Dartmouth medical school’s cheating scandal uncovered after students were monitored online.
The Ivy League school secretly monitored the students online activity.
The following written content by Mark Lungariello
Dartmouth medical school accused 17 students of cheating after the Ivy League school secretly monitored their online activity – then had them defend themselves over Zoom.
The Geisel School of Medicine claimed the students accessed the online course platform Canvas while taking virtual exams, giving themselves an unauthorized open book test.
But the prestigious New Hampshire school is now dealing with claims the probe was flawed.
Students at the school held an on-campus protest and some of the accused cheaters came forward to claim they were advised to admit the charges to get a lesser penalty.
“What has happened to me in the last month, despite not cheating, has resulted in one of the most terrifying, isolating experiences of my life,” first-year student Sirey Zhang told The New York Times.
The cheating probe was launched in January when a faculty member observed students accessing the online learning platform Canvas while taking exams, the school said in a statement sent to The Post on Monday.
The New Hampshire school went back to look at online activity for the entire school year, Dartmouth’s statement said. Students were taking tests virtually amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Past exam activity was included to ensure fairness for all students, including those not suspected of violations but whose grades could be affected by any changes to scores of their peers,” the statement said.
Some groups accused the New Hampshire college of potentially misreading the data. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and the Electronic Frontier Foundation sent a joint letter to the college saying students may have been logged in on cellphones or other computers and not actually cheating.
“Dartmouth has likely turned false positives into accusations of academic misconduct, taking enforcement action against innocent students based on faulty technical evidence,” the groups said in the March letter, which was supplied to The Post.
But by using data page views and not from Canvas logs, the school said it was already able to determine a majority of the cases weren’t deliberate and didn’t violate the school’s Honor Policy. Read more from Fox.
