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 As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. 'as soon as possible.'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.

Comments

Re:Go apply for another school then

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Don't go to college, it's a waste of time &

[slashdot_commentator]

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)".