Identity Rental

Identity theft sounds bad, but does it have to be? What if someone stole access to your bank account and started depositing money there, making wise investments, and never taking a penny out?The point is, however, that the "theft" part doesn't refer to what is done after the assumption of identity, but the mere fact of donning it. I have a Facebook page mostly so someone else can't set one up for me (well, they could, but it would at least compete with the real one).

But sometimes we don't want to fill our own shoes. Wouldn't you like someone else to assume your identity for the purpose of paying your rent or house payment? That would be handy. Heck, imagine if you had a clone who could go to work for you. Essentially, this happens all the time: anytime something is done "in the name of" someone else, it's identity lending. So if the president sends a minion to your office with a "Simon Says" letter, the former's identity is lent to the latter. Identity has economic value.

In the academy one of the cardinal sins (in addition to voting against your own motion) is to assume let someone else assume your identity and speak for you. This is because the pecking order of scholarship depends on your own, presumably authentic, record. I have chosen a complicated way to describe plagiarism, but there's a reason for it. Consider the following quote from this Nov. 12th  article in The Chronicle entitled "The Shadow Scholar":

I've written toward a master's degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I've worked on bachelor's degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I've written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I've attended three dozen online universities. I've completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

This is intended to outrage profs of all stripes, I'm sure. Underneath all the fuss is an assumption about the nature of the physical universe--that past performance predicts future performance. If a student buys a paper and passes is off as their own, it advertises a level of performance that doesn't really exist, and so if we give that student a diploma, the predictive value of that script is diminished. From the student's perspective, this may be a good investment, if at some ethical cost.

The inductive premise (i.e. that the paper predicts actual performance) fails on at least two grounds. First, although a student may have the resources to buy a paper now doesn't mean the same will hold true later. This is weak, however. Supply would quickly meet demand if there were actually a lot of call for such things post-graduation, and the cost would drop. In other words, if one were required to write term papers for one's occupation, these could probably be outsourced to India or something, for cheap. The other objection is more serious--the connection between writing a thesis and being able to think is real, and it's quite possible that the nice essay that was bought from a service does not reflect the student's ability to communicate or think. So the university may mistakenly graduate a student who can't write well or can't put thoughts in order.

What the academy is attempting (and apparently failing) to do is fix an identity to a track record of success. This is a very simplistic notion to begin with, and probably needs an overhaul. The government is interested too: see my post on "FUD." Consider this quote from the article:

[T]he lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.

Let's follow that to the logical conclusion. Suppose the lazy rich person (now: LaRP) can afford to outsource everything in his life. Heck, you don't have to be rich: people already outsource all kinds of things in normal life. See "Enlightened Outsourcing" or Tim Ferris's book The 4-Hour Work Week. But suppose that you could outsource everything you do at your job, and still turn a profit based on your salary. This wouldn't consume your whole day because other people are doing most of the job. So you could hold down more than  one job, maybe at the same company. This violates most preconceptions about what it means "to work somewhere," but whatever--it's a new century. As long as the job gets done, what difference does it make?

This sounds cynical, and certainly this attitude wouldn't find many takers within the academy, but imagine a Track B. Instead of actually doing your homework and taking tests and whatnot, you manage to get it all accomplished by third parties. The bar would probably have to be higher, since if you compare to what a Track A ("honest") student has to do to accomplish all this alone, the Track B student has more time on his or her hands. So double the work load. Or triple it. And don't hide the fact that everything is outsourced--the point is not that the Track B student can do differential equations, but that they can get it done by someone else. How many railroad ties did J.P. Morgan lay himself? Not many, I bet.

That won't happen. But it should be easy enough to detect exceptional performance from students. Something like FACS scores could be used to ascertain a baseline of thinking and communication skills, and partial and complete work could be compared against that benchmark. This actually happened to me once. Our whole senior high school class was bussed off to Rend Lake College, about an hour from my hometown of Pinckneyville, Illinois. We spent the day taking tests on various subjects, and I ended up getting the high score in math and tied for the high score in physics (trusting 30 year old memories here, so caveat emptor). But the word quickly circulated that the other guy who did well on the physics test (from a different school) was not very good at academics. He had just sat next to the proctor, who happened to foolishly leave the test key sitting there. Whether this is true or not, I don't know, but it illustrates the finely-honed human ability to judge ability and compare it against performance. This is why women sometimes look at my shoes when I'm out with my wife: they see us together and think she's too good for me, so they look down to see if the explanation can be found in expensive footware--a signal of wealth. That may be more than you wanted to know. :-)

More: here's another post on identity-for-sale.

