U.K. Moves to Make Essay Mills Illegal

Plus, cheating up threefold at Northwestern. Plus, meet StuDocu.

Issue 61

Essay Mills Likely to Be Banned in U.K.

In widely reported news, the government in the U.K. has announced its support for legislation that would ban essay mills. The announcement says:

The government intends to make it a criminal offence to provide, arrange or advertise these cheating services for financial gain to students taking a qualification at any institution in England providing post-16 education including universities.

Individual members of Parliament had proposed similar efforts (see Issue 37).

A few things here may be significant:

• Backing of the government may greatly enhance the likelihood of its eventual passage.

• The news coverage of the announcement was large, raising awareness of cheating, which is always important in preventing it.

• The proposed law bans advertising essay mills, which is probably the biggest thing as it may implicate social media providers and websites that provide ads for and amplification of essay mills.

• This move underscores how far apart the United States is from its English cousins in Ireland, New Zealand and Australia - and probably the U.K. - all of which have made paid essay writing illegal. On this issue, the distance is more than an ocean or two.

• Though there is research showing that criminalizing cheating may not deter student conduct (see Issue 51), laws aimed at cheating providers may have some impact. There was evidence, for example, that when a similar law passed in Australia, the paid cheating sites limited their operations there.

The U.K. announcement quotes Minister for Skills, Alex Burghart,

Essay mills are completely unethical and profit by undermining the hard work most students do. We are taking steps to ban these cheating services.

Report: Northwestern Had “Threefold” Increase in Cheating

According to a story in The Daily Northwestern, an e-mail from a Northwestern University Dean to faculty “reported a threefold increase in academic integrity violations last year.”

I really suggest you read the story.

As it’s from a Dean’s e-mail to faculty, it probably was not meant to be public and is therefore a great look at what’s really happening at schools.

The Dean notes the increased incidents of collusion cheating and the difficulty in acting on those cases. He also referenced, according to the coverage, that cheating in two STEM classes reached as many as 50 students. Quoting the Dean’s e-mail,

In the end, the irony was lost on students complaining about their cheating classmates: they did not want to be the ones to provide evidence for cheating asking instead for consideration on grading curves.

Because of course they did.

The e-mail also went on to discuss “prohibited resources” - mentioning Chegg by name. The article says:

[the Dean] specifically questioned Chegg’s guarantee for quick answers by “expert tutors” at a low price and its interference as a “clear and present danger” to students.

No, no - stop me if you’ve heard this before - I insist. Cheating is way, way up. Collusion is a problem. Chegg is a big problem.

Adding StuDocu (and Others) to the List of Big Cheating Companies

Times Higher Ed, which once again leads in its coverage of academic misconduct, has a recent article on faculty complaints with StuDocu - a file sharing site.

The article says:

a search of the site reveals that students have been sharing not just their own notes but also materials produced by lecturers, such as handouts, lecture slides and test questions. One academic said that they had found almost an entire module uploaded to StuDocu.

Yup.

It continues, quoting Claire Lougarre, a lecturer at the University of Southampton, who found her own teaching materials on StuDocu,

StuDocu is making money from universities’ and their academics’ intellectual property, which has been uploaded without their consent

Yup.

It also notes that the company:

now boasts 15 million users across 2,000 universities globally, with more than 4 million documents on the site. Earlier this year it raised $50 million (£36 million) in venture capital funding.

Yup. These cheating companies are big and profitable.

In what it does, StuDocu is not much different from Course Hero or Quizlet, it’s just less known. Like those other cheating companies, StuDocu bills itself as a “higher education EdTech platform for knowledge sharing” and says it’s not responsible for how people use the information it collects and sells.

Anyway, StuDocu is big and faculty and other school leaders should be aware of it, as well as of other large, aggressive cheating platforms and companies that don’t get as much attention as the big three of Chegg, Course Hero and Quizlet.

In addition to StuDocu, I’d add Photomath and Edubirdie as massive cheating players you may not know yet. With Photomath, students use their phones to take a picture of any math problem and the company sends them the answer, including step by step solutions they can copy. The company told me just yesterday that their app has been downloaded 250 million times and they answer 2 billion math questions every month.

Also worth keeping an eye on is how, and whether, faculty who’ve had their copyrights violated by StuDocu and others engage with this Chegg/Pearson lawsuit (see Issue 57).

Lawyer: Students Accused of Cheating Need More Support

Times Higher Ed has - again - a story on academic misconduct, this time from a lawyer who represents students who’ve been accused of cheating.

The barrister calls on universities to raise the standards of evidence and guilt in misconduct cases, to allow outside counsel, to presume student innocence and to,

remember the oft-forgotten fact that cheating in an exam is fairly low in the hierarchy of human wrongs. Most students who cheat are decent young people under pressure to do well who, through a lapse in judgement, succumb to a temptation currently made greater by the ease of cheating in at-home, online exams. They are not murderers or violent offenders.

True. Though I’d say we’re not talking about prison sentences here. We’re talking about getting a zero on your exam or being suspended or, at the most extreme, being expelled from school. Those seem “fairly low in the hierarchy” of human punishments.

Schools can absolutely do better in their disposition processes.

But absent in his push for a better system is the reality that having to litigate cases of misconduct is a major, major disincentive to bringing misconduct cases in the first place. The process is, in most cases, already too long, too complicated, too emotionally taxing and too expensive.

Note: We’re famous. A story out today in US News quotes me as author of your favorite newsletter on academic integrity. I know it’s your favorite one because, as far as I know, it’s the only one.

In the next “The Cheat Sheet” - a professor talks about why she went “open book.” Plus, new research about the psychology of why students cheat. Plus, more cheating.

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