Vaccination rates in the United Kingdom hit a low of 80 per cent in the early 2000s, leaving children unprotected from serious diseases. The repercussions are still being felt today, with Dr Wakefield being hailed as a hero by vaccine sceptics.
“There was about 20 years of research before the pandemic that showed that there was less academic misconduct in online courses compared to face-to-face learning.”
tudents were “forced into online learning when they didn’t want to be,”
tudents become easy prey for a US$15 billion global industry specializing in “contract cheating,”
Countries like New Zealand, Ireland, Australia are already ahead of the game, with legislation making it illegal for contract cheating businesses to operate.
U.K. is catching up, having tabled similar legislation.
The specific AI — GPT-3, for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 — was released in June 2020 by OpenAI, a research business co-founded by Elon Musk. It was developed to create content with a human language structure better than any of its predecessors.
According to a 2019 paper by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence, machines fundamentally lack commonsense reasoning — the ability to understand what they’re writing. That finding is based on a critical reevaluation of standard tests to determine commonsense reasoning in machines, such as the Winograd Schema Challenge.
Which makes the results of the EduRef experiment that much more striking. The writing prompts were given in a variety of subjects, including U.S. History, Research Methods (Covid-19 Vaccine Efficacy), Creative Writing, and Law. GPT-3 managed to score a “C” average across four subjects from professors, failing only one assignment.
Aside from potentially troubling implications for educators, what this points to is a dawning inflection point for natural language processing, heretofore a decidedly human characteristic.
“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.
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
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.
Hi all, I don’t use Grammarly, but I hear that a lot of people find it useful. I am also hearing that some instructors/universities find its use problematic. Several years ago, a student that I knew was not a good writer was accused of plagiarism by another instructor. She claimed that her nearly flawless papers were written with the help of Grammarly. I am curious to know if you encourage or prohibit Grammarly in your classes and if your department or university has a policy concerning its use.
My summation of this thread:
naturally, opinions are for and against:
pros –
it helps/forces students understand the need to proofread
partially replaces the very initial work of instructor
cons –
algorithms/technology are/is not perfect
it does not replace a living person (sic!!!)
e.g. it detect passive voice, but does not teach the replacement
Will teachers use @Google‘s new anti-plagiarism tool to target cheaters—or tee up teachable moments about fair use and proper citation?https://t.co/1pDnqutyNt
Will teachers use @Google's new anti-plagiarism tool to target cheaters—or tee up teachable moments about fair use and proper citation?https://t.co/1pDnqutyNt
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