The Jason Arday scandal, part deux

[KatiePricesKnickers]

As the book launch is coming, let the discussion continue.

First thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5563599-the-jason-arday-scandal?utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share
This is lifted from the thread in the education section, which is an interesting summary
https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/the-great-and-unfortunate-story-of?r=8w0woc&triedRedirect=true

Or AIBU with not letting this fade away?

Unless they are all very very stupid, some of them at least must have known he was Billy Liar. I can't believe that there weren't mutterings about him over cups of coffee.

However, they were all terrified of being called racist. It's part of the same chain that allows police to let a young man die in the street because his murderer wasn't white.

These are terrible thing-clearly the murder is much, much worse -but the one good thing that might come out of it eventually is a re-setting of the belief that criticism of a black or brown person is racist.

It will only need a couple of other cases for the retreat from this shite to begin and that's a good thing.

That won't happen, but there should be questions around fraud and how this veers into a crime.

I'm amazed there haven't been any protests - yet.

It's an appalling thing to say isnt it. A pp alleging that critics want him 'lynched'. These disgusting violence suggestions are strangely coming from those who support him. Have we had we want him tarred and feathered yet?

No. We want an admission of guilt from both him and the Cambrudge dons. Not a 'poor me' statement but a 'yes I lied and lied and I am very sorry, particularly for the students that I conned' and Cambridge need to assure their staff and students that those responsible for enabling his fakery will be under strict supervision going forward.

The disability factor is so damaging and I guess you would only really understand if you are surrounded by people with disability. Look at some of the threads on here. "Will he ever talk?", "What will my child be like at x, y, z age", "What future will my child have?"

Jason Arday says he was diagnosed with 'a form of Autism called global developmental delay'. Well that simply isn't true because they aren't the same thing. It's possible he had ASD and he had global developmental delay as a result. However, he also says he was diagnosed with 'Aspergers Syndrome' but that diagnosis was only given when there was no speech delay. In other words, they met the speech milestones (single words by two and phrases by three), but may still struggle with the use of language (e.g. literal use of language). So he has made claims that are, at best, inaccurate.

Also for him to pay back the money he fraudulently obtained from all the universities he conned and to have a criminal record so he can't pop up somewhere and do it again.

For the students to be reimbursed their fees, awarded compensation and have their papers remarked.

Any good lawyer should be all over this. If anything, to officially discredit the Good Law Project. That shark infested set up is long overdue a toppling.

All accounts?

No, I think I am guilty of too much critical thinking

‘I felt Tourette's would ruin my life, now I teach at Cambridge'

So speaks the new ND poster person for Cambridge University, Dr Amanda Cole. Their PR people must have been going round begging staff to allow themselves to be used in this way.

Apologies to Dr Cole and anyone affected by Tourette’s but she has it mildly and controls it. I appreciate that must take effort and good for her with her achievements. But, the way she’s been wheeled in is a bit desperate.

It is the student side of things that gets me the most with all this, they are the victims not 'vulnerable or mentally whatever' him. They have seriously been let down by all the people that have endorsed or supported this clown.

Student fees are so much these days. Imagine your lectures being from someone like this and your papers getting mark by someone that is clearly incapable of writing his own work or even proofreading what he has copied and pasted. He wasted part of their education and they have been changed it.

Once you add to that the possible false hope he has given some parents of children with disabilities or the young people themselves it is beyond fuckwittery territory.

Interestingly there are at a number of universities he conned, so even if we only took Cambridge and Glasgow as examples (using AI for transparency) he could be liable for the following:

'A deliberately conservative estimate would be that Jason Arday may have taught or supervised around 120 students across his time at Glasgow and Cambridge.

For UK undergraduates, university tuition fees are typically around £9,250 per year in England. Some postgraduate and international students pay considerably more, but to keep the calculation conservative it is reasonable to use £9,250 per student for one academic year.

That gives:
120 students × £9,250 = approximately £1.11 million in tuition fees.

His estimated university earnings over the same period could be roughly:

• University of Glasgow: around £110,000–£135,000 over approximately 18 months.

• University of Cambridge: around £300,000–£370,000 over approximately 3½ years.

• Estimated combined salary: around £410,000–£505,000 gross.

So, using deliberately conservative assumptions, the students he may have taught or supervised could represent at least £1.1 million in tuition fees, compared with roughly £450,000 in estimated university salary received.

So a potential total figure of £1.55M that has been fraudulently obtained or collected.

The £1.1 million fees figure is not a calculation of his personal legal liability. It is simply an estimate of the tuition paid by a conservative assumed cohort; any compensation claim would depend on the individual circumstances, the extent of his involvement in each student’s education, and who was legally responsible'.

