"The Looming Cheating Crisis"

Plus, Inside Higher Ed writes on cheating, but advertises cheating companies. Plus, Pitt professors on exams.

Issue 78

To subscribe to “The Cheat Sheet:”

To share “The Cheat Sheet:”

The next “The Cheat Sheet” will be out on Tuesday, December 21, with audio. With my travel schedule and the holidays, the schedule is slightly off.

I’m also toying around with a special “Best of 2021” Issue. If you have ideas or suggestions or nominations, please send them over.

From Inside Higher Ed, on Cheating

As is well documented at this point, Inside Higher Ed (IHE) and academic integrity have an “it’s complicated” relationship.

In one of the more bizarre productions you’ll ever see, for example, IHE completely and repeatedly misrepresented the state of academic misconduct - errors which they have never, as far as I know, clarified, explained or retracted (see Issue 49).

Since then, the publication has surprisingly run a few good articles on the topic of integrity in education, even acknowledging that it’s actually a problem.

Most of those articles have been by Melissa Ezarik and a few days ago she penned another. Like previous efforts, this article is very good - quoting some new voices and genuine experts on misconduct such as Kathryn Baron, who hosts The Score podcast on academic integrity and Karen Symms Gallagher, former dean of the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education (see Issue 67).

Among the highlights from this article is that more than half of students:

see googling during homework as at least somewhat acceptable. And nearly half say it’s at least somewhat acceptable to use study websites. “People will talk about chegging like they do about googling,” says Karen Symms Gallagher.

Yes, Chegg. More on this in a second.

Academic integrity expert David Rettinger of the University of Mary Washington, said of students,

Their institutions talk about these things, and students know what they’re supposed to do, yet students cheat a fair bit.

He’s right. Students do know what they’re supposed to do. And they do cheat a fair bit.

On that point, the story correctly adds that:

maybe education helps, but it does not move the needle on ethical behaviors very much.

Also true. Education about academic integrity is vital. But it’s not determinative. The challenges and problems are far deeper and more complex. To illustrate, the Ezarik piece quotes a student who says,

cheating is only considered cheating because it is explicitly not allowed, not because it is actually an unethical behavior.

Speaking of Inside Higher Ed and Cheating

While the coverage of misconduct at Inside Higher Ed (IHE) has been better recently, the publication is still taking money from cheating companies. This is not a new phenomenon - see Issue 53 or Issue 40.

Just two days after the good reporting on misconduct cited above, IHE sent yet another promotional e-mail from cheating company Course Hero.

Just a reminder that Course Hero has been designated an “academic fraud” site by Cisco (see Issue 42) causing it to be blocked on a number of college campuses. But IHE is promoting it.

Not to be outdone though, my version of the IHE story on cheating included above featured a banner ad from Chegg. Yes, Chegg. A story that literally includes the term “chegging” featured an ad from Chegg.

I can’t make this stuff up.

So, not only is IHE being paid by cheating company Course Hero, it’s being paid by cheating company Chegg too.

The Chegg ad reloaded and changed on my copy of the cheating story before I could get a screengrab but here’s the same Chegg ad on a different IHE story, one that’s also on academic integrity which I will get to a bit later:

IHE is taking ad money from at least two of the big three cheating providers. And it’s not a good look. I’m not sure if IHE wants to promote the entire unholy trinity of cheating companies but, in case they do, they can reach Quizlet at 1-510-495-6550.

Pitt Teachers are Happy for In-Person Exams

PittNews, the student paper at the University of Pittsburg ran a story recently about how professors there are ready to “embrace” a return to in-person exams.

There’s nothing wrong with the story but it merits a mention or two here because, according to the reporting, a teacher at Pitt, during the pandemic held online tests that were:

open book, not proctored and could be started at any point within a 24-hour window.

Knowing what I know about cheating, there’s no point in even bothering to call such an exercise a test. Even worse, that same professor told the paper:

she would use the same final exam that she had prepared for last year, when it was online

Again, what’s the point? That test was gone within 45 seconds of it being available online.

And then there’s this nugget from a different Pitt professor who said:

the inability to access Chegg and other online resources during in-person exams is beneficial to students because it allows professors to ask simpler questions.

Frankly, other than assuming that students were paying Chegg for answers during remote exams, which they probably were, I don’t understand that point.

Because it’s harder for students to cheat with Chegg during an in-person exam, the test will be easier? If they’re cheating with Chegg, it did not matter how hard the test was - they weren’t doing it anyway. Chegg does not charge extra for hard questions. And I guess the logic is - since you can’t cheat, we’ll make this one easy. I’m pretty baffled.

“The Looming Cheating Crisis”

Jack Yoest, an assistant professor at The Catholic University of America wrote a piece for Inside Sources titled, “The Looming Cheating Crisis Parents and Educators Should Beware.”

In it, Yoest says,

One company, Chegg, has made some particularly egregious decisions that are threatening the foundation of the education system

Adding,

Many in the education community are increasingly seeing Chegg’s online tutoring service as a tool for cheating

True.

The professor continues by calling out Chegg’s recent efforts to buy teaching materials from professors (see Issue 62), saying,

Chegg is a problem. Not only should educators look into institutionalized cheating before the problem gets worse, but they should absolutely not be playing into the hands of this company by selling their hard work that will be used by another student to cut corners.

That’s true too.

Cheating is indeed a problem but teachers and other academic leaders would also do well to start by cleaning their own house of those who support or profit from it. Fortunately, there is a list - or two - around.