Columbia University (Was) Hosting Chegg CEO

Plus, even more on Course Hero's new hire. Plus, proctoring executive praises prevention.

Issue 116

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Chegg CEO and His Columbia No Go

On Monday, the Ivy League’s Columbia University was to host “A Conversation with Dan Rosenweig.” Rosenweig is the CEO of Chegg. Chegg is probably the world’s largest commercial cheating provider.

Don’t bother hitting that link. The page is gone.

Luckily, I captured it.

The page is gone because so is the event.

On Friday I contacted Columbia and asked the school for a comment about it. I wanted to know what kind of message it sent to students to host the CEO of a cheating company - that kind of thing.

And a few hours later I heard from the press office at Columbia, saying:

Columbia's Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) invites many outside speakers to address Columbia faculty about trends related to classroom instruction and academic integrity. That said, the session with Dan Rosenweig has been postponed and will be rescheduled at a later date.

So, poof!

There’s no chance that this was “postponed” because of my inquiry. My guess is that some faculty may have said something. I know they knew; that’s how I found out.

Nonetheless, the fact that it seemed to go away so quickly speaks to how dumb it was to set it up in the first place.

I get why Chegg would love it. Appearing under the Columbia logo is great PR. Or at least it would have been.

But for Columbia, it’s nothing short of a catastrophic embarrassment that they scheduled it in the first place. That the school’s “Center for Teaching and Learning” was to be the actual host - well, that’s just offensive.

As for the line from the school that they invite “many outside speakers to address Columbia faculty about trends related to classroom instruction and academic integrity,” that may be. But this was not one of those times.

According to the school’s promotional materials for the event, Chegg’s CEO was going to:

discuss how the company is striving to improve the overall return on investment in education by helping students learn more in less time and at a lower cost.

Not a single word anywhere about cheating or academic integrity. The announcement literally described Chegg as a “learning partner.”

No, really:

Chegg has now become a 24/7 learning partner by offering a suite of high-quality, low-cost, personalized and on-demand educational resources that help students maximize the return on their investment in education and support them on their journey from learning to earning.

So said Columbia University.

And, by the way, when Chegg says they offer “personalized, on-demand educational resources” they mean getting the answers to test questions in 15 minutes or less. Their website literally says students can:

Take a photo of your question and get an answer.

For money, of course.

Honestly, even being in the same zip code with Chegg is not a good look. Had they gone ahead with the event, I am sure some people would have asked the school to reconcile its Honor Code with Chegg’s business model.

I know I would have.

For the record, the Columbia Honor Code says, in part:

[We] hereby pledge to value the integrity of our ideas and the ideas of others by honestly presenting our work, respecting authorship, and striving not simply for answers but for understanding in the pursuit of our common scholastic goals.

And the Code asks students to:

affirm that I will not plagiarize, use unauthorized materials, or give or receive illegitimate help on assignments, papers, or examinations.

I’m going to go ahead and guess that texting a photo of your question so you can get a fast answer from Chegg probably falls under receiving “illegitimate help” on assignments, papers or examinations.

Further, the school has a “Faculty Statement on Academic Integrity” which reads, in part:

you must always submit your own work and not that of another student, scholar, or internet agent.

And that

Students failing to meet these responsibilities should anticipate being asked to leave Columbia.

But Columbia had the welcome mat out for Dan Rosenweig. For a minute. Which was one minute too long.

Another Interview with Course Hero’s Curious Hire

A few months ago, cheating provider Course Hero hired Sean Michael Morris as “Vice President, Academics.”

As was way over-reported at the time, Morris seemed to some like an odd choice. Media described him as a critic of education technology. Though I have pointed out why Morris felt like a perfect fit in that he’s been a vocal critic of anti-cheating technology in particular (see Issue 90 or Issue 92).

Anyway, about a month ago, Ed Surge ran yet another story on Morris and Course Hero. It has a few tidbits worth sharing.

Ed Surge says Course Hero and

similar companies like 2U and Chegg—have been roundly criticized by educators for providing students with the tools they need to cheat.

True. Course Hero and Chegg have been criticized. And they do provide students with cheating tools. For a profit, of course.

Anyway, there’s also this bit from the story:

Morris says taking the gig has allowed him to introduce the educator’s perspective to influential edtech executives who would otherwise probably not get exposed to it. “I’m in conversation with people who have never talked about pedagogy before,” he says.

Yes, that’s right. Morris says some edtech executives have never talked about pedagogy before. Wow, that’s funny.

Later, Ed Surge asks, “What about cheating?” To which Morris says,

“We need to take more responsibility for how students are using the product,” Morris says of Course Hero, adding that the same is true of edtech broadly. But he also hopes to work with educators to build a more nuanced understanding of cheating for the digital age, an area which he describes as prone to misunderstandings.

I’m sorry, a more nuanced understand of cheating? To shamelessly paraphrase the movie Erin Brockovich - cheating isn’t complicated; the people who profit from cheating want to make it complicated.

The article continues:

Part of the problem may have to do with the business model, which focuses on student-generated content, and which has included students posting lecture notes, tests, and similar material. Morris said that educators can struggle to accept a business model that puts students in control

First, a test is not “student-generated content.” Come on.

But again, we see that it’s the educators who “struggle to accept” things. They need to learn to accept the nuances of cheating. And of course educators should be just fine with putting students in control of teaching and learning. What could go wrong?

And finally, the story quotes Morris,

“Cheating has always been a very clear black and white line. I think that digital technology has blurred that line a great deal: in terms of what is authorship, what is borrowing, what is stealing,”

No. Just no.

I have no doubt that the likes of Chegg and Course Hero would love to say the lines of cheating, and borrowing and stealing, are “blurred.” But that’s just nonsense. We all know what attribution is. We all know the difference between borrowing something with credit and stealing it.

I said it before and I’ll say it again. This Course Hero hire was not odd, it was perfect. They got their guy.

Better to Prevent Than Catch

Inside Sources carries a byline this week from Jarrod Morgan, an executive at ProctorU, one of the larger providers of remote proctoring.

The premise is that proctoring exams prevents exam misconduct as much or more than it catches the misconduct. It also makes the point that schools and exam providers, even proctors, would far prefer to deter than to catch.

Both points make sense and aren’t part of the academic integrity conversation often enough.

Morgan says,

Reminding a student or other test-taker to put away their cell phone or take out their earbuds is a three-second intervention that not only might prevent a test-taker from doing something they might regret but it saves what could be months of administrative and legal headaches if that school decides to initiate a formal academic misconduct process.

And, I’m not sure many people knew this:

In fact, even before it is passed along to the school, any suspected cheating incident is reviewed by a trained and supervised proctor at our company at least twice. From there, a suspected incident is reviewed again by the professor and potentially other administrators as they choose a course of action.