Professor Sues Cheating Students - Sort Of

Plus, Inside Higher Ed, Course Hero and Quotes. Plus, UNLV update.

Issue 102

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Professor Sues Students over Copyrighted Exam Materials on Course Hero

The Washington Post and other outlets have what may be the best academic integrity story of the year - maybe any year.

According to the reporting, here’s what happened…

David Berkovitz, a business law professor at Chapman University in California, found his exam materials posted on the website of cheating provider Course Hero.

No surprise there.

When the professor asked Course Hero to ID the students who posted the materials and tried to cheat, the company refused. According to Berkovitz, Course Hero said he’d need a subpoena.

So - and here’s where it gets good - the law professor got one.

First, Berkovitz applied for and got an official copyright for his exam and test materials. Then he filed suit against the unknown students who posted his work online without permission, claiming they’d violated his copy rights. Suit in place, he asked a court to compel Course Hero to unmask the scholastic miscreants. According to the news report, the professor plans to subpoena Course Hero this coming week.

Once Course Hero identifies the students, professor Berkovitz said he plans to drop the legal suit and report the students for academic misconduct. The professor’s lawyer told The Post,

He’s not trying to bankrupt his students or their parents

What he’s trying to do is prevent cheating and have a chilling effect on students cheating going forward.

The professor’s lawyer continued that, since the class in question was graded on a curve, cheating students hurt those who acted honestly. The professor’s lawyer again,

[Berkovitz is] trying to make the class safe for students who want to be honest and honorable

It’s a shame that not all of them are.

It is a shame.

But first, I am shocked but not at all surprised that Course Hero refused to help a professor, if that is what happened. It rips the cover off Course Hero’s ridiculous claims to be an honest education provider. No legitimate education company would side with cheaters and tell a professor to go get a subpoena.

Second, outstanding.

If professor Berkovitz succeeds in forcing Course Hero’s hand, maybe other defrauded educators will follow his lead. Maybe word will spread that students can actually get in serious trouble when they use Course Hero or its complicit cousins to cheat.

And finally, I hope this professor and the thousands and thousands of others in similar situations - educators who have their intellectual property used and sold without their permission - figure out that there are two bad actors in this story. On one hand, there are the students who tried to cheat. On the other is Course Hero. One of those two is worth billions of dollars.

Just saying.

Course Hero, IHE and Quotes

I want to quickly focus on the coverage of the Course Hero/Berkovitz situation in Inside Higher Ed (IHE), which has been an active promotional partner of cheating provider Course Hero for some time now (see Issue 53 or Issue 40).

In their coverage, it’s the grading policy and conduct of the professor - the one who had his copy rights violated and classroom integrity compromised - that IHE describes as “controversial.”

Course Hero, meanwhile, gets the soft treatment:

but exam questions have been known to make their way onto the site, too, giving Course Hero something of a reputation for enabling cheating.

Have been known too make their way - well, golly gee. Passive much? That sentence places the action on the questions themselves, as if buying and selling homework and test answers was some kind of unavoidable accident rather than a business model. Seriously, Course Hero sells answers to test questions in minutes.

Go read Issue 97 - I beg you.

And, according to IHE, that complete lack of agency around questions making their own way somewhere leads to Course Hero having, “something of a reputation.” Sure. Remember, CISCO - perhaps the world’s largest cybersecurity provider - has declared Course Hero an “academic fraud” site (see Issue 42). I’d say that is indeed “something of a reputation.”

But it is the comments of Course Hero’s new Vice-President of Academics, Sean Michael Morris - dutifully quoted by IHE - that I want to highlight. Morris, you may remember, has been a vocal critic of anti-cheating tools such as plagiarism detection and exam proctoring (see Issue 90 or Issue 91).

IHE attributes this to Morris:

empowering students to excel in their own educations is Course Hero’s “DNA,” and that he didn’t like the idea of assigning blame to specific entities as to why or how students cheat.

First, “empowering students to excel” is hands-down the best euphemism I’ve heard for cheating. And it’s not even a good argument. Amphetamines empower athletes to excel - that does not make them legal or fair.

