Education News and Observations

--AZ-Sen: Jon Kyl

--AZ-01: Rick Renzi

--AZ-05: J.D. Hayworth

--CA-04: John Doolittle

--CA-11: Richard Pombo

--CA-50: Brian Bilbray

--CO-04: Marilyn Musgrave

--CO-05: Doug Lamborn

--CO-07: Rick O'Donnell

--CT-04: Christopher Shays

--FL-13: Vernon Buchanan

--FL-16: Joe Negron

--FL-22: Clay Shaw

--ID-01: Bill Sali

--IL-06: Peter Roskam

--IL-10: Mark Kirk

--IL-14: Dennis Hastert

--IN-02: Chris Chocola

--IN-08: John Hostettler

--IA-01: Mike Whalen

--KS-02: Jim Ryun

--KY-03: Anne Northup

--KY-04: Geoff Davis

--MD-Sen: Michael Steele

--MN-01: Gil Gutknecht

--MN-06: Michele Bachmann

--MO-Sen: Jim Talent

--MT-Sen: Conrad Burns

--NV-03: Jon Porter

--NH-02: Charlie Bass

--NJ-07: Mike Ferguson

--NM-01: Heather Wilson

--NY-03: Peter King

--NY-20: John Sweeney

--NY-26: Tom Reynolds

--NY-29: Randy Kuhl

--NC-08: Robin Hayes

--NC-11: Charles Taylor

--OH-01: Steve Chabot

--OH-02: Jean Schmidt

--OH-15: Deborah Pryce

--OH-18: Joy Padgett

--PA-04: Melissa Hart

--PA-07: Curt Weldon

--PA-08: Mike Fitzpatrick

--PA-10: Don Sherwood

--RI-Sen: Lincoln Chafee

--TN-Sen: Bob Corker

--VA-Sen: George Allen

--VA-10: Frank Wolf

--WA-Sen: Mike McGavick

--WA-08: Dave Reichert

Posted by Larry at 1:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As you may have read, I have postulated in my other blog that cheating is rampant at GWU. Recently, I posted here about how services such as Turnitin might discourage plagiarism. Now I have evidence that it might do that if it were integrated into Blackboard here at GWU:

161.253.55.7 - - [30/Sep/2006:15:56:03 -0400] "GET /education/ HTTP/1.1" 200 39181 "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=gwu+turnitin&btnG=Google+Search" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.7) Gecko/20060909 Firefox/1.5.0.7""

This is an entry my access log that shows someone at GWU searched for GWU and Turnitin. I speculate that it was a student who wanted to see what he or she could get away with at GW, but was smart enough to check if GW used Turnitin first.

Posted by Larry at 3:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

With all this talk of ending early admissions at U. Delaware, Harvard, Princeton, and now U. Virginia because of some kind of ethical concerns, let's go back four years and revisit what Princeton admissions officials did, including a dean, and see what happened.

In brief, Princeton admissions officials, including then Princeton's Dean of Admissions LeMenager, used the data (name, birthday & Social Security number) of applicants to Princeton to access their information on Yale's website. Dean LeMenager flat-out lied and told the press he was checking the security of Yale's new system.

What happened to Princeton's admissions staff? Stephen LeMenager was moved to a different job, the investigation's results were never made entirely public, and Princeton blamed Yale for reporting the potential federal felony and breach of student data to Federal authorities.

LeMenager is now director of planning and administration for campus life at Princeton. Slate had an interesting take on the result of the investigation:

Tuesday, Princeton President Shirley Tilghman released the findings of an independent investigator hired by the university. Yale President Richard Levin applauded the investigation's thoroughness. After interviews with 19 individuals at Princeton, four at Yale, and one admissions officer from another Ivy who was present at the deans meeting, the investigator found that LeMenager's accesses were, well … just an innocent way to check out security.

Yale declined to press charges, and admitted some kind of security failure. Many, many universities use SS and DoB to identify students in web registration systems.

Posted by Larry at 2:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Two weeks after Harvard and one week after Princeton, the University of Virginia decided to end its early decision program. It'll probably be next year, since U. Va.'s home page still lists early deadlines for this year:
Early Decision Deadline (11|01|06)
Early Decision Decisions Mailed (12|01|06) .

Posted by Larry at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)