Searching for "cheat"

Chegg and academic integrity

https://www.dailyemerald.com/news/students-cheat-with-online-learning-service-professors-hope-to-identify-users/article_552d56f4-5a31-11eb-98ae-879264ec0299.html

Services like Chegg have become more accessible to students during unproctored exams in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, causing what UO chemistry professor Shannon Boettcher believes is a “huge problem with academic dishonesty across the nation in the light of remote learning and COVID-19.”

he Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s notice and takedown process requires that service providers remove material that a copyright owner identifies on their website through a valid notice of copyright infringement or become subject to potential secondary liability for assisting with copyright infringement, according to Copyright Alliance.

Chegg Inc. has been sued twice in federal court for claims of copyright infringement, denying allegations in both instances.

Apart from its subscription services, Chegg rents and sells textbooks. The publishing company John Wiley & Sons Inc. filed a lawsuit against Chegg on Dec. 18, 2018, in Manhattan U.S. District Court, alleging that Chegg sold counterfeit versions of its textbooks.

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This $12 Billion Company Is Getting Rich Off Students Cheating Their Way Through Covid

https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2021/01/28/this-12-billion-company-is-getting-rich-off-students-cheating-their-way-through-covid

Chegg is based in Santa Clara, California, but the heart of its operation is in India, where it employs more than 70,000 experts with advanced math, science, technology and engineering degrees. The experts, who work freelance, are online 24/7, supplying step-by-step answers to questions posted by subscribers (sometimes answered in less than 15 minutes).

Chegg CEO Dan Rosensweig has profited handsomely. His holdings in Chegg plus after-tax proceeds from stock sales add up to $300 million. Rosensweig, who declined to speak to Forbes, has said that Chegg Study was “not built” for cheating. He describes it instead as the equivalent of an asynchronous, always-on tutor, ready to help students with detailed answers to problems. In a 2019 interview, he said higher education needs to adjust to the on-demand economy, the way Uber or Amazon have.

Throughout the pandemic, schools have spent millions on remote proctoring, a controversial practice in which colleges pay private companies like Honorlock and Examity to surveil students while they take tests.

Chegg Study was enjoying steady growth and little competition. Its only serious rival, privately held Course Hero, is a much smaller operation, valued at $1.1 billion, that generates most of its answers from students.

My note:

such proliferation would not have been possible, if the middle and upper administration has been more supportive of faculty when misconduct is detected. If the administration turns blind eye due to “enrollment” and “retention” priorities and curbs faculty reports regarding academic dishonesty, the industry naturally fills out the gap between a mere syllabus statement and inability to act upon it.

There is plenty of lipservice regarding “personalized learning,” but the reality is overworked faculty, who do not have the opportunity to spend sufficient time with students, less to educate them about plagiarism, cheating and similar “auxiliary” trends besides the content of the course.

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more on cheating in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cheating

Proctorio

Students Are Rebelling Against Eye-Tracking Exam Surveillance Tools

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7wxvd/students-are-rebelling-against-eye-tracking-exam-surveillance-tools

Algorithmic proctoring software has been around for several years, but its use exploded as the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools to quickly transition to remote learning. Proctoring companies cite studies estimating that between 50 and 70 percent of college students will attempt some form of cheating, and warn that cheating will be rampant if students are left unmonitored in their own homes.

Like many other tech companies, they also balk at the suggestion that they are responsible for how their software is used. While their algorithms flag behavior that the designers have deemed suspicious, these companies argue that the ultimate determination of whether cheating occurred rests in the hands of the class instructor.

As more evidence emerges about how the programs work, and fail to work, critics say the tools are bound to hurt low-income students, students with disabilities, students with children or other dependents, and other groups who already face barriers in higher education.

