Fake Degrees Research Articles

Degree Certificate Authentication using QR Code and Smartphone

An institution issued a degree certificate to those students who have successfully completed all studies included in the degree. The degree certificate awarded by the University is of prime importance in the person’s life but the production and circulation of fake certificates is cheap because a paper document can easily be forged with the availability of advance printing and copying technologies. Hence, there is a need to adopt a process that can verify and ensure the authenticity of a document. In order to prevent the circulation of fake degree certificates a method is proposed where the integrity of the contents with in the certificate can be verified with the use of QR Code and Smart Phone Application. A QR Code will contain a digital signature over the data such as degree holder’s name, enrollment number, roll number, total marks obtained etc. which will be signed by university authorities. In order to verify the digital signature a person need to use a specific smart phone application which will scan the QR Code and authenticate the certificate.

Formal degrees of unipotent discrete series representations and the exotic Fourier transform

We introduce a notion of elliptic fake degrees for unipotent elliptic representations of a semisimple p-adic group. We conjecture, and verify in some cases, that the relation between the formal degrees of unipotent discrete series representations of a semisimple p-adic group and the elliptic fake degrees is given by the exotic Fourier transform matrix introduced by Lusztig in the study of representations of finite groups of Lie type.

Coinvariant algebras and fake degrees for spin Weyl groups of exceptional type

We compute all the spin fake degrees for the exceptional Weyl groups, which are by definition the graded multiplicities of the simple modules of a spin Weyl group in its spin coinvariant algebra. The spin fake degrees are all shown to be palindromic polynomials.

Degree Mills: The Billion-Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas by Allen Ezell, John Bear (review)

Reviewed by: Degree Mills: The Billion-Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas by Allen Ezell, John Bear Glenn Allen Phillips Allen Ezell and John Bear. Degree Mills: The Billion-Dollar Industry That Has Sold Over a Million Fake Diplomas. New York: Prometheus Books, 2012. 466pp. Paper: $21.00. ISBN—13: 978-1616-1450-71. In an updated version of their 2005 book by the same title, Allen Ezell (retired FBI agent) and John Bear (author of several guidebooks on distance education) reintroduce the ubiquitous and largely unchecked problem of fake diplomas and institutions of higher education that confer degrees for little or no work. [End Page 282] The authors give a brief history of purchased degrees, follow several stories about the culprits and victims of degree mills, and (in typical guidebook fashion) offer user-friendly checklists and references for readers who wish to avoid being swindled by degree mills or degree mill “graduates.” Ezell’s dutiful service in the FBI as the founder of DipScam, a diploma-mill task force, provides special insight into several criminal cases of running diploma mills. The book includes more than 80 pages of DipScam or DipScam-related activities. This section reads like a collection of war stories. Indeed, that is its purpose. The passages are more entertaining than educational, but they give a unique context to Ezell and Bear’s concerns. Additional chapters, including degree mill graduates in high-profile positions, animals with degrees, and the personal story of a degree-mill victim, add to the sensationalist, journalistic nature of the book. Several reference lists at the end of the book enhance this book’s contribution as a resource. While this book is not scholarly, it is relevant to higher education. The book itself is “a consumer awareness work” (32). The authors hope to help readers “recognize the red flags that signal a less-than-legitimate enterprise…and develop sufficiently sensitive degree mill ‘radar’” (32). This book is for the student who wants to avoid the snares of “fake” degrees, the employers who may encounter a potential employee armed with a questionable degree, and (in smaller doses) the policymakers, legislators, law enforcement, and school administrators who should be addressing the ubiquitous presence (and danger) of degree mills. These resources include a list of unrecognized schools (p. 300), a list of unrecognized accrediting agencies (p. 327), a list of counterfeiting services (p. 347), and Chapter 17, “The Media Professional’s Guide to Finding People with Fake Degrees” (p. 355). Degree Mills contextualizes these lists with history, provocative storytelling, and advice on how to best combat the effects of degree mills, but the reference sections are both the impetus and the wealth of the book. Ezell and Bear offer a useful list of “92 Deceptive Tactics” that degree mills use to lure students (clients). Most notably, degree mills are known to use existing schools’ names with slight alterations (i.e. Stamford, Cormell, and Berkley); claim accreditation through unrecognized or questionable accreditation agencies; and promote their programs with fake pictures, fake faculty, and fake testimonials. The tactics do not provide a systematic way to determine the authenticity of a program, but they do offer several elements to consider when looking into a possible scam organization. The conversation on this topic is sadly limited. At the time of printing, Ezell and Bear noted only three books “devoted entirely or largely to degree mills” (p. 24); and their own intellectual contribution to the conversion is a notion of (ironically) degree. The authors acknowledge that while several programs can be universally considered a sham or fake program, other university degrees may be more palatable to employers or acceptable for job advancement. There is no perfect definition of what a degree mill is or is not; instead there are several descriptors that may lead one to conclude that a particular educational institution is legitimate or illegitimate. Indeed, many of the lists of degree mills that have been offered (including the one in this book) are subject to debate. As Ezell and Bear point out: “A school whose degree can qualify you to take the bar or a state licensing exam in California can get you arrested on...

