Making $2,000 a Week Writing College "Black Market Essays"

Plus, more professors sign up to stand with Course Hero. Plus, Chegg punishments in New Zealand irk faculty.

Issue 39

A “Black Market Essay” Writer Tells Tales in Salon

Salon has an anonymous essay from someone who claims to have spent a chunk of Covid time being paid to do coursework - write papers - for college students.

It’s worth a read.

Among other informative tidbits, the writer says the essay mill site they worked for, Killer Papers, saw a 30% increase in business during remote learning and was offering referral bonuses for new writers.

The author also said, while some repeat customers were rich kids who were just lazy:

More disappointing were the many parents who encouraged this behavior, with some going as far as requesting the essay and purchasing it all without their kid lifting a finger. Their children were so lazy that they couldn’t even work with me to get it done. 

The writer also shares his surprise that so many of his clients were struggling with jobs, kids and life responsibilities and “didn’t have time” to write the papers themselves and “were just trying to advance their careers with a degree.”

The author continues:

If you had told me in March 2020 that in a few months, I’d be making more money as an academic ghostwriter than I ever had in my entire life, I’d have thought you were full of it. In the summer, it was never more than $500 a week for roughly 10 to 12 essays. But during the semester, it could be up to $2,000 a week for 30 to 40 projects—a numbing amount of writing, but a lot of cash.

Thirty to 40 projects a week. Just one writer. Just one company.

More Professors Join Cheating Company’s Upcoming Summit

That “Education Summit” by cheating provider Course Hero is coming up. I’ve written frequently about the professors and other educators who are participating, lending credibility to the very dirty enterprise.

Over the past week or so, some new names have been added to the speaking roster - academics who, in my opinion, should be called upon to explain their embrace of a company that literally profits from academic misconduct.

Here are a few of the new names joining with Course Hero and the schools they represent:

Laura Hamilton, University of California, Merced

Natalie Hobson, Sonoma State University

Norma Hernandez, Arizona State University

Danny Shields, City Colleges of Chicago

Gaye Theresa Johnson, University of California, Los Angeles

Stephanie Speicher, Weber State University

Nicholas Panasik, Claflin University

Joel Amidon, University of Mississippi

Angelita Howard, Morehouse School of Medicine

Jonathan Chin, New York City College of Technology, CUNY

I don’t know whether these folks specifically have been or are being paid by Course Hero. Some event speakers are. But I do know that, if you wanted to check, you’d probably find that the schools these teachers represent have academic intergrity policies that ban the activities Course Hero sells.

Another Proctoring Company Rips Automated Proctoring

A few weeks after a leading remote test proctoring provider said it was dropping its AI-only service, another company - PSI - says AI-only is junk.

In a company statement they say:

automated proctoring that relies exclusively on Artificial Intelligence (AI) has always been unfair and unreliable.  

The consistent and widely publicized failings of automated proctoring where AI is exclusively relied upon to monitor for potential dishonesty have been known for many years, and really since its inception.

PSI says they never used fully automated proctoring and says the industry is “beginning to catch up” on the issue.

University of Auckland’s Bad Policy on Chegg Cheating

Many students use Chegg to get exam answers during exams. When students at the University of Auckland were caught doing it, the school apparently decided to just mark the Chegg-provided answers wrong. The policy let some of the cheaters pass the exam anyway. That has some leaders at the school ‘appalled’.

A disgruntled staff member told Newshub their business students avoided meaningful punishments despite being caught using online studying service Chegg to get answers to questions as they were sitting their online exams in 2020.

The report continues:

Given 24 hours to complete the unsupervised exam, which was shifted online due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these students had copy-pasted questions from the exam and uploaded them to Chegg, where they'd been answered by people from around the world within hours.

"It was just as clear as day - you Google [a paper] and suddenly you get a record of the questions that are up there," the staffer recounted.

First, the school has no business giving a 24-hour, unproctored, online exam. That’s bananas. Second, this policy of simply marking the cheated-on questions wrong is bananas to the power of bananas - it creates zero incentive not to cheat. If you don’t know an answer and you’re going to get it wrong anyway, why not cheat? What’s the downside?

But the deeper problem is that a policy that lenient undercuts enforcement. From the news report again:

The staffer says the experience deterred him from raising further cheating concerns, which he had acquired evidence of later in 2020.

"I said, 'What's the point? Why should I spend all my time following up on all of this stuff if all the examinations office does is slap these students on the wrist and doesn't do anything?'"

In the next “The Cheat Sheet” - scholars aren’t the only ones standing with cheating provider Course Hero. Two of the top higher education publications are, it seems, willing to take their money and promote their cheating services.

Plus, I’ll try to get to a great story about a Fortune 100 company fighting academic fraud - doing what many colleges themselves have been unwilling to do.

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