Chegg Lays off 441
Plus, Cheating at Stanford Law Review. Plus, more convenient silence from education publications. Plus, cheating on medical placement interviews.
Issue 303
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Chegg Lays Off 441 Employees, Nearly a Quarter of its Workforce
As has been well documented, cheating provider Chegg is struggling financially as students realize they no longer have to pay for answers when ChatGPT gives them away for free (see Issue 292).
The company has lost 98% of its value since the cheatfest craziness of pandemic online learning. The CEO is out. And now the new guy has announced the company will lay off 441 employees, about a quarter of its global workforce.
The stock saw a very modest bump on the news of massive layoffs. But that was exceedingly temporary as the share price shrunk to pre-announcement levels, trading as of yesterday at just $2.70 per share. The one year chart of Chegg’s value will put a smile on the face of those who care about contract cheating:
Though the employees who were not fired this week will be headed for the exits, Chegg is not finished. It retains reasonable value as an acquisition target now that its price has hit bottom. My money is on OpenAI or some other generative AI provider to gobble it up, thinking it will give them a foothold in the education market as well as providing oodles of language data. But whatever.
Another thing to note is that in Chegg’s layoff “restructuring” announcement, the company said it was going to focus on cheating partnerships with schools.
Sorry, typo.
Chegg said it plans to focus on creating partnerships with schools. My bad.
Good luck with that. In actual academic circles, the Chegg brand is toxic, antithetical, downright repellent. That Chegg thinks such a move will work shows how absolutely delusional the company is — having convinced itself that it’s actually an education provider.
Anyway, schadenfreude is real and not altogether terrible.
Education Press Failure, Part 847
This is a personal annoyance, I know. And probably no one cares. But this is my newsletter, and I care. So…
Chegg is supposedly an education company. They insist they are, and for the most part, the education media have been happy to go along — uncritically taking their money, covering their nonsense (see Issue 167 of many examples).
But now that Chegg has run aground, the same education trades have been silent. So far as I have seen, not one of the big three — Inside Higher Ed, Chronicle of Higher Ed, or Times Higher Ed — covered the news that a federal Judge all but declared Chegg a cheating company, allowing legal discovery to start in a shareholder fraud lawsuit (see Issue 280).
The Judge wrote:
the Court can draw inferences from plaintiff’s circumstantial evidence to find that cheating on the platform in at-home learning environments ultimately fueled Chegg’s growth.
And:
Though plaintiffs do not show the exact percentage of subscribers who were cheating on Chegg’s platform, they present compelling empirical evidence of substantial cheating during the class period
Cheating fueled Chegg’s growth and compelling empirical evidence of substantial cheating.
But the education press didn’t cover it at all.
And now that Chegg is gasping for financial air and has laid off nearly a quarter of its workforce, the press is, once again, silent.
It’s not as though the education media doesn’t cover big layoffs at education-related companies. Just this week, Inside Higher Ed ran a full story on layoffs at ETS, the test provider. But Chegg cuts 441 people and — nothing.
If you believed Chegg was an education company, it was valued at $13 billion just three years ago. Its ongoing collapse is probably newsworthy. And I confess that I am confused as to why the education press has closed their eyes.
Maybe I missed it — maybe the big three outlets covered either of these events. If they did, please send the articles my way. I’d love to be wrong about this.
Cheating for Acceptance to Stanford Law Review
News coverage in the legal community shows attempted cheating on so-called “write-on” competition to join the prestigious Law Review at Stanford University.
It seems that some number of applicants had their submissions disqualified for collusion and copying. Leaders of the process say the number was small, but they were clear that the disqualifications were for cheating. From the coverage, in an e-mail to applicants, the Review team wrote:
I am sending this second email to inform all candidates that a very small number of submissions were not rejected because of their editing scores or personal statements. While preprocessing the exams, we found that a small minority of editing components shared an extraordinary number of unique mistakes. These exams were rejected for those similarities.
We take cheating on the Candidate Exercise seriously, not only because spots on SLR are so competitive, but also because we ask for such a substantial time commitment from all those who agree to take it. With a limited number of spots, to cheat on the CE is to cheat a qualified and deserving classmate out of a fair and equal consideration.
The news also says that several students claimed that cheating on the admissions process was actually quite common, well beyond the “very small number” described above. The coverage continues:
Tipsters aren’t satisfied, with one saying that the law review leadership email “minimize[s] the extent of the cheating, despite its known, widespread nature.”
Copying specific mistakes is an obvious tell and likely required action. At the same time, students who did not leave behind such glaring fingerprints probably got away with whatever they were doing. In other words, it’s inconceivable that this “very small group” represents all the misconduct. No chance.
But the bigger point is cheating — at Stanford. Law School. Granted, not for grades but still, cheating for a very serious academic honor. It should make you wonder if shortcuts for academic advantage are limited to the coveted spots on Law Review. Spoiler: probably not.
But I’ll also mention quickly, good for the Law Review folks for acting and for knowing that cheating punishes honest students. Cheating, as they say, is to “cheat a qualified and deserving classmate out of a fair and equal consideration.”
It is indeed.
Leaked Interview Questions Rile Medical Graduate Placements in Australia
According to coverage in Australia, exam questions for placement interviews for thousands of Australian medical school graduates were leaked online ahead of the interviews.
I don’t know if that is actually cheating but the story authors clearly think it is, as their headline is:
Cheating disrupts RACGP exams
The short story says further that:
The leaked exam questions were posted online at around 1pm on Thursday and were identified by the college within the hour.
By college, I think they mean academy of physicians organization.
But if that is cheating, we’ve got cheating doctors in Australia and future lawyers cheating at Stanford. That really is where we are.