Chegg Collected $165 Million Last Quarter
Plus, more on Chegg's data breaches. Plus, new books on academic integrity. Plus, thinking about cheating costs.
Issue 162
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Academic Integrity Policies - I’m reviewing academic integrity policies, with a focus on remote testing and proctoring, and plagiarism. If you know of an academic integrity policy or practice guide that you think is good or innovative or outstanding in some way and would share it, please do. A reply e-mail reaches me. Thank you.
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Chegg Made $165 Million Last Quarter, Has 4.8 Million “Subscribers”
Chegg, one of the bigger cheating providers in the world, announced this week that it collected $164.7 million in July, August and September alone and has 4.8 million subscribers to its services. Share prices jumped about 25% on the news.
A few notes.
It’s no surprise that Chegg shares are up. When the stock cratered about a year ago, it was not because people woke up to what the company actually does, it was because its earnings and profits declined - which was, not coincidentally, after pandemic online learning slowed down. I said then that the stock price would rebound, as it has (see Issue 68).
I knew the stock would eventually go back up because cheating is profitable and so long as Chegg is churning profits for its shareholders, investors will invest. I suspect most investors (see Issue 142) don’t know what business Chegg is actually in. But so long as Chegg keeps saying it’s an education company and people keep repeating it, not much is likely to change on the investment and share value front.
Speaking of what business Chegg is really in, their new earnings report is informative. It says that a jaw-dropping 97% of Chegg’s revenue comes from its “services,” which is primarily Chegg Study and Chegg Study Pack. Only 3% comes from renting textbooks and the like. So, Chegg is not a textbook rental company. And since Chegg closed its tutoring service, it’s not a tutoring company.
What “service” does Chegg provide that brings in 97% of $165 million in three months? Obviously, Chegg sells answers to homework and test questions - on demand, all day, every day. They literally advertise that they can answer academic questions, “study time, crunch time, anytime.” They say:
Ask an expert anytime
Take a photo of your question and get an answer.
They used to say they’d get you an answer in 15 minutes. Or maybe it was 30. The point is they are in the pay-for-the-answer-right-now business. That’s what Chegg sells. That’s what they are. That’s how Chegg is making $1.7 million every single day.
And remember, Chegg recently changed its policy and will no longer cooperate with academic integrity investigations to identify students who buy or trade answers on their platform (see Issue 152). Like I said, that’s who they are.
It’s also, I think, incredibly noteworthy that Chegg says they have 4.8 million subscribers to their “services.” These are people paying $16 a month or more to get access to test, exam and homework answers on demand.
That does not include, as Chegg will be happy to tell you, the people who share their login information or sub-sell answers. There’s a very large and active market in people buying Chegg subscriptions and selling answers to test questions for $1 each. It’s a common hustle. It’s everywhere. Here’s an example.
The point is that, if you assume just two people are using Chegg to cheat per paid account, that’s 9.6 million students getting their academic answers from a contract cheater right now. And that’s just one company.
Bits and Bites - and Some Anger - From Chegg’s Data Breach Case
In Issue 161, I shared that Chegg had been sued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for repeated data breaches, exposing sensitive information for 40 million students. All of that was based on reports from the FTC.
The actual FTC complaint has further nuggets worth passing along and adding to the record. Here a few actual quotes from the federal government about Chegg:
Chegg could have prevented or mitigated these information security failures through readily available, and relatively low-cost, measures.
And:
Chegg did not implement reasonable measures to protect personal information against unauthorized access.
Which means that:
Chegg’s failure to employ reasonable and appropriate measures to protect personal information caused or is likely to cause substantial injury to consumers
And that:
Chegg’s failure to provide reasonable security for the personal information it collected from users and employees has led to the repeated exposure of that personal information.
Further, the government also says that because Chegg said its information was secure when it actually was not, their representation:
is false or misleading
That kind of says it all. But there’s more.
Knowing the landscape of academic integrity and remote test security specifically, these two items from the government’s case really stood out and made me angry:
Chegg recorded videos of tutoring sessions that included Chegg users’ images and voices.
Back when Chegg was in the tutoring business, it made and kept recordings of tutoring sessions which showed student faces, voices and, I presume, their homes and dorms. The government does not say whether these videos were compromised in Chegg’s data debacles. But it’s noteworthy that they mention it while listing Chegg’s data debacles.
Remember all the rage and indignation that a university might record a student during a test session? I do.
Which leads to this, from the FTC complaint:
[Chegg] failed to have a policy, process, or procedure for inventorying and deleting users’ and employees’ personal information stored on Chegg’s network after that information is no longer necessary
In other words, not only did Chegg have video of students - in addition to other very sensitive information such as sexual orientation and religion - they had no policy or practice to delete it, like ever.
