Math prof challenges granting of PhD to unqualified student in court

Most large companies don't have a place for him either. Telling your boss directly he's wrong (even if he is) is a career staller, and going over his head will definitely give you enemies.

There are probably quite a few "Walters" here on HN who said "F* it, I'll do my own startup".

The question is, though, how do we positively reward this type of action? For example, if the professor is fired, my guess is that he will have a hard time finding a job somewhere else, because he has rocked the boat. But, he deserves much better than that. How do we solve that?

Take job interviews for example. I hold a CS degree from a major university and my business is a website that so far gets 500,000 pageviews a month and is profitable. It was coded and designed by me from scratch; its server is administered and monitored by me; its community and customer support is managed by me. Given these accomplishments I would say I have a reasonable grasp of the art of web programming. But put me in a job interview situation where an interviewer asks me to write an implementation of something basic like a linked list and I'll probably manage to screw it up somehow. Then when I get sent home and I sit down in front of my monitor, I'll have it done in 5 minutes. Does my being unable to cope with programming interview situations make me a bad programmer? Does being unable to cope with a math exam make one a bad math researcher?

Edit: though on the whole I do agree that degrees nowadays are being handed out like candy and far to often to people completely undeserving of them.

Exam anxiety is real, but the university already had procedures in place about how to deal with that anxiety. Something is wrong, however, when a student only claims exam anxiety after the fact. You know you're anxious about exams before that point. If you are under stress a single time, you know it then. The student already failed that exam once. If the first time he/she was anxious, it should have been reported then. If not, they had a fair shot at passing that exam.

The decision of the dean to change how the exam was to be dealt with is not brilliant, but somewhat OK. It's the upgrading of undergraduate coursework to be doctoral level that should be smelling bad. Messing with the way the exam was to be delivered was simply the smoke from the dodgy fire that was burning underneath.

The spokesman pointed out that this was health-related information (since the student had a doctor diagnose his test anxiety); it'd be reasonable to treat that more carefully.

In general, the laws are pretty strict about not releasing information. Student and health information is not supposed to be available to anyone except on a need-to-know basis, much less made available publicly. Our product had to have an elaborate system of permissions to prevent instructors from inappropriately viewing student data. Even something as apparently innocuous as posting a list of grades matched up against student names or IDs is forbidden.

The laws aren't for show, either. Everyone I interacted with in the course of that job, from bureaucrats down to individual instructors, took FOIPP very seriously. FOIPP compliance was a non-negotiable feature, and FOIPP violation bugs were always highest priority.

Typically, instructors become aware of student disabilities when they are asked to make special arrangements, such as arranging assistant note takers or special exams. Anyone who reveals that information is breaking educational and medical privacy, and would be in for a world of hurt.

I'm not aware if there are special exceptions for information released in the course of a lawsuit, but I'm not surprised that the university reacted severely. They take those laws seriously here.

Because if he can fix UofM others will benefit. If he moves on, nobody will. There is competitive pressures on universities to become degree mills and it must be stopped.

I think historically it was not uncommon for people to just submit a thesis, but nowadays nearly everyone getting a PhD will do so while being at the University and in close collaboration with his Doctoral advisor.

Like this you mean, http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/degrees/honorary/ ?

Then, Unfortunately, they should not get doctorate. (I realize this sounds awful and unfair, but it is actually the only fair deal)

Higher education at that level is very stressful, and a part of me is offended that certain anxieties are given exceptions since they're 'health disorders', while other, just-as-crippling anxieties are ignored.

And then finally, and this may not be the majority of cases but I've seen this happen from very close myself, a part of the problem is the many exchange students who come from developing countries and pay big bucks for their studies. These people have sometimes scraped together everything they and their extended families have to go to the West. If they fail their program, to them it feels like they might as well have been executed on the spot. There's no way they can go back to their countries without a degree. I've seen people on the brink of suicide over the thought of failing exams and having to go back (yes, other ('native') students also get exam anxiety, I'm not dismissing those).

So imagine being a professor and having to grade a thesis of a guy that is only a few years younger than you are (these students often come after several years of working and saving), with a wife and a family to support. You know he doesn't live up to the standards of the program. You also know that everybody else knows (academics at universities in the area) so nobody's going to give him a postdoc anyway. So there's no real harm in giving him the degree, at least not until 'the work gets out' and all diplomas devaluated. The student will most likely be going back to where he came from, where he's going to be welcomed as a genius and offered a cushy government or consulting job. All in all, there he's still going to be quite good, at least compared to the other people at the places that would hire him (yes there are very bright Indian, Chinese etc. students who are just as good as any Western student, I'm not disparaging Asians in general - I'm talking about this specific subset of 'academic refugee students').

