I don't know the specifics of the situation. I generally assume I'm only getting part of the story when I read these sorts of articles. However, knowing Dr. Lukacs, he is most probably correct and in the right on (almost?) everything he is saying, and he is most certainly being royally f*'d over by the university.

That being said, it was just a matter of time until he went up against someone who didn't appreciate his lack of social skills. He is certainly not a diplomatic person by any means. He's one of those guys who would go up to you, tell you how everything about you is wrong (assuming you are in fact wrong), and be honestly perplexed when you get upset about it.

In short, he reminds me of that scene in The Big Lebowski: "You're not wrong, Walter, YOU'RE JUST AN ASSHOLE". This guy is Walter. He's not wrong, but his lack of tact pissed off someone in power over him.

I hope he comes out of this on top, because (as far as I can tell) he didn't do anything wrong, and even if his conduct was in error, seriously university, thanks for giving my degree a bad reputation (by proxy; I got CS, not math).

Just some insight from someone who knows the guy (me!). Hope you find it interesting

Most large companies don't have a place for him either. Telling your boss directly he's wrong (even if he is) is a career staller, and going over his head will definitely give you enemies.

There are probably quite a few "Walters" here on HN who said "F* it, I'll do my own startup".

It's funny that you would say that, because it seems there are few environments better suited to people like Lukacs than academia. The way they see it: sure, the politics is a pain in the ass, but at least they're in an environment where they can make very substantial contributions to the world. The pain of politics is worth doing what they love.

Disclosure: my father is a very well known research professor in his field, who is always complaining about campus politics. "So why are you still there?" always gets the response, "Where else could I go to do this?" If you happen to know somewhere else, let us know.

And given his achievements, and speed at which he has achieved them, he is one of those people who probably won't have trouble getting tenure, no matter how much of a dick he is being.

No. We have to bend organizations into compatibility.

It's said that a reasonable person adapts itself to reality and doesn't try to change the world. Therefore, all the progress comes from the unreasonable ones.

He received his PhD at age 20. He forced Air Canada to change it's policy that claimed the airline wasn't responsible for lost luggage. He's standing up for the integrity of his profession. And he's only 27.

I hope he continues to contribute to society outside of the domain of theoretical maths.

The question is, though, how do we positively reward this type of action? For example, if the professor is fired, my guess is that he will have a hard time finding a job somewhere else, because he has rocked the boat. But, he deserves much better than that. How do we solve that?

I doubt it. In fact, I suspect the first thought of every mathematics department chair in Canada upon reading this story was "Lukacs is running into problems at Manitoba? Is there any way we can get him to come here instead?"

"Exam anxiety" sounds a lot like "cannot focus in situations where results are expected". I would have thought that that's actually a reasonable requirement for a PhD.

Take job interviews for example. I hold a CS degree from a major university and my business is a website that so far gets 500,000 pageviews a month and is profitable. It was coded and designed by me from scratch; its server is administered and monitored by me; its community and customer support is managed by me. Given these accomplishments I would say I have a reasonable grasp of the art of web programming. But put me in a job interview situation where an interviewer asks me to write an implementation of something basic like a linked list and I'll probably manage to screw it up somehow. Then when I get sent home and I sit down in front of my monitor, I'll have it done in 5 minutes. Does my being unable to cope with programming interview situations make me a bad programmer? Does being unable to cope with a math exam make one a bad math researcher?

Edit: though on the whole I do agree that degrees nowadays are being handed out like candy and far to often to people completely undeserving of them.

But the recognition of a PhD is something altogether different. It's not something that any person has a right to. And it seems to me that the only way to get one ought to be to prove that one has earned it, and deserves it. To have a shortcut that says "he could have earned it but for this disability" changes the degree from one of recognizing achievement to a (subjective) judgment of potential.

My CS courses were basically all dependent on exam scores - I would estimate that on average 75% of the course grades came from exams.

In some of the courses, even as late as my 3rd and 4th years, people weren't able to complete projects that had even moderate amounts of coding, even in Java. I would much rather have seen a more 50/50 grading scale (at least in courses that it made sense for - I don't see much of a way to get around exams in theory courses) so that a good grade would require strength in both application and theory.

It's worth noting that the CS department is the only department at this university that applies this grading requirement- I'm a little surprised the other engineering programs haven't picked it up.

I suspect if they ran source-level comparisons on the programming projects at your university, they would find a huge amount of copying between students.

The most worrying is not copying but students outsourcing their assignments. I've googled coding questions before just to find them on rentacoder.com.

Just last week a student offered me money to do their assignment for them. (but of course I flatly declined.) I've heard from some first years the market price for completing that assignment was $75.

Personally I'd hate to go through the university process and make it all the way to PhD only to choke on the exam and be denied the qualification. That's a lot of time, money, and effort lost on such an archaic practice.

I know this may not sound very helpful (I too resisted at first), but have you tried to seek specialized help? A good therapist should be able to help you deal with whatever issues you have that could be causing the condition. It's like hiring an experienced bug fixer.

But more importantly, how do you make sure such excuses are not exploited by people simply failing the standards?

Exam anxiety is real, but the university already had procedures in place about how to deal with that anxiety. Something is wrong, however, when a student only claims exam anxiety after the fact. You know you're anxious about exams before that point. If you are under stress a single time, you know it then. The student already failed that exam once. If the first time he/she was anxious, it should have been reported then. If not, they had a fair shot at passing that exam.

The decision of the dean to change how the exam was to be dealt with is not brilliant, but somewhat OK. It's the upgrading of undergraduate coursework to be doctoral level that should be smelling bad. Messing with the way the exam was to be delivered was simply the smoke from the dodgy fire that was burning underneath.

In August 2010 (according to the timeline on the left of the article), one of the student's undergrad courses was upgraded to a PhD level course.

Suspension of the prof for violating student's privacy by complaining about the case.

Keep in mind this is the same University of Manitoba that will turn over your personal information to bill collectors should you not pay a parking ticket.

(UofM Computer Engineering 1998)

The spokesman pointed out that this was health-related information (since the student had a doctor diagnose his test anxiety); it'd be reasonable to treat that more carefully.

I tend to agree, but apparently the university believes in it, and requires a doctor's note. Given that, I can't really be surprised that they treat it as health information.

That said, "exam anxiety" might be a new one to try in the college admissions racket.

Of course, the student in question remembered about his illness after the exam in PhD program. It does strike me as a little weird that someone wouldn't find out earlier.

Furthermore, exam anxiety does not mean that he should have no exams, just a modified form of exams. It seems that the university officials got in conflict over what the form should be, and dean at some point decided to get rid of the exam altogether, which definitely does strike me as wrong.

http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/11/01/umanitoba%E2%80%94phd-dip...

Lukacs wasn't on the board when this student was exempted from the exam requirement or had his course upgraded. Another professor resigned in protest and Lukacs took his place.

He had never met the student until he served the student with papers for the lawsuit.

The University says it has suspended Lukacs without pay for violating the student's privacy by naming the student and discussing the student's medical conditions in the lawsuit. UofM claims this is a violation of academic privacy and a violation of the law concerning medical privacy.

Lukacs claims he is acting so that his good name is not sullied by being associated with a degree mill. Interesting, to say the least. I see many laudatory comments here. Are other universities as interested in having Lukacs on board as posters here would suggest? If so, why not go to a place with the standards he admires, instead of trying to carry UofM on his shoulders?

In general, the laws are pretty strict about not releasing information. Student and health information is not supposed to be available to anyone except on a need-to-know basis, much less made available publicly. Our product had to have an elaborate system of permissions to prevent instructors from inappropriately viewing student data. Even something as apparently innocuous as posting a list of grades matched up against student names or IDs is forbidden.

The laws aren't for show, either. Everyone I interacted with in the course of that job, from bureaucrats down to individual instructors, took FOIPP very seriously. FOIPP compliance was a non-negotiable feature, and FOIPP violation bugs were always highest priority.

Typically, instructors become aware of student disabilities when they are asked to make special arrangements, such as arranging assistant note takers or special exams. Anyone who reveals that information is breaking educational and medical privacy, and would be in for a world of hurt.

I'm not aware if there are special exceptions for information released in the course of a lawsuit, but I'm not surprised that the university reacted severely. They take those laws seriously here.

Because if he can fix UofM others will benefit. If he moves on, nobody will. There is competitive pressures on universities to become degree mills and it must be stopped.

I think historically it was not uncommon for people to just submit a thesis, but nowadays nearly everyone getting a PhD will do so while being at the University and in close collaboration with his Doctoral advisor.

I think that's the slippery slope that the Prof in question is worried about. Right now, a PhD from the University of Manitoba should hold more value than a purchased one from a diploma mill. If enough of the requirements are waived, this may no longer be the case.

Any specific examples of this? (In Germany or elsewhere?)

The common model is to take a job as an assistant researcher with the chair of your Professor, work on your PhD thesis and papers 50% of the time, and be treated like cheap slave labour by your professor the other 95% (sic!) of the time.

Not likely. To be fair, if I was to name and shame I may as well pack my bags and leave the country.

All I'll say is that these are red-brick Uni's in the UK.

