Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Contact . . .

I have been contacted by a Purdue University official.  They informed me that they are "pursuing (my) information."  I am confident that a thorough investigation is being conducted.  Moreover, I am hopeful that the entire dissertation is examined for redundancies with the Virginia Tech dissertation and any other sources from which the author seems to have taken. 

6 comments:

  1. I bought Adell's dissertation and you are right. Out of the 482 words lifted from Amedy's diss, only three or four are altered, as if done by mistake while typing. Or during a second run-through after cutting and pasting. I'm writing something up on this. Please keep us posted on what you hear from Purdue. They should do an exhaustive study of all of Adell's sources, but I doubt if that will happen. Please make sure to document every word you can from them. Thank you again for doing what every good researcher does. In other words, thank you for telling the truth. There’s not many willing to do that here in Indiana.

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  2. I would demand a refund of the money you paid for Adell's dissertation. You could have just downloaded the sources that Adell copied for free from Virginia tech. Starting on page 1, Adell copied from a a thesis available here:
    http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-22798-18205/unrestricted/chap1-5.pdf

    Another source she copied is free from here:
    http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-042699-151803/unrestricted/Dissertation.pdf

    I think both Adell and whoever is selling her fraudulent thesis (Proquest?)could be sued by the real authors. What give's Proquest or anyone else te right to sell someone's work without acknowledging or compensating them. If they can do it, I guess I should be able to start selling Virginia Tech theses too.

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  3. Thanks, Tom. I wasn't aware of the Virginia Tech site. I agree about ProQuest, too.

    And thanks for the second thesis link, too.

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  4. There are a couple more things to think about in this case.
    1) Plagiarism in the literature review is particularly deceptive. It makes it look like the author did everything the real author did: spend hours and hours reading everything on her subject, make notes, think about it, read again, compare her work to the literature, draft conclusions, organize the material, search deep in the stacks, go to other libraries, edit drafts, organize a bibliography, write final drafts, etc.; but in reality, this key element of doctoral work that can take several years is done in less than one day.

    2) Since many sections are identical to the works published years earlier, we can conclude that the Purdue professors not only let plagiarism slip through, none of them made her go back and add, edit, or rewrite any part of those sections. They must have exactly the same requirements as the Virginia Tech professors who approved the original theses.

    3) Most professors require PhD students to publish articles about their research before graduation, but here name did not show up anywhere when I search a couple databases. I was not able to see if she would cheat on an article, but I did learn that Purdue requires less of their doctoral graduates than most universities.

    4) Her dissertation was published in 2004, well into the digital age, but notice that the Proquest version is not searchable electronically like most are. Since the pages are really just a picture, her thesis will never show up when scholars do research in that area. In other words, every time a researcher is directed to the Virginia Tech theses, the Purdue dissertation would have been suggested too.

    5) Google is an easy to do your own review if you don't want to rely on Purdue. Just start typing sentences from the dissertation into google. I started on page 1 and found the second source of copied material. I quit though because you can't just copy and paste sentences like you can from most dissertations whose authors did not have to hide anything.

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  5. I'm just wondering if there is an update on this. When I pulled up her teaching license she only has Masters listed, no PhD unlike other teachers? My understanding is she has turn in her title and Purdue refuses to answer any questions. Is this true?? She has also hired an atty from Indy??

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    Replies
    1. I am not sure about what happened beyond her resignation (for "personal reasons") from the State Board of Education. However, I believe it is quite telling that there was no public admonishment. She was, as a Board of Education member, a public figure.

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