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Tufts Expelled a Student For Grade Hacking. She Claims Innocence (techcrunch.com)
An anonymous reader quotes TechCrunch: As she sat in the airport with a one-way ticket in her hand, Tiffany Filler wondered how she would pick up the pieces of her life, with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt and nothing to show for it. A day earlier, she was expelled from Tufts University veterinary school. As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. 'as soon as possible.' That night, her plane departed the U.S. for her native Toronto, leaving any prospect of her becoming a veterinarian behind. Filler, 24, was accused of an elaborate months-long scheme involving stealing and using university logins to break into the student records system, view answers, and alter her own and other students' grades.
The case Tufts presented seems compelling, if not entirely believable.
There's just one problem: In almost every instance that the school accused Filler of hacking, she was elsewhere with proof of her whereabouts or an eyewitness account and without the laptop she's accused of using. She has alibis: fellow students who testified to her whereabouts; photos with metadata putting her miles away at the time of the alleged hacks; and a sleep tracker that showed she was asleep during others. Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student on shoddy evidence four months before she was set to graduate.
The case Tufts presented seems compelling, if not entirely believable.
There's just one problem: In almost every instance that the school accused Filler of hacking, she was elsewhere with proof of her whereabouts or an eyewitness account and without the laptop she's accused of using. She has alibis: fellow students who testified to her whereabouts; photos with metadata putting her miles away at the time of the alleged hacks; and a sleep tracker that showed she was asleep during others. Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student on shoddy evidence four months before she was set to graduate.
Hire a lawyer and sue the fuck out the school.
"Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student on shoddy evidence four months before she was set to graduate." - Or... she hired a 3rd party to hack on her behalf, which still benefited her and thus was traceable to her?
The fact that she apparently personally didn't do the actual keystrokes doesn't make her completely innocent of the charges automatically, that's ridiculous. Tufts either has more evidence they aren't sharing publicly (very likely),
or she's got a very winnable lawsuit should she invest in proving her innocence and righting their wrongful accusation.
You're trusting her version of events without getting the scoop from the university, due to privacy concerns. She can say whatever she wants. If she files a suit or not is the key to finding out what actually happened.
In many cases security at an academic institute is a springboard to private as well as a wasteland of people without talent. On the other hand, a smart hacker would also find ways of altering access logs or create an alibi.
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Hmmm. She really should insist on taking a comprehensive test at this point and proving herself. She has a 3.9 on the Masters and 3.5 on the Doctorate. While Tufts is not that top notch, it certainly is not a fluff school either. Simple testing should prove what she knows/does not know.
As it is, if somebody really knows how to crack, then they would purposely change their mac (easy enough to do). I would be curious about her relationship to the other grades that changed.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
No college is going to accept credits transfered by somebody expelled for cheating. If she's lucky, the might accept some of the credits where there's no dispute of the accuracy, but colleges can't afford to accept transfers that would harm their accreditation.
It does sound like something is fishy here. Either the college is wrong or somebody used her device to change the grades for her while she was away from the device. Or there was some sort of massive error.
And people wonder why so many of us think that colleges shouldn't be responsible for handling sexual assault allegations.
My fave part: "“I thought due process was going to be followed,” said Filler, in a call. “I thought it was innocent until proven guilty until I was told ‘you’re guilty unless you can prove it.'”"
Really? I'm pretty sure the last few years has shown for universities it is "guilty until sentenced - maybe we'll revisit the evidence in a year or two,after your life is ruined".
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All of these statements lead me to believe you have not interacted with a college-age human in quite some time.
You see, we have these things that we call 'smartphones' now, that are really just sophisticated tracking devices that log our exact whereabouts down to the meter, chronicle every interaction we have with other people via online services, and tag every photo we take with them with timestamps and geographic coordinates. From the moment they get one, real people in the real world keep these devices on their person or close to hand for almost every waking moment of their lives, so much so that not having verifiable documentation of exactly where you were, what you were doing, and when you were doing it is the more unusual scenario.
That said, none of this necessarily implies this person is innocent; my only point is that having an alibi ready to go has been the default state of the smartphone-carrying world for roughly a decade now.
Tufts is either right or it expelled an innocent student ...
This is why tertiary institutions shouldn't be allowed to act as the police. I realize, in this case, that much of the behaviour relates to academic integrity but the case should have been referred to the FBI.
Also, she should sue for defamation and loss of income.
If they don't want to be taken for idiots then perhaps they could open up a bit on what really happened. It sounds like the student was called to answer for her supposed crimes while not given any time to build a defense. She probably forgot about the weekend trip until she dug into her schedule for the months prior. Do you remember where you spent every weekend for the past year? When she did bring up evidence in her defense then they dismissed it as something she likely doctored.
This looks like a kangaroo court. They were embarrassed about their grades being altered for so long without being detected and so they wanted to find a "mastermind" behind it all to pin it on.
I'm guessing that if they did a real look at what was happening that they'd find a handful of people selling grades. They will likely disappear now, since doing anything after Filler was so publicly punished would only make them look harder.
I'm willing to consider that Filler was in on the deal. Given what was in the article I doubt she acted alone.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
None of that evidence proves that she didn't get a friend to hack into the system, look at the answers, and change her grades for her.
This is unfalsifiable. Nothing could prove that short of omniscience.
Note that other students' grades were also changed; there was likely a "psst, pay me $500 and I'll give you better grades" type of scheme going on here.
That's only the most obvious possibility. Here's another one: The hacker is amongst that group. He/she possesses MAC address+name combinations for all of those people and adjusted all of their grades in order to create uncertainty about which of them was the hacker. Cloning MAC addresses was one of many tactics the hacker used, but the methods used by the school to track the hacker happened to seize upon that particular countermeasure.
boycott going to college.
Easier said than done. Not going to college will by extension mean not being able to go to medical school, engineering school, and eliminate oneself from many occupations which require post-baccalaureate degrees.
With the Internet nowadays, you can learn about ANYTHING you want, for free.
No you can't. Its littered with paywalls, required texts, and even online college lectures aren't available for all the courses required to graduate.
There's a difference between saying "debt slavery for multiple decades does not make college a worthwhile endeavor" and saying "college is a waste of time (although for some people, it can be)".
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon