Chegg "Learns a Hard Lesson"

Plus, a retired professor on looking away from cheating. Plus, the Romanian Prime Minister is accused of PhD plagiarism.

Issue 91

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Chegg “Learns a Hard Lesson”

Reporting in the Financial Times covers the financial stumbles of notable cheating provider Chegg.

The subhead is pretty accurate:

Edtech group faces lawsuits, falling US student numbers and accusations it facilitates cheating

While covering the deep drop in share value at Chegg and its legal trouble with Pearson in particular (see Issue 57), the influential Financial Times comes right at Chegg and others:

A deeper fear is that by creating more direct routes to learning for students, some companies are enabling students to cheat their way to qualifications. Some universities are mulling action to identify where students are using services like Chegg and Course Hero, another subscription rival, to cheat.

Looping in Course Hero? Love it.

Quoting Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig, the FT reported:

He has called claims that the site enables cheating “unfortunate” and “nonsense”.

Adding:

Chegg said it cooperates with university investigations into cheating allegations and has launched an “honor shield” tool to stop students looking up specific questions during exams.  “It has nothing to do with looking up answers,” Rosensweig said.

Chegg’s “Honor Shield” is a soggy fig leaf (see Issue 38).

On what Chegg really provides, FT reported:

many academics disagree. C Edward Watson, associate vice-president at the Association of American Colleges and Universities, said the use of sites like Chegg to answer course questions had been “normalised” on campus, creating an “existential crisis” in higher education. “It calls into question the quality of the degree,” he said.

That’s seriously good work by the Financial Times - bringing in an actual expert on academic misconduct and dragging in Course Hero, another billion-dollar cheating provider. Kudos.

It’s also not the first time that FT has done really, really good work on the business of cheating (see Issue 60).

Retired Cal State Professor: Instructors Don’t Report Cheating

In an opinion piece for the conservative, North Carolina based James G. Martin Center, retired Cal State University, East Bay professor Loretta G. Breuning, writes about her experience trying to counter academic misconduct in her classes and how and why other professors, in her experience, did not.

Skipping over the agenda of the Martin Center, Bruening’s perspectives are worth a moment to scan and, in my experience, reflect a predominant reality at many colleges - that teachers don’t want to see, stop or report cheating.

The reasons are many. Among them is that deterring cheating requires time and investment. Finding evidence of misconduct also takes effort and reporting it, in addition to being highly adversarial, likewise requires substantial and prolonged investment. Additionally, most professors want to trust their students and simply don’t want to know when that trust is broken.

Moreover, as I have heard more than one academic leader say, no one wanted to be a professor in order to play cheating cop. Nothing about that is fun.

Back to Breuning. On this point she writes:

Let’s be honest: professors face unpleasant consequences if they resist cheating, but no consequences if they look the other way.

She continues:

I looked to colleagues for support, but I got just the opposite. The professors I asked were quick to insist that preventing cheating is not their job. “I’m not a policeman,” they’d say. “It’s up to them if they want to learn.” They’d say this in almost the same words, which I found eerie. And they’d say it with high-mindedness, as if their indifference to cheating served a greater good.

Breuning says that her institution, in order to take action on reported misconduct, required instructors to place specific integrity policies and consequences in their course syllabi. But, she says:

I asked colleagues how they were wording it and was shocked to find that no one intended to do it. They were effectively binding themselves to ignore cheating. And again, they’d present this as a virtue in almost identical words: “The students don’t think of it as cheating. They think of it as cooperating, and isn’t that really better than our individualistic culture?”

Personally, I am not a fan of blaming teachers for the bad conduct of others.

Nonetheless, an educational culture that allows misconduct to exist unabated is a problem. Cheating is a threat to academia as a whole and professors should expect more of their colleagues while administrators in particular should examine and fix the policies and incentives that frequently align with inaction.

Accusations of Plagiarism and Widespread Cheating in Romania

News outlets in Romania are covering accusations that the Prime Minister plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis and also examining the country’s pervasive and permissive culture around cheating:

Cheating, plagiarism, and bogus degrees have plagued Romanian schools and universities for years. The issue was recently brought to the fore with Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca accused of plagiarizing parts of his doctoral thesis, charges which he has consistently denied. Several former senior officials, including prime ministers, have also been accused of plagiarism, with many linked to questionable degrees.

And I love this bit:

In 2011, Romania began to take action, with then-Education Minister Daniel Funeriu ordering that CCTV cameras be installed in schools as part of an anti-cheating initiative. As a result, over half the students taking the school-leaving baccalaureate exam failed that year. Two years prior, the pass rate was 80 percent.

This article says the country’s colleges use anti-plagiarism software but it’s cheap and often ineffective. Mihai Coman, a professor at the University of Bucharest, said,

The software that many [university] departments buy is primitive. You'd be better off [checking for plagiarism] by using Google than with [the anti-plagiarism software].

In the reporting, Marian Popescu, chairman of the University of Bucharest's Ethics Commission, said,

Fraud is the order of the day in education

International Quick Bites

• This article from Vietnam outlines the challenges that schools there have faced from online exams. Among other bits, it says:

Dozens of students from many schools were suspended or dispelled after their exam cheating was discovered. The students had other people take English, informatics and final exams for them.

It is easy to find people who provide this service on social networks. They advertise that they can help students write theses, attend all kinds of exams, and obtain high scores.

• A state in India has enacted Section 144, which prohibits public gatherings, as part of their efforts to deter cheating on state exams. Authorities will ban people from assembling within 200 meters of test centers during exams.

• This editorial in Japan calls for a rapid inquiry into the leak of questions and attempted cheating during a national university entrance exam (see Issue 90).

• More than 30 teachers in South Africa are reportedly under investigation for allowing students in a grade 12 exam to cheat.