New International Effort Launched to Combat Contract Cheating
Plus, a funny Course Hero ad. Plus, Randolph-Macon College releases cheating numbers.
Issue 158
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Academic Integrity Policies - I’m starting a review of academic integrity policies, with a focus on remote testing and proctoring, and plagiarism. If you know of an academic integrity policy or practice guide that you think is good or innovative or outstanding in some way and would share it, please do. A reply e-mail reaches me. Thank you.
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New International Coalition Targets Contract Cheating
There is news this week that a new government-backed coalition will cooperate across borders to target “innovative multinational fraudsters” that sell cheating services.
I love it.
Here’s the opening paragraph from the news coverage linked above:
The global contract cheating industry is quick to innovate, tailoring websites to national markets and aggressively targeting the most vulnerable students using social media.
True. And it’s a real delight to see it acknowledged. It’s an even greater delight to see people actually doing something about it. What they’re doing - what they have done - is set up the “Global Academic Integrity Network” (GAIN). According to the news, the new group is headed by:
Quality and Qualifications Ireland (QQI) and Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Teqsa)
And:
the United Nations-backed initiative also brings together bodies from France, Hungary, Italy, South Africa, Ukraine, the UK and Zambia.
A spokesperson from the Irish agency told the paper that advertising from cheating companies:
“It’s really insidious, framed in language that they’re there to help and the student is doing nothing wrong by engaging with them.”
If you’ve read The Cheat Sheet at all, you know that’s true. Insidious is a word I’ve used more than once.
But what I love most about this announcement is this:
Anti-cheating efforts have tended to focus on the front end of commercial websites, but in future regulators want to work more closely with the platforms that handle payments for cheating services.
Bingo. There are two Achilles Heels of many of these global, industrial cheating providers. One is their social media marketing. The other is their payment systems. Squeeze either or both and turning cheating into investor returns is much, much more difficult.
The concurrent question about GAIN will be whether they are bold enough to see the biggest cheating profiteers for what they are and include them in their targeted activities. So far, regulators in Australia and elsewhere have not moved against the likes of Chegg and Course Hero and Bartleby. Perhaps a broader, more global vision and mandate will change that.
More Shady Advertising and Marketing from Course Hero
Companies that sell illicit, or some places illegal, cheating services invest serious time and energy in convincing future customers that their services are legitimate, normal and appropriate.
I’ve chronicled many, many examples. Here is one more.
An outlet called Trending Work has an article asking innocently, “Is Course Hero Legit Or A SCam?” They really did randomly capitalize the C. And it’s a total honest question. So much so that the author refers to Course Hero’s uploaded course documents as “our library.”
Additionally, I’ve said for some time that Course Hero’s annual “summit” in which educators willing participate is a shallow marketing ploy (see Issue 137). And you’ll be shocked to see that in this Course Hero marketing article it says:
Course Hero hosts an annual Education Summit in July to bring together educators and facilitate communication between them, the greater education community, and useful educational resources.
You’ll also be relieved to know that Trending Work says:
Indeed, Course Hero is a reliable resource.
And:
About 2% of all undergraduates have used Course Hero. You may check out our credentials and offerings on Instagram, where we are verified.
Again with the “our.” And I wonder if that 2% is right. If it is, that’s about 400,000 students using Course Hero, give or take.
Further down, there’s even a section titled, “How To Use Course Hero Without Being Caught” - which is very helpful considering this is from Course Hero. And because not being caught is a big deal for a totally legitimate education service, right? You can avoid getting caught, they say, “By paraphrasing the Answer.”
So it’s quite helpful that Course Hero actually owns a paraphrasing company (see Issue 92).
But my absolute favorite line, and another strong contender for our academic integrity line of 2022 is this gem:
Course If you copy the solutions and pass them off as your own in class, you’ve committed hero.
If you cheat, you may indeed have committed a hero. Classic.
Speaking of Course Hero, An Odd Coincidence
A week or so ago, in Issue 155, I’d noted how Course Hero was selling access to a few copyrighted materials from me. Selling these materials is, naturally, their business model. Nonetheless, it was unusual since I’m not a professor or instructor and my articles were not instructional or course documents.
In sharing that news here, I said I would file their silly and cumbersome take down notices and let you know how that went.
Well, I cannot do that because - poof! - those articles, my articles have vanished from the Course Hero site. What an odd coincidence.
Days ago, this URL, had an article I’d written for Forbes on the value of college. You can tell because, if you hit that link, the URL address is: https://www.coursehero.com/file/55016583/Please-Stop-Asking-Whether-College-is-Worth-Itdocx/ and the headline of the Forbes piece it once contained is, “Please Stop Asking Whether College Is Worth It.”
Likewise, this Course Hero link: https://www.coursehero.com/file/49005526/Its-Not-Liberal-Arts-And-Literature-Majors-Who-Are-Most-Underemployedpdf/ used to hold this Forbes article by me with the same headline.
Today, the Course Hero links I shared a week ago say “Page not found.” Hmmm. Same pattern with a handful of other articles by me. There yesterday, gone today. You could almost believe that the folks at Course Hero read The Cheat Sheet - they do, by the way.
Someone over at Course Hero HQ likely decided it was a bad idea to try to profit on the copyrighted material of a critic. Suddenly, spontaneously and quickly, my work is gone. I guess that’s good. Though I do wish they had a similar respect for teachers.
Randolph-Macon College Releases Academic Integrity Numbers
The Yellow Jacket, the student newspaper of Randolph-Macon College (VA), reported on the school’s most recent cases of academic misconduct. The school’s official report is here.
I started with the coverage in the student paper because, almost without exception, they are the only places you’ll find any mention of academic integrity at all. The schools themselves never mention it. Local papers don’t, even in communities with big schools. Without student papers, we’d know almost nothing about what’s going on with academic integrity at American colleges and universities. Even with their work, we don’t know very much.
Even so, Randolph-Macon released their annual report on integrity and misconduct cases showing they handled 13 cases in 2021-22. Those are the hearings. The report says it does not included cases that were handed by instructors and reported to the institution. That number is not provided, though we may assume it’s not zero. Twelve of the 13 cases were adjudicated as “guilty.” Penalties or consequences of those findings were also not disclosed.
While 13 does not sound like a big number, R-MC has a listed student enrollment of about 1,500 total students, putting the hearing rate at just a shade under one percent. For context, if that were consistent - that about 1 percent of students have academic integrity hearings - a school such as UCF, with an enrollment edging on 70,000 would see 700 hearings every year - a scale of nearly two a day, every single day.
And, again, it does not include cases addressed by teachers directly and is not an indication of the rate of misconduct. Most incidents of misconduct are not caught and few of those filter through to official reporting.
Good for R-MC for releasing their numbers. And good for The Yellow Jacket for letting people know about it.