Searching for "cheating"
A peer-reviewed journal published hundreds of them. Why?
https://www.chronicle.com/article/why-did-a-peer-reviewed-journal-publish-hundreds-of-nonsense-papers
One clue is that the overwhelming majority of the papers were ostensibly written by authors who claim to be affiliated with Chinese institutions. Universities in China often reward researchers for publishing in notable journals listed on the Science Citation Index, in some cases paying them cash bonuses, though China’s science and education ministries have recently tried to crack down on the practice. It’s also long been a requirement that doctoral students at many Chinese universities publish a paper before they graduate.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
China’s Plagiarism Problem
https://www.forbes.com/2010/05/26/china-cheating-innovation-markets-economy-plagiarism.html
Plagiarism and the lack of academic integrity it engenders are intricately connected to the larger debate about intellectual property rights (IPR) in China and the government’s promoted idea of a harmonious society to support stability.
ProctorU scraps fully automated remote proctoring
https://www.highereddive.com/news/proctoru-scraps-fully-automated-remote-proctoring/600708/
Online proctoring companies have come under scrutiny for using AI that flags possible cheating too frequently.
++++++++++++
more on proctoring in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=proctor
Cheating Companies Hacked Websites at MIT, Stanford, Columbia And More Than 100 Other Schools
https://www.forbes.com/sites/dereknewton/2021/02/25/cheating-companies-hacked-websites-at-mit-stanford-columbia–and-more-than-100-other-schools/
Jim Ridolfo at the University of Kentucky and William Hart-Davidson at Michigan State University have found that more than 100 websites of American colleges have been hacked or otherwise compromised by essay mills, the contract cheating providers that improperly sell academic work to students.
“If you Google something like essay help and Stanford,” Ridolfo said, “you’ll get school content injected by essay mills or find pages that redirect you to their services.”
block the SQL injections and to set regular scans for additional paper mill intrusions.
hese intrusions were from just 14 known cheating providers when there are probably hundreds of them.
this pattern of hacking legitimate university property to sell cheating services could get much more complex and much more dangerous.
Since cheating is a billion-dollar, global dark market, it’s not surprising. It’s just awful. And schools should move quickly to address it, not just with patches, but with policy and policing.
++++++++++++
more on plagiarism in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=plagiarism
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.
+++++++++++
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.
+++++++++++
more on cheating in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=cheating
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/
+++++++++++++
more on Proctorio in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=proctorio
“Some of the more prominent companies offering these services include Proctorio, Respondus, ProctorU, HonorLock, Kryterion Global Testing Solutions, and Examity.”
Our Bodies Encoded: Algorithmic Test Proctoring in Higher Education
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 Proctorio, Respondus, ProctorU, HonorLock, Kryterion 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.
+++++++++++++++++
more on privacy in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=privacy
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.
+++++++++++++
more on charter schools in this IMS blog
https://blog.stcloudstate.edu/ims?s=charter
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)
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)
82. “The End of Library” Stories (and the Software that Seems to Support That)
86. Badges
89. Clickers
92. “The Flipped Classroom”
93. 3D Printing
100. The Horizon Report
five of the biggest education stories of the year
-
Stagnant Student Performance and Widening Achievement Gaps
a vociferous debate over what to blame, from subpar reading instruction to poverty to uneven implementation of the Common Core
-
A Crisis in Elite College Admissions
-
Declining Trust in Higher Education
a survey from the Pew Research Center found that 59 percent of Republicans and those who lean Republican believe colleges have a negative effect on the country.
Betsy DeVos, continued to draw criticism for rolling back oversight of for-profit colleges and weakening protections for bilked students.
-
The Democratic Party Backed Away From Charter Schools
Charters in cities like New York and Boston have shown promising achievement gains. But the sector has come under increasing fire on the left for harsh discipline practices, contributing to school segregation and serving fewer students with special needs. Teachers unions tend to oppose the schools’ expansion, since most of them are not unionized.
-
Democrats Continue to Debate School Segregation
school segregation remains a defining feature of the American education system today,
++++++++++++++++++
https://www.politics-prose.com/event/book/diane-ravitch-slaying-goliath-passionate-resistance-to-privatization-and-fight-to-save
Introducing Proctor-ring
Posted by Andy Freed |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.
