Academic dishonesty essay

INSIDE HIGHER ED

Submitted by Steve Kolowich on October 6, 2009 - 3:00am

Course Hero or Course Villain?

Aside from the parties and networking opportunities, one of the perennial perks of Greek Life has been the

coveted “test file” — a collection of past exams and papers from various courses.

A new breed of study-buddy sites offers these resources to everybody, not just those who have endured Greek

initiation rites. Companies such as Notehall [1], Knetwit [2], and FindMyNotes.com [3]have long hosted online

markets [4] where students can buy or sell class notes. Now, sites such as Course Hero [5] invite students to

post and download syllabuses, worksheets, essays, previous exams, and many other course materials.

At Course Hero, a site that lately has been the subject of much hand-wringing among campus information

technology officers, users can either shell out $30 for a month-long subscription or pay in uploaded documents.

Forty documents equals one month of access to all the files posted by the site’s users. The company says

millions have visited the site since it was unveiled a year and a half ago. The purpose of Course Hero,

according to David J. Kim, the company’s president and CEO, is to “maximize and accelerate academic

breakthroughs by students.” By providing a place where users can share documents and communicate on

discussion boards, Kim said, the site allows students across the world to leverage others’ knowledge in order to

deepen their own — like any study group, but exponentially larger.

Some professors and administrators, however, have chafed at the idea of a site that encourages students to take

professors' intellectual output, post it without permission, and then allow a company to sell access to it for

profit. “If I put the time and effort into developing a brief summary of a class I was teaching or a particular

lesson, I would be extremely disappointed if it were put on the Internet and people were making a profit off of

it, especially without my permission,” said Gina Mieszczak, who taught at DePaul University for three years

before joining the Illinois Institute of Technology as a network security administrator. Tracy Mitrano, an

information science scholar and director of IT policy at Cornell University, said it is likely that many professors

have legitimate copyright claims on materials that have been uploaded without their knowledge. “If I’m going

to spend many hours writing up an exam, assuming it has original work in it and it’s in a tangible medium, then

I as the creator of that work, under the traditional rules of universities, own the copyright to it,” Mitrano said.

This applies to any original work, she added — even if it’s scrawled on a cocktail napkin. Course Hero,

meanwhile, says it is not liable for any copyright infringements because it explicitly exercises no oversight over

posted content. Like YouTube, Course Hero only takes down copyrighted content if there is a complaint. (This

explains why certain documents found on the site — such as one filed under a purported Benedictine University

offering called “Alumni 1962” — do not appear to correspond to an actual course; contrary to the suspicions of

INSIDE HIGHER ED

Submitted by Steve Kolowich on October 6, 2009 - 3:00am

some, Kim said the company is not using robots to crawl university Web domains for electronic documents.)

“We take copyright and intellectual property infringement very seriously,” said Kim. “However, as a user-

generated content site, we don’t review the content… Unfortunately, at times we recognize that users may

submit materials that they don’t have rights to.” Kim said that relative to the number of documents that have

been posted on the site (“in the millions”), the company has fielded few complaints. He noted that while Course

Hero’s approach to purging copyrighted content is passive, it is in compliance with the Digital Millennium

Copyright Act [6]. But Christopher W. Wessells, vice provost and chief information officer at the University of

San Diego, said many college officials are still in the dark about Course Hero, even as it has become popular

among students. "I recently quizzed 13 provosts and vice provosts," he said. “They had no idea about these

services... I think in general higher education is just beginning to look at this." For some, the question of

whether such a site violates intellectual property protections is secondary; some officials have expressed

concerns over whether Course Hero’s efforts to create a community of shared information might actually enable

cheating. “There are exams, quizzes, homework going up on these sites that are really fertile ground for

plagiarism and dishonesty,” said Wessells.

Former user John Stacey, who said the site's resources helped him complete homework assignments and study

for midterms before he graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara last spring, acknowledged

that “the concerns over plagiarism are well-warranted.” He does, however, think the potential benefit of sharing

sites such as Course Hero outweigh the cost (enough so that he contributed a glowing review to the site’s

testimonial page). “As long as the teaching communities, students, and employees of Course Hero work

together to ensure that plagiarism and cheating, and material that supports it, are absent from the site, it can

serve to vastly enhance the means through which students and collaborate, teach, learn, and innovate amongst

themselves and those in surrounding communities,” Stacey wrote to Inside Higher Ed.

Kim said Course Hero does have plans to “work with educators and institutions in this vein” that it should be

rolling out by next spring, though he declined to offer further details. Josh Baron, the director of academic

technology and e-learning at Marist College and a longtime adjunct professor, said that while he considers

Course Hero’s systematic appropriation of copyrighted material “unethical,” the idea of a learning-based social

networking site holds promise. “Imagine business students at Stanford, Marist, University of Beijing and

University of Paris connecting up outside of their courses to study together and maybe even work on team

projects,” he wrote to colleagues on an Educause discussion forum. “This may become the ‘study group’ of the

21st century.”

INSIDE HIGHER ED

Submitted by Steve Kolowich on October 6, 2009 - 3:00am

Mitrano, the legal expert, said that she understands her colleagues’ frustration as technology chips away at their

control over course materials. But she cautioned against invoking copyright laws in an attempt to cripple Course

Hero or its cousins. “Copyright is supposed to be about an incentive that you get as an author for a limited

period of time to enjoy the benefits of your creation — it’s the [act of] creation that copyright law wants to

incentivize,” she said. “If now professors want to use copyright as a means to maintain their control over the

classroom, I suggest that there might be something disingenuous about that that might chafe with the values that

so many of us in higher education hold dear,” she said.

Source URL: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/10/06/coursehero?width=775&height=500&iframe=true

Questions for Consideration and Critical thinking & Writing

*BEFORE drafting a response use the Formal Essay Outline on pg. 63* begin writing additional instructions

will be announced.

While most students know cheating (cheating in all of its forms) occurs, do you understand the particular ways

academic dishonesty negatively impacts you?

What do you think about a student that achieves high marks or honors in a collegiate/university system by

cheating in one form or another?

Is it realistic to trust that, “teaching communities, students, and study-buddy sites will ensure that plagiarism

and cheating are not a common practice?

Can these online learning platforms serve to ‘vastly enhance’ learning or retention or do they really increase

cheating efficiency? Explain how or why not in your response.