9 ms·

Sadly, it's insanely common to have advanced degrees plagiarized. I worked as a high school teacher and the number of co-workers who phoned it in for advanced d

by socrates1998 7y ago

Sadly, it's insanely common to have advanced degrees plagiarized. I worked as a high school teacher and the number of co-workers who phoned it in for advanced degrees just to get the pay increase was insane. I can't think of one person who did it to actually learn anything. The worst was a couple of "Doctors", who essentially bought their way to getting EdD's. It was just disgusting. Our admins and leaders CHEATING their way to getting advanced degrees and then expecting us to respect them as educators. And they had the gall to make people call them "doctor". One of the many reasons why I quit working for them.

tvanantwerp 7y ago
When I was in high school, the county's highest paid teacher (on account of the credentials) worked there. She taught typing. TYPING! And she wasn't even very good at it! I don't think a single student really respected her. I was friendly with the school's IT guys. One of them told me the story of her mouse "breaking", and him going to fix it. Somebody had just put some scotch tape over the sensor. He silently removed it, told her it was fixed, and went back to his office for a good laugh.
povertyworld 7y ago
People only get the EdD because it's required to be a superintendent in most places. I'm scraping by on a part time higher ed gig, and it's just depressing how the full time staff just see degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise not a path to growth and learning. The average American already thinks higher ed is a scam. At least the people who work in it could try to believe in their own product, but even they don't.
- linuxftw 7y ago
  This is a symptom they believe they're under paid. Plus, you don't need an advanced 'degree' to learn much of anything anymore. The wealth of human knowledge that is available online, for free, is astounding.
  - povertyworld 7y ago
    As someone who has worked in higher ed, part of the degree requirements are to reduce corruption. Otherwise low tier state schools and community colleges would just be packed with the top administrator's buddies. Requiring a doctorate at least means you can't give the job to your pal Joey from Bayonne or whatever. Well, you still can, but he has to grind a mail order doctorate first.
    - linuxftw 7y ago
      State-level certification exams would fix this. You either pass the exam, or you don't, doesn't matter how you acquired the knowledge.
      - povertyworld 7y ago
        But then people will just memorize for the test. We've all seen the IT guys who crammed for some certification, but don't know anything.
        rootusrootus 7y ago
        That is a problem with particular certification exams, not insurmountable at all. E.g. memorizing brain dumps for Microsoft MSCE is one thing, but that trick does not work for the CCIE.
        barbecue_sauce 7y ago
        Is the CCIE one of the "hands on" exams, like the Red Hat and Kubernetes exams?
        rootusrootus 7y ago
        I have less familiarity with the Red Hat and Kubernetes exams, but yes -- the CCIE is a lab exam. Started out at two days but IIRC it is currently at one full eight-hour day in the lab. We have a few CCIEs where I work and the amount of studying to earn the certification is phenominal. The overall pass rate is about roughly 25%, which is notably low.
- BurningFrog 7y ago
  > it's just depressing how the full time staff just see degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise not a path to growth and learning. The average American already thinks higher ed is a scam I think an unbiased look at the evidence might say they're right.
  - bachmeier 7y ago
    Would that be the evidence that college educated workers make more money than those without[1,2], or the evidence that the unemployment rate is lower for those with a college degree than for those without[3,4]? [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252918500A https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252918500A [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252917300Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252917300Q [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04027662 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04027662 [4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14027660 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14027660
    - BurningFrog 7y ago
      That certainly confirms degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise!
    - SkyBelow 7y ago
      Does something have to have no value to be a scam or just a value less than what is being advertised? I do feel lumping all higher education together is a bit unfair and a breakdown would be far more telling where scams are and aren't.
      - bachmeier 7y ago
        > Does something have to have no value to be a scam or just a value less than what is being advertised? Shouldn't you present evidence if you're saying an unbiased look at the evidence shows something is a scam?
        SkyBelow 7y ago
linuxftw 7y ago
