Chegg Being Sued. Again. KPMG Fined. Again.
Plus, schools must invest to stop cheating. Plus, major cheating inquiry opens in South Africa.
Issue 171
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Chegg Being Sued. Again.
Honestly, I’ve lost track of how many investor-related class action legal challenges Chegg is now facing - see Issue 83, or Issue 163 or Issue 167.
But according to published news, the cheating provider may be facing another class action suit, this one related to its mind-blowing data breaches. If you’re not up on Chegg’s data deficiencies, I did a summary of their misdeeds in Issue 161. They are very bad - like 40 million users bad.
Anyway, according to coverage, the suit says:
the information Chegg collects from customers includes names, email and mailing addresses, passwords, demographic details, schools, genders, zip codes, photographs, work and academic histories, and more. In offering scholarship services, Chegg also collects information on customers’ religious denomination, heritage, sexual orientation, military affiliation, disabilities and citizenship, the filing says.
The lawsuit looks to cover all individuals whose data was impacted or otherwise compromised by one of, or any combination of, the four Chegg data breaches.
I suspect it may be a difficult ask to uncover people who will admit to using Chegg, but maybe. Who knows?
KPMG Fined for Cheating. Again.
News from the accounting and auditing world that KPMG was fined $7.7 million last week for a series of violations including - wait for it - cheating on training exams.
On the cheating, the firm’s Colombia branch was cited for:
quality control failures [that] prevented the firm from identifying extensive, improper answer-sharing among firm personnel in connection with tests on internal training exams covering topics that were relevant to compliance
A similar story from KPMG UK:
KPMG UK failed to detect or prevent extensive, improper answer sharing on tests for mandatory internal training courses. From 2018 until March 2021, hundreds of individuals from KPMG UK and KPMG Resource Centre Private Limited, an India-based entity that provides support for KPMG UK’s issuer audit work, engaged in improper answer sharing. The improper answer sharing occurred in connection with tests for training courses covering topics that included auditing, accounting, and professional independence.
Hundreds of individuals.
This is not the first time KPMG has been caught and fined for exam cheating (see Issue 57). And KPMG is not the only global accounting firm to be punished for exam cheating either (see Issue 97 and Issue 131).
It’s deeply troubling, obviously, that the companies tasked with auditing and certifying financial interests have been routinely caught cheating on their own required tests. But I don’t think it’s an issue with accounting and auditing. I think the accounting marketplace happens to have a regulator with the power to investigate and sanction - one that seems to care about test cheating.
“Universities Must be Prepared to Invest” in Stopping Cheating
A few weeks back, Rebecca Awdry, a researcher affiliated with Monash University and Deakin University, penned a nice piece on academic misconduct for The Guardian. She also co-authored a recent research item covered in Issue 169.
Though I quibble with some small bits of this Guardian piece, it’s worth a read.
She starts off right on point:
University students cheat. Researchers globally have reported on the types and rates of cheating for decades. Recently though, and especially since the pandemic, there is growing concern about cheating and the risk it poses to the integrity of higher education – and rightly so.
Rightly so.
And she zeroes in on contract cheating, writing:
Companies offering “study help” have many different business models. They are predatory and use marketing techniques to promote themselves as legitimate “support” for students.
They sure do.
She then addresses the relatively recent effort by TEQSA - Australia’s regulatory authority charged with combatting cheating - to shut down some of the sites that sell cheating services (see Issue 142). Awdry says that’s good, but it does nothing to address why students are cheating. That’s fair.
And she’s right when she shares that TEQSA:
is doing more to address cheating than other similar bodies in other countries.
My criticism is that TEQSA isn’t doing nearly enough. But they are still doing more than any other regulator, anywhere.
Still, Awdry writes, and I agree, that resources lie very close to the heart of why cheating is a serious issue:
Poor resourcing means the amount of attention tutors can give students has diminished. It also means the ability for academics to catch cheating is lowered.
True. Budgets are an expression of values and it’s clear that most schools, be they in Australia or Akron, don’t actually value academic integrity. At least not nearly as much as they say they do.
In addition to the quote in the headline above, Awdry continues:
The amount of money universities are willing to spend to help fix the problem will also determine the outcome. At the moment, there doesn’t seem to be the appetite to address the systemic issues that allow cheating to occur, such as increasing the amount of time academics have to assess student work.
Say it louder for those who are fiddling on their phones.
She also shares - and this is important - that:
Very few students who admit outsourcing their work say they were caught. This is highly alarming. Improving detection must be central to any efforts to reduce cheating.
And:
With little or ineffective detection techniques there is little incentive for students to avoid cheating.
True, true, true. And it’s never said enough.
Like I said, it’s a good piece.
Where I quibble a bit is where she says that, according to her own research:
students are more likely to get a fraudulent assignment from friends, family or other students than websites.
I’m skeptical, by a big margin. But I will read her findings.
And where she says, a few times, that addressing cheating will require more than shutting down “a few websites.” That’s true. But it devalues the impact of what is a serious, profit-driven, supply side cheating problem.
But that’s a minor cringe in an otherwise really strong piece.
Major Cheating Investigation Launches in South Africa
According to multiple news reports, the government in South Africa is investigating a very large cheating incident.
The cheating reportedly involved 1,127 students in a matriculation, post-high school exam. The students used WhatsApp messenger to get answers to test questions during test breaks including, it’s alleged, paying a teacher about $87 each to join the chat group.
Class Notes
The news coverage and opinion offerings on ChatGPT - the new AI writing tool -have been abundant. Many, if not most, include some mention of academic integrity or assessment configuration. There are too many stories to cover. But it’s obviously a hot topic. The last Issue of The Cheat Sheet had some of my thoughts on the academic integrity implications of ChatGPT, and it’s been one of the most shared, most read regular editions of the year.
As you know, 2022 is almost over which means it’s time for the Best/Worst in academic integrity for the year - like I did for 2021. I’m not sure what the categories will be, but if you have suggestions for them, or for the winners and non-winners, please send them in. A reply e-mail reaches me.