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EdTech Goes Undercover: An Insider’s View of What Students Post on Contract Cheating Sites

Amelia Pang is a journalist and an editor at EdTech: Focus on Higher Education. Her work has appeared in the New Republic, Mother Jones, and  The New York Times Sunday Review, among other publications.

Editor’s Note: This is part 1 of a 2-part investigation. Part 2 covers how IT departments can detect and prevent contract cheating in higher education.

“Please complete my assignment,” a student posts on a microtutoring website that universities say  facilitates contract cheating . The assignment is on the history of public health. APA format. Three sources. At least 750 words. In less than 15 minutes,  EdTech  sees a university ghostwriter accepting the assignment for $20.

There are hundreds of “homework help” websites that have seen an  exponential increase in customers  since the start of the pandemic. The services offered on sites like these typically run the gamut of legitimate tutoring to selling exam documents and answers. Some flat out offer to take an entire online course or exam for students.

The shadow industry of contract cheating falls into a legal gray area. When students and tutors make an account on a homework help site, they must sign a terms-of-service agreement and honor code that forbids academic cheating. But an undercover  EdTech  investigation found this agreement appears to be rarely enforced.

“I have definitely seen an increase in customers since the pandemic began,” Alex, an academic ghostwriter who currently works for a homework help site, tells  EdTech.  “Specifically, there has been an increase in the number of students posting that they want full online classes done for them. Most of the time, students have no problem finding a contractor.”

What Is Contract Cheating, and How Does It Work?

To avoid legal liability, some homework help sites are using automation tools to edit the language of posts. Whenever students submit a post, the first line always says something like “I need help understanding the assignment,” or “Help me learn.”

But  EdTech  saw this as mostly a cursory statement. Many students will also directly say, “Please complete my assignment.” Some even go so far as to request that the “tutor” be available at a certain date and time to take an online exam for them.

“I would say that 30 percent of the requests are for ‘help’ versus completing assignments,”  a tutor for one of these sites told BRIGHT Magazine in 2016.  “It is largely a place for students to cheat.”

When  EdTech  created a tutor account at a homework help site earlier this year, we found that not much has changed since the BRIGHT Magazine article came out five years ago.

An insider's view of what students post on contract cheating sites.

Although students are blatantly asking for “tutors” to complete assignments and exams for them,  EdTech  saw academic ghostwriters making bids and accepting the work — often within minutes.

Students Hire Academic Ghostwriters to Take Online Courses for Them

Former and current academic ghostwriters also say that taking an entire online course for students is a common practice in the industry — a practice that has existed since the inception of online education. “That was always standard operating procedure,” says Dave Tomar, a former academic ghostwriter who started his decade-long career in contract cheating in 2000. He is currently the managing editor of  Academic Influence , where he  shares his insights  on how educators can counter the surge of contract cheating during the pandemic.

“When I started doing this, I would frequently get these full online modules at the beginning of a rolling semester," Tomar says. “I got the full syllabus, and everything that I was expected to do over the next couple of months. Now, with countless students forced into remote learning, you have a whole new customer pool that is growing.”

As for how much students are willing to pay, the contractors charge “anywhere from $300 to $700 for a full class depending on the student, the subject and the difficulty,” says Alex, who currently works for a homework help site.

INSIDER EXCLUSIVE:   Read Part 2 – What can universities do about contract cheating?

Fake Tutors Entice Unknowing Students to Engage in Contract Cheating

Academic cheating sites also strongly encourage students to sell their coursework— an act that may be illegal in 17 states.

“Distributing any post-secondary assignment for a profit with reasonable knowledge that it will be submitted by another person for academic credit is a crime in many US states,” Citron Research, an investment research firm that investigates overvalued fraudulent companies, stated in  a report.

It’s a big problem for many institutions. According to Douglas Harrison, vice president and dean of the school of cybersecurity and information technology at the  University of Maryland Global Campus , some of these contract cheating websites are “facilitating massive transfers of institutional proprietary material into their file-sharing systems.”

Harrison says many students may not even realize they are cheating when they download a university’s copyrighted classroom assessment materials because these websites reframe downloading answers to tests as a form of studying or tutoring. “They reframe file-sharing as educational, even though these are behaviors that conventional norms of academic integrity would consider misconduct,” he says.

