As House Republicans prepare to oust Liz Cheney from leadership, one outspoken GOP Trump critic says the party should not swear fealty to a 'dear leader.'
72% of retail CFD accounts lose money. Plus500 allows traders to open on-the-go CFD positions with 0 commission.HANOVER, N.H. — Sirey Zhang, a first-year student at Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, was on spring break in March when he received an email from administrators accusing him of cheating.
Dartmouth had reviewed Zhang’s online activity on Canvas, its learning management system, during three remote exams, the email said. The data indicated that he had looked up course material related to one question during each test, honor code violations that could lead to expulsion, the email said. Zhang, 22, said he had not cheated. But when the school’s student affairs office suggested he would have a better outcome if he expressed remorse and pleaded guilty, he felt he had little choice but to agree. Now he faces suspension and a misconduct mark on his academic record that could derail his dream of becoming a pediatrician. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times “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,” said Zhang, who has filed an appeal. He is one of 17 medical students whom Dartmouth recently accused of cheating on remote tests while in-person exams were shut down because of the coronavirus. The allegations have prompted an on-campus protest, letters of concern to school administrators from more than two dozen faculty members and complaints of unfair treatment from the student government, turning the pastoral Ivy League campus into a national battleground over escalating school surveillance during the pandemic. At the heart of the accusations is Dartmouth’s use of the Canvas system to retroactively track student activity during remote exams without their knowledge. In the process, the medical school may have overstepped by using certain online activity data to try to pinpoint cheating, leading to some erroneous accusations, according to independent technology experts, a review of the software code and school documents obtained by The New York Times. Dartmouth’s drive to root out cheating provides a sobering case study of how the coronavirus has accelerated colleges’ reliance on technology, normalizing student tracking in ways that are likely to endure after the pandemic. While universities have long used anti-plagiarism software and other anti-cheating apps, the pandemic has pushed hundreds of schools that switched to remote learning to embrace more invasive tools. Over the last year, many have required students to download software that can take over their computers during remote exams or use webcams to monitor their eye movements for possibly suspicious activity, even as technology experts have warned that such tools can be invasive, insecure, unfair and inaccurate. Some universities are now facing a backlash over the technology. A few, including the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently said they would cease using the exam-monitoring tools. “These kinds of technical solutions to academic misconduct seem like a magic bullet,” said Shaanan Cohney, a cybersecurity lecturer at the University of Melbourne who researches remote learning software. But “universities which lack some of the structure or the expertise to understand these issues on a deeper level end up running into really significant trouble.” At Dartmouth, the use of Canvas in the cheating investigation was unusual because the software was not designed as a forensic tool. Instead, professors post assignments on it, and students submit their homework through it. That has raised questions about Dartmouth’s methodology. While some students may have cheated, technology experts said, it would be difficult for a disciplinary committee to distinguish cheating from noncheating based on the data snapshots that Dartmouth provided to accused students. And in an analysis of the Canvas software code, the Times found instances in which the system automatically generated activity data even when no one was using a device. “If other schools follow the precedent that Dartmouth is setting here, any student can be accused based on the flimsiest technical evidence,” said Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights organization, who analyzed Dartmouth’s methodology. Seven of the 17 accused students have had their cases dismissed. In at least one of those cases, administrators said, “automated Canvas processes are likely to have created the data that was seen rather than deliberate activity by the user,” according to a school email that students made public. The 10 others have been expelled, suspended or received course failures and unprofessional-conduct marks on their records that could curtail their medical careers. Nine pleaded guilty, including Zhang, according to school documents; some have filed appeals. Some accused students said Dartmouth had hamstrung their ability to defend themselves. They said they had less than 48 hours to respond to the charges, were not provided complete data logs for the exams, were advised to plead guilty though they denied cheating or were given just two minutes to make their case in online hearings, according to six of the students and a review of documents. Five of the students declined to be named for fear of reprisals by Dartmouth. Duane Compton, dean of the Geisel School, said in an interview that its methods for identifying possible cheating cases were fair and valid. Administrators investigated carefully, he said, and provided accused students with all the data on which the cheating charges were based. He denied that the student affairs office had advised those who said they had not cheated to plead guilty. Compton acknowledged that the investigation had caused distress on campus. But he said Geisel, founded in 1797 and one of the nation’s oldest medical schools, was obligated to hold its students accountable. “We