UK Barrister: Cheating is Rife, Universities Must Do More
Plus, Chegg wins a gimmie. Plus, Brown student: "What's With All the Cheaters?" Plus, corrections.
Issue 304
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UK Barrister: Academic Cheating is Rife, Vast Majority Goes Undetected
UK Barrister and friend of The Cheat Sheet Daniel Sokol has penned a must-read piece on academic cheating for The Spectator. Written by someone who defends students in misconduct cases, if you can access it, it’s worth your time.
The article is a good look at some of the more common ways students are cheating in this AI, tech-driven era of online courses and assessments. The author would know.
Sokol covers the more traditional cheating hacks — cheat sheets, cell phones. And, he says directly:
With no invigilators patrolling the room, it is far easier to cheat in remote assessments. Students can access their notes or online materials, and they can interact with others with little chance of detection (‘hey, what did you get for question three?’). Some work-shy students divide up an exam paper among themselves, sharing the answers with each other. For example, student A would be tasked with answering the first two questions, student B the next two and so on.
Indeed. I remember not long ago, people would argue this point. But the truth is that unsupervised, remote assessments are a breeding ground for malfeasance.
Even in supervised or proctored remote exams, Sokol exposes cheating:
I have had clients who installed listening equipment inside innocent-looking ear protectors (‘there are small children in the house and I need peace and quiet’). This allowed them to communicate with a third party in another room, who had a duplicate computer screen and fed them the answers verbally.
That these were his clients leads me to believe that they were caught. Still, attempted cheating is pervasive and creative, even when supervised.
Sokol goes in on essay mills and paid writing services too:
Many clients have paid others to write their essays. One Master’s student confessed to me that every single essay he had submitted that year had been purchased from an essay-writer. I have even had PhD students whose entire thesis – close to 100,00 words – was written by a third party. These essay-writers, aware that their clients are breaching university rules, can be unscrupulous. I have received several panicked calls from students, usually on weekends, who have been blackmailed by the essay-writer: ‘if you don’t pay us £1,000, we will tell everything to your university’. In another example of humanity’s vengeful side, I have had clients whose former partners have tipped off their ex’s university about historical episodes of cheating, sometimes years after the event. This can lead to the revocation of degrees and other qualifications.
I don’t know what to tell you except that he’s right.
He is also very clear that:
This year, I have seen a sharp rise in allegations of AI-related cheating, with many universities still uncertain about how to deal with the rapidly evolving technology.
Adding:
Ironically, there is AI software that ‘humanises’ AI-written text, and the savvier students know to sprinkle deliberate errors in the work.
Again, true. Cheaters will not only cheat the learning, they will try to cheat the detection systems.
At a high level, I think most of what Sokol shares is known — at least to you savvy readers. But I want to double-underscore Sokol’s take-aways. Remember, he represents accused students and has seen the cases.
He writes:
My clients tell me that cheating is rife, and that the vast majority of it goes undetected. ‘Lots of people on my course have colluded but they didn’t get caught,’ is a phrase I often hear.
And:
when I take off my horsehair wig, I believe far more must be done by universities to teach students about the wrongs of academic misconduct. A few slides during induction, and a line or two in a mass e-mail to students, have little impact. They should also make it harder for students to cheat. Given the ease with which students can do so in remote assessments, through collusion, commissioning work from others, and more recently AI, a return to the exam hall should be the norm for most students. Cheating will still happen, of course, but at a lower rate, and while I would have fewer clients, the educational value of a university degree would be improved.
Say it again.
Far more must be done by universities. Slides and e-mail warnings “have little impact.” Make it harder for students to cheat — cheating is easy. This is about “the educational value of a university degree.”
No joke.
I do not know what more can be said. When a defense lawyer begs the banks to be better at locking their vaults, we have a problem.
Let me try it this way: We have a problem. And I am beyond tired of screaming about it.
Chegg Wins One
Chegg’s Board and legal team won a legal challenge this month — another investor lawsuit alleging that cheating is Chegg’s business model, which it is.
The coverage at Bloomberg Law requires a subscription but this is a different lawsuit from the one proceeding in California, which alleged fraud (see Issue 280). Also different from the one in which textbook publisher Pearson is suing Chegg alleging copyright violations (see Issue 55).