And then consider that if you fail this guy, you know you're basically doing the equivalent of a 'thumbs down' in a Roman amphitheater. That's a tough decision to make. I know, this sort of factors shouldn't come into play, but that's easy to say from behind a desk far far away from this situation. I've seen people seriously struggle with this dilemma, and I've seen choices being made in both directions. It's heart wrenching, and it makes people think several times before accepting a next student who may turn out this way.

We put pressures on them to lower prices and they responded by packing passenger in as little space as medically safe and by serving the most lightweight food that will keep you alive during the flight.

We turned airlines into people movers just like we are turning universities into degree mills.

Expect to see more of it as it gained traction among in US colleges of education about 20 years ago - particularly in primary education departments.

On the bright side, at least it's not an MD.

Edit: I believe that in general mainstreaming and inclusion are a good public policy concept with a really thorny ethical issue attached. The thorny issue is, at what point you tell the student, "We were only kidding. You're not really smart enough to continue on the academic path with your classmates."

In the US its rise coincided with that of facilitated communication in the classroom for autistic individuals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication

Both ideas gained a lot of traction in primary education departments in the early 90's [US]. Primary educators loved Mainstreaming because they were able to pretend the thorny issue didn't exist and let it be dealt with at the secondary level.

As with any bureaucracy, secondary educators have an incentive to continue to pass the buck and little to gain by kicking the mayor's autistic nephew out of AP calculus (so to speak).

Keep him out of university?

There must be a few differences. 2 years is an incredibly short time period to get a Phd.

here is Canada, and any US program I looked at... 4 years is usually a minimum and 5 years is common.

What people are talking about here is usually the US system, where your PhD path includes Masters classes. You get a Masters along the way (I have mine in a drawer somewhere), but this is incidental along the path to the PhD. It takes 2-3 years to get those classes out the way, then you're all research. The system is the same as you are describing, except that Americans don't tend to split them up in their heads.

The candidacy exam is one of the exams the student got out of. There is, of course, then the proposal and the final defense.

The absolute minimum time you could complete it was 3 years, but typically you were expected to take 5-7 years (though it was also expected that you'd be teaching at a university during the last couple of years).

I remember once I was teaching a class, and one of the students sprung this on me: he claimed he had some issues with the tests and the time required was too short (in reality, my tests were always designed such that if you knew the material you could ace them in 20 minutes; if you didn't, you could sit there for an hour. And they were open book, open notes, so no memorization required).

So the next test came, and I told him: take as long as you want; I'll be here. The test started at 6pm (it was an evening course). Most of the class left in an hour or so. But he stayed. And I stayed with him. I did my reading, etc. Finally, at 1AM, he gave up and said he was done.

The next day, he dropped the course.

Speaking as a college professor, I see that in practice the key distinction is that the students with the actual disability both A) get a doctor's note and B) tell me long in advance of requesting any specific accommodations. And much of the time they don't even dip very heavily into their accommodations---they may be allotted double time on an exam, for instance, but on an exam where the best un-disabled students finish in 35 minutes, the double-time students (who often are very good students) take the full period or slightly longer, rather than the full 100 minutes they're allotted.

I'm not going to try to diagnose the UM student here, but I will note that it is somewhat suspicious that the "exam anxiety" claim didn't come up until after he or she had failed for the second time.

Most (maybe all?) US universities will make similar allowances for students with mental illness. The student and teacher usually work out alternatives for assignments if necessary.

> Seems like it would be something that's hard to draw the line between a legitimate psychological issue and normal behavior. I'd venture that nearly everyone experiences some sort of "exam anxiety".

This is exactly the problem with a number of different psychiatric disorders. The bad cases, those are easy to diagnose. The closer you get to the "average" end of the spectrum is where it gets harder to distinguish. In these cases, I think it's always a good idea to get a second opinion.

Personally, I think this is just some kind of university political coup. It's my impression that (in the States) getting a PhD isn't really about exams. Instead, one focuses on doing research and choosing something to specialize on in their field. Research stuff, publish stuff, pass classes, propose thesis, write thesis.

Unless it's different in Canada, who cares if this kid didn't take an exam? If he has done some research, published something, and written a thesis, I'm pretty okay with him having earned a PhD.

I'm sure there's about a million different things I don't know about this particular incident, though. It does seem really weird that this professor would take the issue to the legal system. Wouldn't that jeopardize his future in academia? Doesn't seem worth it.

I'm not sure how I feel about the classification, but I had never heard of anyone failing to get it who tried hard enough. Although it doesn't help turn a D into a B, it seems very useful when you're in the A range competing for graduate schools (which they both pursued).