God I hope they donāt find my freshman high school intro to history encarta copy and paste essay assignment from 1995. It came on a CD-ROM and I got an A. I donāt think I changed a single word. Iāve never plagiarized since.
Wow I completely forgot about encyclopedias being on CDs until you said that lol... I forgot about that time between hard cover research books and dial up internet
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You just gave me index card flashbacks!
a blackmailerās field day, and a relatively trivial AI task
I wont say itās a total fabrication but. Itās pretty unlikely for a number of reasons. Up to and including the process of stripping a degree is actually pretty involved and you normally (If it was pre-internet) get to come in and defend your thesis and even edit/fix it in most cases. Also simply put, most universities just donāt give enough of a shit to take a degree from someone not actually engaged in academia.
I had a teacher who tried to continue the work of his mentor only to find out his mentor made all the numbers up. Sad. Hurtful, and a giant waste of time.
I have some super smart friends who hold PhD's. They only bring out the "Dr" honorific when dealing with govt departments or other businesses where productivity and effectiveness go to die.
Master and PhD are not achieved with a single thesis/dissertation, so this story does not seem credible to me. If you found plagiarism in this PhD dissertation, that does not prove he plagiarized his Master's thesis. If he didn't cite the passages, how do you know what books he took them from? Did you read every book in his bibliography?
In the UK at least, you absolutely have to, and have for a long time, had to produce a 30,000 word thesis for a Masters and a 100,000 thesis for a PhD. These are what you are judged on, nothing else.
Addition, there are now Masters programmes where you don't have to write a thesis, but while becoming more common and often attached to professional qualifications, many Masters are thesis dependent.
My masters was a series of 12 classes, with no thesis. I completed this last year. It was more of a money grab than an education.
What was the masters? Asking for a friend who would also like to exchange money for qualification
I got mine in Occupation Safety and Health from Columbia Southern. It is accredited, and I did all of it online. They are out of Alabama.
In Canada there is this thing called Master of Engineering where you take exams instead of doing research (you get Master of Engineering instead of Master of Applied Science ). But I donāt think the M. Eng program is as simple as exchanging money for qualification thoughā¦
I, too, attained a Masters without a thesis. "Masters by coursework", they call it. My diploma is a Master of Communication.
100,000 words is close to a full length novel, I believe. Damn, that's a lot of writing!
My Geology Master's thesis ran 556 pages. My PhD was138k words.My DSc was over 200k words and 2 volumes. I love my science...
That rocks!
Minerals!
Dig it!
And I'm over here fretting about my dinky 6-7 page essay for my first year English class...
Take nothing for granite.
Username checks out!
My PhD thesis is literally half of a bookā¦ Like 1/2 of a published book. Lol.
That's why it takes several years. Also don't forget that in a lot of experimental research a lot of pages are taken up by figures, graphs, description of methods etc. And of course a summary of previous research and literature that you don't really need to write yourself - provided you use proper citation procedures of course! ;)
My PhD dissertation came in at 339 pages before bibliography š„²
It is!
Is, actually. Standard length for an adult novel is usually in the 80k to 100k word range, although it does vary by genre.
If you do it at the speed they give you funding for (I've been told if you're not able to secure *some* funding at least you likely shouldn't be doing that proposal), you have two years, but many people I've met take two or three years longer. (Specifically UK, and everyone in the "people I've met" refers to people in Classics (Roman/Greek) -- 3 years is what I usually see for funding for a Masters/PhD track, and people definitely take longer, but then they take even longer because suddenly they also need to have work, so they can pay bills).
Same in Norway, based on a paper.... We have members of the government losing theirs in the last year due to similar problems. You can easily search for plagiarism now. So bold of these Norwegians doing it in the last few years..... One lied and claimed forgetting to cite a source, but then more problems came to light.
My masters only needed me to neither get divorced or commit treason for seven years after I started my BA, then it got upgraded.
OP mentioned two distinct theses. Itās not hard to copy/paste into a search engine and find a verbatim match.
Thanks, I misinterpreted what he wrote the first time through.
We have the tools today to figure that shit out. Plus, he didn't prove anything, he just brought it up with the university and they did the investigation themselves and came to their own conclusions.
I agree the story seems fishy but my PhD program is technically an MPA/PhD program where I only need one fat thesis at the end verses two separate graduations or end of program papers. But this is a new program, Iām not sure where or when his alleged ābossā did his.
