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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 As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. 'as soon as possible.'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.
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.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
The article is making it sound sad that she only had 4 months left on her degree. That probably caused Tufts to have to act sooner. Expelling her is probably significantly easier than revoking her degree if issued. If she was a first year, they probably could have taken more time.
But now, if she is later exonerated, they can let her back in for her last set of classes a year late.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
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.
News for nerds because:
1. School
2. Grades
3. Computers
4. Alleged hacking
5. Law
You really must be new here, most of those subjects are very nerdy.
If she files a suit or not is the key to finding out what actually happened.
That's easy to say, but not so easy to do, particularly when you're now stuck in another country.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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".
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Not really. It's hard enough to sue a large entity that has an active legal department when you are a citizen of the same country. It's really really hard to do so when you are a citizen of a different country and you aren't even a resident here. Her student visa went *poof* as soon as she was formally expelled, so she had to go home already. So she is in another country, unemployed, and the proud owner of a five figure debt, Not suing doesn't really say anything about the potential merits of a suit.
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.
It doesn't work that way. Young people aren't stupid. They can see the injustice done to a classmate and sometimes it will affect them in a negative way. Zero tolerance is the system's way of shifting responsibility from individual teachers or administrators to a nameless, faceless, inanimate rule book. "You can't blame me; I was just following the rules (orders)." Yeah, sure, like we haven't heard that one before.
The instant she was expelled, her student visa went POOF. She HAD to leave
But lets look at the other side, what the university alleges is multiple felonies. If they're so sure she did it, why didn't they report these serious crimes to law enforcement?
Nobody who is innocent has an alibi ready to go. Real people in the real world don't have documentation putting them elsewhere most of the time because they don't expect to need it. People who have that documentation ready to go, especially for a large number of incidents, made sure they'd have it to prove their innocence which means they aren't innocent at all.
I could easily produce lots of data to support alibis that I didn't previously know I needed, because I log lots of my life. Google Maps tracks my phone's location all the time, and it's basically never further from me than the next room. I use a sleep tracker, and that data is logged to Fitbit. What I eat is also logged to Fitbit, with timestamps. Same for my workouts. My meditation sessions are logged by Headspace. My work is logged in EMACS org mode, down to a resolution of a few minutes... and much of that can be corroborated with git commit timestamps, Google Docs version history, Web history, email and chat logs (I archive everything; delete nothing). A large percentage of my time is scheduled in Google Calendar... including a lot of info about who I'm supposed to meet, so after the fact it would be easy to dig up witnesses to corroborate those meetings. If I find out quickly enough about the need for an alibi, my home surveillance video camera history may have data to help.
That's just off the top of my head; I'm sure if I had reason to put some thought into it, I could find a lot more digital breadcrumbs from which I could gather data to alibi myself. And non-digital ones as well. Receipts, for example.
Having a lot of digital history to draw on just means that you're okay with being tracked, and perhaps even aid it. It's possible that's foolish, but it in no way implies you're a criminal.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
So you're saying if she floats she's a witch and we kill her, but if she drowns she's innocent?
Exactly this. The university is constrained by FERPA in terms of the information it can release, even in cases of academic misconduct. If the evidence that Ms. Filler claims to have never seen includes other students' grades or academic records, then it will require a subpoena for the university to produce it.
One thing in particular strike me as questionable. From the article:
Her insinuation that she was called into an ethics and grievance meeting of eight senior academics without advance notification doesn't pass the smell test. Having been personally involved in cases of academic misconduct at a private university, I assume that Tufts has a specific internal procedure that must be followed in cases like this. A student accused of cheating is first presented with the charges, and a hearing date is set at which the student answers those charges with evidence and testimony of their own. I would bet that Tufts can easily provide documentation that she was indeed notified well in advance of the hearing.
Contrary to what the Techcrunch article implies, faculty and staff are not going to accuse a student of such egregious academic misconduct without being very sure of their evidence, and being very careful to document that they followed their own internal procedures. Universities constantly deal with accusations of student cheating, and with students' parents who hire attorneys who threaten to sue the school. Holding a "surprise" hearing would be an invitation to a lawsuit, which Tuft's own internal attorneys would never allow.
