Teaching “in the time of Chegg”

Plus, Course Hero's privacy policy says everything. Plus, International Ink.

Issue 146

To subscribe to “The Cheat Sheet,” just enter your e-mail address below:

To share “The Cheat Sheet:”

If you enjoy The Cheat Sheet, please consider chipping in a few bucks to support it:

---

Teaching “in the time of Chegg”

Physics Today has an absolutely phenomenal story on Chegg and teaching. As the outlet’s name may foretell, it focuses on teaching physics and I wish I could repost all of it. It’s glorious.

For Chegg - which is totally absolutely not a cheating company - it sure gets mentioned awfully always in stories about cheating. This one mentions Chegg a very reasonable 23 times.

Here’s one:

Chegg offers libraries of searchable solutions and the option to post new problems with requests for solutions. Other companies, such as Quizlet, Bartleby, and Course Hero, provide similar services. Quizlet profits through advertising; the others charge monthly fees ranging from $9.95 to $39.99.

The companies bill themselves as tutorial services for many subjects, including physics.

The story continues:

But students can—and do—use the services to cheat.

Ah, they sure do. Here’s this too:

Before the pandemic lockdowns, Mark Messier, a neutrino physicist at Indiana University Bloomington, was grading exams for the introductory mechanics course he was teaching. It was obvious that some students had cheated, he says. “I saw idiosyncratic features repeated in the solutions that multiple students turned in.” A quick Google search turned up five of the six problems from the take-home exam on Chegg. “I could see they were scanned versions of my exam problems,” he says.

A recently graduated physics major said that:

After she finished an online midterm exam for a junior-level quantum mechanics class in summer 2020, she “poked around online and found it had been uploaded to Chegg” while the exam was still in progress. She has also seen group chats online where students discussed how they would work together on an upcoming exam.

And:

Juan Gutiérrez, chair of mathematics at the University of Texas (UT) at San Antonio, says that for online exams, he has “witnessed answers being posted on Chegg within five minutes of a test going live.”

And:

Tracy Hodge, an associate professor of physics at Berea College, a small liberal arts school in Kentucky, points to the availability of more reliable resources for physics help—often offered by academic institutions. “The biggest problem is the ethics these [for-profit] services teach students,” she says. “They teach that the goal is to get the right answer and get points rather than to master the material. They teach that it’s okay to cheat. Chegg gives students a shortcut that doesn’t help them. The company is out to make money.”

Could not have said it better myself.

And there’s so much more. It’s great. Jump over and give it a read.

Course Hero’s Privacy Policy Says Everything

Here’s the nerdiest sentence you’ll read today - I was reading Course Hero’s privacy policy this weekend and noticed something interesting.

Actually, since I used Course Hero to cheat on my midterms (see Issue 97), I received an e-mail about updates to their policy, so I read it. You’re right, that’s not much better.

Anyway, most of their policy feels pretty typical, though surprisingly permissive.

What caught my eye was this bit about signing up for Course Hero:

If you identify as an educator, the school and email we collect is the school where you teach and your school issued email, which are verified by our third-party identification service provider. We also collect your first and last name. If you provide a personal email but want to create an educator account, or if you are unable to be verified by our third party identification service provider, we will collect a copy of your school/faculty issued ID or other document that verifies your status as an educator, such as your employment offer, letter of acceptance, or copy of a pay stub.

If you’re a teacher, Course Hero does a ton of work to be sure they know who you are - that you are who you say you are. And that seems fine.

Meanwhile here’s what they collect and verify if you sign up for Course Hero as a student: nothing.

It says:

If you sign up as a student, you may choose to provide us with your first and last name, phone number (if you choose to enable SMS texting in your account settings), graduation date (month and year), and a profile picture.

You may choose to give your name. Or not. Up to you.

So, obviously Course Hero can require a “school issued email” and they can verify it. Or they “will collect a copy of your school/faculty issued ID or other document that verifies your status.” They can do that. They are capable.

So, you have to wonder why it is that Course Hero doesn’t require such verification for students. They can, clearly. They just don’t want to. But why? Why it is that, for students, even their names are optional and nothing is verified?

It’s a silly question, actually. The answer is pretty obvious.

If students had to tell Course Hero who they actually are, no one would use their service to cheat. No student is going to upload their student ID or verify their official school e-mail address and then go download the exam or pay for answers on demand. Well, some actually do. But most won’t.

Illicit conduct relies on anonymity. That Course Hero verifies teachers and chooses to allow students to be shadows tells me that Course Hero knows exactly what it’s selling and to whom and why.

I mean, if Course Hero was confident that it was really a study resource for modern learners, as they claim, there’s no reason to allow for anonymity. Who would be concerned about someone knowing they are studying? In fact, you’d think students would want their teachers to know they were seeking legitimate help.

But Course Hero doesn’t require students to verify who they are. They can. They just don’t. If they actually wanted people to not cheat on their site, they could. But they won’t.

This feels like a good place to mention that not only does Course Hero allow its users to be anonymous, they refuse to cooperate with academic integrity inquiries. A Course Hero spokesperson said that getting information about who’s using the platform to cheat would require a subpoena (see Issue 106).

And here’s a sentence you never thought you’d read in The Cheat Sheet - it kind of makes me respect Chegg.

I mean, when this verify the e-mail issue came up with Chegg, at least they had the decency to fib and claim that verifying student e-mail addresses was too complicated, even though they too were verifying teacher e-mail addresses (see Issue 38). And at least Chegg will cooperate with integrity inquiries. They make it very difficult, but they do it. At least Chegg has the civility to pretend.

International Ink - Invisible and India. There’s also a Thing from Manila.

Cheating in India is big business and big news. They take preventative measures and actually arrest people.

As an example, the government will shut down the Internet during exam times to prevent cheating. The shut off will take place in two, two-hour blocks over two days. In addition, phones will be banned for test-takers and proctors alike and all test centers will be recorded. And further:

District police chiefs have been requested to keep their intelligence network active in the centres to ensure all the security systems are functioning.

Also, a TV station in India has shown video of students “openly cheating” on exams - an undergraduate law exam. I can’t tell exactly what these students are doing to cheat, but it’s pretty clear there’s no proctor or exam authority around.

There’s also this from Ghana - that students are using invisible, UV ink to cheat. They write notes in UV ink and hit it with UV light during the exams. According to the coverage, a student said:

“They think it is an ordinary pen. Well, I sometimes tell some of the invigilators that it is an ordinary pen. I have an inkless pen that comes with the UV pen.”

Finally, from Manila, there’s this interview with an executive at Our Lady of Fatima University and a regional director with Turnitin about academic integrity, AI and writing similarity.