Chapman professor’s legal battle with Course Hero raises debate of ethics behind pay-to-use learning platforms

A Chapman business professor recently issued a subpoena to Course Hero to get the names of students who uploaded testing materials from spring 2021 to the site, calling to question the ethics of online learning platforms. Photo collage by DANIEL PEARSON, Photo Editor

Pay-to-use learning platforms are a common method of cheating among college students, despite clear policies on their websites promoting academic integrity. 

A recent lawsuit involving a Chapman University professor and Course Hero, one of many online learning platforms that students use to cheat on tests and assignments, has raised the question of the ethicality of using these online resources. 

Ella Jewell, a freshman global communication and world languages major, told The Panther she believes that students are solely at fault when cheating. 

“I don’t think it’s ethical that students use websites like Chegg; it defeats the purpose of education,” Jewell said. “What even is the point of attending classes if there’s no work going into it? I think that education is something that students are lucky to have, and to disrespect the professors that are devoting time and energy to is not okay.” 

In order to figure out the names of the students who uploaded testing materials from his Legal Environment of Business (BUS 215) class on Course Hero, Chapman professor David Berkovitz issued a subpoena to Course Hero claiming copyright infringement of his spring 2021 midterm and final exams.

Since Course Hero does not give out any user information without a subpoena, Berkovitz had to file a complaint through federal court and obtain copyright registration for his exams through the U.S. Office of Copyright. Attorney Mark E. Hankin, Berkovitz’s lawyer, said the professor plans to drop all legal action after acquiring the names of the students and will pass along the information to Chapman’s Academic Integrity Committee.

The case, which has made national headlines in recent weeks, has opened a societal dialogue regarding whether using platforms like Course Hero is ethical or just plain cheating.

Ricky Lin, a freshman health sciences major, said using these resources is appropriate, since professors often don’t provide enough guidance to students. 

“It's definitely more of the professor's fault (that cheating occurs),” Lin said. "A lot of the time, for exams, for example, professors might not offer enough resources like study guides for the students, which leads to them to cheat using these websites.” 

Along with Course Hero, Chegg and bartleby are frontrunners in the online learning realm. 

The three websites have varying approaches to providing additional help to students. Chegg is a homework help site as well as a textbook seller. While Course Hero is an open platform for students to submit study materials, students are able to ask questions on bartleby and receive an answer within 30 minutes. 

Hannah Torres, a senior media studies major at the University of California, Berkeley and bartleby brand ambassador, said she spoke to Chegg co-founder Osman Rashid about who takes more responsibility when it comes to cheating. 

“Something (Rashid) made a really good point about is that part of the problem when it comes to cheating is that it's the responsibility of the student and the professor,” Torres said. "If the professor knows that students have access to a midterm that we have seen in the past ten years, it's ignorant to assume that students aren't going to cheat on that. It's also on behalf of the students to abide by our academic code of conduct and to not cheat.” 

Likewise, it is possible that the students who uploaded the test materials to Course Hero may have been motivated by a lack of resources within the classroom and felt the need to help other students.

Because Course Hero is a crowdsourcing site, meaning its content is generated by its many users, there are few barriers to prevent copyrighted materials from being posted at all. Instead, Course Hero states they remove or disable access to content that they are notified is infringing on copyright.

Sean Michael Morris, Course Hero’s vice president of academics, told The Panther that Course Hero does not condone cheating but conceded that cheating can occur among students on the site’s open platform. Course Hero’s Terms of Use states they are not responsible for content uploaded to their site and that all submissions are copyright protected.

“Technically speaking, we don't facilitate cheating; that doesn't mean that it can't happen in that space,” Morris said. “But when it does happen, people are breaking our terms of service and the honor code that they've agreed to when they become part of the platform.”

Course Hero users also criticized the difficulty of removing materials posted on the website. 

Jennifer Sano-Franchini, a professor at Virginia Tech, told Inside Higher Ed that Course Hero would not completely remove one of her old syllabi she requested to take down — they would only prevent access to it. 

Morris said Course Hero makes requested documents inaccessible but does not fully remove them in order to prevent duplicates from being uploaded. 

“It's actually for the copyright owner’s protection that we keep that on the site,” Morris said. 

Sano-Franchini said in a Tweet that she “find(s) it despicable how (Course Hero is) rhetorically displacing all responsibilities onto individual students, even as the site incentivizes the uploading of course content.”

For every 10 documents a student submits, they get five free “unlocks,” which allow them to view and download study materials. 

There is also a problem of violations of privacy on Course Hero. Several student essays about traumatic experiences included their full names and attended universities, according to Inside Higher Ed. The downside of hosting an unmonitored, crowdsourcing platform is that too much information is being uploaded at once, making it difficult for Course Hero to see every document uploaded. 

“We are a user-generated site and, we say publicly, we have 70 million documents any given day, and so it’s not something we have a good sense of — what’s in the library,” Monique Ho,  Course Hero's chief compliance officer and general counsel told Inside Higher Ed. 

The issue of privacy is one that Course Hero, Chegg and bartleby all address on their websites. Course Hero requires a subpoena to identify copyright infringers in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, while Chegg has an honor code investigation which can lead to them sharing students’ names and email addresses with professors. On the other end of the spectrum, bartleby is the only site that does not share its users’ information.

“bartleby really prides itself in our information privacy policies. So that's one of the things that differentiates us — that we really value student information,” Torres said. “And as much as we want (students) to trust us, (bartleby) trusts them that they're going to use it to help them move forward with their education responsibly and ethically.” 

Morris said that Course Hero is discussing new ideas about how to educate students on how to use their platform, but nothing has been decided on yet.

“One of my jobs is to try to reach out to educators and help them understand how to teach students about the platform itself, how to teach them about academic integrity, how to teach them about plagiarism, how to teach them about making sure that their privacy (is secure) online," Morris said. "All of those sorts of things are pieces of the education that we're trying to (provide).” 

Rashid offered strategies for how to combat cheating in an academic setting. Primarily, he urged professors not to recycle their testing materials, which he believes may lead to an increased temptation among students to cheat.

“Professors need to create more expansive, creative question sets and not repeat tests,” Rashid wrote in an email to The Panther. “Universities need to mandate that test questions should not be repeated.”