Remember all the rage and indignation about how students didn’t know how long a school would keep their test data? I do.
Here’s a for-profit company actually doing the things that students and some pundits said they were deeply worried about - keeping video, not deleting data, being careless with sensitive information, personal information finding its way to the dark web.
And the response is - let’s just say lacking. It’s lacking.
For example, outfits such as the “Electronic Frontier Foundation” and the “Electronic Privacy Information Center” have made a living criticizing remote exam proctoring - usually inaccurately. Yet I haven’t heard either one say a word about Chegg’s failures.
You’d think, at an absolute minimum, they’d warn students not to use for-profit, outside “homework help” sites because, as this case proves, they are often very bad with data security and privacy. But they haven’t. When they do speak up - cough, cough - I’ll share.
New Books on Academic Integrity
Two new books on academic integrity are out recently.
One, Contract Cheating in Higher Education - Global Perspectives on Theory, Practice, and Policy, is by some familiar and friendly names in the space.
The listed authors include: Sarah Elaine Eaton, Guy J. Curtis, Brenda M. Stoesz, Joseph Clare, Kiata Rundle and Josh Seeland. The blurb says it’s “The first book dedicated to the topic of contract cheating.”
The second book is actually a free collection of three books on academic integrity from the folks at Turnitin, the plagiarism detection and authenticity tool. The blurb on that says the:
downloadable eBooks outlines best practices and offers data-driven information for students, educators, and administrators seeking to uphold assessment with integrity across all disciplines.
The National News Examines Longevity of Misconduct Consequences
The National News, an English-facing outlet based in the UAE, has a column this week on academic misconduct.
The piece focuses on a relatively new line in dealing with the mindset and risk/reward calculus of potential cheaters - the possibility that cheating could be uncovered years later, derailing career and life. It’s an interesting approach that instructors and institutions may consider and makes the ongoing court case in Texas even more important (see Issue 156).
Even though the article starts with an error in saying contract cheating is illegal in the United States and once again mushes together “contract cheating” and “essay mills,” it’s still worth a read.
Among the worthwhile parts is a rundown of some people who have had degrees revoked and careers curtailed over plagiarism:
In recent years, several prominent figures have been accused of academic dishonesty and retroactively stripped of their degrees. Last year, for instance, Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel was discovered to have plagiarised large parts of his 1998 postgraduate dissertation in public law and political science. Only two of the dissertation's 56 pages were plagiarism free. Under threat of consequences from his former university, Mr Bettel, opted to give up his diploma.
Mr Bettel is not alone. Pal Schmitt, resigned as President of Hungary in 2012 after being stripped of his doctorate by Semmelweis University in Austria over allegations of plagiarism related to his 1992 dissertation. Similarly, in 2013, Annette Schavan, Germany's former education and research minister, had her academic accolade rescinded after instances of plagiarism were detected in her doctoral work. Former US senator John E Walsh was stripped of his Master's degree for the same reason. The list goes on, and it is generally only those in public office that we hear about.
To which the author asks:
How many future politicians and business leaders will have their academic credentials rescinded based on the application of tomorrow's technology to essays written and bought today?
It’s a good question. Perhaps it will alter some notorious short-term thinking if we tell today’s students that cheating may get you the A right now but it can also have life-changing consequences. You may fool your professor today, but you won’t fool the Internet forever - that kind of thing.
I mean didn’t we just learn that the names of 40 million Chegg users was for sale? How many doctors and lawyers and CEOs and politicians do you reckon are on that little list?
I’ll also mention that I like that the article includes this as a short term sore spot - one that’s really, really overlooked as a contract cheating pressure point:
internet platforms must do more to prevent these contract cheating services from pedalling their wares in the first place.
True. If institutions or governments were to ever be aggressive in pushing Google and the social media companies to ban cheating sellers the way they ban drug and weapons sellers - it would make a difference. Cheating profiteers thrive on the thin veil of credibility that comes with being on Google and having ads on Twitter, with their service accessible on a school’s server. Students tell themselves that if a service was really banned, it would actually be banned. They’re not wrong.
But as it is, cheating companies and essay mills advertise and entice on social media platforms and search engines with impunity - or at least overwhelmingly so.
Australia has shut down some sites (see Issue 157), but they are generally very small fish. And Ireland has convinced Facebook to remove ads for cheating companies (see Issue 74), which is great. But unfortunately it only proves what is possible while highlighting what’s not being done.
Anyway, that was an aside. The point of The National News article is about how cheating today may blow up years from now and I think it’s an important one.
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