> This year one of my students claimed to have done a user experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to his house during a period of 4 days. This is extremely unlikely, not to say absurdly unrealistic.

I'm not familiar with conducting a user experience test. Why is this so unbelievable? (Also, the rest of the story is kinda hilarious; there will definitely need to be some standards and process changes in academia.)

depends on the situation but generally most people aren't that enthusiastic to be your UX guinea pigs, and it isn't that much fun to administer the same test so many times in a single day (think of how bored your optometrist sounds as they ask you which lens is better). I worked at a shop that had a target of 3-5 users for any given UX testing because usually it starts to get repetitive after that - you tend to hit the diminishing returns portion of the curve.

So if you assume that the UX tests were short (20-30 minutes) you're still talking ~15 total hours spent on UX testing, or two full work days. That would be a surprising amount of time.

As someone else said, it's conceivable that they ran very short studies on a large number of people in the context of having a party or a couple of small gatherings, but it does seem unlikely overall.

Just to recap: very generously, a college student with money to spend (that might sound like a joke but I consider fortunate circumstances) on convincing people that it’s worth their time to sit through a usability test actually going through with it “for the lulz”. The part about a person being willing to do a bunch of work to avoid doing a bunch of work makes sense (typical “mental gymnastics”) but it kinda falls apart at 30+ real people legitimately agreeing. It’s ironic that a single-digit amount is just as useful; that’s even a more believable lie.

Thanks for explaining!

You have to get people to actually come to your house voluntarily in the middle of the week to sit down and do some boring stuff in your computer. And it all just clicked with everyone’s schedules in four days. I usually can’t get people to even answer a 5-minute online form, let alone get them to drive to my house. Maybe he’s just popular (which he isn’t, by the way; and a confessed previous cheater.)

> This year one of my students claimed to have done a user experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to his house during a period of 4 days.

Is it possible that maybe he thrown a big party (or a series of parties) and asked the folks there to try his stuff? Not sure what is the length and depth of the usability test in question, but if it is a short questionnaire that might work? But I see where your suspicion is coming from.

I believe in Occam’s Razor, so I’d say no. This guy was already caught cheating before, also.

This surprisingly remind me of the last to birthday parties I organized for myself. Unexpectedly I managed to get much more people together than I expected. Simply by actually trying to ask as many people as possible. I was really happy about this. Both times.

Maybe that student was doing the same. Simply asking a lot of people. And other studends usually do not. I find it really hard to overcome my own shyness in this regard. And I wouldn't consider myself particularly shy. I assume a lot of people simply do not try asking enough people in order to get a decent amount of them to join.

Of course that guy might be simply cheating, but I just wanted to share the story.

> Not sure what to do anymore,

Scan the signatures and reverse image search them. Or look one or two of the people up on facebook and ask them whether they did the study.

To add: If it turns on this is legit, ask him how he did it so that you can advise others on what to do for their theses.

Surely the guy just wrote a bunch of random signatures. Otherwise it would be obvious that they weren't captured by the same device.

I don't believe it's easy to make up 30 different signatures without them having similar style.

In middle school, I put a lot of time into a paper for a history class, at least three times what anyone else did (probably more). I got a B for the class. The teacher said it felt like the paper was copied, because the writing was "too professional" and that middle school students don't write like that. The teacher was wrong. I just happened to have worked really hard because the topic was interesting to me.

Are there rules about investigation? In general, if someone makes a claim, it invites testing.

The consent forms are likely friends, so calling to ask questions about the experience should give you an idea of what to believe.

The outcome can be your decision. Meet with the student and tell them their degree is in jeopardy and use it as a teaching lesson, or prove to them that they can get away with believable lies as long as no one has the courage to catch them. Your colleagues should have some insights, as well.