Dave Tomar former academic ghostwriter.

To make matters worse, these websites have mastered sophisticated techniques to lure unsuspecting students. Several of these prominent homework tutoring sites will offer to give students a discount if they let their academic ghostwriter have access to the online course. This often results in the contract cheater stealing other students’ personal information.

“So the contract cheater then reaches out to other students and says, ‘I’m a tutor in your course. And I’ve helped another student in your class with their assignments. Would you like a little help?’” Harrison says, describing how the contract cheater pitches cheating “services” to other students.

This can be especially confusing for students, who may not know how to tell the difference between a contract cheater and a legitimate tutor who is affiliated with the university.

“Most of the students who we find in academic misconduct settings after inappropriately using materials on these sites, they did not set out to be malicious cheaters. Now that doesn’t mean we don’t hold them accountable, but we have to hold them accountable in proportion to the root cause of the situation,” Harrison says.

Who Is Using Academic Ghostwriters?

According to the ghostwriters who are contracted to help students cheat, their customers are usually underserved students who need access to remedial courses, and nontraditional students who struggle to balance coursework with full-time employment.

“I would argue that what is facilitating the surge of contract cheating is the fact that students are increasingly desperate and lacking support,” says Tomar.

During Tomar’s time as an academic ghostwriter, he caught glimpses into their personal circumstances. “Some would tell you they are a parent working full time. And they just can’t deal with this challenge right now. Some say, ‘I’ve invested X number of dollars into this education, and I cannot afford to fail this class. But I don’t know how to do this assignment.’”

Alex mentions that many are also English language learners. “As I noted, some students are asking for whole classes to be done, and a lot of those are English or writing-intensive courses,” he says. “That does not mean that they are ESL, but [my sense is] most of them are.”

To fundamentally address the cheating pandemic, universities and colleges may need to invest in more resources for vulnerable student populations.

“It begins with figuring out who’s struggling, why they’re struggling and what we can do to help them before they end up as contract cheating customers,” Tomar says.

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How AI Writing Tools Are Helping Students Fake Their Homework

Creativity could be on the way out

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• The increasing use of AI writing tools could help students cheat.
• Teachers say software that helps generate text can be used to fake homework assignments. 
• One teacher says content from programs that rewrite or paraphrase content sticks out like a "sore thumb" at the middle school level.

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Getting good grades in school may soon be about artificial intelligence (AI) as much as hard work. 

Online software tools that help students write essays using AI have become so effective that some teachers worry the new technology is replacing creativity during homework assignments. Students are increasingly turning to these programs that can write entire paragraphs or essays with just a few prompts, often leaving teachers none the wiser. 

"As far as I can tell, it is currently not that easy to detect AI writing," Vincent Conitzer , a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University , told Lifewire in an email interview. "These systems do not straightforwardly plagiarize existing text that can then be found. I am also not aware of any features of the writing that obviously signal that it came from AI."

Homework Helpers

The use of AI writing tools by students is on the rise, anecdotes suggest. Conitzer said he’s heard one philosophy professor say he would shift away from the use of essays in his classes due to concern over AI-generated reports.

Tools based on Large Language Models (LLMs), such as GPT-3/X, have seen tremendous improvement over the last few years, Robert Weißgraeber , the managing director of AX Semantics , an AI-powered, natural language generation (NLG) software company, said in an email interview. Users enter a short phrase or paragraph, and the tool extends that phrase or section into a lengthy article.

These systems do not straightforwardly plagiarize existing text that can then be found.

Don't expect LLMs to replace real authors anytime soon, though, Weissgraeber said. GPT-3X tools are just "stochastic parrots" that produce perfect-sounding text, "however when looked at in detail, they produce defects called 'hallucinations,'—which means they are outputting things that cannot be deduced from the arguments built into the input, data, or the text itself. The perfect syntax and word choices can dazzle the reader, but when looked at closely, they actually produce semantic and pragmatic gibberish."