Teaching should be qualified on certifications only, of which a degree is not a qualifier. Good teachers are under paid, bad teachers are over paid, why support the system? Don't use public schools. I would say that most 4 year degrees are mostly 'useless' knowledge. I would say most high schools are mostly useless knowledge. I don't know what society is optimizing for, I think it's optimizing for more and more expensive education.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- povertyworld 7y ago
  As much as I like to believe people can teach themselves anything, if you look at places like Kaggle, there are really no self-taught people. It's just a parade of Phd holders and grad students. I'm sure there are one or two, but clearly for most people coughing up the dough for a Computer Science / Data Science degree is indeed worth it.
  - autokad 7y ago
    I agree with your statements, but dont forget the people who value education are the same ones with degrees and the same ones who self learn. when I was amazed at how we can now take classes at schools like Havard for free on Coursera, my nephew was like 'well what do i get out of it?' *face palm likewise with kaggle. I love participating on it when I have time, but when people who want to be data scientists but dont have a masters/phd and no experience, I tell them to participate there. They always say, I dont want to do that, what else? =|
- socrates1998 7y ago
  Don't use public schools? What do you propose instead? What should teenagers do instead of learn how to read, write and do math?
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    If you're still learning how to read, write, and do basic math as a teenager, society has failed you. I propose homeschooling or private schooling for those who can afford it. I have determined that the public school curriculum is trash, the people creating it are trash, and the people teaching it are trash. If you want trash students, please, send them to trash schools.
matz1 7y ago
>I can't think of one person who did it to actually learn anything I don't think this is the goal. If I can just for example pay for like $15k in order to get $15k pay increase, then to me its a good deal.
- fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
  Good deal for the person getting the 15k sure, a terrible deal for the people paying property taxes to fund that raise.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Also a terrible deal for people at the receiving end of the services of such a person.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - paulcole 7y ago
    Not if the extra $15k keeps an otherwise good teacher/educator from leaving and going to a private company.
    - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
      I'm happy to pay the good teachers more so long as we can pay the bad ones less and get rid of them easily. The unions fight measures like that hard in my experience.
      - yummypaint 7y ago
        Unions fight to protect their members. If taxpayers arent willing to fund enough compensation to attract quality candidates, it is gaurenteed to create a bad situation. Unions protecting bad teachers is a symptom not a cause.
everdrive 7y ago
You might get more earnest learners if the degree weren't tied to pay or prestige. Everyone wants pay and prestige, but only some people want to learn.
uxp100 7y ago
I have a friend who has a Doctorate and teaches some high school teachers, and is a high school teacher/administrator herself, and she always complains about teachers doing things like taking phone calls in the middle of lecture, or just never showing up and complaining to the colleges administration if she gives a poor grade. The older they are the worse they behave, so she says. Of course, her side job teaching them in the summer probably wouldn't exist if they didn't get pay increases for degrees, so...
- uxp100 7y ago
  Just anecdotes from one person, but she also said that those perusing degrees were more engaged and less likely to just be taking calls etc. than those who were doing continuing education credits.
austincheney 7y ago
This is the most high profile case that comes to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/11/us/boston-u-panel-finds-plagiarism-by-dr-king.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/11/us/boston-u-panel-finds-p...
JakeStone 7y ago
You just sadly reminded me of when I was an undergrad taking a grad class on "History of Mathematics". Two undergrads taking the class because it just sounded neat, and the professor made things interesting. 10 graduate students who were teachers taking the class for the increased salary. An evening seminar of three hours per week after work where we examined as much as possible over how people did math through the ages and through time. You could tell these grads were bored. But, fine, dealing with kids all day, then having to learn something new that isn't likely to ever be more than a trivia point in a lecture might not be a great thing. Then... We get to a point where it looks like Archimedes came this close to discovering integral calculus. [insert appropriate WOW! meme here] A couple of grunts from the grads. Me and the other undergrad were gobsmacked. There were other examples, but that's the one that always sticks in my head. It's also what contributed to me not being very impressed by some of the grade school teachers I met as my kids were enrolled.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- chengiz 7y ago
