Chegg Will No Longer ID Cheating Students

Plus, Florida test fraud, with arrests. Plus, stop doing that. Plus, class notes.

Issue 152

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Chegg Decides It Won’t Help With Academic Integrity Issues Anymore

I tempted fate. It’s my fault.

In Issue 146, in pointing out the absurdity of a Course Hero policy, I actually wrote, “it kind of makes me respect Chegg.” Because, I said:

at least Chegg will cooperate with integrity inquiries. They make it very difficult, but they do it. At least Chegg has the civility to pretend.

But based on reporting in The Chronicle of Higher Education - the civility is over. Chegg is done pretending.

In a stunning and indefensible change, schools and teachers will no longer be able to know which Chegg users were cheating, which is, of course, approximately all of them.

Here’s the open to The Chronicle piece:

Chegg is no longer providing student information to colleges conducting honor-code investigations through the platform.

In so doing, Chegg has unceremoniously extended an attentive middle finger to educators and education institutions. Frankly, I am relieved that we can finally end the fantasy in which Chegg was an education company or a tutoring provider or a teaching tool or whatever.

Here’s another graph from the story:

“Chegg was the only site that was willing to actually engage with me,” recalled Ajay Shenoy, an associate professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz, who used Chegg’s honor-code investigations process in early 2020 to identify three of his students who’d posted his exam questions on the platform. “It made me feel like Chegg might actually care about academic integrity.”

The past-tense does strong work there.

One of the fascinating things about this is that Chegg appears to have not nailed down their cover story.

For example, Chegg told The Chronicle the change was for student privacy. But they told at least one teacher they were no longer going to fully cooperate with integrity inquires because the company:

has observed a large decline in Honor Code requests and has therefore decided to reinvest resources away from Honor Code Investigations

So deep is their commitment to privacy that they said the “reinvest resources away” thing first. Then they said the privacy thing. I guess someone thought that moving money away from academic integrity wasn’t a good look so, student privacy.

The thing is, the reinvestment excuse doesn’t work either. That’s because Chegg isn’t nixing giving information altogether. If asked, they will tell teachers and schools when a question was posted as well as when one of their “tutors” gave the answer. That way, you’ll know Chegg sold the answers to your test, during the test - you just won’t know to whom. They know. They’re just not telling.

But back to the “reinvestment” line. Consider that it very likely costs Chegg the same amount of money to run a data report whether there’s student information in it or not. Chegg is still running reports, still answering inquiries - which means that shielding cheating students won’t save even one dime.

In fact, one smart observer noted that it probably actually cost Chegg money to reprogram their report functionality in order to stop providing the student integrity information. If that’s right, it means Chegg spent money to protect cheating students.

Naturally, the most likely reason for the reversal is that Chegg’s big competitors in the cheat game don’t cooperate with integrity inquiries. Course Hero famously doesn’t. They make professors get a subpoena (see Issue 102).

So, if you’re cheating, knowing that Chegg may turn you in makes Chegg more of a gamble. Students know this. They discuss it all the time. And since students have choices, they’ll choose to cheat with the company where there is less risk of being caught. That’s a business disadvantage, and Chegg decided they wanted to keep their misconduct customers.

Quoting professor Shenoy from The Chronicle piece again:

It’s “like they’ve decided that it’s not profitable to turn in cheaters”

It is exactly like that. It is probably exactly that. When making a choice between integrity and profit, Chegg picked profit.

Finally, while actively withdrawing its support for integrity, Chegg nonetheless wanted credit for its “Honor Shield” product, which is - and has been - a joke. Chegg literally wants professors to send them their exams before the exam. When Chegg first rolled out “Honor Shield,” in order to use it, professors were required to release their copy rights - forever.

Professor Shenoy pretty much nailed that one too:

Shenoy said there’s a lot more trust needed between faculty members and Chegg, though, for a tool like that to be successful. “Faculty members who are writing an exam, we keep these things so under wraps. Even back when I had paper exams, it was like, ‘Can I trust the people at the copy office?’” he said. “So the idea that I’d give [Chegg] my exam … that’s absurd.”

Absurd indeed.

Anyway, if there was ever a question as to how much Chegg actually cared about academic integrity, it has been answered. Again.