Update: If you thought this issue was simple, check out this article in TechDirt: 200 Students Admit To 'Cheating' On Exam... But Bigger Question Is If It Was Really Cheating Or Studying

Farming Credits and Your Next Million $

One of the more frequented posts of mine is this one on the fear and uncertainty about the Higher Education Opportunity Act's language about ascertaining a student's identity. In the post I noted that "the requirement is for accreditors, not schools, meaning that this requirement will likely become part of the accreditation list of to-dos next time it rolls around." This appears to be happening. The last time I talked to a SACS VP, a few weeks ago, she went out of her way to tell me that this authentication issue was coming around the bend. There were no specifics. She also mentioned, by the way, that it will soon not be possible to reject transfer credits merely because they come from an unaccredited institution. This seems bizarre to me, but I haven't followed up on that yet.

The problem of authentication stems from the easy anonymity of the internet. If a student signs up for and takes online courses, how can you be sure that it actually is the registered student doing the work? How easy would it be to hire someone else out to do it?

With face to face interactions, this is still possible, but seems to me would be pretty rare. You'd essentially have to hire someone to become your alter ego, interacting in the classroom with students and faculty. It would take a peculiar sort of person to be willing to do that (are you listening, Mr. Ripley?). But with a purely online environment, an unscrupulous student could conceivably hire different stand-ins for each class. It becomes much easier to hide one's identity in general.

Interestingly, this happens in online games already. Massively multi-player online games like World of Warcraft have their own virtual currency. A player who doesn't want to grind through the lower levels, suffering the pains of an entry-level character, can simply buy a powerful avatar with cash by converting US dollars to World of Warcraft gold. There are plenty of so-called farmers out there who specialize in creating this product (as well as others). Because the internet is ubiquitous, the farmer can live in China. This June 30 article from GossipGamers states that:

According to a survey in 2008 by Richard Heeks, he estimates 80-85% of the gold farmers are based in China and the virtual currency market generates between $200 million and $1 billion annually.

This trade, however, is to be banned by the Chinese government. I suspect it will go on anyway, but the larger point is what else can they farm? College credits, maybe? Language would probably be a problem in China, but perhaps less so in India. And home-grown credit farms are not unlikely either. I remember from my SIU days that there was a guy who made a living just doing math tutoring, with his posters all over campus: Vince makes Sense! I wonder if Vince is still in business. How much harder would it be for a financially-strapped grad student, say, to spoof a couple of online sections of Math 101 for cash? Don't you think that's already happening?

I've heard rumors about devices coming to market that would provide some level of cheat-proofing. Imagine a USB-plug-in gizmo that monitors audio and video around your computer as you take an online test at home. In my opinion this will never work. That's must my gut feeling as an IT guy. Even that could relatively easily be gotten around by a clever student. Think how hard it is to prevent cheating when the instructor is actually in the room walking around...

This is a hard problem. I foresee a large market for identity-spoof-proof products. (There's a brand name for you: go pay $10 for spoof-proof.com--you won't be sorry!). It's an interesting line of thought to imagine what is it about YOU that ties you to a particular product: a writing, homework, test, interaction... Really, the only thing that cannot be spoofed is the connection that it comes from your mind and body. So, for example, a type-sensor that notes how you use the keyboard when typing would be very hard to imitate. Potentially, another person could learn the pauses and fits and starts that characterize your particular style of keyboarding, but this I imagine to be so time-consuming that the cost would become prohibitive. In a different vein, deep patterns of style in vocabulary and grammar would be invisible to the spoofer, but could be perhaps detected with pattern-recognition tools like latent semantic analysis.

So there, dear reader: I've presented you with a latent demand for a new product, two solutions, and a brand name. When you make your next million, please make out the thank-you check to:

Stanislav Zaa
Gmail, Com

Alternatively, should you turn to the dark side, please hire me as a consultant and we'll see how we can get around those pesky keyboard and semantics limitations. (Just kidding. Really. No, Really.)