  I dont understand what you're trying to convey. I like history but someone almost discovering something holds no appeal for me; what actually happened does. And these people were not interested in the course in the first place.
  - AlexCoventry 7y ago
    What would the world look like, if the calculus had been discovered two millenia earlier?
    - chengiz 7y ago
      That's fiction, not history.
  - JakeStone 7y ago
    [TL;DR] It's not the destination, it's the journey. Archimedes didn't reach the destination of integral calculus, but he at least started the journey, and I appreciate it. [/TL;DR] I think it's a sense of wonder thing. The scope of knowledge (to my understanding) didn't exist back then to imagine infinitesimals. I believe they were having issues with irrationals, let alone things that approached 0 but weren't exactly 0. There's a sibling comment along the lines of "what if calculus had been discovered 2,000 years earlier" that touches on this, but I think for me there's added the idea that there's proof that some people, some times, can almost see what's next in terms of discoverable knowledge, and it keeps me hopeful. Most of us have some "off" theory/fantasy/hope with no rigid proof of validity. And many of those are just random neurons firing that might make a good fanfic. But there's that person over there who has a mostly fleshed out idea for (insert super tech here) and just needs to figure out step 37. It turns out she'll never invent the super tech defined. But X-2891q in the year 3971 will meme a holograph that brings that super tech into reality. While the super tech likely adds to society, the original person who came up with elements of the concept enriched herself in doing so, by my perspective.
awillen 7y ago
It wasn't until I dated a middle school teacher for a while that I realized how crazy the pay scale is there. Her pay would automatically go up for any grad degree. She was teaching middle school science, but she could have gotten an online Master's in sociology and received a pay bump. I absolutely would have gone online and done the absolute minimum in the easiest possible program I could find, and I wouldn't have thought twice about it. The fact that any Master's degree would do already tells me that it's irrelevant to the school district whether the degree improves teaching (and let's be honest, even getting a Master's in bio won't really help a third grade science teacher), so what difference does it make if it's a total BS degree?
- barbecue_sauce 7y ago
  This all depends on the school district and/or state. Many places, you have to actually get degrees in Education rather than random subjects. (And you are expected to do this to stay employed, rather than to get pay bumps).
  - awillen 7y ago
    Seems weird that you have to do it to stay employed. If you're a middle school science teacher for several years, why would they fire you for not getting an additional credential just because you've been in the job for a certain amount of time, when they've been allowing you to do the job without it?
    - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
      Well, in the situation I’m describing, you’re expected to have an education bachelors to get a teaching job in the first place, with the condition that you get a masters within a certain number of years (followed by continuing education credits). This is essentially dictated by the Teachers Union, to keep salaries high and reduce the supply of qualified educators (though they also negotiate for partial or full reimbursement of education costs for their members so teachers aren’t paying completely out of pocket).
Alex63 7y ago
I was taught (as a Canadian from an English family) that the only people who should be addressed as "doctor" in normal conversation are MDs and active/retired college/university professors. What is common etiquette today?
- cgh 7y ago
  Still the same I think, except in certain provinces such as BC chiropractors and naturopaths can unfortunately refer to themselves as "doctors" and do so at every opportunity. But maybe that doesn't fall under the definition of "normal conversation".
- gnicholas 7y ago
  I wouldn't call anyone "doctor" in normal conversation. Also, at least in my experience (several friends/family are professors), it can be seen as disrespectful to refer to a professor as "doctor" because that is the title that you get when you finish your PhD, but before you have a job as an actual professor. For reference, I live in Palo Alto and went to universities in the US.
MaysonL 7y ago
My mother worked for years as secretary for an EdD who was unable to draft a coherent paragraph: she wrote all of his business letters for him. He did, I believe, enjoy being referred to as "Doctor".
qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
My 5th grader referred to her principal as “doctor” so and so... I told her he is not a doctor. Now, on the other hand, I am one. With a license to practice and I never demand anyone use it. That’s just absurd!
barry-cotter 7y ago
An Ed.D. is not an advanced degree. It is an abomination. You cannot cheapen an Ed.D. or an M.Ed. by cheating to get it because no one with any familiarity with them respects them. Degrees in education have no effect on teaching effectiveness, they’re among the clearest possible examples of pure credentialism and gatekeeping.