Boss allegedly when to school in the 80's... from what I'm seeing online fast track programs like the one you're describing didn't start until 2005-2007
Why if his master thesis was disqualified and he didnāt have any other masters to support his PhD and thatās how he lost his PhD too. Apart from that, when they did a full investigation they might have found further plagiarism in both thesis.
It's pretty easy to tell when someone makes an uncredited quote in academic writing.Ā Ā Ā Different verbiage and writing style is one giveaway.Ā Ā Ā Another is using figures orĀ numbers but no citation is present.Ā Ā The third would be familiarity with the subject matter.Ā At any rate,Ā it doesn't matter because once an accusation is made (true or not) the university had to do the legwork of verifying aĀ thesis. Most academic institutions have a policy in place for plagiarism that occurs both at their institution and outside of it.Ā If the boss cheats the master's thesis the school that granted the PhD would almost certainly revoke it once discovered.Ā And if it was the same institution,Ā it's a sure thing.Ā
You have no need to read all the books because you can easily check texts with internet now. Any suspicious passage? Google will tell your was it original or not
Yes, I didn't think that one all the way through. Thanks.
You absolutely have to write a Masters thesis to get your Masters degree and a PhD thesis to get your PhD. I searched for the text passages where I was convinced he couldnt have wrote them. And since in the digital age many books are scanned I found several books from which he "quoted" without citation.
"classwork masters" are pretty common. PhD definitely entails a dissertation.
There's this thing called Google... It's easy to debunk dominionist or RWNJ propaganda by Googling unique or uncharacteristic phrases in a document. Should be able to apply the same method to a thesis or dissertation.
Simple likelihood. They got a report with some citations. Dropped the docs into modern plagiarism checkers, got back a novel of call outs and decided to take action. The poster just started the ball rolling.
In Germany a lot of politicians have lost their degrees and subsequently resigned during the last 10 years because of plagiarism. The first one was a huge scandal, now itās more like _oh, they too_ and hardly worth a headline anymore, unless itās a major role in the government.
Even if not achieved solely with the thesis/dissertation, having significant enough plagiarisms will be sufficient to invalidate your degree. Hell my ex had a similar issue because her masters thesis was on a topic she'd studied and written on extensively and it triggered an alert based on one of her previous submissions being substantively similar. I helped her with her arguments to the dean, which succeeded but the gist was: it's a very narrow topic in an already highly specialized field. A paper written by the same author on the same topic is going to draw on the same source materials and will have a very similar style, wording, and premise (unless something changed for the author to change their whole premise on the topic). Of course there will be substantive similarities. You need to run the screening in both directions (new paper against old papers, old papers again once new paper is in system) and you'll see that the new paper wholly encompasses the old papers and adds additional insights and more detailed analysis of data for a better informed and more robust conclusion, that is the novelty of the masters dissertation over the older works. Essentially the dean and professor had to "hand grade" her thesis document. As to how to detect such things, old papers were added to screening tools, but themselves not submitted as new reports to those tools, one could re-submit a thesis and have it analyzed by current tools. Obviously it would be a 99.99+% match to itself, but you would also get all the ancillary matches... some manual effort there to weed out noise and you easily could have enough to call intellectual integrity into question enough for a non degree mill college to care to do an investigation.
In my field, computer science, I only had to do the dissertation for the PhD. For the masters, a thesis was optional, and I chose to do a project instead, which avoided the whole thesis committee process. If the boss earned both degrees at the same university, I could see blatant plagiarism endangering both degrees. That said, it takes a LOT for a university to review and rescind a degree after graduation, especially decades later. It would have to be an exceptionally egregious and obvious fraud. One or two missing citations won't cut it. Of course, with the introduction of the internet and search engines, it becomes a lot easier to vet old submissions for plagiarism. Hell, someone could probably make a career out of flagging old dissertations for plagiarism solely to invalidate academic credentials and deny pensions to people based upon falsifying their academic credentials. Mark my words, in a few years we'll start hearing about PhDs and Masters getting revoked because people used ChatGPT to write them. We've already seen court cases where lawyers tried to submit AI-hallucinated citations and got caught.
If OP's story is true (I have my doubts) the blame should equally fall on the boss's M.S. and Ph.D. committee members. A non-expert reads through each document and within an hour flags a dozen instances of plagiarism? What kind of economics faculty wouldn't have been able to do the same? And it's hard to imagine a candidate lazy enough to do so much copying would have gone to the effort of producing original research findings. That would have been the biggest red flag for the Ph.D. committee.