A close friend highlighted the issue through a discovery he made whilst developing plagarism detection software for a private organisation that worked closely with a certain collective of Universities, I recognised one of the names of the people he mentioned and I know for a fact, due to my own personal connection with the individual that she never attended or would even come close to qualifying for the PhD she claims to have been awarded.

Another Swedish gentleman who I became very good friends with during my travels in NZ eventually disclosed how he achieved his PhD through certain 'investments' and has since used said qualification to leverage his residency application to stay in NZ permanently.

Of course, perfectly understandable.

> All I'll say is that these are red-brick Uni's in the UK.

Which are the 'redbrick' ones? Are they the ones which used to be polytechnics, or Oxbridge, or the ones in between like Bath and Glasgow?

Like this you mean, http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/univ/degrees/honorary/ ?

>"I'm familiar with a handful of PhD holders who didn't even attend the University that granted it."

"Like this?" I asked. The parent comment was vague and my enquiry was, in part, to ascertain whether the commenter was referring to those who get degrees by being rich and|or famous or whether he was referring to direct purchase.

Now he has expanded on his point my question is largely moot but the comment stands to point out that there is another class of individuals given degrees that didn't earn them (by fulfilling _academic_ requirements).

I found it annoying at graduation that some people being given degrees by my Uni simply because those people were doing their [highly paid] job (being actors, sportsmen, politicians, company directors, etc.).

It's just cheap PR for the University.

Instead of handing out degree certs they should work out some other system to brown-nose "celebrities".

But they already have. They don't hand out "degree certs" to celebrities. They hand out something entirely different: Honorary Degrees. These are completely different, in look and meaning, from actual academic degrees. Celebrities are not being given real PhDs. A "Doctor of Laws, honoris causa" is not the same as J.S.D. You'd get laughed out of every meeting on the planet if you tried to pretend your honorary doctorate was even remotely the same thing as a real academic certificate.

In the same way that Monopoly Money doesn't devalue real money, Honorary Degrees do not devalue degree certificates, because they are an entirely different item that simply happen to share a word in common.

The bottom line is that a doctorate is not an easy thing to get, it's stressful and some people probably can't take the stress.

Then, Unfortunately, they should not get doctorate. (I realize this sounds awful and unfair, but it is actually the only fair deal)

Specifically, I see people from time to time who I feel perhaps did not work as hard for their rank as I did for mine.

The lesson I've learned in the end is don't trust credentials too much. If you want to find out what kind of martial artist someone is, don't look at the belt, look at how they train.

I would imagine the same can be said for a PhD. Don't look at the degree, read the research!

Think about how bad it would be, if medical degree holders do not know how to treat people, pilot license holder do not know how to fly airplanes or civil engineer degree holder not knowing what alleviation is safe for the suspension bridge. The only way patients/flying authorities/ government authorities etc. would know if a doctor/pilot/engineer is qualified to carryout the assigned task, if the degree actually reflect a reasonable level of proficiency in the particular field.

I would also offer however, that even those professions do not completely trust the degree. Each one of those professions has a number of oversight and regulation bodies which are inconstant contact with the the practitioners. Specifically:

- Malpractice insurers who specify covered and non-covered activities

- Professional colleges which review practitioners regularly - the FAA

And so forth.

  > - Malpractice insurers who specify covered and
  > non-covered activities

If papers and research are exemplary, I see no reason that exams should disqualify someone from obtaining a Doctorate. The bar should be somewhat higher, but not to the point that the only way you can get a PhD without passing all the exams is to win a Nobel.

I don't know how well that applies to this specific case, however.

Typically, other than exceptional cases, usually there is a bare minimum requirement to meet(on some criteria or other) to avoid disqualification. System needs its rules to run efficiently.

Higher education at that level is very stressful, and a part of me is offended that certain anxieties are given exceptions since they're 'health disorders', while other, just-as-crippling anxieties are ignored.

As time moves forward, shouldn't we be setting the bar higher, not continually dropping it lower and lower? Why, in so many areas, are standards sliding rather than getting stronger (not just in education, but in government and some industries, too)?

What's happening to personal responsibility and a clear set of rules by which to play the game? Am I wrong in seeing things this way?

We put pressures on them to lower prices and they responded by packing passenger in as little space as medically safe and by serving the most lightweight food that will keep you alive during the flight.

We turned airlines into people movers just like we are turning universities into degree mills.

And then finally, and this may not be the majority of cases but I've seen this happen from very close myself, a part of the problem is the many exchange students who come from developing countries and pay big bucks for their studies. These people have sometimes scraped together everything they and their extended families have to go to the West. If they fail their program, to them it feels like they might as well have been executed on the spot. There's no way they can go back to their countries without a degree. I've seen people on the brink of suicide over the thought of failing exams and having to go back (yes, other ('native') students also get exam anxiety, I'm not dismissing those).

