Plagiarism Checker Copyleaks Partners with Chegg, QuillBot
Plus, cheating soars in Northern Ireland. Plus, local TV station goes deep on ChatGPT cheating.
Issue 208
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Copyleaks, Which Says Its Products “Help Create and Protect Original Content,” Partners With Chegg and QuillBot
So, I have a story.
Recently, I was at an education conference. Copyleaks, which makes and sells a plagiarism checker, an AI text detection tool, and an AI grading solution, had a booth.
In chatting with one of the Copyleaks folks behind their table, I made a comment about the threat that companies such as Chegg and QuillBot represent to academic honesty and integrity. Oddly, the person seemed eager to correct me. Chegg, they said, was a partner with Copyleaks and that Copyleaks was also a technology provider to QuillBot. They said something like ‘our technology powers QuillBot.’
For the record, I was wearing a conference badge that identified me as an education writer. Also for the record, I was stunned.
I still am.
Copyleaks, if you don’t know it, holds itself out as an academic integrity company. They present themselves as the kind of enterprise you’d expect is helping to protect students and schools from cheating providers such as Chegg and QuillBot - not taking money from them.
Then, a few days after the conference, I happened to be on the phone with an executive of Copyleaks - a person near the very top of their leadership pyramid. In that conversation too, I mentioned Chegg. In response, the executive also told me Copyleaks had a partnership with Chegg. The executive said Chegg was one of their biggest clients, earning the company more than a million dollars a year. I don’t remember if this executive mentioned QuillBot.
I’m not identifying either of these people because, though they both knew or could easily have known that I am an education writer, neither conversation was a formal interview. I think people should assume they’re on the record when speaking with a reporter, unless other terms are set beforehand. But still, since it was not an official, on-the-record conversation, I’m keeping their names out of it.
Then, as the universe works sometimes, just days after that, I was on the phone with someone else - someone completely unaffiliated with any of these companies - and he asked me if I’d heard that Copyleaks was working with Chegg.
After these conversations, I was able to confirm the business relationship between Chegg and Copyleaks from a third person - someone with knowledge of the dynamics. He did not know anything about QuillBot or Course Hero, but as you will see, he did not need to.
Squishy Non-Denial
With three sources and an unsolicited rumor, I asked Copyleaks directly, on the record, whether they had business relations with two of the largest and most insidious cheating companies. I relayed, essentially, what the first two employees told me.
Here, in its entirety, is the response from Eric Bogard, VP of Marketing at Copyleaks:
Thanks for the message.
I'm not sure who the source of this potential information is, but we unfortunately cannot disclose financials, who we work with, etc. beyond what's listed on our site.
Thanks-
Eric.
We all know what that means.
The company could have said it was not true, that I had bad information. They could have simply said, ‘no, we have no business relationships with Chegg or Course Hero or QuillBot.’ Or they could have said, ‘yes, but it’s not how it looks, let us explain.’
But they didn’t.
Copyleaks also declined to be interviewed. Twice.
They did not have to do the interview. With the “cannot disclose” answer, they said everything. All of which allows me to say, with confidence - Copyleaks is in business with Chegg and Course Hero/Learneo/QuillBot.
Copyleaks and “Trusted by”
But first, since Copyleaks suggested it, let’s look at what’s listed on their website. The company says it’s “Trusted by Leading Organizations” and lists:
University of California, San Diego
The University of Edenborough
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Oakland University
Ohio Business College
That’s just a few, of course. Copyleaks has many education clients or customers.
Also on their website is that last month, Copyleaks announced a partnership with the LMS Moodle:
Moodle, the world’s most customizable and trusted eLearning solution that empowers educators to improve our world, and Copyleaks, the leading AI-based text analysis platform that identifies potential plagiarism and the presence of AI content, verifies authenticity and ownership, and inspires error-free writing, today announced a partnership that brings comprehensive content integrity to Moodle’s worldwide users.
It continues:
Coupled with Copyleaks’ AI-based plagiarism and paraphrasing detection, instructors can be confident knowing they have complete content integrity.
Confident. Integrity.
Interesting. I wonder if Moddle knew about the Chegg partnership.
Copyleaks also has partnership and integration deals with Edgenuity and Macmillan Learning.
UpGrad
Also on their site, Copyleaks shares a deal with an outfit called “UpGrad” which is described as an “E-Learning & Online Degree Platform.” What’s interesting about the UpGrad deal is how it’s described on the Copyleaks website:
UpGrad needed a plagiarism detection solution to integrate with their custom-made online learning platform. So they added Copyleaks to their environment, allowing students to receive a similarity report with every assignment they submitted. Now, they are alerted if the similarity percentage is too high and can update their assignment accordingly.
Say what now?
Copyleaks has a system that alerts students if they’re plagiarizing too much so they can fix it? Literally, if what they said is true, they alert students “if the similarity percentage is too high” so they “can update their assignment accordingly.”
Wow. That’s not integrity, that’s helping cheaters avoid detection.
Chegg
Anyway, since the company isn’t talking, the nature of the relationship between Chegg and Copyleaks is not known. But the most logical connection is probably something similar to the UpGrad deal, wherein Copyleaks pre-checks the homework and test answers that Chegg sells to students.
That’s just a guess. But it makes sense that Chegg would want to be sure that the answers its paid cheaters are delivering aren’t cut and pasted from some existing source. That is to say, that Chegg’s answers won’t be flagged by existing plagiarism software. Chegg, it seems to me, cannot charge students for answers if the work is going to be flagged as plagiarism. If nothing else, Chegg work has to be unplagiarized, or least be unplagiarized enough so as to not trigger detection systems.
If I’m right, then Copyleaks is being paid to help cheaters avoid plagiarism detection, while selling plagiarism detection to schools. They are quite possibly being paid to help cheaters bypass their own detection systems - systems paid for by schools.