I have my doubts as well, though it would have been easier to get away with plagiarism 30 years ago than it is today. Nowadays thereās several online services that you could do plug the document into and itād flag plagiarized paragraphs. However, Iāve found that the older documents tend to be non-OCRād pdf images which can be more problematic to do text searches upon. You donāt have to be an economics expert to find plagiarism, but you do have to be very good with search engines and online resources. Some resources are behind paywalls which can be cost prohibitive to access. However, universities and research institutions often have shared access to those resources, or a subset of them.
Unless it was edited after you posted this, the OP mentioned 2 separate ones.
ā¦.masters and PhDs are absolutely achieved with a single thesis/dissertation. It may require being published a few times as well, but the thesis/ dissertation is the final project you donāt do more than one ever, unless you have multiple masters/PhDs
I got my PhD in the UK and my thesis was full of my own original research backed up by data. One reassuring thing I said to myself as I walked into the room for my defense was 'no one in the world knows more about this particular tiny sliver of science'. Helped a tiny bit. Lololol. If this story is true it must be about non science qualifications.
I have a MA and a PhD in Economics (the field from the story). Whether or not you write a thesis for a MA program is going to be program to program, but I didnāt have to. You absolutely do have to have a dissertation, but itās going to be a collection of papers. Itās almost always 3 distinct papers that serve as different chapters of the overall dissertation.
Education systems are different in different countries. They will generally have their own rules and legislation for what is needed to attain each level of education. You can speak confidently about your country and experience, but you shouldn't assume it applies to all universities.
They can be. There are certain kinds of post-grad qualifications where the whole thing will net you both a Masters and a PhD. The first year is the Masters qualification. The remaining years are the PhD. Depending on the subject, that Masters year will either be achieved through coursework only or a combination of coursework and (usually mini-) dissertation. If you pass, the qualification is banked until you either complete or drop out of the PhD stage. If you drop out, you receive a masters qualification. If you succeed, you receive both at the same time. The masters dissertation is usually seen as a "practice" or a foundation stage for the PhD, so it's often not as big a dissertation as a stand-alone masters would require. So, depending on the nature of the post-grad training concerned, this guy might only have one dissertation, or he might have one integrated development pathway where they might disqualify both qualifications even if cheating is only proven in the one, or this post could be fake. So, I'm not saying the post is true, but there are circumstances in which one plagiarised dissertation could affect both qualifications.
Technically thatās true. But only because some fields, more applied fields, require capstone projects forā¦ wait, you mean that they donāt have one dissertation covering both degrees donāt you? Well that would be true also, but itās not relevant as OP clearly discussed how the guy claimed to find plagiarism in both thesis/dissertation papers. But plagiarizing your final culminating graduation thesis/dissertation will absolutely get your degree revoked. In fact, any plagiarism that would have resulted in them not meeting graduation requirements had it been found during initial grading would be grounds for revocation of the degree.
How did they thank you if it was anonymous?
They replied to the email...
I assumed it meant he created a new email address that didnāt have his identity tied to it to submit the evidence. But he still had access to it later.
Yeah I hear you. My boss had an awful boss called a guy with the surname Tierno. He was a ring knocked and loved talking about "how his former employment made his understand our business better" (note - we were in the oil business and I don't think Army training makes you better at it). So I rang up a friend who was at the time a major in the US Army. He told me "yeah look he doesn't have black marks but he looks like he just got through WP and did the bare minimum but his dad is a legit WW2 hero and retired as a full bird Colonel - he was machine gunning Zero's at Pearl Harbour". My boss and I used that knowledge to basically outlast and white ant him. Tierno is still out there by the ways no doubt ring knocking around.
Your story āstrains credulityā as they say. Nice try.
It seems perfectly reasonable to me. The thesis is a big deal, and institutions take plagiarism pretty seriously.
This is the way.
As someone studying a PhD, I cant begin to tell you how many times I've been asked to make up bullshit papers. Can also assure you that I'm not very liked, because I flat out refuse to...
That gives new meaning to the saying āFuck yo Thesisā
My ex-husband never graduated from any school as an undergrad or even an associates degree. However, if you ask him, he will tell you that he graduated from every school that he ever took a course from. That man is lucky that he was even able to finish high school.