So imagine being a professor and having to grade a thesis of a guy that is only a few years younger than you are (these students often come after several years of working and saving), with a wife and a family to support. You know he doesn't live up to the standards of the program. You also know that everybody else knows (academics at universities in the area) so nobody's going to give him a postdoc anyway. So there's no real harm in giving him the degree, at least not until 'the work gets out' and all diplomas devaluated. The student will most likely be going back to where he came from, where he's going to be welcomed as a genius and offered a cushy government or consulting job. All in all, there he's still going to be quite good, at least compared to the other people at the places that would hire him (yes there are very bright Indian, Chinese etc. students who are just as good as any Western student, I'm not disparaging Asians in general - I'm talking about this specific subset of 'academic refugee students').

And then consider that if you fail this guy, you know you're basically doing the equivalent of a 'thumbs down' in a Roman amphitheater. That's a tough decision to make. I know, this sort of factors shouldn't come into play, but that's easy to say from behind a desk far far away from this situation. I've seen people seriously struggle with this dilemma, and I've seen choices being made in both directions. It's heart wrenching, and it makes people think several times before accepting a next student who may turn out this way.

Expect to see more of it as it gained traction among in US colleges of education about 20 years ago - particularly in primary education departments.

On the bright side, at least it's not an MD.

Edit: I believe that in general mainstreaming and inclusion are a good public policy concept with a really thorny ethical issue attached. The thorny issue is, at what point you tell the student, "We were only kidding. You're not really smart enough to continue on the academic path with your classmates."

In the US its rise coincided with that of facilitated communication in the classroom for autistic individuals. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facilitated_communication

Both ideas gained a lot of traction in primary education departments in the early 90's [US]. Primary educators loved Mainstreaming because they were able to pretend the thorny issue didn't exist and let it be dealt with at the secondary level.

As with any bureaucracy, secondary educators have an incentive to continue to pass the buck and little to gain by kicking the mayor's autistic nephew out of AP calculus (so to speak).

But I am not sufficiently familiar with the enrollment policies of English Universities in the 1950's to speculate on a counterfactual.

That's one of the ideas behind mainstreaming: put the kids into mainstream environments, with assistance as needed, in order to bring out whatever potential might be there. (Kinda like with 'normal' kids, expose them to art to bring out artistic talents, etc.)

Mainstreaming is not only about cognitive impairment. It's disabilities in general. Taking the deaf kid, the kid in a wheelchair, or the kid with a cognitive impairment, and putting them in classes with non-disabled kids, rather than isolating them with others 'of their own kind'.

At the level of primary education, this competition of interests is easy for educators to ignore since many of the objectives are social rather than academic and primary classrooms naturally contain students with widely ranging levels of cognitive development.

However, at what point do you use absolute achievement rather than relative to the individual? Middle School? High School? Undergraduate? Graduate? Professional Licensing?

The article points to a case well down the slippery slope. Replace "PhD in Math" with "JD" and your at the bottom...unless of course, one advocates requiring courts to consider the cognitive impairments of an attorneys when evaluating the merits of their briefs.

The problem is that at some point the consequences of relative standards could seriously affect other people...that's why chiropractors aren't allowed to perform open heart surgery.

To cast it in terms of rights, my right to maximize my opportunities does not trump your right to maximize your opportunities, and vice versa.

It's a specific thing. You're stretching the definition.

It's like someone says, "I don't have cancer, I have aids," and you reply, "Well, aids is a kind of cancer, since it gets into your body and then spreads like a cancer eventually killing you."

Not really. For many, it's just that it's not "their thing". More that 50% of the incoming students failed the first semester at the college I attended. Many tried a couple times and then went away to pursue other careers. I would never favor dumbing down the curriculum to accommodate people who want to be professional engineers but can't do math...

One day, I could be flying the planes they designed.

Here in Australia, the last degree involving exams and course work is the Masters. A PhD involves writing a thesis on new and original work under the supervision of your adviser. It usually takes 2 to 3 years. There are no exams.

I'd be interested to hear the perspective of those from the US and Europe.

The candidacy exam is one of the exams the student got out of. There is, of course, then the proposal and the final defense.

There must be a few differences. 2 years is an incredibly short time period to get a Phd.

here is Canada, and any US program I looked at... 4 years is usually a minimum and 5 years is common.

