More than 2,000 Websites Identified as "Contract Cheating" Providers

Plus, USA Today reports on Chegg. Plus, Quick Bites.

Issue 70

Financial Times Says There’s a List of More Than 2,000 Contract Cheating Websites

The Financial Times (U.K.) ran a long, investigative piece on what it called:

a global network of so-called “essay mills”, businesses that help the world’s rising population of university students to cheat their way through their studies.

As part of the U.K. Government’s attempt to ban essay mills and other cheating companies (see Issue 61), the Financial Times says it saw a list of 2,000 websites shared among government officials there and in Australia - websites that sell cheating services. These merchants of misconduct, the paper said, are focused on:

ghostwriting assignments — often including coursework or open-book exams that contribute directly to student degree results.

Yup - 2,000 of them.

The paper quotes Thomas Lancaster of Imperial College in London:

the sector has “ballooned” since the mid-2000s. He estimated that “billions of pounds . . . are going through these firms every year”. In the UK, he estimates that between 5 and 10 per cent of students will use them at least once.

Yup - billions of pounds, billions of dollars.

It’s a potent reminder that, in this fight, individual professors and schools are embarrassingly overmatched in addressing the onslaught of opportunity.

Anyway, to make the point of how easy it was to buy academic work, the paper contracted three essays and had them graded. Surprising no one, they were not very good.

USA Today Covers Chegg Cheating and Potential Blackmail

USA Today has a story out today on cheating company Chegg.

It’s another national publisher linking Chegg to all manner of illicit conduct including academic misconduct and blackmail.

The article relays the story of a cheating and blackmail situation at the University of Texas, San Antonio. The details are murky but there’s an allegation that a student using Chegg to cheat was threatened with exposure by the person hired to do their work. Chegg says that did not happen on their service.

And here’s a sentence you never thought you’d see from me - Chegg is right. Based on what’s in the story, what the student alleges is implausible. No way.

In any case, there are three points here. One, as mentioned, Chegg is a cheating provider. From the USA Today story:

Chegg's test prep and homework help either come through live experts or a cache of questions from textbooks and exams. If a student needs help with a math problem, they can upload a photo of it to Chegg. An answer, complete with how to solve it, can come back within minutes. 

Professors say students have used the service in exams, snapping pictures surreptitiously with their phones and peeking when the answers come in.

Cheating in college is nothing new, but some feared the increased online learning spurred by the pandemic would lead to even more academic dishonesty, enabled by websites like Chegg. 

Chegg denies that characterization, and said its users agree in its terms of service not to use the platform to cheat. It also cooperates with schools looking to find cheaters.

That last sentence is the second point. Even though Chegg makes getting their cooperation exceptionally and unnecessarily difficult, when they do provide it, word spreads and students react.

Citing a situation at Ohio State University, the story says a student warned fellow students that Chegg will turn them in. But:

the solution was simple. Don’t cheat, or if you do, use a different name and email address. 

In other words, students should use Chegg’s totally above-board education services with fake names, which they do. It’s no accident that you can use a completely fictional name and e-mail address to buy answers from Chegg but if you’re a professor and you want their help to stop cheating, you have to prove you are who you say you are. It’s an issue Chegg could fix. If they wanted to (see Issue 38).

The last point is that blackmail from cheating sellers happens. In Issue 48, I detailed one such incident.

Teen Vogue is - I Don’t Even Know What

In the third national media story on academic integrity this week, Teen Vogue ran an opinion piece on remote test proctoring.

It’s incomprehensible, recycled nonsense, repeating claims that are unproven, unprovable or have already been discredited. I loathe giving it any visibility.

Nonetheless, it surfaces two truths. One, that anyone who uses the terms “e-proctoring” or “eproctoring” has no idea what they are talking about. And, two, that Teen Vogue has no editorial controls whatsoever.

I mean, sure, it’s Teen Vogue. But still, these things actually matter. Cheating is a multi-billion dollar business and nothing less than the credibility of education itself is at stake. So it’s inexcusable to make no effort on accuracy at all.

It would take a thousand words to point out the obvious errors and frankly, no one should be that invested in arguing with the righteously misinformed. All you really need to know is that the piece argues that remote proctoring is just awful and not worth it just to “catch a handful of cheaters.”

“The Cheat Sheet” Quick Bites

• Jeremy Epstein, of the Association for Computing Machinery and Christopher Kang, a student at the University of Washington, penned a balanced, quite reasonable opinion piece for Inside Higher Ed on the desire to know how remote testing providers such as proctoring companies and LMS systems work.

  Though the challenge with opening these “black boxes” is that the more people know about how they work, the easier they are to cheat.

• The Colorado Springs Gazette ran an opinion piece by Christy Hinch, Director of Compliance for Athletics at Colorado Christian University, in which she calls on schools and the NCAA to limit gambling on college sports and access to cheating sites, which athletes use to skirt academic requirements. She mentions Chegg.

• In late October, The New York Times ran a long article about the dramatic rise in cheating at online bridge games. Yes, bridge. The card game. And stop me if you’ve heard this before:

In interviews, top players, league officials and data analysts described a surge in cheating as the coronavirus pandemic pushed players online, and a subsequent backlog of cases in the game’s byzantine disciplinary system.

“It’s a problem. I think anybody who says it’s not a problem is probably naïve,” said A.J. Stephani, the chair of the appeals and charges committee — a kind of Supreme Court of bridge

• Michael Mindzak, professor at Brock University, and Sarah Elaine Eaton, professor at University of Calgary, wrote in The Conversation about how AI is getting better at writing and that may present challenges to academic integrity.

• Emily Parnell, a Columnist at the Kansas City Star, shared her experience with her daughter’s teacher giving an unsupervised exam. She says that “open book” exams are not cheats but are the new way of learning. But my favorite lines are:

Old-school definitions of learning lean toward memorization of facts, and in some cases, that still holds true. You must memorize road rules. Driving is not an open-book activity.

• The International Center for Academic Integrity is calling for presentation proposals for its March conference. The deadline is November 11.

• I wrote a piece in Forbes about cheating provider Photomath - a free service that lets students get answers to any math problem instantly, just by using their phone camera. The company says it gives step-by-step solutions to billions of math problems every month. And, of course, because cheating is profitable, investors are happy to fund it.

In the next “The Cheat Sheet” - more coverage and commentary about academic integrity. Plus, more cheating.

Got tips, tricks or comments? I’m Derek@NovemeberGroup.net

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