Florida Exam Fraud - Arrests, Cash and a Thousand Invalid Tests

Three high school teachers in Pasco County Florida - just north of Clearwater and Tampa - were arrested this week for helping hundreds of students cheat on an agriculture certification exam. Coverage is here and here.

The story is that these three teachers helped students cheat on a agriculture certification test, a career credential.

It’s a great case study for those interested in academic misconduct.

To start, and in no specific order, Florida decided it was a good idea to give cash rewards to teachers when a student passes the exam - between $25 and $50 per awarded certification. That’s just awful incentive to bend the rules or, in this case, obliterate them. Law enforcement says the cheating teachers collected around $36,000 in total for the passing grades.

Law enforcement also says, although the 50 or 100-question exam usually takes 30 to 45 minutes to complete, students in Pasco were finishing in five. No one noticed. But that tells me the exam was digital or automated and that no one was checking the data. Seriously, why record the time to complete if no one is going to look at it?

It seems also that Hudson High School students, where the teachers taught, were unusually gifted at this exam. According to news reports, the school issued more certificates than any other school - 10x more than the next closest school. Again, no one noticed.

And the rules required the tests to be proctored. They were not. Students brought in “study guides” made by the teachers - which were actually copies of the tests with answers. Some 284 students used the guides. Other students were given answers during the test. In some cases, the teachers just took the test for students. In other cases, some students did not even know they were taking a test, but passed it anyway.

In the news reports, state officials said:

“When our agents started this investigation, they found that none of the mandatory requirements were followed,” [the official] said. “So not a single proctor was used in any of these tests.”

You think?

But, again, no one knew there were no proctors? How is that possible?

And, after all that, how did Florida crack this case? Go ahead, guess.

An anonymous tip.

Yup, someone called the test maker and said they’d cheated. That’s just great work right there. Five minute exam answers, ten times the passage numbers, cash bounties and no proctors and someone had to tell the state cheating was going on.

But my favorite bit of this story is that the Pasco school district, which also received money from the state for passing these tests - $400 to $800 each - was said to have:

tightened its testing protocols and controls districtwide

I bet.

Regulator to Accounting Firms: Stop Cheating

I’ve had this one since July and it’s short and funny. So it seems like a good place to drop it in.

You’ve probably seen the massive fines that have been levied against accounting firms in the United States, the U.K., and in Australia for allowing their auditors to cheat on required exams in trivial subjects such as ethics (see Issue 97 or Issue 57 or Issue 131).

Now that you’re caught up, an outlet called CPAPracticeAdvisor wrote a little article about the goings on. The opening line of the article is:

Britain’s accounting regulator has written to the industry’s largest firms asking them to stop their staff cheating in exams. 

That ought to turn the trick. Well done. Slow clap.

Class Notes

New Project - I am staring a new project and I’d appreciate your help.

I’m trying to collect, review and analyze academic integrity policies. The goal is to be able to share some innovative approaches, best practices, the most clear language, up to date procedures, and those kinds of things. It may be a big project so to start, I want to focus on remote assessments and written assessments - remote testing and proctoring, and plagiarism. Not exclusively, just as a place to start.

So, 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. If you want to share yours, please do.

I’m not sure where these will live or what form they will take so as to be most helpful. But maybe we can get started and see what we can see, so to speak.

Indexing Problem - This being Issue 152 - assuming I counted correctly - with an average of three stories per issue, that’s somewhere around 456 articles or stories I’ve covered here. And as that volume grows, finding stuff from past Issues is a challenge.

Anyone can use the search icon on the homepage - just below the main banner on the right. With it, you can search for specific terms such as Chegg or Florida. That works. But the search doesn’t work if you want to find the articles on research or on professional assessment or on assessment design. I tried tagging the articles, but for some reason Substack’s search simply doesn’t like that - they don’t work.

So, I am eager to find a way to index the existing stories by subject before 450 articles becomes a thousand. If you have an idea on how to do that - software that can host or help create an easy index in a public place, please let me know. Ideally, if it’s not asking too much, something free.

Thank you, and tips - As always, thank you for reading and sharing The Cheat Sheet. We have 2,233 subscribers now, which is amazing. Thank you. And a reminder - if you know of something that’s worth sharing, please reach out. You can always remain anonymous.