But it’s that Morris “didn’t like the idea of assigning blame to specific entities” that gets me. Of course a company that sells cheating is not happy with “the idea of assigning blame” for cheating.

“Let’s not point fingers,” is the final, desperate refuge of the guilty.

Finally, it’s this Morris quote or attribution from IHE that takes the cake of all cakes:

‘Oh, the students did it. Oh, Course Hero did it. Oh, the teacher did it.’ What we need to be looking at instead is why students and teachers have this sort of adversarial relationship with each other

I’m sorry - adversarial?

This is from the spokesperson of a company that reportedly told professor Berkovitz to go get a subpoena.

Simply stunning.

Another Educator Stands with Course Hero

As covered in Issue 99, Course Hero is hosting another “summit” with teachers next month and a new speaker has been added to the roster since I last looked.

An instructor at Glendale Community College will join the festivities - adding her name and institutional credibility under the Course Hero banner.

I honestly doubt that students are actually confused about what Course Hero is and what it does. But if they are, it’s no accident. One day a professor sues his students for using Course Hero. The same day, a different professor agrees to speak at their conference.

UNLV’s $15 Misconduct Penalty

Also in Issue 99 was a little blurb about the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) - that students were talking about the penalty for cheating. A student who’d been caught cheating said the outcome was to “just have to pay $15 for an online integrity course, no probation or suspension.”

I mused that such a consequence felt inconsequential.

I’d also said that I’d ask UNLV if that was accurate - that the $15 “online integrity course” was the outcome of cheating cases.

And it is.

Tony Allen, Senior Director at the UNLV Office of Media Relations confirmed that:

for lower-level first referrals to their office, it’s common to use an Online Academic Integrity Tutorial (at the student’s expense) and related reflection letter as an educational conduct sanction. Using this response, they’ve reported good success with students learning from a first incident and not having a repeat incident.

While I get the inclination and desire to not throw the book at “lower-level” first offenders, a sanction this weak is really no sanction at all. Fifteen bucks and an online course is less than it costs to resolve a speeding ticket and it conveys a lack of seriousness about academic integrity. In fact, such a low penalty probably incentivizes misconduct. There’s an entire genre of psychology proving that people will gladly pay a minor fee or fine to gain some temporary advantage.

I mean, if you’re already paying Chegg $20 bucks to get the exam answers, an extra $15 is nothing more than an added cost of doing business. And that’s if you’re caught.

As for why, as UNLV says, they have few repeat incidents, it’s possible that students are “learning from the first incident.” We can assume that’s true in some cases.

It’s also an easy assumption that students who’ve paid their $15 know they’ve exhausted their free pass and understand that follow-on penalties for a second offense could actually be significant. That could be good too. But it does really incentivize taking the $15 first-time route if you think you really need it - like that “Get Out of Jail Free” card in Monopoly.

But there’s also another possible explanation for why UNLV isn’t seeing many repeat offenders - one that has nothing to do with the “learning” theory. It’s that we know most cheaters aren’t caught in the first place, let alone twice.

Credible research has estimated that only about 1% of academic misconduct is detected and addressed with possible penalties. If that 1% estimate is even close to accurate, the odds of being caught twice is one in a thousand. In other words, it’s possible that the reason UNLV isn’t seeing many people cheat twice is that they’re not catching people cheating once.

Honestly, I have no idea. But I think it unlikely that the UNLV penalty of “just” $15 and an online class is doing much of anything to reduce misconduct.

Cases of Misconduct Nearly Double at UNLV

In response to my query on their penalties, UNLV also shared their misconduct data - for which they should be entirely and completely commended.

And, like nearly every other school in the world, UNLV has seen misconduct rates increase recently. According to the school:

UNLV – much like many universities nationwide – reported a notable increase in cases during the pandemic.  The numbers below are for the academic year, roughly from late May to late May of the listed years.

2020-2021: 754 reports    
2019-2020: 389 reports    

The enrollment at UNLV is about 29,000.