Catching AI Cheaters

AI-assisted writing programs are now so effective that it's hard to catch cheaters, experts say. Other than making students write in a supervised setting, perhaps the best way for teachers to avoid the use of AI writing is to come up with unusual topics that require common sense to write about, Conitzer said.

"For example, I just had GPT-3 write the beginning of two essays," he added. "The first was about whether free speech should sometimes be restricted to keep people safe, a generic essay topic about which you can find all kinds of writing online, and GPT-3 produced sensible text listing the pros and cons.

"The second was about what a teenager who was accidentally transported to the year 1000 but still has her phone in her pocket should do with her phone. GPT-3 recommended using it to call her friends and family and do research about the year 1000."

The perfect syntax and word choices can dazzle the reader...

Erin Beers , a middle school language arts teacher in the Cincinnati area, told Lifewire in an email interview that content from programs that rewrite or paraphrase content sticks out like a "sore thumb" at the middle school level. 

"I can usually spot fraudulent activity due to a student's use of complex sentence structure and an abundance of adjectives," Beers said. "Most 7th-grade writers simply don't write at that level."

Beers said she's against students using most AI writing programs, saying, "Anything that attempts to replicate creativity is likely limiting a writer's growth."

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Weißgraeber recommends teachers not be fooled by smooth-looking prose that may have been generated by AI. "Look at the argumentation chains," he added. "Are all statements grounded in correlating facts and data that are also listed?"

However, despairing teachers take note. There's at least one upside to students using AI tools, Conitzer contends. 

"In principle, students could learn quite a few things from AI writing," he said. "It often produces clear and well-structured prose that could serve as a good example, though the style is usually generic. Students could also learn more about AI from it, including how it sometimes still fails miserably at commonsense reasoning and how it reflects the human writing it was trained on."

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A Network of Fake Test Answer Sites Is Trying to Incriminate Students

Machine Learning

But some experts say such “honeypots” are educational entrapment By Colin Lecher

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When Kurt Wilson, a computer science student at the University of Central Florida, heard that his university was using a controversial online proctoring tool called Honorlock, he immediately wanted to learn more.

The company, whose business has boomed during the pandemic, promises to ensure that remote students don’t cheat on exams through AI-powered software used by students that “monitors each student’s exam session and alerts a live, US-based test proctor if it detects any potential problems.” The software can scan students’ faces to verify their identity, track specific phrases that their computer microphone captures, and even promises to search for and remove test questions that leak online.

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Because it turns out moving fast and breaking things broke some super important things.

One feature from Honorlock especially piqued Wilson’s interest. The company, according to its materials, provides a way to track cheating students through what Honorlock calls “seed sites” or others call “honeypots”—fake websites that remotely tattle on students who visit them during exams.

Wilson pored over a patent for the software to learn more, finding example sites listed. By looking for common code and the same test questions over the past year, Wilson eventually turned up about a dozen honeypots apparently linked to Honorlock, five of which are still operating .

“It kind of became an obsession at one point,” said Wilson, who hasn’t tracked the honeypots in some months but was at one point checking for them daily.

The sites Wilson found are bare bones. They have names like “ gradepack.com ” and “ quizlookup.com .” They’re largely a catalog of thousands of apparent test questions that are sometimes bizarrely specific. “In which part of the digestive system does chemical digestion begin?” one post asks . A multiple-choice question requests using “VSEPR theory to predict the molecular geometry around the carbon atom in formaldehyde, H2CO.”

Click on the “show answer” button below any of the questions and you won’t get help but will be rewarded with a digital chiming noise and no answer. But visitors to the sites are having detailed information about their mouse movements and even typing transmitted to an Honorlock server.

In the patent, recently flagged, along with an Honorlock honeypot site, by student media at Arizona State University , the company explains that its sites can track visitor information like IP addresses as evidence that a student was looking up answers on a secondary device.

I can sum up this activity in one word: entrapment. Sarah Eaton, University of Calgary

When the pandemic led to shuttered schools, demand for services like Honorlock skyrocketed as educators worried about whether students would be able to easily find answers online using devices that instructors didn’t know about. In its online materials for its software, Honorlock says, “[S]tudents have access to more and more electronic devices and it’s becoming harder for instructors to preserve academic integrity.” 

