Chegg: An Idea to Limit Cheating Would be Unfair to Students
Plus, researchers say that “overwhelmingly, faculty choose not to report" academic integrity violations.
Issue 10, March 3
Chegg Says Delaying Answers so Students Can’t Cheat Would Be “Really Unfair”
A recent EdSurge podcast (February 23), hosted by Jeff Young, focused on Chegg which it says, “has become synonymous with cheating.”
The podcast title is, “More Students Are Using Chegg to Cheat. Is the Company Doing Enough to Stop It?” The answer, by the way, is no. The better question is whether they want to.
The podcast opens with a very familiar story. A professor at the University of Oregon found his exam questions, and answers, on Chegg. Students posted questions and got answers during the exam.
Young interviews Tricia Bertram Gallant, a familiar name in academic integrity and former head of the ICAI, the International Center for Academic Integrity. She lays out that cheating on exams is probably “skyrocketing” and says of sites like Chegg,
If they were truly interested in academic integrity and helping institutions uphold academic integrity and their sites are truly about helping students learn, not about cheating, then a simple delay from the time of the posting of the question and the answer of the question would help
She continued,
That is, you know, a simple thing to do and I guess you’d have to ask those businesses, “why won’t you do that?”
Young asked Candace Sue, the Head of Academic Relations at Chegg. Sue conceded a delay was, “a very common request from faculty” but said Chegg won’t delay answers because,
It’s really unfair in our view to make [students] wait for an artificial delay.
That fairness is upended by stopping cheating is Newspeak.
The Chegg argument is that students have limited time to study.
What they’re really saying is that if you’re paying someone to give you answers to your school work, you should get it when you want it. Otherwise, it’s unfair.
ICAI Presentation: Perhaps Just 1% of Cheating Violations are Reported
The ICAI (International Center for Academic Integrity) is holding its annual conference this week. On Tuesday, February 2, researchers from Medicine Hat College (CAN) presented, “Oh What a Tangled Web We Weave: How Reporting Academic Integrity Violations Impacts Faculty Relationships.” The YouTube is here.
Jason Openo, Director, Teaching and Learning and Rick Robinson, Interim Dean, School of Business & Continuing Studies cited research showing that only about 1% of faculty report academic integrity violations.
One percent. So, when you see reporting of hundreds of cases of cheating at a school, that’s the 1% that’s actually reported.
Openo said,
there appears to be a lack of concerted action on their part of faculty to address academic integrity violations
Part of that, Openo said was a
denial of the problem or a denial of harmful consequences [of cheating]
But the base of the research is that perhaps the primary reason that faculty do not report misconduct is the emotional toll that reporting takes. Openo said,
We believe that the biggest barrier to factor in making a concerted effort against academic integrity violations is concept of emotional labor
Adding, significantly, that
This may be especially true for probationary and part time faculty who jeopardize positive teacher ratings and risk future economic wellbeing by pursuing cases of academic dishonesty.
A large portion of the emotional cost of reporting cheating, the researchers presented, was the perceived or actual risk to student the faculty relationship.
Robinson added
the results of our research tend to support the idea that faculty in general will continue to not report if we don’t do anything to change it. There are things we can do to lesson the emotional labor load.
Those things include connecting teachers to the outcomes of their reports, initiating real time support for faculty and dealing with part time faculty, who may face more significant consequences when reporting violations.
In the last “The Cheat Sheet” I noted that an article about cheating at Harvard Westlake, the elite private high school, had disappeared from its website. It’s back. No response as to why it was missing for a time. The article is here.
Coming up in the next “The Cheat Sheet” - more presentations from the ICAI conference including presentations on the impact of a culture of cheating and more on Chegg. To get it, subscribe: