The Shameless, Relentless March of Corporate Cheating Providers
Plus, CEOs go to cable news, say weird stuff.
Issue 266
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Investor-Backed Cheating Providers Just Can’t Stop
The cheating industrial complex is very large, highly lucrative, sophisticated, and from my view, driven entirely by greed.
Cheating providers tell the world that they are education companies, assisting in learning. They probably tell themselves that too. I figure they need to.
But until someone is willing to defend straight-up selling test answers during a test, I think we can all flatly dismiss the idea that these companies are in the education game. They are in the corrupt learning and devalue credentials game. I am happy to debate and thoroughly embarrass anyone who would be willing to say otherwise.
Here, in this update, I’m focusing on one particular form of profit-fueled cheating service — the paraphraser. The rewriter. The fence. The forger. The accomplice.
Best known of these is QuillBot, which is, very fittingly, owned by cheating leader Course Hero which will, as mentioned, just give test-takers answers during a test. Even when you tell them you’re taking a test, they sell the answer (see Issue 97). The company that refuses to cooperate with teachers on academic integrity inquiries, going so far as to tell one professor to sue them. Which one did (see Issue 102). The company that was recently sued by a university for reselling its copyrighted property without authorization (see Issue 252). And by “copyrighted property,” I mean exams, test answers, sample essays — the cheating stuff. The company that was flagged by Cisco as an academic fraud provider (see Issue 42).
That company.
An apple off that tree, Course Hero’s QuillBot exists to rewrite stuff — blurring stolen essays, confusing plagiarism and AI detectors, smudging the fingerprints of essay mills and cut-and-paste Internet junk. Pay Course Hero for the exam answers from last semester, then pay them again to drop it into QuillBot so it gets polished up and doesn’t look stolen. It’s a nice racket.
Then there’s Grammarly, which probably began innocently, like a spell-check for grammar. That’s OK, I guess. But over time, Grammarly has morphed into a full-on cheating engine. Like QuillBot, Grammarly now has a “free paraphrasing tool” which it says will:
Quickly reword sentences for essays, emails, articles, and more with this free online paraphrasing tool.
Interesting that their first example is essays.
The really insidious part about Grammarly is that, owing to its origins, it’s convinced nearly everyone that it’s an innocuous prompt, a suggester. That is a problem (see Issue 263). Students are using Grammarly, thinking it’s the epitome of nothingness and they are incredulous when schools and instructors consider it cheating, which it may very well be.
To be clear, maybe Grammarly flagging a subject verb agreement issue is not cheating. Maybe. But Grammarly “rewording sentences for essays” very likely is, especially if you don’t cite it.
And, after that contextual rantlet, there are two news items about Grammarly and Quillbot, both sent in by keen observers and readers. I thank them.
On QuillBot
QuillBot has launched something called “QuillBot University.” No, really:
If your skin isn’t crawling too much, the page for QuillBot U, linked above, is revelatory in seeing just how brazenly cheat-forward QuillBot is. Knowing it’s owned by Course Hero, that’s no surprise. But still.
For starters, the page’s left column links to several QuillBot resources including one called “QuillBot Flow” which says it is:
A next-generation word processor, supercharged with QuillBot’s cutting-edge AI
QuillBot University also links to its in-house plagiarism checker.
Now, you may be wondering why a QuillBot user would need to check their paper for plagiarism if they actually wrote it. Outstanding question, says me. The QuillBot plagiarism checker conveniently highlights the sentences and passages that are likely plagiarized so you can change them. Or have QuillBot do it for you. Either way.
It also has links to QuillBot’s Chrome Internet browser extension. And one for Microsoft Word. And for Mac. So you’re never more than a click away from academic shortcuts and assistance avoiding detection.
While you’re on the page, check out the list of schools that QuillBot says are “Institutions that write with QuillBot.” It appears most are in India. But some names you may know include:
The University of Southern California
University of Illinois
Cambridge University Press
Mississippi State University
University of Iowa
University of Surrey
It’s part of the predictable practice of cheating providers’ desperation to don the airs of respectability and legitimacy, to convince everyone they can that they aren’t selling cheating.
Anyway, QuillBot has a “university” now. I don’t know if that’s legal. But it is absolutely not appropriate. Though I am sure Course Hero’s investors don’t care, so long as the money keeps flowing, which it does.
On Grammarly
Grammarly, the presumed innocent grammar assistant, in addition to offering direct paraphrasing now, has also launched a new service called GrammarlyGO that uses generative AI to — wait for it — write for you.
From its description:
Prompt Grammarly’s generative text feature with basic instructions to get polished drafts in seconds.
Nice.
The person who sent this my way says that GrammarlyGO offers 100 prompts per month in free accounts and as many as 500 monthly prompts if you pay. Though these settings may be disabled by default for education and student accounts. I have not double-checked either point.
Our source on GrammarlyGO also pointed me to this article about the tools. The headline is, quite literally:
Grammarly's ChatGPT upgrade won’t just improve your writing, it’ll do it for you
The subhead is:
GrammarlyGo takes the assistant out of digital writer assistant
The first sentence of the story is:
Grammarly will soon no longer just recommend ways for you to improve your writing, it’ll do the writing for you.
Soon, by the way, is now. And I have no doubt that it does exactly that.
Maybe it’s not too surprising that Grammarly now offers AI that can churn out “polished drafts in seconds.” Though I am sure it will surprise some. And it begs the question — if a student says their revisions ‘are just Grammarly,’ what Grammarly are they using? The paraphraser? The writing bot? These are all Grammarly now.
But this bit is, in my view, completely sickening. And I do hope you hung with this long enough to get here.
In the drop-down list of questions in Grammarly’s paraphrase engine, is this:
In case you cannot read it, the question is whether using a paraphrase tool is considered cheating. To which, Grammarly confidently answers:
Using a paraphrasing tools isn’t cheating.
Grammarly says AI paraphrasing is “a helpful way to speed up your work.”
They say to be sure to cite your original source, emphasis added. But no mention whatsoever that having AI rewrite your paper with paraphrasing may rightly be considered academic misconduct by most educators.
That’s blatant misguidance. Setting students up. Complicating the lives and jobs of teachers and schools. It’s dishonest and profit-motivated.
And it’s obvious why. Like QuillBot, services are pretty hard to sell if your users fully understand the risks they are taking. It’s far more profitable to pretend to be legitimate, trustworthy, helpful.
As long as the cash register keeps ringing, amiright?
Education CEOs Behaving Badly
Two CEOs of education companies spoke with cable news outlets recently and bits of their comments need some scrutiny or correction.
From the outset, I hesitate to lump them together because one, Alon Yamin, CEO of AI and plagiarism detection company Copyleaks, is not an education CEO. I cannot accurately describe a company that partners with Chegg and Course Hero (see Issue 208) to be in the education business. The other CEO is Steve Daly of Instructure, which makes the popular learning management system Canvas. Daly most definitely is an education CEO.
In any case, Daly was recently on CNBC and Yamin recently over at FoxNews.
Daly on CNBC
The headline of the Daly interview, from CNBC is:
Fighting AI cheating in school
That’s great. Big fan. The interview is worth watching.
But in discussing the possible transformative and beneficial uses of AI in education, and sadly dismissing the threats of misconduct, Daly also said:
ultimately there is technology available that can detect whether somebody’s using AI, although there are a lot of false positives that come up with that technology and it can be a little bit traumatic for a student that gets accused of plagiarism when they didn’t use generative AI. So, ultimately, I think that’s probably the wrong approach
Daly continues:
educators are starting to look at it differently. It’s a little bit like security, you know, if we just had virus protection out there trying to detect when bad software was in our environment, that’s probably not the right way to do it. We should be looking at behaviors, we should be employing the technology to look at how students are learning rather than just did they use this technology in an untoward way
First, in addition to being a good and complex workflow and content management system, Canvas is an expansive marketplace for outside education providers. Some of them make and sell plagiarism and AI detection technology and could be paying Canvas to access the platform and their users. If I was in charge of such a company and I heard the CEO of Canvas talking about “a lot of false positives,” and it being “traumatic,” and the “wrong approach,” I’d be ticked.
Which does not even get to the merit of the matter that, objectively, that’s not true. In addition to being dismissive of educators who, it can be inferred, can’t properly use detection technology without causing trauma.
Finally, Daly’s analogy was pretty spot-on, though I think it’s clear he did not mean it to be.
Yes, we should be looking at behaviors and all the threat data we have. No one is suggesting turning off virus protection software — are they? Likewise, no one is suggesting that anyone rely on virus protection software alone — are they?
It’s troubling to see an education CEO be so dismissive of misconduct and threats to academic integrity. Especially considering that LMS platforms have known cheating bugs that, so far at least, no one seems the least bit interested in squashing (see Issue 229). Though, in fairness, the video referenced in Issue 229 has, it appears, been removed from YouTube. At least that’s something.
Yamin on FoxNews
FoxNews was, surprising no one, reporting on the plagiarism accusations against now former Harvard President Claudine Gay. They spoke with Yamin because CopyLeaks is, on paper at least, a plagiarism and AI detection system.
Note: I have not gotten into the allegations and reverberations of Gay and Harvard here because I simply have not had time to dig into the details. And given the heat on all sides of it, I am avoiding comment until I am better informed. As always, and especially here, I strongly sense that the details matter.
In any case, I did not see video of the interview and I did not go hunt it down. But based on the written story, Yamin said:
A year ago, many people considered plagiarism a moot point following the expansion of AI. What was there to worry about if AI was writing everything? But as we’ve seen in the news over the last few months, plagiarism hasn’t gone anywhere. It seems to be as prevalent as ever
Even if you set aside that CopyLeaks helps students avoid plagiarism detection — say what now?
AI made plagiarism a moot point? How’s that again? I’m genuinely baffled. I guess it’s that we don’t need to worry about plagiarism because “AI was writing everything”? What?
I mean, AI writing is plagiarizing — just anonymously and at mass scale. Ask the publishers who are now suing ChatGPT or the publishers ChatGPT has already decided to pay.
But that’s nuance. Plagiarism still exists. It did not go away. Does he really think it went away?
Also, while I am irked, “over the last few months?” Does he think the accusations against Gay are over things she just published? I’m two levels up from confused about what he’s talking about.
FoxNews also quotes him as saying:
Beyond content creation, the advancing AI technology allows us to identify potential plagiarism even faster and more thoroughly than before. Plus, plagiarism committed in the past is now even more challenging to outrun because of advancing AI-based technology that can scan and detect plagiarism both online and in images of physical text.
At least that part is mostly true. The plagiarism police have teeth now. Maybe I’ll write about that, it seems interesting.
Finally, I will note that FoxNews described CopyLeaks as:
helping to combat plagiarism in education
Though it’s not clear they are. In my view, they are actively doing exactly the opposite.