He better sell a lot of books then!

Unfortunately he is likely to now sell a lot of books because everyone will be buying to check out for more lies they can discover and to check out his writing skills.

I would say the students that have been affected by his teaching should get a percentage of their fees back relating to the percentage of their course he was involved in. They would have other lecturers/modules etc. However his teaching and marking could arguably have caused someone to fail a module or get lower overall degree result. So I suppose full re payment of degree should be seriously considered. What a mess!

I think by using the racially charged term "lynched" you are very much playing in to this guys hands. He has set a lot of traps in his deception. Race, neurodiversity, disability, illness, injury - all designed to both create false adversity, and a trip wire for those who might find him out. Clearly his race isn't falsified, but accounts of racism he'd suffered clearly were.

I doubt even the most frothing right winger wants to see him lynched. Did you mean this metaphorically? I don't want any over the top punishment and I hope Arday can find peace and a more truthful pursuit and live a full and happy life.

But. He must pay for what he has done. He has fraudulently obtained trappings of employment and provided unqualified substandard education to young people taking on vast debt for the privilege. He has deprived more qualified, brilliant people from securing the job and the education those young debt-ridden students have forked out for.

And. It isn't just him. It is the silly fools in positions of authority that were so keen to employ a person of colour, neurodiversity and learning impairments, that they couldn't, or didn't want to see his deception at the detriment to their institution and its fee paying students.

People don't want a lynching. They just see this as fraud and want the person responsible and the accomplices to answer for it.

Much as I don't want to argue with AI, I don't see how it would be fair to hold Arday responsible for the entirety of each student's tuition fees, given that university students normally have multiple lecturers.

I don’t think anyone is saying Arday was responsible for every single part of a student’s degree. The point is that students paid the university for a proper standard of teaching, supervision and assessment.

If some students can show that the part of their course he was responsible for was seriously below standard, and that it affected their experience or even their final result, then I think it is completely reasonable for them to ask the university for their fees back for that period.

The students’ contract was with the university, so the university should be the one compensating them in the first instance.

But if the university’s investigation eventually finds that Arday misrepresented his qualifications, failed to do what he was employed to do, or otherwise caused the university to suffer those losses, then I don’t see why the university shouldn’t try to recover that money from him.

That seems fairer than expecting students to carry the loss, or for the university to simply write it off if it turns out an individual was responsible for causing it.

Possibly because my dear long necked one if his teaching and marking has affected a students overall grade at end of year then he would arguably be responsible for them getting a lower degree result

Sure, but there's a lot of ifs there.

If his teaching and marking affected their overall grade for the year
If that grade for the year counted for their degree classification
If their degree classification was affected by that overall grade

And the assumption is that his shit teaching lowered students' grades. If he's also shit at marking, then he could have given students higher grades than they deserved. I'm not sure how uni marking is moderated, if at all, though.

I agree. It's not like he's the first person to exaggerate his qualifications to get a job. 75% of Cambridge professors are male. Do we really think they all got there on merit because women just can't compare?

What he did was wrong, but in the grand scheme of things, it's minor compared to many others whose crimes aren't obsessed over.

Why are you downplaying what he has claimed to 'exaggerating his qualifications' when that's not even the half of it?

Have you seen how many threads that Salt Path thing has generated?

People really want the attention that Arday is getting to be disproportionate because then they can call racism. However, I don't think it's unusual at all, especially given how funny and outrageous his claims have been.

It's pretty unlikely that one marker on one module would be able to tip the balance in this way. The calculations would be really difficult, too - after all, it's equally likely some will have done better than they otherwise would have, if, for example, he wasn't really on it with correcting the kinds of errors with which his own thesis was replete!

Don't get me wrong, the guy is an absolute grifter and those students were unlucky to be assigned him, and the whole story offends me deeply on a personal and professional level, but I don't think it's remotely workable to compensate anyone who feels that their overall mark was lower (there's always also the chance their work on that module was less good and would have been judged as such by any marker! So you would have to ask the rest of the team to remark every last thing!)

The most usual way to moderate AFAIK is that a module leader, course convenor, or whatever the term is at whatever institutiion, would send a batch to a colleague to confirm that they agree the basic grade boundaries and there is no issue with over- or under-marking. Obviously that's not a perfect system, and it varies in different institutions, but there will always be some version of moderation.

Yes please. They truly are a despicable organisation,

Not sure if this link will work but clearly this extends beyond Arday:

https://spectator.com/article/the-problems-with-the-faculty-of-education-go-beyond-jason-arday/

Given the research that shows how shoddy marking is in subjective subjects in national exams set by professional exam markers and marked by people trained in marking, I'm pretty sure that marking in university humanities department is more of an art than a science.