Cheating in Classrooms: Catch Me If you Can

UCLA professor Peter Nonacs informed his students that the Game Theory exam would be "insanely hard", but, it would allow anything including talking, Googling, or hiring an outside expert as consultant, as long as there was no blood draws. In other words, students are encouraged, or, invited to cheat through it.

The actual examine went exactly as Professor Nonacs had planned. The majority of students signed up to share one copy of answers, while three lone wolfs submitted individual solutions.

Professor Peter Fröhlich of Johns Hopkins University had always used the highest points in an exam as the 100% (A), and calculate the rest of the class accordingly. This policy is public and effective to differentiate the differences among students, until they figured it out.

Last semester, in Professor Fröhlich's Introduction to Programming Class, students boycotted the final exam so that everyone ended up with the 'A' with the same highest point: 100%.

Washington Post: Fraud, Death and Coverup at Johns Hopkins University

Washington Post reported today on a saga of academic struggles unfolding at this time on campus at Johns Hopkins University.

Daniel Yuan, M.D., former Research Associate in the Boeke Lab.

A Chinese American scientist Dr. Daniel Yuan should have got the hint when he was demoted by Dr. Boeke after he questioned the data published by the Boeke Lab of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. While he refused to keep silence, Dr. Boeke fired him. In the past few years, Yuan had informed Nature where the Hopkins papers published as well as NIH where the Hopkins team received millions of grants on the fishy research project. However, both Nature and the NIH refused to respond.

The Boeke Lab at Johns Hopkins specializes in genetic, otherwise dubbed 'factory science' by Nobel Laureate Dr. Sydney Brenner. In this type of research, large amount of data were produced by computerized equipments. A statistician would then run different models on these data, and hopeful some hidden information would be digged out. In plain English, the success of an experiment is often determined by advanced tricks applied in statistical analysis. Dr. Yuan was a statistician worked in the lab, who came to this research field out of pure love to science. His previous career was a pediatrician and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. When Dr. Yuan reran some data produced by others in the group, the numbers simply do not add up.

Johns Hopkins University obviously was not happy to hear anything negative about its star researcher, not named in the Washington Post article, Dr. Jef D. Boeke. Dr. Boeke is the PI of the project associated with the fraudulent data. Another Chinese scientist in the same lab Dr. Zhang Jie who challenged the data separately was also forced out by Dr. Boeke. While all the clues led to Dr. Boeke, it's doubtful how long could he keep the secret without some help from higher up.

In any typical year, Johns Hopkins University would receive $600 million from the NIH alone. The bulk of the NIH grants are on various -omics, which happened to be categorized by Dr. Brenner as 'high throughput, low input, and no output' biology. If the quota was proved to have somewhat truth in it, then the entire functioning structure of the NIH would collapse.

The coverup had been successful, until one group member Dr. Yu-yi Lin, who allegedly forged the data, found dead on the deadline he was supposed to answer questions to the data. Before the death made headline news, Yuan had asked the US federal government who paid for the fraudulent research to investigate, but Office of Research Integrity said, the incident "no longer pose a risk" to federal research after the researcher's suicide.

One thing for sure, as long as Johns Hopkins University has been happy with federal dollars, the government could care less. After all, it's not federal dollars. It is tax dollars that grows from the trees.

EVen with a relative small size, Johns Hopkins University has been the top recipient of federal research fundings for over 30 years. Year after year, Johns Hopkins University topped much much larger schools such as Harvard University or Stanford University in terms of gaining research grants. For example, in FY 2010, Johns Hopkins University scooped in $2 billion, with $1.73 of which come from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Health (NIH), The Department of Defense (DOD) and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Dr. Boeke's Lab is exemplary of Johns Hopkin's success, although it may be only the tip of the iceberg.

Wait, hold on a second, have we used the word 'suicide'? Perhaps not. Hours after Dr. Lin's death, an email was sent from Dr. Lin's email account to Dr. Yuan bragging about it. Dr. Yuan was laying with empty vials of sedatives and muscle relaxants around him. As far as we know, Dr. Yuan kept a copy of this email, but nobody seems bother/allow a criminal investigation. Anyone say murder? With billions of dollars at stake, what would you expect?

When contacted by the Washington Post, Johns Hopkins University declined to have any JHU employee interviewed.

We may never know.

This Side that Side

* Johns Hopkins University started need-blind admission, and it is a good news for Chinese.  As a matter of fact, any-blindness regardless is a good news for Chinese because they have been targeted in every twisted fashion in college admission.  If a white student need to achieve 80% to be admitted to a university T, then a Chinese with similar background will have to exceed 90% to get in.  Of course Blacks or Latinos are totally different stories, but although White people cry foul the most often, Asian are the real victim.  Yeah, we like being blind.

* Hangzhou Youth reported that an entire bus-full of people fled the scene when one old lady fell, somehow, when the driver braked for a pedestrian crossing the road.  The old lady got a bruise on her head but was otherwise okay.  They were good people, to be clear, as some had offer the old lady their seats.  The old lady thanked them but stayed standing near the door because she only had one stop ahead.

Thanks to the Calabash Monk case in Nanjing three years ago, all Chinese are fleeing away and refused to offer help to others, especially to old ladies.  The communist judge famously questioned the defendant Peng Yu, who helped an old lady, why did you help her if you didn't caused her fell down? Peng was sentenced to pay a fortune to the lady, even though he claimed innocent, and he had many witnesses and a surveillance camera to back up.  The old lady, on the other hand, had a son who was a communist official in a powerful unit.