Coinvariant algebras and fake degrees for spin Weyl groups of classical type

AbstractThe coinvariant algebra of a Weyl group plays a fundamental role in several areas of mathematics. The fake degrees are the graded multiplicities of the irreducible modules of a Weyl group in its coinvariant algebra, and they were computed by Steinberg, Lusztig and Beynon–Lusztig. In this paper we formulate a notion of spin coinvariant algebra for every Weyl group. Then we compute all the spin fake degrees for each classical Weyl group, which are by definition the graded multiplicities of the simple modules of a spin Weyl group in the spin coinvariant algebra. The spin fake degrees for the exceptional Weyl groups are given in a sequel.

The future of Digital Student Data Portability: the Groningen Declaration

Paper based diplomas are easy to forge and require a noticeable amount of expertise to verify, especially when presented in a different country from the one that produced them. The so-called diploma mills, illegal operations that sell fake degrees, are running rampant at the moment. Moving to fully digital diplomas can prevent these problems. Digital identity technologies can be used for providing controlled access to verifiable information about an individual academic achievement. The Groningen Declaration has become the centre of a world wide effort to join efforts dedicated to the creation of Digital Diploma Deposits, encompassing developments from China through Mexico and Norway through South Africa. At the core of this efforts lays the work of groups like EUNIS's own RS3G (Rome Students Systems and Standards Group), EAIE's DSDP (Digital Student Data Portability), USA National Student Clearing House or TERENA TF-EMC2. The aim of the present paper and the corresponding presentation is to increase awareness in the European University ICT community of the efforts that surround the Declaration, by presenting the achievements of the first year of its existence, like the meeting that took place in April 2013 in Beijing hosted by CHESSIC and the Chinese MoE.

Frobenius character formula and spin generic degrees for Hecke-Clifford algebra

The spin analogues of several classical concepts and results for Hecke algebras are established. A Frobenius type formula is obtained for irreducible characters of the Hecke-Clifford algebra. A precise characterization of the trace functions allows us to define the character table for the algebra. The algebra is endowed with a canonical symmetrizing trace form, with respect to which the spin generic degrees are formulated and shown to coincide with the spin fake degrees. We further provide a characterization of the trace functions and the symmetrizing trace form on the spin Hecke algebra which is Morita super-equivalent to the Hecke-Clifford algebra.

Educational imposters and fake degrees

We develop a sociological context for understanding the phenomenon of falsely claimed educational credentials and analyze national data that cast light on the incidence of false degrees. We find that about 6% of Bachelor's degrees and 35% of Associate's degrees are falsely claimed. Most individuals who falsely claim degrees have attended the college in question. Many have nearly completed the required credits, but claim a degree without having finished. The socio-demographic profile of persons falsely claiming credentials is consistent with Merton's theory of innovative deviance, but not with the theory of status inconsistency.

An Introduction to the Economics of Fake Degrees

:This paper critiques the multifarious ways whereby academic qualifications may be falsified in the international marketplace. The objectives are fourfold: (1) defining the main terms used such as fake degrees and diploma mills; (2) providing a brief history of fake degrees and identifying the factors that explain their recent development; (3) developing a theoretical framework to analyze fake degrees; and (4) exploring the costs and benefits of this activiry and its net impact on a given society. Degrees serve instrumental and ceremonial purposes. It is argued that degree holders may be considered as members of a club. They confer to their holders excludable but non-rival property rights such as abilities, signaling and status. The paper contends that holders of fake degrees can be considered as “free riders” on these property rights, especially the status tied to legitimate degrees.

Bimahonian distributions

Motivated by permutation statistics, we define for any complex reflection group W a family of bivariate generating functions. They are defined either in terms of Hilbert series for W-invariant polynomials when W acts diagonally on two sets of variables, or equivalently, as sums involving the fake degrees of irreducible representations for W. It is also shown that they satisfy a ``bicyclic sieving phenomenon'', which combinatorially interprets their values when the two variables are set equal to certain roots of unity.

A remark on the irreducible characters and fake degrees of finite real reflection groups

Summary. Beynon and Lusztig have shown that the fake degrees of almost all irreducible characters of finite real reflection groups are palindromes, and that the exceptions to this rule correspond to the non rational characters of the generic ring A defined over R = C[q]. Their proof consists of a case-by-case check. In this note we give an explanation for this phenomenon and some related facts about fake degrees. Moreover, in the situation where we allow for distinct parameters qa in the definition of A, we shall give a simple uniform proof of the fact that all the central idempotents of A ~- are elements of A ~, where K = C[x/~].