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 As a Canadian, her visa was no longer valid and she was told by the school to leave the U.S. 'as soon as possible.'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:I do not understand this

[Shikaku]

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.

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)".

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

[Tuidjy]

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.