“Each academic department has almost complete agency to design their curriculum as far as I know, and each professor has the freedom to design their own exams and use whatever monitoring they see fit,” Rohan Singh, a computer engineering student at Michigan State University, told Motherboard.

after students approached faculty members at the University of California Santa Barbara, the faculty association sent a letter to the school’s administration raising concerns about whether ProctorU would share student data with third parties. 
In response, a ProctorU attorney threatened to sue the faculty association for defamation and violating copyright law (because the association had used the company’s name and linked to its website). He also accused the faculty association of “directly impacting efforts to mitigate civil disruption across the United States” by interfering with education during a national emergency, and said he was sending his complaint to the state’s Attorney General.

here is a link to a community discussion regarding this and similar software use:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/RemakingtheUniversity/permalink/1430416163818409/

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more on Proctorio in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=proctorio
“Some of the more prominent companies offering these services include ProctorioRespondusProctorUHonorLockKryterion Global Testing Solutions, and Examity.”

Algorithmic Test Proctoring

Our Bodies Encoded: Algorithmic Test Proctoring in Higher Education

SHEA SWAUGER ED-TECH

https://hybridpedagogy.org/our-bodies-encoded-algorithmic-test-proctoring-in-higher-education/

While in-person test proctoring has been used to combat test-based cheating, this can be difficult to translate to online courses. Ed-tech companies have sought to address this concern by offering to watch students take online tests, in real time, through their webcams.

Some of the more prominent companies offering these services include ProctorioRespondusProctorUHonorLockKryterion Global Testing Solutions, and Examity.

Algorithmic test proctoring’s settings have discriminatory consequences across multiple identities and serious privacy implications. 

While racist technology calibrated for white skin isn’t new (everything from photography to soap dispensers do this), we see it deployed through face detection and facial recognition used by algorithmic proctoring systems.

While some test proctoring companies develop their own facial recognition software, most purchase software developed by other companies, but these technologies generally function similarly and have shown a consistent inability to identify people with darker skin or even tell the difference between Chinese people. Facial recognition literally encodes the invisibility of Black people and the racist stereotype that all Asian people look the same.

As Os Keyes has demonstrated, facial recognition has a terrible history with gender. This means that a software asking students to verify their identity is compromising for students who identify as trans, non-binary, or express their gender in ways counter to cis/heteronormativity.

These features and settings create a system of asymmetric surveillance and lack of accountability, things which have always created a risk for abuse and sexual harassment. Technologies like these have a long history of being abused, largely by heterosexual men at the expense of women’s bodies, privacy, and dignity.

Their promotional messaging functions similarly to dog whistle politics which is commonly used in anti-immigration rhetoric. It’s also not a coincidence that these technologies are being used to exclude people not wanted by an institution; biometrics and facial recognition have been connected to anti-immigration policies, supported by both Republican and Democratic administrations, going back to the 1990’s.

Borrowing from Henry A. Giroux, Kevin Seeber describes the pedagogy of punishment and some of its consequences in regards to higher education’s approach to plagiarism in his book chapter “The Failed Pedagogy of Punishment: Moving Discussions of Plagiarism beyond Detection and Discipline.”

my note: I am repeating this for years
Sean Michael Morris and Jesse Stommel’s ongoing critique of Turnitin, a plagiarism detection software, outlines exactly how this logic operates in ed-tech and higher education: 1) don’t trust students, 2) surveil them, 3) ignore the complexity of writing and citation, and 4) monetize the data.

Technological Solutionism

Cheating is not a technological problem, but a social and pedagogical problem.
Our habit of believing that technology will solve pedagogical problems is endemic to narratives produced by the ed-tech community and, as Audrey Watters writes, is tied to the Silicon Valley culture that often funds it. Scholars have been dismantling the narrative of technological solutionism and neutrality for some time now. In her book “Algorithms of Oppression,” Safiya Umoja Noble demonstrates how the algorithms that are responsible for Google Search amplify and “reinforce oppressive social relationships and enact new modes of racial profiling.”

Anna Lauren Hoffmann, who coined the term “data violence” to describe the impact harmful technological systems have on people and how these systems retain the appearance of objectivity despite the disproportionate harm they inflict on marginalized communities.