But some experts in the ethics of education worry techniques like honeypot websites simply go too far.

“I can sum up this activity in one word,” said Sarah Eaton, an associate professor at the University of Calgary who studies academic integrity. “Entrapment.” 

Capturing Students’ Data

While several companies offer services that tap into students’ webcams to track them, setting up fake sites to catch potential cheaters appears to be an innovation—one that crosses an ethical line for some experts. 

Before, students searching online for answers may simply have turned up nothing, while now, a potentially incriminating website will be there to tempt them.

Ceceilia Parnther, an associate professor at St. John’s University who has studied remote proctoring, said the situation is ironic: Students “are being set up” through honeypots, she said, in an attempt to detect academic integrity violations, a practice that’s itself ethically questionable. 

“The face-to-face comparison is a teacher walking around with the answer key and putting it on the corner of each desk and then penalizing students if they look over at it,” she said.

Honorlock is not directly mentioned on the sites Wilson found. But the sites list the same test questions as each other and include terms of service pages that mention the email address “[email protected].” The network activity of the pages, reviewed by The Markup, also shows data being sent to an Honorlock.com server.

To understand precisely what data the honeypot sites might be tracking, The Markup inspected the page’s source code and network activity using Firefox’s developer tools for each of the still-operating websites noted by Wilson. We found that the sites captured data on a visitor’s type of device, where that visitor’s mouse was on the page, what they entered into a search bar, and details on what they clicked.

Honorlock didn’t respond to a request for comment on the sites or to answer other questions about its privacy practices.

It’s not clear how many students have been caught by the company’s honeypots. Honorlock touts partnerships with colleges like the University of Florida and University of Maryland, among several others. The company announced last year that, fueled by pandemic-era demand, it had raised $25 million in venture funding, building on a previous round of $11.5 million. Universities around the United States have now signed lucrative contracts with Honorlock, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for the service.

Some educators, meanwhile, are using similar tactics on their own, spreading false or traceable test answers online to catch students who look up answers.

In one case, reported on by student media at Princeton , a professor acknowledged that a mathematics TA there had attempted to catch students cheating by adding a “unique marker” to a wrong solution posted online. The solution included “a reference to a Theorem” that was irrelevant to the answer. The Princetonian reported that several students were accused of cheating based on their response to the question.

Michael Hotchkiss, a spokesperson for Princeton, declined to comment.

Rethinking Exams

Apart from honeypots, proctoring software’s rapid ascent has also given rise to other privacy and ethics concerns. Some students and educators argue the software leads to an anxiety-inducing testing environment , and others have raised technical concerns, pointing to face-detection software that fails to recognize the faces of darker-skinned students .

The fear of an all-seeing proctor can have brutal side effects. One woman went into labor while taking a remote bar exam but continued with the test, afraid of being flagged for cheating.

For educators, the draw of software that promises to automatically track down cheaters is clear. But some experts argue that it isn’t a problem that can or should be fixed by advances in technology to surveil students but a rethinking of how those students are tested in the first place.

Students see that there’s an environment where it’s automatically assumed that they are not to be trusted. Ceceilia Parnther, St. John’s University

Pedagogy ethicists like Parnther say this kind of software is backfiring by creating an environment where students are, by default, under suspicion. That mindset itself facilitates cheating, she says, by subtly suggesting to students that they might as well cheat because teachers expect them to anyway. “Students see that there’s an environment where it’s automatically assumed that they are not to be trusted,” Parnther said.

Eaton proposes that educators should consider a more radical rethinking of testing, one that doesn’t rely on surveilling students. Punishing students for using their devices fundamentally goes against how learning works in the age of the internet, Eaton says, and the cat-and-mouse game of sussing out possible cheaters isn’t working. Moving to a better system might mean shifting to more oral or open-book exams, for example, which still demonstrate proficiency without the specter of simply Googling answers. 

There will always be some level of cheating on exams, Parnther argues, but the costs of cracking down on students is now coming at the expense of their education.

“While we can’t ensure that no students will ever cheat, we can make it a norm that most students are just trying to do their best work,” she said. 

Additional reporting by Surya Mattu.