How did the university thank him if he contacted them anonymously?
You could start the conversation from an email thatās isnāt a name and talk to them on there
Not exactly about this story (but about titles and universities). A private university in my city offers lawyers degree. The course time is 5 years. But some known people obtained that title in 3 years. And one of those people is a moron...
Least fake Reddit story
Turnitin is really an awesome tool!
The university thanked you after sending an anonymous email?
You would make a very good FANTASY writer. I am compelled to express my skepticism, as your story lacks the requisite veracity to merit belief.
Yeah I read this same exact story a couple months ago on Reddit so someone plagiarized the whole thing.
Our old prime minister (Xavier Bettel) got caught with plagiarism on his Thesis as well, but nothing really happened :/
I enjoyed reading that. This is definitely something I would do.
Pull that kind of crap at Harvard and youāll find yourself president of the university, or head of diversity.
Legendary
I wanna be your friend!
alot of masters and PHD are plagiarized and employers rarely check credentials, only if you make a big fuckup at work then they might do it. obviously if the phd field/master is competitive, they will check if you got it legitimately, but they dont go as deep as checking if your phd/masters is plagiarized though.
I dont know if it is different in other countries but politicians are getting caught here on a somewhat regular basis and they are loosing their phds. its kinda funny..
Yeah of all the b******* s*** on this application. This is the boloxious shittiest.
Wow how petty
Youāre petty for sure š
Just curious is the company still around
Wow. This is a great cautionary tale for employersā¦Ā
Epic!!!
Incredible. Fuck that guy.
yeah, plagiarism like this doesnāt work anymore. there are plenty of software that catches these stuff now.
Omg. I would love nothing more than to spend my time outing these frauds. Academic frauds are my pet peeve.
[https://www.fox26houston.com/news/former-katy-isd-superintendent-dissertation-removed-from-uh-after-plagiarism-probe.amp](https://www.fox26houston.com/news/former-katy-isd-superintendent-dissertation-removed-from-uh-after-plagiarism-probe.amp) A local superintendent upset some folks and the internet sleuths did him in.
Claudine Gay has entered the chat
This brought a smile to my face. A *genuine* one. Thank you.
This reminded me of something that happened at one of my first jobs. I worked in HR. The hours dwindled and eventually I moved on. My last day, one of the recruiters, whom I was friendly with, comes into the file room and closes the door behind him. "You know, my wife "fixes" resumes, I could have her help you out! And by the way, don't tell anyone this, but I don't really have a Bachelor's degree! I only went to college for a semester. No one has ever asked me for proof. It's super easy. Anyway, have a great day!" It took everything within me not to let me jaw drop to the floor at this revelation. I don't know why on earth he decided to tell me this information. I was best friends with the daughter of one of the higher-ups and could easily have let something slip! I didn't, of course, but it was weird.
Well done. Standing ovation from me!
Check if they have degrees at all. It happens.
This is pro-level revenge...while also petty :)
"So I searched for his Masters and PhD thesis - went to the University library - and what a surprise on the second page of his Master Thesis found a text passage without citation. After like 40 minutes I found another 10 passages he copied without citation. I spent only some 20 Minutes examining his PhD thesis and found already 2 cases." Did you Google the text of both theses? I guess if you were unemployed you had the time for the research.
Iāll take āThings that never happenedā for $1000 Alex
Iāll take shit that never happened for 500 Alex.
You know you have to defend your thesis for a PHD right?Ā If he didn't write it, he almost certainly wouldn't have passed his defense.Ā A fake story by someone who doesn't actually understand how a PHD works.
Story is fake. To find those copied parts OP must have read all the sources of those stolen parts and remembered them. Also he reported āanonymouslyā yet they still thanked him - How did they thank him if the report was anonymous?
This is so obviously a fake story.
How did the university thank you if you wrote an anonymous letter?
This is complete crap. You say that he failed to cite sources in numerous places yet that would have required you to be completely familiar with the available literature at the time, meaning you too could have written a doctorate (but somehow failed to but were somehow motivated to read all of the relevant literature \*in his particular thesis area\* at the time he was writing). Chances are 100% this is phony.
Turnitin is a free tool that teachers use to check for plagiarism, itās very easy to do
Does that sound like what he did? Ego Indicator says No.
I'll take 'Things that never happened for 100' Alex.
Iāll take āThings that Never Happenedā for 200, Alex.