Greg Mayer writes:

A colleague recently sent me this paper which might interest you, as it is about “cooking” the ranking data, and the lack of consequences for bad behavior in academic settings.

It’s mostly an argument that the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) is corrupt, but hinges on a dean at Temple’s business school of being actually convicted of fraud, but there being no repercussions for the school from the AACSB, which alleges to enforce and vouch for the high ethical standards of its accredited institutions (including “Any school that deliberately misrepresents data contained within an accreditation report or within AACSB’s Business School Questionnaire is subject to revocation of accreditation status . . .”)

I followed the link, and . . . check this out:

The former dean of Temple University’s business school was convicted Monday on charges of conspiracy and wire fraud for a scheme in which he and others used false data to boost the school’s position on the US News and World Report’s rankings . . .

“Used false data to boost the school’s position on the US News and World Report’s rankings . . .” Sounds familiar, no?

The news article continues:

[Business school dean] Porat conspired with Isaac Gottlieb, a statistics professor at Fox [that’s the name of Temple University’s business school], and Marjorie O’Neill, manager of finance at Fox, to give false information to US News about Fox’s online MBA (OMBA) and part-time MBA (PMBA) programs. In particular, they falsely stated how many students took the GMAT, their average work experience and the percentage of students who were enrolled part time, the indictment states. . . .

Gottlieb and O’Neill have both pleaded guilty to conspiracy and have not yet been sentenced, according to court records.

Using the juiced numbers, US News ranked Fox’s OMBA program as the best in the country from 2015 to 2018, and Fox’s PMBA program rose in the US News rankings from 53rd in 2014 up to 7th in 2017. Porat used these rankings in the school’s marketing materials, and enrollment in the programs increased significantly, the indictment states. . . .

On January 8, 2018, the website Poets & Quants published an article about the MBA rankings that noted suspiciously that Fox claimed all of its OMBA students had taken the GMAT. Fox administrators and officials saw the article and, in a meeting with Porat and others, became concerned because they knew that data was inaccurate . . . Despite that meeting, Porat gave a champagne toast touting the school’s latest No. 1 ranking, and a few hours later sent out a marketing email boasting of the latest top ranking . . .

Here’s some good news:

Temple hired the outside law firm Jones Day to investigate the incident, and Porat, Gottlieb and O’Neill gave “false or misleading” statements to the investigators, the indictment states.

I don’t know that Columbia University has hired any outside auditor to check how our fake numbers were produced. It might be that such an investigation is happening or has happened; I just haven’t heard about it.

The thing that really caught my eye about the above story was that one of the conspirators was a statistics professor!

I looked him up and here he is:

Dr. Gottlieb was a full clinical professor at Temple University, Fox Business school, department of Statistical Science (2009-2018.) Previously 1997-2008 he was a faculty member at Rutgers University. . . . Over the last 20 years, he has taught how to use Excel—and how to apply it effectively to various business disciplines—to thousands of MBA and Executive MBA students at Rutgers, Temple, NYU, Columbia and other universities. . . .

No mention of the bit about pleading guilty to conspiracy. But there’s this, on his Consulting page:

My experience has always improve efficiency, reduced overhead and eliminated errors in every project.
Eliminated errors in data entry and enabled reducing labor and manual operations.

But that’s inaccurate. In the U.S. News project, it seems that he created errors. That’s the opposite of eliminating them.

I guess he has a future as the Bursar at Second Chance U.

In all seriousness, this really makes me mad. A statistics professor doing that!