Before this ruling, a lawyer who is closely following Chegg’s perilous legal future described this case — the one Chegg just won — as the longest of long shots. If I remember correctly, this case asked a Judge to essentially declare that the company was being so mismanaged as to fire the Board and allow shareholders to run it. As I understand it, this case asked the Court to declare that Chegg is a cheating company, which is improper, and to give the company management to shareholders.
Those challenges almost never succeed, the squire told me.
I share that for context. That it’s not that Chegg is not a cheating company. It is.
But reading between the lines, the shareholders likely did not meet the standards needed to justify the remedy they wanted. I have not read the ruling (if someone has it, please send it along), but it probably did not help in any way that academic cheating, selling answers to assignments and tests, as Chegg does all day every day, is not illegal. At least not at the federal level. But again, I’m guessing. Maybe that played no role.
Either way, I’m sure Chegg will make hay out of a Court saying Chegg is not a cheating company — at least not enough to justify firing the entire company leadership. But winning this slam-dunk case will do nothing to address Chegg’s real crisis — the fact that students don’t have to pay Chegg to cheat anymore when ChatGPT will cheat for free.
Hey, that’s kinda a little rhyme there — don’t pay Chegg to cheat, ChatGPT does it for free.
You’re welcome.
Student at Brown Asks, “What’s With All the Cheaters in CS?”
A student at the Ivy League’s Brown University wrote a piece for the student paper in which he asks, “What’s with all the cheaters in CS?”
It’s a fair question.
And though the author says that he has “not witnessed any cheating incidents firsthand,” he nonetheless feels comfortable enough with the idea of significant misconduct to write about it as a given. For example, he writes:
we need to address the cheating epidemic that has come to define the discipline.
And:
there is still a vast amount of cases of cheating to merit concern. Last semester, one of my CS professors called out over twenty cases of cheating on a homework assignment.
Our student thinks that a major subset of the cheating in computer science is driven by the quest for post-graduation finances — students are being told that a CS degree leads to top salaries. Accordingly, students are jumping into CS for money, not for love. And this leads to cheating, to get to the reward as fast and easily as possible.
I have no doubt he’s right.
As I’ve said many times, the commodification of higher education is a major social driver of misconduct. The more we measure education in dollars, or pounds, the less value it has, and the more motivation there is to cheat. The correlation is well documented, though the piece offers no advice for how to address it. And I confess I have no ideas either.
Of note is that the student also says students are more likely to cheat in classes they do not like. And though this too is well established, his solution of allowing students more freedom in picking their courses is a dead end — at least as an avenue for limiting cheating.
That’s because students do pick classes for love of learning, but they also pick easy classes. The “Easy A” is a thing. And sometimes, the easy part of the “Easy A” is easy to cheat. In other words, allowing students to pick and choose classes won’t stop cheating, it will make it easier for those who seek shortcuts to take them.
Anyway — good effort.
I also love that the piece says:
Notwithstanding the fact that students probably won’t land that cushy job at Google if they had to cheat their way through an introductory CS course
I mean, true. But my question is bigger — how long before Google figures out that CS graduates from Brown have no idea what they are doing?
And, a follow-up, then what?
Allowing Google, or any employer, to weed out a school’s cheaters through their own inquiry and effort is a very, very short-sighted proposition.
If schools are actually interested in demonstrating that their degrees have value, leaving quality control to others seems like a very, very poor approach. I mean, name another business that spends years building its products then leaves it to the market to see if the product can actually do what it claims. Aside from Boeing. Name another. Knowingly putting defective and deficient products into the market seems like a self-destructive operational model.
Anyway, good for our scholar-scribe for raising the issue and for correctly pinpointing a real cause — the external, financial motivations of many students, programs, and schools.
A Class Note, Plus Department of Corrections Department
Note, I used ChatGTP to proofread this. It caught one spelling error and I accepted two grammar suggestions.
I did so in part because, in the last Issue, there was a typo in the headline. Instead of saying Chegg laid off 441 people, I missed the second ‘f’ and wrote that Chegg laid them of. Which makes no sense.
It was a simple, albeit embarrassing, typo. Sorry.
You know how it is. Sometimes, when you’re on, you’re on. But when you’re off, you’re just of.