This system of measuring bodies and behaviors, associating certain bodies and behaviors with desirability and others with inferiority, engages in what Lennard J. Davis calls the Eugenic Gaze.

Higher education is deeply complicit in the eugenics movement. Nazism borrowed many of its ideas about racial purity from the American school of eugenics, and universities were instrumental in supporting eugenics research by publishing copious literature on it, establishing endowed professorships, institutes, and scholarly societies that spearheaded eugenic research and propaganda.

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more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy

Charter schools

A charter chain thinks it has the answer for alternative schools

Critics complain that the schools lack rigor and often use software programs vulnerable to cheating, such as Edgenuity. https://www.edgenuity.com/login/

Bixby also pushed back on the idea, expressed by some alternative school critics, that students in traditional classrooms, with teachers who each see over 150 pupils a day, are assured a more meaningful experience. Altus students are assigned to one main teacher who becomes responsible for each of their students’ progress throughout their time in the program. The network aims to assign no more than 40 students to each teacher so that they have time to get to know them. And all instruction is delivered one-on-one or in small groups.

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more on charter schools in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=charter

100 tech debacles of the decade

http://hackeducation.com/2019/12/31/what-a-shitshow

1. Anti-School Shooter Software

4. “The Year of the MOOC” (2012)

6. “Everyone Should Learn to Code”

8. LAUSD’s iPad Initiative (2013)

9. Virtual Charter Schools

10. Google for Education

14. inBloom. The Shared Learning Collaborative (2011)

17. Test Prep

20. Predictive Analytics

22. Automated Essay Grading

25. Peter Thiel

26. Google Glass

32. Common Core State Standards

44. YouTube, the New “Educational TV”

48. The Hour of Code

49. Yik Yak

52. Virtual Reality

57. TurnItIn (and the Cheating Detection Racket) (my note: repeating the same for years: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=turnitin)

59. Clayton Christensen’s Predictions
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=clayton

61. Edmodo. https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=edmodo

62. Edsurge

64. Alexa at School

65. Apple’s iTextbooks (2011)

67. UC Berkeley Deletes Its Online Lectures. ADA

72. Chatbot Instructors. IBM Watson “AI” technology (2016)

81. Interactive Whiteboards (my note: repeating the same for years: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=smartboard)

82. “The End of Library” Stories (and the Software that Seems to Support That)

86. Badges

89. Clickers

90. “Ban Laptops” Op-Eds (my note: collecting pros and cons for years: https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims/2017/04/03/use-of-laptops-in-the-classroom/)

92. “The Flipped Classroom”

93. 3D Printing

100. The Horizon Report

2019 Year in Education

five of the biggest education stories of the year

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https://www.politics-prose.com/event/book/diane-ravitch-slaying-goliath-passionate-resistance-to-privatization-and-fight-to-save

Google plagiarism tool

Ed-tech historian and critic Audrey Watters, for example, said plagiarism-detection software in general frames all writers as potential cheaters, undermining the trust that is essential to strong student-teacher relationships. She said the companies making the software tend to accept as given that most writing assignments are so cookie-cutter that students can reasonably consider copying someone else’s work a viable strategy.

My note: the paragraph above reflects my deep personal belief and most of the information and notes in this blog regarding the “automation” of plagiarism detection

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more on plagiarism in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=plagiarism

Proctor-ring April’s Fool

Introducing Proctor-ring

Posted by  |April 2019 /

Announcing Proctor-ring, a new biometric tool in the war on cheating.

Starting today, Online Learning has partnered with the Academic Integrity Task Force and that import shop in the strip mall on Hwy 99 to provide a new, low cost option for improving the integrity of your exams. The Proctor-ring uses mood ring technology to identify common changes in human emotion that have been calibrated to identify academic dishonesty. While many vendors will sell you very expensive tools to combat cheating, the Proctor-ring is cost effective and scales well across all disciplines.