Ms. Filler has the right to file suit against Tufts. What puzzles me is that she did not retain an attorney in this matter long ago. The initial accusations were made months before her expulsion. Or ... what if she did hire a lawyer, got nowhere given the evidence against her, and didn't tell Techcrunch?
She is now presenting her case to the court of public opinion, which may get her some offers of pro bono legal assistance. The question is whether such assistance will lead to any relief for her, once other people learn more from Tufts' side of the story.
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.
Actually, I'm not giving her version of events a great deal of credence. But I trust it over the word of an arbitrary bureaucracy that acted to prevent official records from happening. Even then, I'd only trust the result somewhat, as those "official records" seem to generally and unaccountably always favor the bureaucracy. They need to be open an verifiable, or sealed at the request of the accused, before I'll trust them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Saying that someone already in debt should automatically hire a lawyer when being told of an on-going investigation that she doesn't know the details of strikes me as a bit absurd. When I was in school I *wasn't* in debt, and I would still have been extremely reluctant to hire a lawyer. I would expect that the "investigation" would find that I was innocent, so why should I burden myself with debt. I generally trusted the authorities to "do the right thing".
If you think she should have automatically hired a lawyer, that tells me you've never lived on limited finances. I admit this is a bit of a projection on my part, but I can't imagine a student who hasn't grown up in a rather wealthy family thinking that the first thing to do is hire a lawyer.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The fact her grades were changed (along with others) is evidence. Her laptop *was* used for some of this hacking, even she is not denying this.
I honestly don't know to believe her or not; lots of the alibi material also could be rigged.
At the very least there should be an investigation that would let her return if they find someone else did it. But to say there is no evidence, is really going too far the other way.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Canada may save her form having to payup or at least have an easier time of getting out of it / under the law.
Easier bankruptcy and lower max Garnishments %
http://canadastudentdebt.ca/cs...
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
I agree that things sound pretty fishy in her account. If all that was done to her, she would probably have a solid case and would probably sue for damages as well. But it sounds far more likely that there is solid evidence and procedures were followed. That still does not mean she is guilty and she could just remember things wrongly. She could also have been framed. One possibility is that those changing the grades got wind of an investigation and were looking for a scapegoat and she qualified. If you want a scapegoat, you always want somebody that makes a good victim. It is not that hard to hack the laptop of a non-expert and use it to access an already placed backdoor if you have some help on-site to do it. It is also not hard to leave false evidence behind and/or remove the evidence of the intrusion into the laptop.
That said, even a thorough, expensive, expert investigation may still not be able to determine the truth. It is all digital and that allows perfect falsification of evidence if you know what you are doing. That should mean a preference for "not guilty" and all that happens is her grades get reset to what they were before. That they kicked her out may just be because they also saw somebody not really able to fight back or because they thought they had solid evidence.
In the end, who we absolutely know screwed up here is Tufts: They hat IT security bad enough that they could be hacked and grades could be changed. That should definitely not have been possible. Everything else in this is murky at best.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
If they don't want to be taken for idiots then perhaps they could open up a bit on what really happened.
Why? Answering to the court of public opinion is only likely to get them in trouble should they ever have to answer to an actual court. The university doesn't own anyone a comment on someone's sob story to the media.
It sounds like the student was called to answer for her supposed crimes while not given any time to build a defense.
I've been on the university side of this discussion and I call bullshit. Expulsion is no swift matter, and a claim like this most definitely will have gone through multiple levels of escalation over months.
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.
Oh? Weren't you just saying the university should open up on what "really" happened? It sounds like you already made up your mind based on one person's story. Her story really has you wrapped around her finger.
You can learn some things for free. Others, like being a veterinarian? No only is there a significant amount of hands-on experience, but you also have to know whether you are physiologically capable of working with hurt animals.
