LOL, Chegg
Plus, court dismisses Linkletter suit. Again. Plus, WSJ op-ed on Gay, Harvard, and cheating.
Issue 267
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The LOL PR Regarding Chegg
In serious academic environs, Chegg is a punchline. Much of the time, the company’s insistence that it be taken seriously is the joke. Chegg has as much to do with education as a Doritos vending machine has to do with interstellar travel.
Yesterday, a press release was published about Chegg that is so perfect that it kind of defies description. To be clear, the release is not from Chegg, and it’s not clear the company even approved it. Although given its language, they likely did.
The headline is:
MyAcademia.Zone Partners with Chegg to Offer Cutting-Edge Plagiarism Checking for Educators
I could do a strong six minutes on that alone. How “MyAcademia.Zone,” whatever that is, is loving up on Chegg. Or how that’s the kind of love that Chegg attracts. Or why it is that Chegg has a plagiarism checker, though we all know why. Just like we all know that Chegg’s checker is probably actually CopyLeaks (see Issue 208).
But that’s not the funny bit.
In the release, MyAcademia describes itself as “a respected online academic platform” and that it “has announced a strategic partnership with Chegg.” But so professional and credible is Chegg’s new strategic partner that their press release says — and I kid you not — untouched by me:
"Our collaboration with Chegg is a game-changer for educators worldwide," stated [Representative's Name], [Position] at myAcademia.zone. "We recognize the challenges educators face in maintaining academic integrity, and this partnership is our commitment to offering them the best tools to address these challenges effectively."
Freaking awesome. And I am here for every inch of it.
It goes on:
"This tool is not just about detecting plagiarism; it's about empowering educators to nurture a culture of integrity among their students," added [Representative's Name]. "It's an invaluable asset for teaching the importance of original thought and proper citation in academic work."
Let me ask — is this tool about proofreading? Or, doing the work? Oh, my mistake. It’s Chegg, so of course not.
Either way, Chegg’s strategic partner in academic excellence, everyone. Classic.
Linkletter Suit Against Proctorio is Dismissed
Over the last three or so years, few things have divided the academic and academic integrity community more than the legal challenges between Ian Linkletter, a former staffer at the University of British Columbia, and exam proctoring provider Proctorio.
There’s a brief overview of the case in Issue 208, and links going further back from there.
Some folks who are, I am sure, well-meaning, rallied to Linkletter, positioning him as a hero of student privacy and a victim of big, bad proctoring companies. They publicly supported him, wrote about his cases, and gave him money, amplifying incorrect narratives about remote exam security. Their certainty and righteousness have been, in all honesty, painful to watch. Especially if you were confident we were always going to end up here — Linkletter’s case against Proctorio has been dismissed by Canadian courts. Again.
Is this over, legally? Probably. Proctorio’s injunction barring Linkletter from sharing their intellectual property stands. Linkletter’s claims of targeted litigation to silence him as a quasi-whistleblower, do not.
Will this get people to acknowledge their errors or at least be more circumspect in the future? I doubt it.
WSJ Op-Ed on Harvard, Gay, and “Cheating Crisis on Campus”
The Wall St. Journal ran an op-ed recently on college cheating and Claudine Gay, the recently former President at Harvard. MSN has the same article, but not behind the WSJ subscription wall.
Because it’s in The Journal, it’s full of partisan and easily disproved shots about “Democrat-run cities” and “crimes in cities with left-wing governments,” which have zip-all to do with the circumstances at Harvard specifically or academic integrity generally. The piece also collapses on its own lack of internal logic. Nonetheless, it shares some truths about cheating with a sizable audience and I am grateful for that.
On plagiarism, for example, the piece says that:
such lapses, and even more-serious academic-integrity offenses, are too often ignored or excused
You will get no argument from me on that.
It goes on:
Academic-integrity infractions, however, often aren’t caught or reported. According to a Harvard Crimson survey, 25% of the class of 2023 reported having cheated, including nearly one-fifth of those with 4.0 grade-point averages. This may underestimate the behavior. Respondents said they expected about half their classmates had cheated at some point during their studies.
Also, largely true. Academic misconduct is rarely reported, even when it’s detected.
And:
Friends who teach at colleges say faculty often don’t report plagiarism or cheating to administrators because the process of doing so is laborious, and students often get off with a slap on the wrist.
As I have lamented often, also largely true. Reporting misconduct is a burden, actual outcomes are opaque and rare.
And more:
Nontenured professors also worry about poor student evaluations—which may determine whether their contracts are renewed. Cheating can be difficult to prove, especially among the more discreet. Software that flags plagiarism has been available for more than 20 years, but professors often don’t use it. As a result students get away with plagiarizing, intentionally or not, and continue to do so.
While it’s smirk-worthy to see a WSJ writer accidentally point out a benefit of tenure, it’s also true that teachers without it are less likely to look for or report misconduct. Evaluations are part why. Though I do quibble with the idea that professors don’t use plagiarism software; I think it’s more likely that they don’t fully understand what it means or use the information it affords.
The piece also walks through the efforts at Stanford University to institute test proctoring, which had been barred by the school’s honor code. Citing student hostility to the planned change, the WSJ article says:
Faculty are also often intimidated by students who impugn their motives if they try to clamp down on cheating.
Fair.
The article pretty much says that cheating is up at Stanford because the school has admitted too many unqualified and unprepared applicants to meet diversity goals. Which is racist. And absurd. It’s that kind of piece.
Still, it’s largely right about the state of academic misconduct today. And it’s a big audience. So, I’ll take it.