QuillBot
QuillBot is an AI-powered paraphrase engine that has a very high use case for rewriting material specifically to avoid plagiarism detection or AI text detection. And, it turns out, QuillBot also offers a plagiarism detector so students can check their work for plagiarism before they turn it in and, naturally, adjust anything that may trigger a misconduct review - for a fee, of course.
And because QuillBot offers a plagiarism detector, we don’t need to speculate about whether there is a business relationship between QuillBot and Copyleaks - QuillBot says there is. Right there in the FAQ, QuillBot says:
Our third-party vendor, CopyLeaks, does not store your content. QuillBot will never share your content with any third parties outside of CopyLeaks.
You may have to zoom in, but here’s the image:
It’s pretty clear that helping students pre-check cheating material to avoid detection is what Copyleaks does - whether that material originates with Chegg or QuillBot or anywhere else. That’s how they safeguard original and authentic work, apparently. And again, all while charging schools to check the work they’ve already helped students “clean up.”
The Integrity in Academic Integrity
The big issue here is integrity - academic and corporate.
To be as clear as I know how to be - it’s impossible to say you’re an academic integrity company, to sell academic security services to schools, and do business with cheating providers. It’s as simple as that.
On its website, Copyleaks says:
Building Digital Trust and Confidence:
It’s the Copyleaks Way
It may be the Copyleaks way, but nothing about working with Chegg builds trust or confidence.
When selling to schools, Copyleaks says their products:
Detect plagiarism and uphold academic integrity with a simple interface and unsurpassed efficiency.
I know, I’m repeating. But you cannot “uphold academic integrity” if you’re cashing checks from Chegg or QuillBot and helping students beat plagiarism detectors. Cannot be done. A quick reminder, both Chegg and Course Hero/QuillBot refuse to cooperate with academic integrity inquires from teachers or schools.
That Copyleaks is in bed with anti-integrity companies while selling cheating detection products, that’s quite something. I don’t know what else to call it. It’s like a bank security guard being paid by Butch Cassidy. Banks would be right to have questions. If I had a bank, I would not even let them in the front door, let alone pay them to supposedly guard anything whatsoever.
Frankly, I don’t care if Copyleaks wants to help students and cheating companies bypass integrity checks. It’s dishonest. But that’s their business.
What I care more about are the teachers, schools and other education providers who probably think they’re paying for an academic integrity solution, with integrity - or at least one that isn’t doing side deals with the very companies and services that they’re spending time and money to contain.
Cheating Cases Spike in Northern Ireland
According to reporting in the Belfast Telegraph (subscription required), cases of cheating have “soared” at Northern Ireland universities over the past three years. At the nation’s two main universities, the reporting found cases of academic misconduct totaled 2,223 over those three years.
From the article:
At Queen’s University, Belfast (QUB) the number of cases of students cheating their way to a degree doubled from 2010 to 2020.
Last year, Ulster University found one student had copied others’ work four times.
Some 1,270 incidents of cheating have been dealt with by Ulster University (UU), with a further 953 at Queen’s since 2019.
I don’t know why a student was still a student after copying someone’s work the first three times. But still, cases doubled.
A spokesperson for students blamed the increase on “pressure” being put on students and the increasing ability of schools to find misconduct. I’m not sure about the first part but the second part does not wash.
According to a breakdown of the incidents, most were for plagiarism. And since schools have been actively using plagiarism detection for a decade or more, I’m not sure the schools are more able to catch it than they were eight years ago.
Consider the numbers from Ulster University, according to the news article:
the overall number of detections was 262 in the 2019/20 academic year. That included 226 cases of plagiarism. A further nine were second offences and two were third offences. Direct cheating in exams was responsible for 18 incidents, with three further online exam offences.
This tells me that either Ulster does not have any exams or they’re doing a very poor job of safeguarding them. If just 8% of misconduct incidents come in exam settings, that’s a red flag. Or at least it should be. And it means that the reported numbers are not a good barometer for actual misconduct, as they usually aren’t.
Even as undercounted as they likely are, cases of cheating are way up, surprising no one.
Local TV Investigates Cheating and ChatGPT
A local TV station in Rochester, NY recently did an investigative reporting segment on the ChatGPT/AI threat to academic integrity, saying:
For students, this is a library and ghost writer on steroids
During the piece, the reporter interviews a college senior who says she used GPT to save research time. Which, given how wrong ChatGPT can be, sounds like a terrible idea.
Anyway, the reporter says:
The concern is cheating, handing in what the artificial intelligence writes
The station interviews two administrators or educators at the University of Rochester. One says, students “could try” to turn in AI-generated work for grades. When asked how the school knows if something is AI, the second interviewee said:
We, so far, have had a handful of cases where an AI tool was used and the way it was the instructor suspected of something, called up the student, talked to the student because they knew the student and in that conversation, the student admitted to having used it.
Real quick on this - good that some professors are paying close enough attention to written assignments and know their students well enough to recognize an outlier. But we all know that those twin circumstances are rare, which means that, if relationships and intuition are a school’s only line of defense in dealing with AI writing, the school is missing most of it.
The other interviewee from the school says:
I don’t think there’s any substitute, and this goes not for catching students, but in supporting their learning, for knowing your students.
Again, fair and true. But not too realistic in an online class with 200 students. Or when, as we’ve seen too often, professors don’t consider protecting integrity to be part of their job.
The reporter interviews a leader in one of the local K-12 districts and says the district:
does not have a case of a student using ChatGPT to cheat.
That’s a laugher. What they really mean is they have put zero effort into trying to spot or stop it.
At the end, the TV story returns to the college student interviewed at the open. She says, of GPT:
It’s the same as using textbooks but a lot faster
To which I can only say, my goodness.