Are Cheating Providers Catfishing Professors? Maybe.
Plus, Ireland says essay mills may be hiring on-campus "promoters" to gather information on assignments. Plus, an Honorlock executive writes on "hybrid" approaches.
Issue 134
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Are Cheating Companies Catfishing Professors to Stuff Their Essay Offerings? Maybe.
Inside Higher Ed has a first-person essay from Lee Brewer Jones, an English professor at Georgia State University, about someone using the identity of a theater writer to solicit answers and academic viewpoints.
The poser did not solicit anything else, save for the educator’s views and opinions on a specific dramatist. After discovering the ruse, the professor theorized:
that my answers may have been used as grist for companies that sell custom essays and other course materials to students. Despite the ready availability of TurnItIn and other plagiarism-prevention software, nothing prevents students from using paper mills for their essays or other written materials. Even doctoral dissertations sometimes, sadly, have ghostwriters, and some of our colleagues cheated their way through their terminal degrees, which they purchased rather than earned.
It’s true that students do use essay mills to buy papers instead of write them, and at alarming rates. And I try to never be shocked at what cheating profit-seekers will do to squeeze a dime out of academic dishonesty.
Still, in this case, I doubt the catfisher was part of a run-of-the-mill essay mill, if you will. The requested material was too specific to be broadly useful and, moreover, essay mills usually function on volume, they turn and burn written work - fast and without too much investment. Price and speed sell fake essays, not quality insights.
It probably doesn’t matter, but my hunch is the poser was turning the gathered material into, as Jones suggested, a graduate paper such as a dissertation. Even more likely is that Jones’s intellectual effort will be used in future published “research” from other academics. That practice is very common and highly profitable, especially in academic cultures with few authenticity safeguards.
Nonetheless, it’s almost certain the effort was undertaken for unscrupulous advantage by someone, for a price. And, as Jones says, it’s an important reminder that fraudsters and cheaters are out there every day, seeking any advantage they can gain to fuel their financial interests.
Also, I want to share this snippet from the Jones piece:
A truism among English professors, going back at least to when I entered the profession in the 1980s, holds that journalists are notorious slackers with respect to grammar, punctuation, italicization and pretty much everything about writing my professors taught me to hold dear.
Ouch.
Ireland: Essay Mills May Be Hiring On-campus “Promotors” to Collect Information on Assignments
Ireland, as you may know, is one of a few countries to ban the selling or advertising of cheatings services. In fact, it was among the first, doing so in 2019. As part of its ban, Ireland has a board - Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI) - that monitors cheating and works to reduce it.
What an idea.
In any case, a memo from the QQI came to the attention of a reporter who’s used it to write a few pieces on academic misconduct in Ireland - here and here and here.
That’s great. But since they are largely repetitive - being based on the same memo - I’m just going to pull parts of all three stories that may be of general interest.
One bit is that the QQI says:
INDIVIDUAL STUDENTS ARE being targeted by online services offering to write assessments for them while “promoters” are suspected to have been hired within colleges to gather inside information on assignments.
Students have even been contacted individually on WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram about specific essays they had to do as part of their college work.
Terrifying, but not entirely new.
Essay mills and other cheating providers have, for some time now, offered free services or discounts to students who will not only share assignment information but give access to classroom or school LMS systems, chat groups or even lists of student e-mail addresses. Armed with this, cheating companies can reach their targets more directly and with a better pitch. “Do you need answers to Professor Smith’s chemistry exam on Tuesday?” - for example.
Continuing:
(QQI) said it was suspected details of the assignments were either being provided by other students in exchange for discounts or where students had been hired as “promoters” on college campuses.
The direct hiring of students to gather assignment details - that is new. At least to me. I’ve seen it class by class but never as an ongoing job. Maybe it should not be a surprise considering that known cheating companies such as Course Hero have been making a big push to hire “campus reps” (see Issue 103).
The reporting continues that, according to QQI:
recent years had seen massive growth in ‘essay mills’ that offered “bespoke assignment writing services” to individual studies.
It said they had since expanded to include paraphrasing services – which try to get around counter-plagiarism tools that are in use in third level institutions.
QQI said international research showed as many as one in seven students may have used a contract cheating service
All true. In fact, speaking of Course Hero - just a reminder that they recently bought a very handy “paraphrasing service.” But they’re totally not a cheating company.
The most newsworthy bits of the three articles were that QQI said:
they had set up systems with TikTok, Google, Facebook, and Instagram where they could report profiles, posts, and search results that offered services which compromised academic integrity.
And a QQI spokesperson said,
“Regular check-in meetings with TikTok and Google will enable QQI to share trends of concern observed which may inform monitoring, community policies and [the] discoverability and ranking of search results.”
Again, what an idea.
If anyone asked these companies to stop promoting cheating companies in the U.S. or in Canada, who knows what they may say. We don’t know because, as far as I know, no one has asked.
And finally, the reporting also attributes the QQI as saying,
“The international reputation and credibility of the national education and training system, and that of the individual institutions within it, demands that our HEIs are bastions of academic integrity.”
What an idea.
Honorlock Executive Writes on “Hybrid Proctoring”
A VP at Honorlock, which provides remote exam security products, wrote an article for e-Campus News on what he calls, “a hybrid proctoring approach.”
It starts:
As online learning increasingly becomes part of the higher-ed experience, it is imperative that the methods and technologies used to deliver and monitor online learning maintain high levels of integrity, fairness and usability.
Clearly.
The piece highlights the benefits of using AI and human proctors together to monitor and proctor online exams and assessments. It’s a technique that the author calls “hybrid,” which is a new term to me.
But it’s a good refresher on the reality that there are at least four different types of exam monitoring or proctoring - passive with services that restrict certain in-exam activities, passive with AI monitoring of test sessions only, “hybrid” that uses a human proctor and AI and finally, a live human proctor only.
The most important line of the piece may be this:
AI is a powerful tool that can provide an abundance of benefits for the online learning experience. However, it isn’t always perfect and shouldn’t be used alone.
Different schools, teachers, programs and exams have different needs and standards. But the ‘don’t use AI alone’ idea seems to be an emerging consensus among proctoring providers.
Reminder: That Ridiculous Course Hero Summit Coming Up
Just a reminder. That ridiculous and confusing Course Hero “summit” is coming up in about two weeks.
Ridiculous and confusing are not the words I really want to use.
To see what academics and professors and others have signed up to share their personal and institutional credibility with a cheating provider, check the link above.