Going Through the Motions in Undergrad Courses

So much of what is learned as an undergrad is impractical and unimportant to students, especially outside of one's major or minor. There is little humanity in the liberal arts and humanities, social sciences, fine arts and other disciplines, as they are taught in much of US higher education.

Mandatory classes often have little or no meaning to students other than as a ticket to punch. They are at best esoteric. Or worse, folks see these courses as a series of lies.  And they know how to play the game of looking studious and compliant for better grades. Many are also willing to cheat to slide through in an increasingly competitive the job market. 

 

 

Sensing that students don't care or don't have the time to care about their classes, teachers may make undergrad courses easy blow off courses instead of something to challenge their imaginations. 

 

Teachers may rely on their star students for gratification, believing that former students will have delayed light bulb moments. 

 

And there are professors, adjuncts, and teaching assistants who are too overworked or distracted to care. 

It's often worse where students, faculty, and content creators are nothing but numbers: in large auditoriums and online education, especially at robocolleges. In that case, the level of caring can be nearly zero. 

Does it have to be that way in undergrad education? Our answer is no. And others agree with us.  But yet things do not change radically under higher ed bureaucracies, especially when administrators, teachers, and students are going through the motions.   

Student Newspaper Promotes Cheating Services for Cash (Derek Newton)

The Daily, the student newspaper at Ball State University in Indiana, ran an article recently with this headline:

Best Way to Remove AI Plagiarism from Text: Bypass AI Detectors

So, that’s pretty bad. There’s no real justification that I can imagine for advising students on how not to get caught committing academic fraud. But here we are.

The article is absent a byline, of course. And it comes with the standard disclaimer that papers and publishers probably believe absolves them of responsibility:

This post is provided by a third party who may receive compensation from the products or services they mention.

Translated, this means that some company, probably a soulless, astroturf digital content and placement agent, was paid by a cheating provider to place their dubious content and improve their SEO results. The agent, in turn, pays the newspaper for the “post” to appear on their pages, under their masthead. The paper, in turn, gets to play the ridiculous and tiring game of — “that’s not us.”

We covered similar antics before, in Issue 204.

Did not mean to rhyme. Though, I do it all the time.

Anyway, seeing cheating services in a student newspaper feels new, and doubly problematic — not only increasing the digital credibility of companies that sell deception and misconduct, but perhaps actually reaching target customers. It’s not ideal.

I did e-mail The Daily to ask about the article/advertisement and where they thought their duties sat related to integrity and fraud. They have not replied, and the article is still up.

That article is what you may expect. It starts:

Is your text AI-generated? If so, it may need to be revised to remove AI plagiarism.

You may need to remove the plagiarism — not actually do the work, by the way — because, they say, submitting “AI-plagiarized content” in assignments and research papers is, and I quote, “not advisable.”

Do tell, how do you use AI to generate text and remove the plagiarism? The Ball State paper is happy to share. Always check your paper through an AI-detector, they advise. Then, “it should be converted to human-like content.”

The article continues:

Dozens of AI humanizing tools are available to bypass AI detectors and produce 100% human-like content.

And, being super helpful, the article lists and links to several of them. But first, in what I can just barely describe as English, the article includes:

• If the text is generated or paraphrased with AI models are most likely that AI plagiarised.

• If you write the content using custom LLMs with advanced prompts are less liked AI-generated.

• When you copied word-to-word content from other AI writers.

• Trying to humanize AI content with cheap Humanizer tools leads to AI plagiarism. 

Ah, what’s that again?

Following that, the piece offers step-by-step advice to remove AI content, directing readers to AI detectors, then pasting the flagged content into a different software and:

Click the “Humanize” button.

The suggested software, the article says:

produces human content for you.

First, way creepy. Second, there is zero chance that’s not academic cheating. Covering your tracks is not clever, it’s an admission of intent to deceive.

And, the article goes on:

If you successfully removed AI-generated content with [company redacted], you can use it.

Go ahead, use it. But let’s also reflect on the obvious — using AI content to replace AI content is no way removing AI content.

Surprising absolutely no one, the article also suggests using QuillBot, which is owned by cheating titan Course Hero (now Learneo), and backed by several education investors (see Issue 80).

Continuing:

Quillbot can accurately rewrite any AI-generated content into human-like content

Yes, the company that education investors have backed is being marketed as a way to sneak AI-created academic work past AI detection systems. It’s being marketed that way because that is exactly what it does. These investors, so far as I can tell, seem not the least bit bothered by the fact that one of their companies is polluting and destroying the teaching and learning value proposition they claim to support.