take academic integrity very seriously,” he said. “We wouldn’t want people to be able to be eligible for a medical license without really having the appropriate training.” Instructure, the company that owns Canvas, did not return requests for comment. A Hunt Begins In January, a faculty member reported possible cheating during remote exams, Compton said. Geisel opened an investigation. To hinder online cheating, Geisel requires students to turn on ExamSoft — a separate tool that prevents them from looking up study materials during tests — on the laptop or tablet on which they take exams. The school also requires students to keep a backup device nearby. The faculty member’s report made administrators concerned that some students may have used their backup device to look at course material on Canvas while taking tests on their primary device. Geisel’s Committee on Student Performance and Conduct, a faculty group with student members that investigates academic integrity cases, then asked the school’s technology staff to audit Canvas activity during 18 remote exams that all first- and second-year students had taken during the academic year. The review looked at more than 3,000 exams since last fall. The tech staff then developed a system to recognize online activity patterns that might signal cheating, said Sean McNamara, Dartmouth’s senior director of information security. The pattern typically showed activity on a Canvas course homepage — on, say, neurology — during an exam followed by activity on a Canvas study page, like a practice quiz, related to the test question. “You see that pattern of essentially a human reading the content and selecting where they’re going on the page,” McNamara said. “The data is very clear in describing that behavior.” The audit identified 38 potential cheating cases. But the committee quickly eliminated some of those because one professor had directed students to use Canvas, Compton said. In emails sent in mid-March, the committee told the 17 accused students that an analysis showed they had been active on relevant Canvas pages during one or more exams. The emails contained spreadsheets with the exam’s name, the test question number, time stamps and the names of Canvas pages that showed online activity. Questions Arise Almost immediately, questions emerged over whether the committee had mistaken automated activity on Canvas for human activity, based on a limited subset of exam data. Geisel students said they often had dozens of course pages open on Canvas, which they rarely logged out of. Those pages can automatically generate activity data even when no one is looking at them, according to the Times’ analysis and technology experts. School officials said that their analysis, which they hired a legal consulting firm to validate, discounted automated activity and that accused students had been given all necessary data in their cases. But at least two students told the committee in March that the audit had misinterpreted automated Canvas activity as human cheating. The committee dismissed the charges against them. In another case, a professor notified the committee that the Canvas pages used as evidence contained no information related to the exam questions his student was accused of cheating on, according to an analysis submitted to the committee. The student has appealed. The committee has also not provided students with the wording of the exam questions they were accused of cheating on, complete Canvas activity logs for the exams, the amount of time spent on each Canvas page and data on whether the system flagged their page activity as automated or user-initiated, according to documents. Dartmouth declined to comment on the data issues, citing the appeals. Quintin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation compared Dartmouth’s methods to accusing someone of stealing a piece of fruit in a grocery store by presenting a snapshot of that person touching an orange but not releasing video footage showing whether the person later put back the orange, bought it or pocketed it without paying. Compton said the committee’s dismissal of cases over time validated its methodology. “The fact that we had a large number of students and we were very deliberate about eliminating a large, large fraction or majority of those students from consideration,” he said, “I think actually makes the case well for us trying to be really careful about this.” Campus Tensions Tensions flared in early April when an anonymous student account on Instagram posted about the cheating charges. Soon after, Dartmouth issued a social media policy warning that students’ anonymous posts “may still be traced back” to them. Around the same time, Geisel administrators held a virtual forum and were barraged with questions about the investigation. The conduct review committee then issued decisions in 10 of the cases, telling several students that they would be expelled, suspending others and requiring some to retake courses or repeat a year of school at a cost of nearly $70,000. Many on campus were outraged. On April 21, dozens of students in white lab coats gathered in the rain in front of Compton’s office to protest. Some held signs that said “BELIEVE YOUR STUDENTS” and “DUE PROCESS FOR ALL” in indigo letters, which dissolved in the rain into blue splotches. Several students said they were now so afraid of being unfairly targeted in a data-mining dragnet that they had pushed the medical school to offer in-person exams with human proctors. Others said they had advised prospective medical students against coming to Dartmouth. “Some students have built their whole lives around medical school, and now they’re being thrown out like they’re worthless,” said Meredith Ryan, a fourth-year medical student not connected to the investigation. That same day, more than two dozen members of Dartmouth’s faculty wrote a letter to Compton saying that the cheating inquiry had created “deep mistrust” on campus and that the school should “make amends