Primrose Road

I developed an assignment for my College Writing students that will (I hope) teach them to start separating the crap from the non-crap on the Internet. Internet sources are, in my view, just fine if you're writing about a current issue, as long as you've got some lit review skills in your utility belt and are armed with several peer-reviewed journal articles as well.

Sorting out the Hyper-Crappy from the Slightly-Less-Crappy on the Internet:

Students will work in groups (3-5 students each) and present their findings during class.

Go to the Learning Annex (http://www.learningannex.com) page and select “Online Classes.” (You may need to select a city, and then go back to the “Online Classes” link a second time.) Choose an instructor with the title “Dr” before his or her name or the letters “Ph.D.” after his or her name (i.e. the teacher of the Past Life Regression course). Be prepared to present your answers to and discuss your thoughts on the questions that follow. Also, please tell us to what degree you believe the instructor you chose can be considered a reliable source of information.

1. Use Dissertation Abstracts Online to search for the instructor you’ve chosen. Is (s)he listed there? If so, on what did (s)he write his or her dissertation? If not, what are some possible reasons why (s)he is not listed there?

2. Check Lexis-Nexis and other relevant databases for articles by the instructor published in peer-reviewed journals. Were you able to find any articles? If so, what did the instructor research/write about?

3. Find the instructor’s personal homepage (most of them have one). Is the instructor forthcoming about where (s)he got his or her degree? (How) does the instructor describe his or her educational background?

4. If the instructor does not tell visitors to his or her website where (s)he got his or her degree, search the web to see if you can discover where the degree is from. Then visit the school's website: is the school legitimate or a "diploma mill"? How can you tell?

5. Search for web pages that reference the instructor. Is there a shared theme to these pages? How reliable do pages that reference the instructor tend to be?

A comment from one of my students: "So it's legal to put the letters 'Ph.D.' after your name even though you don't have a legitimate degree? That's incredibly unfair to people who've worked hard to earn a real doctorate."

Well said.

Yesterday, I directed my Business Writing students to several known diploma mill websites and gave them the following "ethical dilemma" to attempt to resolve:

You are an employer, and you learn that an employee's master's degree came from an unaccredited diploma mill. After speaking with the employee and several colleagues, you determine that the employee genuinely didn't know that what (s)he earned/purchased was not a valid master's degree (i.e. (s)he believed that one could earn a master's degree with three month-long online courses and a 15-page book report). What do you do?

After looking over the websites, several students responded that they would fire the employee, not so much because (s)he had a diploma mill "degree," but because (s)he fell for the diploma mill scam.

"Just look at the 'faculty' pages," one student said (and others echoed her sentiments). "Some of them look like mugshots, and none of them has an accredited degree! How could anyone not know that something's not right?"

And they appreciated my "if it teaches 'Angelology,' it's a diploma mill" rule. Lots of cries of "Angelology? What the hell?" and "What does it mean for my B.S. in Engineering if somebody else can get a bachelor's in Angelology?" My faith in Generation Y has momentarily been restored.

Fighting a Brecht-and-Deleuze-induced headache, I took two Advil and went to the Chinese restaurant up the block to get some chicken fried rice. While waiting fifteen minutes for my rice, I paged through a copy of The Learning Annex's latest catalog, noting every seminar led by someone with the letters "Ph.D." after his or her name.

On a related note, can we please grind up the Law of Attraction, bake it in a pie, and serve it to its mother for dinner?

Of the six "Ph.D."s in the catalog, two are legit. One woman teaches Law of Attraction-style thinking, but she has a dissertation listed in Dissertation Abstracts International. Another, despite being endorsed by Oprah, has a Ph.D. from an Ivy League school, with a dissertation on a non-woo topic. The other four (I'm being nice and not including names):

1) A Ph.D. in "energy medicine." Two biographies online tell us where he's taught, but not where he obtained his degree.

2) A Ph.D. candidate at an unaccredited distance education school of "esoteric and hypnotherapy studies." According to her bio, she attended one accredited university, though it doesn't say anything about her having graduated or earned a degree. The second institution listed does not appear to exist anywhere outside of the woman's own biography.

3) A "former psychology professor" who doesn't tell us where she formerly professed. She also isn't forthcoming on where she earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology, which would explain why there are no hits on her very distinctive name in Dissertation Abstracts International.

4) A "metaphysicist" who calls herself "Dr. ______ ________, Ph.D.," though her site mentions nothing about her having earned a degree. There are zero hits on her name in Dissertation Abstracts International.

Word of advice: people with accredited, legitimate advanced degrees tend to be forthcoming about where they earned those degrees.