As long as the checks keep coming - amiright?

After listing other step-by-step ways to get around AI detectors, the article says:

If you use a good service, you can definitely transform AI-generated content into human-like content.

By that, they mean not getting caught cheating.

None of this should really surprise anyone. Where there’s a dollar to be made by peddling unethical shortcuts, someone will do it because people will pay.

Before moving on, let me point out once again the paradox — if AI detectors do not work, as some people mistakenly claim, why are companies paying for articles such as this one to sell services to bypass them? If AI detection was useless, there would be no market at all for these fingerprint erasure services. 

This article first appeared at Derek Newton's The Cheat Sheet.  

Cheating Giant Chegg, Shrinks (Derek Newton)

[Editor's Note: This article first appeared in The Cheat Sheet, the free newsletter on academic integrity and cheating.]

Yesterday, academic cheating company Chegg took yet another major hit on its stock value after the market closed, a decline that continues.

Today, Chegg - which is shockingly listed on the New York Stock Exchange - tumbled below $10 a share. In February 2021, Chegg shares were worth more than $113. In just over two years, Chegg shares have lost more than $100 in value - an Alpine decline of more than 91%.

Yikes.

The panic retreat by investors was initiated by Chegg’s quarterly earnings (Q1 - 2023) which were, not good. The bullets, according to news coverage:

Total net revenue down 7% year over year

*Subscription services, which represent 90% of Chegg’s business, were down 3% year over year.

*Total subscribers were down 5.1 million year over year.

*Projected further, continued declines in revenue, subscribers, and profit.

The company and media blamed the decline on AI tools such as ChatGPT - the automated service that can answer academic questions faster than Chegg, and for free.

In the earnings announcement, Chegg’s CEO said:

"since March we saw a significant spike in student interest in ChatGPT. We now believe it’s having an impact on our new customer growth rate."

Two things.

To start, The Cheat Sheet could have saved Chegg’s investors some serious money. Or, made you some, had you shorted Chegg. Back in Issue 68, I wrote:

Bottom line: Chegg as a business is in trouble.

Yup.

This past February, in Issue 193, I wrote:

… Chegg thinks their earnings will be essentially unchanged for 2023 vs 2022. I think they’re dreaming.

They were.

I’d repeated the wisdom of some smart readers who said early, early on that the likes of ChatGPT was going to be a Chegg killer. I agreed and told EdSurge exactly that, also in February (see Issue 193):

Some instructors have opposed companies like Chegg and Course Hero, as trying to get content related to the courses they teach removed can cause a headache. The chatbots represent a new headache, for teachers and possibly also for homework-help companies.

That whole business could be threatened by free tools like ChatGPT, argues Derek Newton, who runs The Cheat Sheet, a newsletter that covers academic dishonesty.

For Newton, the primary motivation of a student using homework-help services is laziness or a lack of preparedness. And so having a free alternative that can give answers to questions — like ChatGPT — could shrink the number of students who are willing to pay

In that Issue I wrote:

It’s too early to tell if ChatGPT will dent Chegg and its irresponsible ilk - but I can’t really see how it won’t.

And so it came to pass.

It is clear now that Chegg’s recent announcement of a partnership with ChatGPT (see Issue 203) was a desperate Hail Mary. And there’s no reason to think it will work, no reason to think Chegg’s decline won’t continue.

It also answers a question I’d been wrestling with for years - whether Chegg’s investors (see Issue 142) knew its core business was academic misconduct or not. This most recent investment retreat proved to me that they did. They only left when a better, more efficient cheater started eating their profits.

But a wise confidant and reader texted to say my question was academic - Chegg’s investors know now. He’s right.

When a free answer site takes away your customers, it becomes very clear very quickly what you’re actually selling.

Finally, a reminder that a collapsing valuation is not Chegg’s only problem.

As it happens, I checked in last week on the legal challenge by Pearson, against Chegg (see Issue 55). The suit is still active. And if Pearson wins, it could decapitate Chegg’s entire value proposition - selling the answers to questions they do not own. Chegg also continues to face investor legal challenges (see Issue 163). Since this recent stock evaporation essentially confirms that Chegg was a cheating provider all along, it’s hard to see how this recent news hurts investors’ claims.

Related links: 

EdTech Meltdown

College Meltdown 2.0