[1] - https://www.vice.com/en/article/5dp4gx/professor-catfished-b...
Joking aside, I agree. There is so many things you could achieve while successfully impersonating someone. Seems like the best you can do in academia is to ruin someone's career. In this case it seemed fortunately "harmless" though.
Fake being a surgeon and they’ll assign you to surgery, etc.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/451/
Judging by some of the revelations in other business it seems not exceptional for people to add things to their cv's they've never done. And it's much less likely to ever come out, because people are less likely to check (and it might also be more difficult to check)
Maybe in some cases you can link together some open source projects and pretend you did a lot of work.
EDIT: Or the imposter gave the interview and added a mark up ;)
In a science or engineering class, it might be everything above 40%.
A test which has a significant fraction of scores at the right side of the distribution has saturated the range: there are differences in comprehension and mastery between one 100% and another, which aren't being measured by the test.
The platonic form of a perfect test would have exactly one student per class who got every question correct, but that's impossible to reach except by luck. So a teacher is stuck between writing a test which is too difficult for everyone, and one which is too easy for a substantial fraction of the class. They should pick the first over the second.
While that can feel frustrating (I know, I've been there!) it's likely that you in fact learned the material better than you would have in a class where your level of mastery allowed you to score perfectly for an A+ and in the mid 80s for a B.
No, the teacher is not stuck here. It is rarely the purpose of an academic test to plot students on a wide distribution. That’s just something fun for teachers to do to look for exceptional students.
If the purpose of a test is to determine if an individual student passes some bar of understanding, then there is absolutely no reason to make it extremely difficult and then give A’s to those who got >50% correct.
It shows you what the next level is, reminds you that there's more depth to the subject than you can master in 12 weeks.
As long as you get the letter grade you deserve in the end, why not have an interesting challenge along the way?
Because of its wide applicability to business environments overall, the course was mandatory for some non-CS students. And boy, they hated it.
So, we've slowly grown from 80%->90%->95%.
There is nothing very special or original about his tattoos. Just about everyone has tattoos that look like this nowadays. Anyone can walk in and select these out of a flash book.
This is like complaining that someone is wearing the same t-shirt.
Yes, I realize the imposter is mimicking other aspects of his personality, but I see a dozen copies of this guy walking around every day.
Do an image search for "more knuckle tattoo" and "hand rose tattoo" you'll see tons.
The dedication to impersonating Dr. Lodder is why it's concerning. The imposter wasn't just submitting Lodder's work as his own; he _permanently altered his body_ to appear more like Lodder.
That might be a coincidence though. He didn't submit only Lodder's work & bio, but also that of others in tattoo studies.
From the article: We discovered he’d also taken magazine articles I’d written and added footnotes to them, stolen catalogue essays I’d authored, and taken other people’s work from old books and paraphrased it.
He might steal work from everyone but because Hipsters All Look The Same, Matt Lodder feels like that guy is copying his personality when they've just read the same magazines and books and then selected the same tattoos out of the catalogue.
They're apparently so excited that they can slag off an academic for having tattoos that are, in their minds, Not All That, that they are excusing themselves from the difficult work of reading TFA.
"Yes, I realize the imposter is mimicking other aspects of his personality"
... like, umm, copying vast tracts of his academic work?
I was only commenting on his tattoos, which are unoriginal and a dime a dozen. The imposter getting those same tattoos is - in this day and age - equivalent to having an identical wardrobe.
Yes, in addition to the actually bizarre and creepy copying of the academic work.
Yes, the "similarity' of the tattoos is just a completely unconnected coincidence to the weird academic stalking and no-one could possibly see any kind of link between the two.