with the students falsely accused.” In an email to students and faculty a week later, Compton apologized that Geisel’s handling of the cases had “added to the already high levels of stress and alienation” of the pandemic and said the school was working to improve its procedures. The medical school has already made one change that could reduce the risk of false cheating allegations. For remote exams, new guidelines said, students are now “expected to log out of Canvas on all devices prior to testing.” Zhang, the first-year student, said the investigation had shaken his faith in an institution he loves. He had decided to become a doctor, he said, to address disparities in health care access after he won a fellowship as a Dartmouth undergraduate to study medicine in Tanzania. Zhang said he felt compelled to speak publicly to help reform a process he found traumatizing. “I’m terrified,” he said. “But if me speaking up means that there’s at least one student in the future who doesn’t have to feel the way that I did, then it’s all worthwhile.” This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times CompanyCOLUMBUS, Ohio — The voice on the 911 call is a teenage girl’s, and it is quavering, as if she has been crying. “I want to leave this foster home,” she tells the dispatcher. “I want to leave this foster home.” When two police officers arrived at the home in Columbus, Ohio, they reported later, they met an agitated ninth grader, Ja’Niah Bryant, who told them that the fighting at 3171 Legion Lane was getting worse and worse. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times They said there was nothing they could do. Twenty-three days later, Ja’Niah called 911 again, telling the police that she and her older sister were being threatened by two young women who used to live at the house. Officers arrived in the middle of a melee outside the house, and one of them fatally shot Ja’Niah’s 16-year-old sister, Ma’Khia Bryant, who was lunging at one of the women, brandishing a steak knife. The shooting, which occurred moments before a jury in Minneapolis convicted Derek Chauvin of murdering George Floyd, released a new wave of anger over shootings by the police. To calm the furor, the Columbus police quickly released body camera footage, which showed some of the fight outside the house and, they said, demonstrated that the officer had acted to protect the other woman. But Bryant’s tragic death was also preceded by a turbulent journey through the foster care system, which had cycled her through at least five placements in two years — after her own mother was found to be negligent — despite efforts by their grandmother to reunite the family. Ohio places children in foster care at a rate 10% higher than the national average, and child welfare officials here are considerably less likely than in the country as a whole to place children with their relatives. Black children, like the Bryants, account for nearly one-third of children removed from homes — nearly twice their proportion in the population. A review of Ma’Khia Bryant’s pathway through foster care shows that it failed her in critical ways. Research has demonstrated that children fare far better when they remain with family members, a practice known as kinship care. It also shows that each successive placement causes additional trauma, further setting back a child in crisis. A spokesperson for Franklin County Children Services, which had custody of the siblings, declined to comment on Ma’Khia Bryant’s case, citing confidentiality laws. Angela Moore, their foster mother at the time of Bryant’s death, talked about the teenager and the events leading up to her death but did not respond later to detailed questions about the Bryant girls and their care. This account is based on interviews with Ma’Khia Bryant’s family members and acquaintances as well as court documents and other case records that were provided by her mother’s lawyer. The oldest of four children born to Paula Bryant, a nursing assistant, and Myron Hammonds, Ma’Khia Bryant was removed from her mother’s home in 2018 and spent 16 months living with her grandmother Jeanene Hammonds. When her grandmother was kicked out by her landlord, the siblings went into foster care and spent two years cycling through short-term placements, arrangements that dissolved one after another. The Chute of the System In 2018, Paula Bryant had moved with her five children — including a teenage son from a previous relationship — into a house in West Columbus. Hammonds, Ma’Khia’s father, did not live with the family, and Paula Bryant described herself as raising the children largely on her own. Andrea Douglass, 37, a pastor’s wife who lived two doors down from the Bryant family that year, recalled the fights between Paula Bryant and her daughters. “The girls ran out of the house terrified and were hanging out in the backyard screaming while the mom was yelling at them,” Douglass said, recalling that she was worried about their safety. The family had been on the radar of Children Services for several years, amid repeated complaints that the two youngest children were absent from school. In February 2017, Bryant took Ma’Khia, Ja’Niah and two younger siblings to one of the agency’s offices and said “she was at her wits' end” and could no longer handle them, according to a Children Services document outlining the case. The move had been difficult for her daughters, who missed their friends on the East Side, Bryant said. “They were kind of rebelling in the home,” she said. The police came, Bryant said, when she was arguing with Ma’Khia and Ja’Niah over bedtimes, and their younger sister, Azariah, ran outside and yelled for help. “The officers said, 'You have just lost control as a parent — meaning, you can tell them to go to bed, go upstairs right now, and they’re not going to go,'” she said. The children told police officers that they had suffered physical abuse from their mother and an older half-brother, according to the mother’s lawyer, Michelle