What people are talking about here is usually the US system, where your PhD path includes Masters classes. You get a Masters along the way (I have mine in a drawer somewhere), but this is incidental along the path to the PhD. It takes 2-3 years to get those classes out the way, then you're all research. The system is the same as you are describing, except that Americans don't tend to split them up in their heads.

What you're describing is maybe how they are funded - but not the reality in my experience.

The absolute minimum time you could complete it was 3 years, but typically you were expected to take 5-7 years (though it was also expected that you'd be teaching at a university during the last couple of years).

Seems like it would be something that's hard to draw the line between a legitimate psychological issue and normal behavior. I'd venture that nearly everyone experiences some sort of "exam anxiety".

Speaking as a college professor, I see that in practice the key distinction is that the students with the actual disability both A) get a doctor's note and B) tell me long in advance of requesting any specific accommodations. And much of the time they don't even dip very heavily into their accommodations---they may be allotted double time on an exam, for instance, but on an exam where the best un-disabled students finish in 35 minutes, the double-time students (who often are very good students) take the full period or slightly longer, rather than the full 100 minutes they're allotted.

I'm not going to try to diagnose the UM student here, but I will note that it is somewhat suspicious that the "exam anxiety" claim didn't come up until after he or she had failed for the second time.

That's the bit that smells rotten for me too. I was receiving counseling for exam anxiety, and I knew full well about it when I was 17, not at the end of a PhD exam when I'm 22+, that I've already taken once already.

There's a certain point where one has to step back and say "You had all this time to see a doctor, and yet you've made it this far without one, so why are you claiming this now after the fact?"

I remember once I was teaching a class, and one of the students sprung this on me: he claimed he had some issues with the tests and the time required was too short (in reality, my tests were always designed such that if you knew the material you could ace them in 20 minutes; if you didn't, you could sit there for an hour. And they were open book, open notes, so no memorization required).

So the next test came, and I told him: take as long as you want; I'll be here. The test started at 6pm (it was an evening course). Most of the class left in an hour or so. But he stayed. And I stayed with him. I did my reading, etc. Finally, at 1AM, he gave up and said he was done.

The next day, he dropped the course.

If your exams are written in such a way that they're completely time-dependent anyway, you have bigger problems with your examination procedures.

I'm not sure how I feel about the classification, but I had never heard of anyone failing to get it who tried hard enough. Although it doesn't help turn a D into a B, it seems very useful when you're in the A range competing for graduate schools (which they both pursued).

Most (maybe all?) US universities will make similar allowances for students with mental illness. The student and teacher usually work out alternatives for assignments if necessary.

> Seems like it would be something that's hard to draw the line between a legitimate psychological issue and normal behavior. I'd venture that nearly everyone experiences some sort of "exam anxiety".

This is exactly the problem with a number of different psychiatric disorders. The bad cases, those are easy to diagnose. The closer you get to the "average" end of the spectrum is where it gets harder to distinguish. In these cases, I think it's always a good idea to get a second opinion.

Personally, I think this is just some kind of university political coup. It's my impression that (in the States) getting a PhD isn't really about exams. Instead, one focuses on doing research and choosing something to specialize on in their field. Research stuff, publish stuff, pass classes, propose thesis, write thesis.

Unless it's different in Canada, who cares if this kid didn't take an exam? If he has done some research, published something, and written a thesis, I'm pretty okay with him having earned a PhD.

I'm sure there's about a million different things I don't know about this particular incident, though. It does seem really weird that this professor would take the issue to the legal system. Wouldn't that jeopardize his future in academia? Doesn't seem worth it.

I mean, he seems to be making the statement that someone who produces excellent papers and research but is incapable of coming up with a coherent response to an arbitrary topic in a short timeframe is unworthy of a PhD.

It seems to me there's a place for people who can't think on their toes, even among the ranks of the official Doctors.

Doesn't everyone get some sort of "exam anxiety". Isn't ability in exam like situations part of what is being tested?

Does anyone have info about what the alternate testing methods are. They should be elective in any case to provide equal opportunity. For example if the alternative is a extended project and viva then any student should be allowed to take the alternative. Also the degree transcript should make it clear how the degree was achieved so that an employer doesn't wrongly assume a skill (working under [exam] pressure) that the applicant doesn't have.

This is what the argument is about here, that the value of the PhD is being cheapened. If a person was judged by his projects, this would become irrelevant.

When I go to a doctor's office, I don't really always have time to investigate in detail the various projects he undertook.

What's at stake here is that the agency tasked with upholding the standard (the U of Manitoba) seems to have slackened the agreed-upon standard for the sets of projects involved to reach the level of "PhD in Mathematics".

  > When I go to a doctor's office, I don't really always
  > have time to investigate in detail the various
  > projects he undertook.