Loan Giant Sallie Mae Stands By Cheating Giant Chegg

Plus, cheating reports "more than double" at Duke - with Chegg, of course. Plus, a look at 60 days of cheating.

Issue 14

Sallie Mae to Keep “Partnership” with Chegg

At the recent International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) conference, nearly everyone complained about Chegg, the subscription site that sells fast answers to homework and exam questions.

A few professors and administrators also complained that student loan giant Sallie Mae was backing Chegg, giving their borrowers free subscriptions to the cheating service, adding credibility and easing access to barred resources and bad study habits.

Honestly, it was hard to believe. Turns out, it’s true.

With an undergraduate loan from Sallie Mae, a student can get the “perk” of four free months of Chegg - answers to all your homework, quiz and test questions, for free, the lender confirmed.

I asked Sallie Mae why they’d do that. And to be certain that Sallie Mae was not confused about Chegg, I shared recent news coverage and noted that Chegg has been banned, by name, in the academic integrity codes of more than 100 colleges. Armed with this information, Sallie Mae gave this statement:

We’re committed to offering responsible tools and resources to help students access and complete their education. These resources include helping students develop a plan to pay for higher education, find scholarships, apply for financial aid, or even find an internship or job. Our partnership with Chegg is rooted in our commitment to helping students succeed. We agree that success should not come at the expense of academic integrity. Our understanding is the vast majority of those students who use Chegg’s services do so as a study resource and Chegg has taken steps and launched new tools to further promote and preserve academic integrity.

It’s a mystery why Sallie Mae would partner with a service that literally no longer provides tutoring. Chegg closed its actual tutoring service in January, 2021. Or why Sallie Mae would give away something so many colleges specifically prohibit. But they are, and apparently plan to keep doing it.

At least now there’s no question that Sallie Mae knows what it’s doing.

Duke University Cites Students for Misconduct

Academic blue-blood Duke University recently said that scholastic dishonesty cases have “more than doubled compared to a typical academic year.” 

Really, that’s no surprise. This year alone, cheating has been chronicled at nearly every Ivy League school and two of the nation’s military academies. Cheating is everyone’s problem.

The university said,

From a typical volume of approximately 89 reports during the fall 2019 semester, 243 reports were submitted during the fall 2020 semester

The school also said that

The majority of cases involved “unauthorized collaboration” such as accessing online sites like Chegg prior and/or during exams, posting exam questions to online websites or collaborating with other students during quizzes, post labs and/or examinations.

It’s obviously rhetorical, but how many more times do you think we will all read “more than doubled” and “Chegg” in the same news report?

Sixty Days of Cheating

The initial issue of “The Cheat Sheet” went out about 60 days ago, on January 23, and I had conceived of it as an every-other-week missive perhaps. I was unprepared for how much news there was to share, so much that “The Cheat Sheet” rolls out about twice a week now.

In the 60 days since the first issue, I have recorded and shared news of cheating at no fewer than 20 schools - that’s one every 72 hours. Here they are:

The University of Minnesota, University of British Columbia, Franklin College, Quinnipiac University, Binghamton University, Harvard-Westlake (High School), Memorial University of Newfoundland, Duke University, California State University (LA),  North Carolina State, Purdue University, Franklin & Marshall College, the University of Houston, Texas State University, the New Jersey Institute of Technology, University of Manitoba, University of Albany, the University of Regina, the University of Saskatchewan and The United States Air Force Academy.

And more to come.

In Thursday’s “The Cheat Sheet,” NBC/CNBC report on national surge in cheating due to online courses and programs. And, more cheating reports. To share and subscribe: