Podcast Interviews Former Paid Essay Mill Writer
Plus, The Guardian looks at Proctorio. Plus, former Guitar Hero CEO opines on higher education.
Issue 151
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Podcast Interviews Former Contract Essay Writer
The EdSurge podcast hosted by Jeff Young, interviewed Dave Tomar, the former paid essay writer turned author and advocate.
I’m glad EdSurge is covering misconduct. Here are some of the highlights of the interview.
Young opens with:
It is easier than ever for student to cheat on essay assignments using the Internet and there’s growing concern that, since the pandemic, this kind of cheating is on the rise. In fact there is a booming industry of companies that connect students to writers who’ll do their papers, complete their assignments for them, for a price.
You might be surprised at how easy it is for students to turn to these essay writers for hire. Many paper writing companies – they have responsive customer service lines where you can chat right away with a live person, ask about things like prices. And those prices can be pretty consistent, about $10 to $12 per page
Tomar, who started a paid writing gig while still in college at Rutgers University, was asked if he “felt bad” about violating academic policy while he was a student. To which he said:
I felt bad about the money I was spending to be at Rutgers
He says it was “a poor fit.” He says, in retrospect, that “allowed me to rationalize helping students cheat.” At the time, he says, he:
“never felt any compunction about defrauding this institution”
Tomar also says he was always “very forthcoming” about his work because:
I was really happy to tell anyone that would ask, what my disappointments were with not just Rutgers but with higher education in general. I was always really happy to say, if you asked me what I did for a living, ‘I help students cheat.’
Tomar says in his final year of writing essays, he made about $66,000, adding:
It’s one of these things I try to impress upon anybody that has any questions about it - you tend to think of it as sort of this black market of shady drug dealers, but it’s not that. It is a business and you can find these sites on Google, they have customer service, the better ones anyway. The companies I worked for 20 years ago are still around and repeat business is one of the reasons. They operate above boards in spite of selling an illicit product.
Fact check: true.
Tomar also told EdSurge:
Repeat business is huge because if you write a paper for a student at the beginning of a semester and they have more papers to write and they are the type of student with enough linguistic deficiencies that they have to outsource the work, chances are they’re going to need you the rest of way through. I definitely worked with students a semester, a year, three years, full courses of study, full degree programs.
Yup - graduates are out there right now, with framed degrees stamped with the names of some big universities, who just paid other people to do their work. Tell me again how this isn’t a threat to the core value of a college degree.
There’s much more.
Tomar says the essay mills protect themselves with legal language that says the materials are for studying, that the essay is for editorial services and so on. He says there are thousands of companies selling essays. He says that students who lack basic learning skills are the most likely to cheat and says that banning cheating sites, as Australia did recently, is unlikely to have much impact (see Issue 142).
On those points, Tomar is largely right. And if you can spare the 40-odd minutes, the interview is worth a listen.
Tomar’s insights as someone who was inside this insidious industry for so long, are valuable - though I do strongly disagree with what seems to be an underlying view of his that colleges themselves are partly to blame for cheating.
For example, for students who “cannot write” - in his words, he says that using contract cheating services:
it’s an ends justifies the means - get your degree and get out sort of thing. Because college is so transactional for so many people. And that’s understandable, I can’t even criticize that.
He goes on:
But for the students where [cheating] is the area of need, where the ends justifies the means… [cheating] can be become a pretty pragmatic little investment
It is clear that Tomar is not advocating cheating, but he is still justifying it. It’s true that the transactional nature of education is a driver of academic misconduct but that does not excuse cheating nor does it make misconduct a pragmatic investment. For anyone. And I can criticize that.
Anyway, if you have the time - plug in the headphones and give it a listen. Discussion is good.
The Guardian Looks at Proctorio
The U.K. paper The Guardian recently ran a rather lengthy and seemingly spontaneous profile on the tactics of one of the larger remote proctoring providers, Proctorio.
The article is focused on how Proctorio’s efforts may be seen as - may even be designed to - push back at critics. The jumping off point is the legal back-and-forth between the company and a former staffer at the University of British Columbia, Ian Linkletter. The case hasn’t been going well recently for Linkletter (see Issue 103).
The coverage is biased but not egregious. As an example of bias it says:
While there are many charges against e-proctoring technology, perhaps most egregious is the potential of the software to discriminate on the basis of a user’s skin color.
In support, it offers a story of a single student who struggled with ID verification and lighting before her quiz - a problem the story says Proctorio worked to resolve.
As far as I can tell, the story gets most of the facts right. It cites cases where Proctorio’s critics have had to say their criticisms were “imprecise and presented without context,” while the company also admitted that some software they use has errors - which I think we knew already. At the same time, the story does incorrectly (see Special Edition 2) say:
In another court case brought by a student against Cleveland State University, an Ohio judge has just ruled that scanning rooms via e-proctoring software before students take exams is unconstitutional.
That’s wrong - in at least two ways.
Though I am not sure why The Guardian did this story, they did.
Former CEO of Guitar Hero Shares “How to Fix College”
I concede I missed this when it came out in June in the New York Post, but Dan Rosenweig, the former CEO of the Guitar Hero video game franchise, told us how to fix higher education - through technology, of course.
What’s this have to do with academic integrity, you ask? Excellent question.
Mr. Rosenweig is now the CEO of Chegg - the notorious cheating provider. And he wants to tell us how to fix college.
The article itself is a boring rehash of things those who don’t understand higher education often say about higher education - that it’s too expensive, that it takes too long, that a college degree is not the path to a good job and good career. It’s all nonsense. Popular mythology, but nonsense.
The guy who cashes his paychecks and stock options by selling the answers to homework assignments and tests says we need to “fix college”:
By lowering costs, offering more coursework the job market actually needs and drastically improving outcomes. Students need to earn degrees faster and personalize learning to meet both their academic and professional goals. Traditional one-size-fits-all curricula are no longer relevant in this economy
Honestly, his positions are laughable and his research is elementary.
I’ll give just one example. He wrote that:
According to the National Center for Education, the cost of attending college increased by a whopping 169% between 1980 and 2020, while earnings of Americans aged 22 to 27 rose by a far more modest 19%.
I left the link in so you can see that he does not source the National Center for Education - and he means, by the way, the National Center for Education Statistics - he sources an article from CNBC about the information. Actually, the CNBC article is about someone who wrote about the information.
Even so, the data he’s trying to cite is over 40 years of price increases. And comparing the cost of college to “all workers” including non-graduates is misleading. So is capping the pay comparison age at 27, as most college graduates see their earnings stretch out as they advance in their careers into their 40s and 50s.
All that aside, the very next paragraph of the CNBC story Rosenweig cited says:
And though college costs have risen, workers with a bachelor’s degree have still fared best in the labor market.
He forgot to mention that because he’s trying to make the point that college is bad.
And while it would be fun to go point by point on his article to show how absurd it is, I won’t. I really only have a few quick points here that are related to academic integrity and this piece by Rosenweig.
The first is that Chegg and its illicit cousins in the contract cheating game thrive on being seen as legitimate leaders in education. It’s why they fund scholarships and sponsor student athletes and host education conferences and pen silly articles on how “we” should “fix” education.
Another point is that nowhere in this Post piece do the words “academic integrity” appear. Rosenwieg doesn’t mention it, probably for good reason, and he’s identified only as the CEO of “educational technology company Chegg.” The point - we do a pretty lousy job of informing editors and writers and even our own colleagues about which companies are actively eroding academic integrity for profit. Maybe the Post does not care, but it’s a solid bet they don’t know what Chegg actually sells. Chegg sure isn’t going to tell them.
My final quick point is that cheating companies are deeply invested in perpetuating the frame of thinking that going to college is transactional, that it’s all about the career prospects and return on investment - especially if they can convince people college is a bad investment. If it’s a waste, if it’s “not worth it,” if it’s stupid and silly, if the only goal is get through it, then paying companies like Chegg to give you answers becomes a - what did Dave Tomar say? - a pragmatic investment.
One way to make the case for academic integrity is to reject the frame that college should be measured with in money. Money is one way to measure the value of education, but it’s a very bad one.