Martin, though Bryant denied ever abusing them. A magistrate judge dismissed the abuse claims against Bryant in February 2019 but found that she had neglected the children, according to court documents. Bryant said she was detained while Ma’Khia and her three younger siblings “went in the paddy wagon.” Hammonds, their grandmother, took the four children into her two-bedroom apartment. After about six months, she began receiving $1,200 a month in aid from the state to cover their care. Service agencies offer far less support to family members who agree to take care of children in need; the per diem allowances paid to licensed foster parents are often 10 times greater than the public assistance paid to relatives. A grandparent can become licensed as a foster parent, but it can take as long as six months. Then Hammonds' landlord found out that the children had moved into the apartment and told her she would have to move. She scrambled, placing the older girls at a summer camp and the younger two siblings in temporary foster care. When the camp ended, she had few options. In desperation, she called the children’s caseworker to ask if she could take them to a hotel with her for a few nights, but the caseworker said that was not allowed. He told her to drop the two older girls off at Franklin County Children Services. There was no chance at that point that the children would go back to their mother, who was still struggling to meet requirements for counseling and scheduled visits. Instead, the county placed all four children in foster care. Hammonds slept wherever she could for several months until she secured a home that could accommodate the children. In December 2019, Hammonds submitted a petition to the court for their return, but it was rejected. Although the court’s reasoning is not known, the Children Services agency had reported to the court that Hammonds had failed to meet all of the children’s needs and had not made sure they attended all necessary counseling appointments, according to Martin. The girls, meanwhile, were placed in separate group homes. The two sisters moved through a half-dozen living situations, ultimately ending up at Moore’s house on Legion Lane — not far from their grandmother’s house and together for the first time since they left her care. By this spring, Ja’Niah Bryant said, Moore’s home had become increasingly tense. In the weeks leading up to the shooting, she said, Moore had accused the girls of stealing the cards that carry cash benefits for food. And she said Moore sometimes left them unsupervised or with former foster children — women in their 20s who, Bryant said, berated them and mocked her sister’s speech impediment. After school on April 20, the two Bryant girls found themselves alone in the house with Tionna Bonner, 22, one of Moore’s former foster children. Bonner, who had come to celebrate Moore’s birthday the previous day, was now scolding the girls, saying they were habitually disrespecting Moore. “She’s like, ‘My mom told you all to clean up this house; it’s dirty,’” Ja’Niah Bryant said. The dispute escalated quickly, but when Ja’Niah Bryant called Moore, who was at work, she said she was too busy to get involved, Bryant said. So each of them called for backup: Bryant called her grandmother, and Bonner called another young woman, Shai-Onta Craig-Watkins, 20, who had lived in the house as a foster child. Neither Bonner nor Craig-Watkins agreed to be interviewed for this article. Hammonds rushed over and described standing on the stairway inside, trying to protect her granddaughters as the older women threatened to beat them up. Bonner had pulled out a knife, Ja’Niah Bryant and her grandmother said, and Ma’Khia had grabbed a steak knife from the kitchen. Ja’Niah Bryant went into her room and called 911. In the call, placed at 4:32 p.m., she asked for help as people shouted in the background. “It’s 3171 Legion Lane,” Ja’Niah Bryant told the dispatcher. “We got Angie’s grown girls trying to fight us, trying to stab us, trying to put her hands on our grandma. Get here now!” Twelve minutes later, the police arrived. In a brief lull, Craig-Watkins left the house, and the sisters began to pack up their things, thinking the worst of the situation was over. As they rushed out of the house, their father was pulling in to come to their aid. But also arriving was Craig-Watkins, who had returned with two more people. The two groups crossed paths, and Craig-Watkins spit toward the family, Ja’Niah Bryant and Jeanene Hammonds said. “I feel like that really made Ma’Khia really mad when she spit,” Bryant said. “That’s when everything just went left.” A police officer stepped out of his car and walked toward the driveway just as Ma’Khia Bryant turned her attention to Craig-Watkins and could be heard on a video from a neighbor’s surveillance camera threatening to stab her. As Ma’Khia Bryant charged, Craig-Watkins tumbled to the ground, and Myron Hammonds tried to kick her. Ma’Khia Bryant turned to Bonner and backed her up against a car. Ma’Khia Bryant raised a knife, and Officer Nicholas Reardon, a white 23-year-old who was the first officer to approach the scene, shot four times at her. As Bryant’s body lay on the ground, police officers led her sister inside Moore’s house, along with her father’s young son. Before an officer took her phone, she sneaked into a bathroom and made one more call for help. “I called my real mom — my biological mom — and I told her, I said, ‘I need you. They just shot Ma’Khia. Get here now,’” Bryant recalled. This article originally appeared in The New York Times. © 2021 The New York Times CompanyVariant COVID-19 infections skyrocketed following spring break in Florida and there have been more than 10,000 variant cases reported throughout the state, the South Florida Sun Sentinel reported based on data from the Florida Department of Health. The Florida Department of Health does not disclose variant cases on its public dashboard.
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