tvanantwerp 7y ago

When I was in high school, the county's highest paid teacher (on account of the credentials) worked there. She taught typing. TYPING! And she wasn't even very good at it! I don't think a single student really respected her. I was friendly with the school's IT guys. One of them told me the story of her mouse "breaking", and him going to fix it. Somebody had just put some scotch tape over the sensor. He silently removed it, told her it was fixed, and went back to his office for a good laugh.

povertyworld 7y ago

People only get the EdD because it's required to be a superintendent in most places. I'm scraping by on a part time higher ed gig, and it's just depressing how the full time staff just see degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise not a path to growth and learning. The average American already thinks higher ed is a scam. At least the people who work in it could try to believe in their own product, but even they don't.

linuxftw 7y ago
This is a symptom they believe they're under paid. Plus, you don't need an advanced 'degree' to learn much of anything anymore. The wealth of human knowledge that is available online, for free, is astounding.
- povertyworld 7y ago
  As someone who has worked in higher ed, part of the degree requirements are to reduce corruption. Otherwise low tier state schools and community colleges would just be packed with the top administrator's buddies. Requiring a doctorate at least means you can't give the job to your pal Joey from Bayonne or whatever. Well, you still can, but he has to grind a mail order doctorate first.
  - linuxftw 7y ago
    State-level certification exams would fix this. You either pass the exam, or you don't, doesn't matter how you acquired the knowledge.
    - povertyworld 7y ago
      But then people will just memorize for the test. We've all seen the IT guys who crammed for some certification, but don't know anything.
      - rootusrootus 7y ago
        That is a problem with particular certification exams, not insurmountable at all. E.g. memorizing brain dumps for Microsoft MSCE is one thing, but that trick does not work for the CCIE.
        barbecue_sauce 7y ago
        Is the CCIE one of the "hands on" exams, like the Red Hat and Kubernetes exams?
        rootusrootus 7y ago
        I have less familiarity with the Red Hat and Kubernetes exams, but yes -- the CCIE is a lab exam. Started out at two days but IIRC it is currently at one full eight-hour day in the lab. We have a few CCIEs where I work and the amount of studying to earn the certification is phenominal. The overall pass rate is about roughly 25%, which is notably low.
BurningFrog 7y ago
> it's just depressing how the full time staff just see degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise not a path to growth and learning. The average American already thinks higher ed is a scam I think an unbiased look at the evidence might say they're right.
- bachmeier 7y ago
  Would that be the evidence that college educated workers make more money than those without[1,2], or the evidence that the unemployment rate is lower for those with a college degree than for those without[3,4]? [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252918500A https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252918500A [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252917300Q https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0252917300Q [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04027662 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU04027662 [4] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14027660 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS14027660
  - BurningFrog 7y ago
    That certainly confirms degrees as an obstacle to getting a raise!
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    Does something have to have no value to be a scam or just a value less than what is being advertised? I do feel lumping all higher education together is a bit unfair and a breakdown would be far more telling where scams are and aren't.
    - bachmeier 7y ago
      > Does something have to have no value to be a scam or just a value less than what is being advertised? Shouldn't you present evidence if you're saying an unbiased look at the evidence shows something is a scam?
      - SkyBelow 7y ago

