Congratulations! You May Own a Cheating Company.

Plus, Yahoo! Finance and the Chegg CEO, Live from Switzerland. Plus, more teachers sign on with, stand up for Course Hero.

Issue 121

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Your (Least) Favorite Cheating Company on Yahoo! Finance

Chegg CEO Dan Rosenweig gave a nutty, softball interview on Yahoo! Finance the other day. The segment was from Davos, Switzerland where an international education conclave is going down.

The first question should have been what the former CEO of Guitar Hero was doing at a supposedly serious education conference. But it wasn’t. There was also not a single question about cheating. Instead, Yahoo! Finance, like so many before it, simply presented Chegg as an innocuous education company.

A noteworthy part of the interview was that the CEO repeated the excuse for his company’s market collapse - that there were fewer college students (which is true) because the labor market is so strong (which is simply a guess).

Fewer college students may impact Chegg’s financial numbers. After all, fewer people in fewer classes means fewer people willing to pay for cheating services, especially if more of those students are in a classroom instead of online. Still, college undergraduate enrollment in the U.S. is down about 9% and change since the pandemic started so it’s unclear how a 9% dip in enrollment accounts for a 80% drop in Chegg’s stock price over the last 15 months.

Yahoo! Finance didn’t ask about that either.

Congratulations! You May Own Chegg Stock.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, which does not usually address the issue of academic integrity, has a story this week on state pension funds investing in cheating company Chegg.

The headline is pretty simple:

Work in Public Education? You Might Be an Investor in Chegg

Yup. Congratulations.

The story outlines that state pension funds in Texas, California, Ohio and Kentucky invest in Chegg. It seems the Chronicle missed New Jersey (see Issue 111), which means there may be others.

Of course, the investments represent a small portion of Chegg’s overall investor base and a small portion of these funds’ overall investments. But still, the idea that states - and public education leaders in particular - may be profiting from a commercial cheating provider is unsettling.

I’m not sure this is good news but, in addition to being morally dubious, the funds probably aren’t profiting much. As mentioned, Chegg stock is down some 80% over the past 15 months, which probably just adds injury to insult.

Two little notes from The Chronicle story though.

One, it takes a light touch on Chegg’s cheating business. That’s odd because the whole story is about the conflict in being an educator while profiting from a cheating company. Nonetheless, The Chronicle describes the frequent and well documented cheating on Chegg as how:

the site’s services can be co-opted by bad actors

And that:

many faculty members see [it] as a conduit for cheating.

Not that it is a conduit for cheating, only that people see it that way. Thanks, Chronicle.

I do love this part of the story, though - it quotes Juan B. Gutiérrez, a math professor and department chair at the University of Texas, San Antonio as saying,

I definitely condemn that business model

Exactly. Chegg is not some benign platform that is infested with “bad actors.” It’s cheating as a business model.

Course Hero Announces Another “Summit” with Educators

Not to be left out of this week’s news regarding notorious cheating companies, Course Hero has announced yet another “summit.” They’ve done these before (see Issue 99).

And like before, people who really should know better are standing up for and standing with Course Hero. Announced as speaking at the July event are:

• Kelly Pope, DePaul University

• Catherine Ross, The University of Texas at Tyler

• Stephanie Speicher, Weber State University

• Mary McNaughton-Cassill, University of Texas, San Antonio

• Gaye Theresa Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles

• Laura Summers, University of Colorado, Denver

I’d previously asked Course Hero whether they paid their speakers. The company refused to say.

Anyway, here we go again with teachers giving a comb-over of credibility to Course Hero - a company which, you may recall, was designed as “an academic fraud provider” (see Issue 42).

As these things unfold, I continue to wonder about a student who is caught using Course Hero to cheat (see Issue 97 for an example). What happens when that student correctly points out that a professor from the school - maybe even their professor - spoke at a Course Hero conference.

Moral credibility disintegrated. I mean how do you ethically police others when you cannot police your own?

“The Cheat Sheet” Quick Bites

• Kind of buried in that ridiculous Yahoo! Finance interview with Chegg’s CEO is that he praised Guild Education as “our partners,” saying that “our partnership with Guild is going really well.” Guild Education in turn partners with several universities and major companies to provide employee education programs. And they apparently are a Chegg partner. Good to know.

• A student and/or columnist at the student paper for the University of Minnesota wrote recently about, “Students and their academic ghostwriters.” I do not think it covers any new ground. But it exists. And now you know about it.

• Proving yet again that cheating is not just an American or western problem, an outlet called The National has a story about warnings by leaders in the UAE about contract cheating sites that sell answers for cash. A professor said,

  This is highly concerning to all universities and institutions because it means these sites are regularly visited and are aggressively marketing their unethical services to students.

• The Economist has a story about test cheating in India, which is a serious and pervasive problem. It’s fair to say, however, that no government in the world invests more in stopping test misconduct than India’s. Still, the story says the cheating, “is a symptom of a poor education system.” That may be but, personally, I cannot wait until The Economist gets a look at what the rest of the world simply isn’t doing at all.