Essay forensics: The German caper

The long view of security strategies for your network.

I recently had the unpleasant duty of reporting one of my undergraduate students to the Norwich University Academic Integrity Committee (AIC) for suspected academic dishonesty. In this report, without compromising the student's identity (something forbidden by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act or FERPA), I want to show academic readers the investigative procedure that resulted in conviction of the student by the AIC and a resulting grade of F on his entire course.

The first clue that there was something wrong was the gut-level sense that the writing I received in the final draft of the student's term paper on April 28, 2010 was not his own. I went back to his first draft and his second draft and reread his responses to quizzes and the mid-term exam; not one of these documents resembled the final paper in style. The earlier work was riddled with grammatical errors, sentence fragments, unclear assertions, and disorganized presentation of a mishmash of apparently undigested information. The final paper was well organized, well written, and exhaustively documented.

Another issue that struck me was that the last paragraph of the final version actually did resemble the original drafts – and it was printed in a point size (11) different from that of the rest of the paper (12).

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I recently had the unpleasant duty of reporting one of my undergraduate students to the Norwich University Academic Integrity Committee (AIC) for suspected academic dishonesty. In this report, without compromising the student's identity (something forbidden by the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act or FERPA), I want to show academic readers the investigative procedure that resulted in conviction of the student by the AIC and a resulting grade of F on his entire course.

The first clue that there was something wrong was the gut-level sense that the writing I received in the final draft of the student's term paper on April 28, 2010 was not his own. I went back to his first draft and his second draft and reread his responses to quizzes and the mid-term exam; not one of these documents resembled the final paper in style. The earlier work was riddled with grammatical errors, sentence fragments, unclear assertions, and disorganized presentation of a mishmash of apparently undigested information. The final paper was well organized, well written, and exhaustively documented.

Another issue that struck me was that the last paragraph of the final version actually did resemble the original drafts – and it was printed in a point size (11) different from that of the rest of the paper (12).

Next, I examined the references in the paper. About 18 of them lacked specific page numbers or URLs, so I went to the Kreitzberg University Library and searched for them in the collection and in the electronic resources. No luck. The only references to them via search engines on the Web were to a few fragmentary extracts with only a few pages in Google Books. I asked the Reference Librarian to check whether anyone (not the specific names of borrowers) had received any of these missing texts using interlibrary loans; no one had in the period from January through May 2010.

One of the references was to a German-language text. In the bibliography, the student left the following note: "Unless you have begun reading in German, you might want to explain this." That was, um, odd.

I also examined the metadata in the Word documents submitted by the students by using the free Metadata Analyzer from Smart PC Solutions. The tool showed inconclusive results; the author field for the first draft had the student's former girlfriend (according to him, he wrote it on her computer); the author of the second draft was "profiletest" (which I was unable to tie to anything significant using a Google search) and the author of the third (final) draft was "image_add" (also inconclusive in a search).

During the AIC hearing, I asked the student for the specific pages and URLs for the incomplete references; he was unable to supply them, claiming he had not recorded any of these details. When asked the meaning of the phrase about explaining the German text, he could not respond coherently. Asked (in German) how he came to read such a large history book (it is 889 pages long according to the snippet in Google), he responded that he does not speak German. Well, I asked, how did you read the book to be able to reference it in your work? He said he read a translation (there is no such translation: I checked). He asked if I was aware of translation engines such as Google Translate; but, I asked, how could he have known which pages to translate if he doesn't read German? He said he translated the entire book (although it is NOT available in its entirety online).

M. E. Kabay, PhD, CISSP-ISSMP, specializes in security and operations management consulting services and teaching. He is Chief Technical Officer of Adaptive Cyber Security Instruments, Inc. and Associate Professor of Information Assurance in the School of Business and Management at Norwich University. Visit his Web site for white papers and course materials.