The proctorring color chart explains what colors are associated with which emotion or breach in academic honesty.a test taker is wearing a gauche ring with a stone jewel while taking a paper exam

Teacher Brand and Digital Reputation

Rise and Shine! How to Boost Your Teacher Brand and Digital Reputation

By Kasey Bell     Apr 5, 2016

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2016-04-05-rise-and-shine-how-to-boost-your-teacher-brand-and-digital-reputation

Five tips to help you create a personal brand and a positive digital reputation

1. What will they find when they Google you?

2. What is branding?

Your brand is what you represent, the content that you share, your audience, your Personal Learning Network (PLN), and your teaching philosophy. You want your brand to demonstrate that you are trustworthy, and offer quality content, insightful comments, and experience. Your brand tells your audience that what you offer is of value. Together, the elements that create your brand should communicate a distinct, cohesive story. For instance, when you visit any of my social media profiles, you will see a consistent message. The avatar and logo for my website Shake Up Learning are more recognizable than my face, and that’s intentional. That isn’t to say that every brand needs an avatar. But do find a creative way to tell your personal story.

3. Choose the right platforms

There is no right or wrong platform. Choosing where you want to build your online presence depends on the audience that you want to engage. If you want to reach parents and school community stakeholders, Facebook is a strong bet. If you want to reach other educators, Twitter and Pinterest are big winners. The bottom line is that you don’t have to use them all. Find and connect with your audience where your audience resides.

4. Claim your social media real estate

Before you settle on a username, check that it’s available on all of the social media platforms that you want to use—and then keep it consistent. You will lose your audience if you make it hard to find you. Also keep your handle simple and short, and try to avoid special characters. When a new platform arrives, claim your username early even if you aren’t sure that you will maintain a presence there.

5. Optimize your social media profiles

Guy Kawasaki, co-author of The Art of Social Media, khas nearly 1.5 million followers on Twitter alone, and he offers effective social media tips in his book. Here are the basics:

  • Add a picture of your face or logo. Your picture validates who you are. No more eggheads! Using the default egg avatar on Twitter says you don’t have a brand, and doesn’t tell your audience that you are trustworthy.
  • Use your real name. Sure, you can lie, but that isn’t going to help you build a brand and online presence. Many platforms allow you to show your name as well as your handle.
  • Link to your website, blog or About.me page. Don’t have one? Get one! You may not be ready to start a blog, but anyone can easily set up an About.me page—which is like an online resume.
  •  Compose a meaningful bio, which will help others find and follow you. It should describe your experience in the field of education and highlight topics that you follow like Maker EdGoogle Apps, or edtech.
  • Add a cover image. Choose an image that tells your story. Who are you? What do you do that sets you apart? Canva is a graphic design tool that makes creating a cover image easy. It offers ready-made templates in the right size for all of the major social media platforms.
  • Be consistent across all mediums. You want your followers to see the same brand on all of your social media profiles. This also means you shouldn’t change your profile picture every five minutes. Be recognizable.

Tools to build your brand and online presence

  •  About.me: A quick and easy personal homepage that shows your audience who you are and how to connect with you.
  •  Canva: An easy-to-use design tool for creating images, with templates for social media.
  •  Fiverr: A marketplace for services that you can use to commission a logo, avatar, or web design.
  •  Wix: A free website builder.
  •  Weebly: A free website builder.
  •  Buffer: A free web tool for sharing and scheduling content across multiple social media platforms.
  •  Nuzzel: A free web tool that lets you see the content trending among the people you follow.
  •  The Art of Social Media: A guide to creating a compelling social media presence, by Guy Kawasaki and Peg Fitzpatrick.
  •  What Happens in Vegas Stays on YouTube: Tips for preserving your digital reputation, by Erik Qualman.
  •  What Happens on Campus Stays on YouTube: Advice for students on protective their digital reputations, by Erik Qualman.

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more on digital citizenship in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=digital+citizenship

also:

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/628252216744698154/
social media cheat sheet and content calendar

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