An indirect way of checking credentials would be looking at the faculty member's listing with their current school. Here at Oswego faculty listings (in the college bulletin) include degrees. Official transcripts are required to include those degrees in the bulletin
Gary J. Klatsky, Ph. D. Director, Human Computer Interaction M.A. Program Department of Psychology [EMAIL PROTECTED] Oswego State University (SUNY) http://www.oswego.edu/~klatsky 7060 State Hwy 104W Voice: (315) 312-3474 Oswego, NY 13126 Fax: (315) 312-6330 All of us who are concerned for peace and triumph of reason and justice must be keenly aware how small an influence reason and honest good will exert upon events in the political field. Albert Einstein **************************************************** ------__o --------__o ----------__o ----_`\<, _ ------_`\<, _ --------_`\<, _ ---(_)/ (_) -----(_)/ (_) -------(_)/ (_) **************************************************** -----Original Message----- From: Mike Palij [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, June 23, 2006 9:51 AM To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS) Cc: Mike Palij Subject: [tips] Re: validating credentials On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 20:19:46 -0700, Christopher D. Green wrote: >Mike Palij wrote: >>On Thu, 22 Jun 2006 17:04:23 -0700, Michael Sylvester wrote: >>> Are profs credentials public records? >> >>That depends upon how one defines "public records". To reiterate: when people are involved in educational organizations, parts of their records are probably protected by some privacy rights laws (e.g., things like whether a person took a specific course, what grade was received, etc.) but there are often "trails" left by a person that are more or less public (e.g., for undergraduates this might include being mentioned in undergraduate publications like a student newspaper, club magazine, class yearbook, etc.; for graduate students, there may be similar sources but, depending upon the program, official filing of docuements such as one's master's thesis or doctoral dissertation would be clearer indicators that one has completed the requirements for a degree). >>> I would like to know if I can call-up a university and ask >>> if someone graduated with a PhD from that school. > > Don't all schools keep a copy of their graduate students' >theses/dissertations in their libraries? Just look it up. I imagine that this is true but there are a couple of potential problems: (1) Some masters programs do not require one to do a master's thesis, providing the option of either taking additional courses or taking a exam. In this case, lack of a master's thesis in a school's library or in an electronic database may not mean anything -- however, this might give one a reason call a graduate program and ask if they have require a thesis for their master's degree (one can could then ask "By the way, do you have a copy of the master's thesis for a person named 'X'?"). (2) It is possible for schools to close and it then becomes unclear where their library holdings are. In such cases, I imagine one would have to contact appropriate state agencies (e.g., dept of education, board of regents, etc.) to see if one can get info on students, faculty, etc. If one were claiming to have a Ph.D., it probably would be clever to claim that one got it from a defunct institution, but now we're going into detective fiction territory. >>However, I imagine that one could always check Disseration >>Abstracts to see if the person's dissertation is listed. I don't >>know if this is foolproof but if there's a dissertation abstract >>present, then the person probably got the Ph.D. or equivalent. >>The electronic version of DAI should allow one to do so >>quickly and easily. > > Or, you could do that. This is actually the main point that I wanted to address. If memory serves, I believe that DAI used to be associated with the University of Michigan (UMI) which produced the paper version of DAI as well as microform and photocopies of dissertations. Some time in the past decade or so, UMI developed a web-accessible database called "Digitial Dissertations" which allowed one to search for specific dissertations and, for recent dissertations, PDFs of the abstract and/or entire dissertation. ProQuest apparently took over UMI some time in the recent past. I went to the Digital Dissertations website this morning just to check that it was still there -- it is but it will be "migrating" to a new form. ProQuest is expanding its database and will be calling its service "ProQuest Dissertations and Theses" (PQDT). The new service is supposed to be available in July 2006 and one can get additional info from their website: http://www.il.proquest.com/promos/product/feature01_umi.shtml What is available at your institution will probably depend upon the subscription plan that your institution has. -Mike Palij New York University [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Regards, >-- >Christopher D. Green >Department of Psychology >York University >Toronto, ON M3J 1P3 >Canada >http://www.yorku.ca/christo --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=engl ish --- To make changes to your subscription go to: http://acsun.frostburg.edu/cgi-bin/lyris.pl?enter=tips&text_mode=0&lang=english
