Tuesday, December 20, 2022

Expert testimony helped twins accused of cheating on a medical school exam successfully sue the university for defamation

LAT:

A professor who was remotely monitoring an eight-hour exam noticed that the twins were progressing similarly though the questions and had many of the same incorrect answers. To her, that meant they were cheating.

The Binghams filed a lawsuit against the university and turned to Nancy Segal, a Cal State Fullerton psychology professor who has spent her career studying twins, to help clear their names.

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Segal opened the Twins Studies Center at Cal State Fullerton when she began working at the college in 1991.

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Segal was in her last year of college at Boston University when her abnormal psychology professor gave an assignment to write about people adjusting to situations. Segal decided to draw on a situation from her childhood in New York City, where her fraternal twin sister tested into a more advanced elementary school class than she did.