linuxftw 7y ago

Teaching should be qualified on certifications only, of which a degree is not a qualifier. Good teachers are under paid, bad teachers are over paid, why support the system? Don't use public schools. I would say that most 4 year degrees are mostly 'useless' knowledge. I would say most high schools are mostly useless knowledge. I don't know what society is optimizing for, I think it's optimizing for more and more expensive education.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
povertyworld 7y ago
As much as I like to believe people can teach themselves anything, if you look at places like Kaggle, there are really no self-taught people. It's just a parade of Phd holders and grad students. I'm sure there are one or two, but clearly for most people coughing up the dough for a Computer Science / Data Science degree is indeed worth it.
- autokad 7y ago
  I agree with your statements, but dont forget the people who value education are the same ones with degrees and the same ones who self learn. when I was amazed at how we can now take classes at schools like Havard for free on Coursera, my nephew was like 'well what do i get out of it?' *face palm likewise with kaggle. I love participating on it when I have time, but when people who want to be data scientists but dont have a masters/phd and no experience, I tell them to participate there. They always say, I dont want to do that, what else? =|
socrates1998 7y ago
Don't use public schools? What do you propose instead? What should teenagers do instead of learn how to read, write and do math?
- linuxftw 7y ago
  If you're still learning how to read, write, and do basic math as a teenager, society has failed you. I propose homeschooling or private schooling for those who can afford it. I have determined that the public school curriculum is trash, the people creating it are trash, and the people teaching it are trash. If you want trash students, please, send them to trash schools.

matz1 7y ago

>I can't think of one person who did it to actually learn anything I don't think this is the goal. If I can just for example pay for like $15k in order to get $15k pay increase, then to me its a good deal.

fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
Good deal for the person getting the 15k sure, a terrible deal for the people paying property taxes to fund that raise.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Also a terrible deal for people at the receiving end of the services of such a person.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- paulcole 7y ago
  Not if the extra $15k keeps an otherwise good teacher/educator from leaving and going to a private company.
  - fuzz4lyfe 7y ago
    I'm happy to pay the good teachers more so long as we can pay the bad ones less and get rid of them easily. The unions fight measures like that hard in my experience.
    - yummypaint 7y ago
      Unions fight to protect their members. If taxpayers arent willing to fund enough compensation to attract quality candidates, it is gaurenteed to create a bad situation. Unions protecting bad teachers is a symptom not a cause.

everdrive 7y ago

You might get more earnest learners if the degree weren't tied to pay or prestige. Everyone wants pay and prestige, but only some people want to learn.

uxp100 7y ago

I have a friend who has a Doctorate and teaches some high school teachers, and is a high school teacher/administrator herself, and she always complains about teachers doing things like taking phone calls in the middle of lecture, or just never showing up and complaining to the colleges administration if she gives a poor grade. The older they are the worse they behave, so she says. Of course, her side job teaching them in the summer probably wouldn't exist if they didn't get pay increases for degrees, so...

uxp100 7y ago
Just anecdotes from one person, but she also said that those perusing degrees were more engaged and less likely to just be taking calls etc. than those who were doing continuing education credits.

austincheney 7y ago

This is the most high profile case that comes to mind: https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/11/us/boston-u-panel-finds-plagiarism-by-dr-king.html https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/11/us/boston-u-panel-finds-p...

