Education

Georgia Tech Has An Undercover Cheating Bot


Considering how much we collectively invest in higher education in America, and the outsized returns our colleges and universities generate, it’s appalling how little we—they—invest in protecting it.

Every school in the country has a cheating problem, from Harvard and Stanford on to You Name It State. Of all the ways to cheat, contract cheating—paying someone to do academic work for you—is both particularly pernicious and comically common. A review of academic literature on contract cheating found that, “from 2014 to present the percentage of students admitting to paying someone else to undertake their work was 15.7%.”

That’s admitted cheating. That’s admitted to paid contract cheating. My own research shows that in the U.S. alone, paying for contracted schoolwork is notably more common than even 15.7%.

What’s considerably more shocking is how little American schools seem to care about it. I single out American schools because in places such as the U.K. and Australia policing college cheating is serious business—students get expelled, degrees are revoked, people are fired. They hold symposia on cheating, have national academic intergrity oversight bodies. They talk about it.

Schools in the United States either tend to deny it happens or convince themselves that their honor codes and orientation lectures and written student conduct policies are enough. That’s naïve and, as mentioned, a shockingly cavalier approach to such a valuable and expensive enterprise.

There are exceptions, though. A handful of domestic schools have taken creative approaches to stopping academic fraud. In 2018, I wrote about the University of Maryland tinkering with a bot to crawl file-sharing services looking for copyrighted material such as tests and homework assignments.  

Then, a few months ago, some smart folks at Georgia Tech (GT) launched their own weapon in the war on contract cheating—a bot named Jack Watson.

First and foremost, good for Georgia Tech. It’s a notable and noble thing when an American university takes action to combat fraud, especially action that’s unilateral, creative and effective, which Jack Watson seems to be.

The GT bot infiltrates cheating sites—of which there are hundreds—and poses as a for-hire writer and homework cheater, bidding on work offered up by Georgia Tech students who want to pay for their work to be done by someone else. When a GT student picks the bot to do their work, the bot sends the student a professor-crafted assignment with a secret “watermark.” If the student submits the work with the scarlet letter, they are caught.

As of August 2019, the bot had already nabbed nine students. When you think of the steps involved—getting in the cheating site, posing as a contracted cheater, finding assignments from Georgia Tech, submitting a bid, getting picked, creating the watermark assignment, sending to the students, the student using it, then getting caught—nine is an outrageous number.

Further, the nine cannot be from every single cheating site, there are just too many. So, catching nine in this ten-step process over just a handful of months should support the premise that contract cheating is pervasive, even at a prestigious top 30 national university.

The GT bot designers said they hoped Jack Watson could be used by other universities. Let’s all hope that hundreds of schools have been on the phone to Atlanta asking how they can beg or borrow the technology.

Unfortunately, other schools probably have not inquired about Jack Watson because the odds are good that schools don’t know about it. That’s because people here don’t talk about cheating and because, proving that point, I could find only two press outlets that covered the GT innovation—Times Higher Education and something called Study International, which appears to be an aggregator and college lead generation funnel. Both are based in London and serve primarily overseas readers.

It will be doubly unfortunate if this GT technology does not earn more visibility and adoption because, experts say, the best way to stop contract cheating is deterrence, the fear of getting caught. Yes, schools can educate students about cheating and provide resources to mitigate the circumstance that motivate it, but nothing works as well as the possibility of being caught. So, the simple possibility that a school-run bot may be out there, posing as an essay writer for hire on cheating sites would do wonders to cut down on cheating.

But even that is probably too much to hope for. It’s more likely that the leaders of our billion dollar education brands will continue to leave their doors unlocked, the keys in the car, and turn out their lights, ignoring the data showing that more than more than one in every seven people who walk down their street is stealing from them—and all of us.



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