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.

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.

The New York Times did this story last year. The only real news in the Post's story is that almost 1200 students have signed a petition complaining about their "intellectual property rights". If they had a real case, they could sue.

Given that academics estimate that 60% of high school students plagiarize some of their work, what do you do about it? How do you protect your non-plagiarising students? Can you imagine going from a high school that doesn't use Turnitin to a university that does?

Early decision programs helped colleges increase their rankings in the annual U.S. News and World Report Survey by increasing their selectivity and yield. While publicly dismissing the importance of the U.S. News survey, colleges will do anything in their power to improve their rank. Universities are concerned with looking good on paper just as much as their applicants are.

My own grad school, the GWU School of Business, is trying to get a better ranking. Initially, this would theoretically improve my chances of getting a better job after graduation, but the Atlantic cited studies showing that a few years out, pay is merit-based.

Didn't some Ivies just change their early decision processes a few years ago in response to the Fallows article? In 2002, Yale and Stanford, but not Princeton, eliminated binding early admission, as if lots of students, once into the school of their choice, would then opt to fill out additional college applications. Harvard never had a binding early admissions process, but it didn't need to, since it won in most cases.

The University of Delaware elimintated its ED program in June 2006, but since they are not in the Ivy League, nobody noticed. On June 15 2006, a group of liberal arts college presidents gathered in New York to discuss admissions reform. Since the meeting was private, we don't know for sure what the results will be.

This fall, Harvard is eliminating its early decision process, and other schools are following, maybe. The NYT's David Leonhardt reported, "Officials at Brown, Dartmouth, Penn, Princeton and Yale, for their part, suggested last week that they had no immediate plans to make a change." (Sept. 17 2006) The next day, Princeton ended its binding early admissions program, according to the AP.

Schools have countermeasures such as Turnitin and iThenticate. Turnitin can scale enough so that all students in a University handing in papers in any online form will automatically have their content checked for plagiarism. Turnitin claims to have the US Military Academy at West Point as a client, so even organizations with strong honor codes will "trust but verify."

As with any battle, as one side grows more sophisticated, the other side will need to work to keep up.

Social networking sites are starting to cause worry for parents while their use is exploding. New Scientist has a great primer on social networking and the Internet. It's almost a given that all 2008 U.S. presidential candidates will have their own social networking pages. New Scientist continues a series of stories on social networking and its impact on attitudes and privacy.

While I'm not sure how helpful podcasts will be helpful for students outside of large lecture classes, I love being able to pick and choose good lectures at my convenience. The integration of the iPod into the university system might also help Apple's lower-priced online music sales competitors figure out why Apple is succeeding where they are failing.

We are quick to blame adolescents for getting themselves into predicaments that adults believe could be easily avoided. But recent research indicates that simple irresponsibility may not be the full explanation. When teenagers perform certain tasks, their prefrontal cortex, which handles decision making, is working much harder than the same region in adults facing the same circumstances. The teen brain also makes less use of other regions that could help out. Under challenging conditions, adolescents may assess and react less efficiently than adults.

-- Leslie Sabbagh, Scientific American, August 2006.

Neuroscientists probing the teen brain have found that it undergoes a major remodelling that may be responsible for the teenager's propensity to take risks, seek out new experiences and fail to restrain inappropriate responses. Their work suggests that, even before you add raging hormones and peer-group-driven rebelliousness-without-a-cause to the mixture, teenagers may simply be unable consistently to make decisions the same way adults do. This could well be one of the reasons that, although most people are healthier during their adolescence than at any other time in their lives, adolescents are three or four times more likely to die than children past infancy2: they take risks, have accidents and pay the prices.

-- Kendall Powell, Nature 442, 865-867(24 August 2006)

In my observation of many A players, I have concluded that childhood really matters. Often these high performers come from demanding backgrounds where unconditional approval was withheld. Getting As, for example, did not meet with admiration from parents. The achievement was typically followed up with the message, “You can do better,” which is never rewarding and often damaging. From your star’s perspective, feedback of this sort obligated him to work endlessly to reach an unattainable goal. The psychologist Anna Freud (Sigmund Freud’s daughter) and others who studied children raised in this manner discovered that these individuals end up with extraordinarily punishing superegos. At first, the pressure comes from outside authority figures; later, A players impose it on themselves and on others. Winston Churchill, who adored his often abusive father, is a case in point. As an adult, Churchill ended each day with a merciless ritual: “I try myself by court martial to see if I have done anything effective during the day.”

Not quite my parents, but close.