(The website of a fake California university has stolen the history and reputation of the University of Alberta. (University of Alberta)

 

By Anna McMillan,

CBC News

March 16, 2018

Website for California South University claimed its president is Justin Trudeau

A fake university in Irvine, Calif. has stolen the University of Alberta’s identity.

The now-inactive website for California South University claimed the institution’s campus “consists of 150 buildings covering 50 city blocks.” Similar wording is used on Wikipedia to describe the U of A’s North Campus in Edmonton.

The CSU website also stated “39,000 students from United States and 150 other countries participate in 400 programs in 19 faculties” — again, just like a description of the U of A on Wikipedia, if you swap the U.S. for Canada.

But those similarities aren’t a coincidence. The information on the CSU website was stolen from the U of A.

So were some of the campus names. The CSU website said the university has “five distributed campuses including, in addition to the North Campus, two auxiliary satellites: Campus Saint-Jean in southeast Edmonton, and Augustana Campus in Camrose.”

(The website for the fictitious California South University said it has five campuses, including Campus Saint-Jean in Edmonton and Augustana Campus in Camrose. (California South University)

Most of the content on the website was plagiarized from the U of A’s Wikipedia page — not exactly demonstrating the academic integrity post-secondary institutions try to promote.

The plagiarism is near-verbatim, only with the words “Edmonton” and “Alberta” replaced with “Irvine” and “California.” The plagiarizers didn’t bother to swap out the word “province” for “state,” meaning California is often referred to as a province.

The website was taken down Thursday night.

Scamming academics

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