JakeStone 7y ago

You just sadly reminded me of when I was an undergrad taking a grad class on "History of Mathematics". Two undergrads taking the class because it just sounded neat, and the professor made things interesting. 10 graduate students who were teachers taking the class for the increased salary. An evening seminar of three hours per week after work where we examined as much as possible over how people did math through the ages and through time. You could tell these grads were bored. But, fine, dealing with kids all day, then having to learn something new that isn't likely to ever be more than a trivia point in a lecture might not be a great thing. Then... We get to a point where it looks like Archimedes came this close to discovering integral calculus. [insert appropriate WOW! meme here] A couple of grunts from the grads. Me and the other undergrad were gobsmacked. There were other examples, but that's the one that always sticks in my head. It's also what contributed to me not being very impressed by some of the grade school teachers I met as my kids were enrolled.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
chengiz 7y ago
I dont understand what you're trying to convey. I like history but someone almost discovering something holds no appeal for me; what actually happened does. And these people were not interested in the course in the first place.
- AlexCoventry 7y ago
  What would the world look like, if the calculus had been discovered two millenia earlier?
  - chengiz 7y ago
    That's fiction, not history.
- JakeStone 7y ago
  [TL;DR] It's not the destination, it's the journey. Archimedes didn't reach the destination of integral calculus, but he at least started the journey, and I appreciate it. [/TL;DR] I think it's a sense of wonder thing. The scope of knowledge (to my understanding) didn't exist back then to imagine infinitesimals. I believe they were having issues with irrationals, let alone things that approached 0 but weren't exactly 0. There's a sibling comment along the lines of "what if calculus had been discovered 2,000 years earlier" that touches on this, but I think for me there's added the idea that there's proof that some people, some times, can almost see what's next in terms of discoverable knowledge, and it keeps me hopeful. Most of us have some "off" theory/fantasy/hope with no rigid proof of validity. And many of those are just random neurons firing that might make a good fanfic. But there's that person over there who has a mostly fleshed out idea for (insert super tech here) and just needs to figure out step 37. It turns out she'll never invent the super tech defined. But X-2891q in the year 3971 will meme a holograph that brings that super tech into reality. While the super tech likely adds to society, the original person who came up with elements of the concept enriched herself in doing so, by my perspective.

awillen 7y ago

It wasn't until I dated a middle school teacher for a while that I realized how crazy the pay scale is there. Her pay would automatically go up for any grad degree. She was teaching middle school science, but she could have gotten an online Master's in sociology and received a pay bump. I absolutely would have gone online and done the absolute minimum in the easiest possible program I could find, and I wouldn't have thought twice about it. The fact that any Master's degree would do already tells me that it's irrelevant to the school district whether the degree improves teaching (and let's be honest, even getting a Master's in bio won't really help a third grade science teacher), so what difference does it make if it's a total BS degree?

barbecue_sauce 7y ago
This all depends on the school district and/or state. Many places, you have to actually get degrees in Education rather than random subjects. (And you are expected to do this to stay employed, rather than to get pay bumps).
- awillen 7y ago
  Seems weird that you have to do it to stay employed. If you're a middle school science teacher for several years, why would they fire you for not getting an additional credential just because you've been in the job for a certain amount of time, when they've been allowing you to do the job without it?
  - barbecue_sauce 7y ago
    Well, in the situation I’m describing, you’re expected to have an education bachelors to get a teaching job in the first place, with the condition that you get a masters within a certain number of years (followed by continuing education credits). This is essentially dictated by the Teachers Union, to keep salaries high and reduce the supply of qualified educators (though they also negotiate for partial or full reimbursement of education costs for their members so teachers aren’t paying completely out of pocket).

Alex63 7y ago

I was taught (as a Canadian from an English family) that the only people who should be addressed as "doctor" in normal conversation are MDs and active/retired college/university professors. What is common etiquette today?

cgh 7y ago
Still the same I think, except in certain provinces such as BC chiropractors and naturopaths can unfortunately refer to themselves as "doctors" and do so at every opportunity. But maybe that doesn't fall under the definition of "normal conversation".
gnicholas 7y ago
I wouldn't call anyone "doctor" in normal conversation. Also, at least in my experience (several friends/family are professors), it can be seen as disrespectful to refer to a professor as "doctor" because that is the title that you get when you finish your PhD, but before you have a job as an actual professor. For reference, I live in Palo Alto and went to universities in the US.

MaysonL 7y ago

My mother worked for years as secretary for an EdD who was unable to draft a coherent paragraph: she wrote all of his business letters for him. He did, I believe, enjoy being referred to as "Doctor".

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago

My 5th grader referred to her principal as “doctor” so and so... I told her he is not a doctor. Now, on the other hand, I am one. With a license to practice and I never demand anyone use it. That’s just absurd!

barry-cotter 7y ago

An Ed.D. is not an advanced degree. It is an abomination. You cannot cheapen an Ed.D. or an M.Ed. by cheating to get it because no one with any familiarity with them respects them. Degrees in education have no effect on teaching effectiveness, they’re among the clearest possible examples of pure credentialism and gatekeeping.