Speaking for myself... in the Army, I was once attached to Engineering Battalion for a while. After an industrial accident (80s, Communist country) I had to help in containing and suppressing a serious fire, and getting some hurt people to a field hospital (to this day I suspect it was a field hospital only because they wanted to keep the extent of the casualties secret)
Guess what. I was fine fighting the fires, I was fine looking at cremated bodies and smelling cooked human, and I was fine carrying and driving badly hurt people. But when they asked me to help during cleaning the wounds, by the second patient, the nurse told me to get lost before I puked on his patients. I went away, I sat down, and I must have passed out, because I lost a quarter hour.
You do not want to waste months studying, and then realize that you lose your composure working deep in someone or something's body. I also I doubt you can practice medicine, even veterinary medicine without a degree.
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Also, speaking as someone who in College has busted cheaters and got them expelled: cheaters often work in groups. We once caught someone who had made his girlfriend attend an early exam, take her copy of the final out, and give it to him, so he would have an advantage for the later exam that used the same questions.
The girl was good looking enough so that we, the TAs, noticed that we had not seen her before, wondered whose section she was in, and counted the exams. Three people got expelled - the cheater, his girlfriend, and the friend who worked on the quiz. Yes, they were stupid enough to try to turn the copy she had taken from the first exam... not realizing that every quiz had its unique binary id on each page, spelled with dots and spaces.
So my guess?
If the university is secure enough to kick her out her without fearing a lawsuit, they figured out that someone was doing it for her, which is why she has such solid alibis, and she refused to rat him out. These things are not handled lightly.
No good deed goes unpunished...
I'd like her to sue Tufts, and I'd donate $50 towards that.
Privacy begins with
Worked in the physical therapy department of an acute care hospital for a while. Every summer we'd get a few folks volunteering to get their hours in to apply to go to PT school (easier to get into med school - similar pre-reqs, far fewer seats per year).
Every year I'd take 'em into the whirlpool room to work on a burn victim, or some poor old stroked out person iwth massive bed sores, or someone about to loose a leg from diabetic ulcers and complications thereof...
And every year one or two of 'em would quit and change majors....
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
Isn't that a "Right" down there in the Excited States?
Or does that not apply to Colleges and Universities?
It's a shame she doesn't have the money to fight this, or a decent lawyer could likely get her a HUGE settlement, with compensation for everything she has to endure over all this B.S.
Looks like she'll be suffering under the (potentially) false accusations (and summary conviction) op these offenses against the institution.
I'd just like to know: Just how much evidence contrary to the accusation does she need to be exonerated, or is she just doomed?
Uh, no. Youâ(TM)re not going to be practicing as a vet in Canada without the degree. My friends wife was a medical doctor in India and moved to Canada. She went through an exhaustive review of her program and how it compared to Canadian standards, had to take several courses here to upgrade and do 2 years of medical rotations before she was able to practice in Canada as a GP. Itâ(TM)s not a show up and open an office
If she had an alibi for every event they claim she was part of, then that in itself is suspicious. Who would have an alibi for every random time that somebody tried to frame you for something?
If someone hacked her laptop and was using it to hack the grades while she was sleeping or away, then it's pretty likely that she had an alibi for every occurrence - I can document every time I'm sleeping with my smart watch and my smart-thermostat motion sensors. Every time I leave the house, it's captured on the cloud cam in the garage, as well as the camera at the corner gas station that I have to pass to leave the neighborhood. My car is pretty new, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was tracking me through the navigation system or other car computer. When I go for a run or a bike ride, my smart watch tracks me. When I go to work, my employer has video and badge swipe evidence. When I travel, I have airline receipts, or if driving, toll and gas receipts. And of course, I have smart phone, so both the phone manufacturer and my cellular carrier knows my every move. Some of these can be faked, others are outside of my control.
In modern times, it's pretty hard to *not* have an alibi unless you're trying not to.
After this level of press coverage? People are probably tracking her down now. The publicity might pay huge dividends for whatever law firm does the job. This on top of a contingency would be a huge payoff.