Course Hero Really Did Host an Event on Academic Integrity. No Kidding.

Plus, the Greek "Corona Degree." Plus, cheating reports increase at Miami University. Plus, quick bites - an international edition.

Issue 21

Course Hero Hosts “Conversation About Academic Integrity”

You read that right. Course Hero, one of the most blatant and problematic cheating sites, recently hosted an online event on academic integrity.

If you follow academic integrity even casually, that level of irony is shocking. But the even more shocking bit is that Course Hero somehow convinced actual professors and academic professionals to participate - to put their names and school affiliations under the Course Hero logo. They’re listed at that link above.

It’s not a good look. In fact, it’s awful - walking a very fine line of endorsing Course Hero as legitimate.

It’s not.

In fact, the March conference of the International Center for Academic Integrity had an entire session on Course Hero. You can watch it here. In it, Zachary Dixon, Assistant Professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, describes the Course Hero situation:

There’s more than 100,000 documents from our university alone on Course Hero. And Course Hero makes you submit one take down request per document, and so you could never get hold of that efficiently.

If you’re not familiar with Embry-Riddle, it’s the largest school in the country specializing in aeronautics and aviation. Not to scare you but, aviation. 100,000 compromised course documents on Course Hero. Aviation.

I asked Professor Dixon to estimate how many out of 100 professors have their course materials compromised on Course Hero and related sites. He said,

A hundred. A hundred out of a hundred, I almost guarantee you.

After the session, Inside Higher Ed covered the work Dixon and his colleagues are doing to combat Course Hero. That was this month. But coverage of Course Hero’s problems goes back to least 2009, saying even then that professors were worried the site was “encouraging plagiarism among their students.”

The point is, there’s little excuse for not knowing what Course Hero does. Yet, faculty and staff signed on to this month’s event, lending their credibility to it. I registered to watch the event but only stuck around for the first few sessions, long enough to hear not one word about the outsized role Course Hero plays in facilitating, and profiting from, cheating.

Cheating Causes “Corona Degrees” in Greece

France24 has the story of cheating during online classes being so common in Greece that instructors and students joke that degrees awarded now are “Corona Degrees.”

Here are the article’s opening two paragraphs:

Shuttered for over a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, Greek universities are now grappling with a surge in online exam cheating giving rise to a new reality: the "corona degree".

Both professors and students candidly admit that examination safeguards are practically impossible to enforce in a remote-learning environment with hundreds of participants simultaneously online.

It quotes Sophia, a 20-year old student saying,

Last summer, I took two exams on behalf of two of my friends and nobody realised.

I logged in using their computers and personal registration codes. There was no requirement for an open camera during the exam. My two friends received a nearly perfect score without opening a book

Angela Kastrinaki, dean of the University of Crete's literature department, told the international news agency:

Some of her students even enlisted a respected specialist in linguistic history to help crack an exam question that was not available online.

"But even he got a verse wrong, so I got 50 papers with the same mistake. It was funny," says Kastrinaki. Overall, she found 100 students had employed some form of cheating that day.

Cheating Reports Jump Up At Miami University

The student paper at Miami University (OH), has a confusing story about academic misconduct that reports:

During the 2017-18 school year, 496 cases of academic dishonesty were reported. During the 2018-19 school year, 480 were reported. This number increased to about 700 in the 2019-20 school year, though not all cases are settled yet.

The articles says about 500 cases have been reported so far this year and about 100 more are expected during the exam period, bringing the expected total for 20-21 above 600.

The article is confusing because it somehow says that, “Academic dishonesty reports haven’t increased” and quotes Brenda Quaye, assistant director for academic integrity, saying seemingly contradictory things:

“It’s a perception that more academic dishonesty happens in online classes because nobody really knows what’s going on,” Quaye said, “but that’s not true.”

First, it is true. Second:

Quaye said some students have always used outside resources on exams and quizzes, but it’s easier to do so remotely.

“Sitting in a physical classroom taking an exam, it’s harder to pull out a phone or a computer and look stuff up,” Quaye said.

Like I said, confusing.

Anyway, the article continues:

Reza Akhtar, professor of mathematics, agreed it’s easier for students to cheat online. He said he has personally seen an increase in cheating within the mathematics department, and he helps the department chair with hearing cases because there are so many within his department.

“When it comes to cheating in [person], it’s usually cheat sheets because those are the easiest to sneak in,” Akhtar said. “There’s less of that and more looking up solutions on Chegg.com or the internet. Chegg is kind of the curse of faculty.”

The Cheat Sheet Quick Bites, International Edition

• Fifty-eight students at Deakin University (AUS) were found to have purchased academic coursework from essay mills in 2020. Eleven were suspended or expelled.

• Pune University (India) caught 150 students cheating during online exams. About half were caught by exam proctors during the exam.

• “A cheating plague” has hit universities in Queensland (AUS). The Queensland University of Technology responded to about 1,000 individual instances of some form of cheating in 2020. Australian research has found about six percent of students use commercial cheating services.

• Reporting in Hong Kong says schools there are struggling with Chegg. A university student said it is easy and common for candidates to cheat at online exams.

In the next “The Cheat Sheet” - leaked documents from University of Bristol (UK) detail their struggles with cheating in online exams. Plus, a student sues Syracuse University over his academic misconduct hearing.

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