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Malfunctioning NYC AI Chatbot Still Active Despite Widespread Evidence It’s Encouraging Illegal Behavior

Mayor Eric Adams said the city is working to fix the problems, and the site now advises visitors to “not use its responses as legal or professional advice”

Hello World

What We’ve Been Feeding Our Brains

An eclectic mix of books, podcasts, records, and games that The Markup staff has found fascinating this month

NYC’s AI Chatbot Tells Businesses to Break the Law

The Microsoft-powered bot says bosses can take workers’ tips and that landlords can discriminate based on source of income

Remote Learning and Cheating: Professors and Students Weigh In

By Maya Eashwaran

Lengthy time differences, technical difficulties, and Zoom fatigue: These are just three challenges of pandemic-era higher education. And another problem surfaced in a big way during the 2020 AP exams : the ease of cheating from home, when answers to tests and homework problems are often just a click away. 

Roughly a year after college campuses were evacuated due to the COVID-19 pandemic, academic integrity remains an issue for students and professors alike. With professors struggling to curb rampant cheating during online exams and students wrestling with the often confusing and stressful realities of online learning, the college classroom has never been more tense. 

Websites like Chegg and Slader have been cited in cheating scandals across the country, including at Georgia Tech , Boston University , Texas A&M , North Carolina State , and Princeton University . These websites provide homework help and study tools, but many professors and academic integrity directors believe these services are inadvertently undermining honest learning. 

Teen Vogue has spoken with academics and students to learn more about what kind of cheating is happening during remote learning, and what they think should be done about it.

University battles with help sites have peaked during the COVID-19 crisis, but the root of the problem has been years in the making. “I call it a game of whack-a-mole,” says David Rettinger, president emeritus of the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) and director of academic integrity at the University of Mary Washington. New sites are constantly rising in popularity, he explains, making it harder for professors to prevent students from seeking answers online, especially now. 

Institutions like the ICAI do not maintain school-by-school records of cheating cases, but the current president of the ICAI, Camilla Roberts, says the organization has seen an uptick in violations that deal with online tutoring sites. “We have seen a drastic increase of violations dealing with these types of ‘help sites,’” says Roberts, who also serves as the director of honor and integrity at Kansas State University.  

She says the switch to online learning has helped administrators identify how widespread academic integrity violations are at K-State. In spring 2019, the college recorded 97 cases for the entire spring semester; during the online half of spring 2020, it saw a stunning 238 cases. 

This trend has also been noticeable at smaller schools like Florida’s Jacksonville University, which has around 4,100 total graduate and undergraduate students . Relative to the spring and fall semesters in 2019, cases rose by 65% and 38%, respectively, in 2020, according to director of academic integrity Lee Ann Clements. “The faculty had this perception that online students are more likely to cheat than students in face-to-face classes,” she says. “And it's just not true.”

The problem lies in the pedagogy, Clements explains. In traditionally online programs, cheating cases did not increase — it was only the classes that transitioned from in-person to online learning that experienced the issue.

Rettinger’s colleagues who typically work at online-only universities are “laughing at us,” he says. “They’re saying, ‘What you’re trying to do in 20 minutes is what we took 10 years to build.’ It’s like trying to win a bike race without a bike.”

When teaching and learning shifted to Zoom last spring, Tyler Johnson, a lecturer at North Carolina State’s department of statistics, found himself filing an unusually high number of academic integrity reports. 

Through the latter half of the spring semester, Johnson found exam questions from his introductory statistics course posted to Chegg. He eventually identified some 200 violations in the course of 800 students, he says. In response, students launched a petition claiming that the professor had neglected to clearly explain what was and was not permitted during the testing period. (Johnson says he was explicit that only course materials and personal notes were allowed.)

For the final exam, Johnson monitored the site during the exam window (which he typically extended to 48 hours to accommodate students’ unique living situations) to quickly identify and remove test questions, but says it was more difficult than expected. He tried to contact Chegg to report the posts but didn’t get traction.

In a statement to Teen Vogue , Candace Sue, Chegg’s director of academic relations, says that faculty need to provide signed letters from deans or student conduct officials to initiate honor code violation investigations. This is required to protect student privacy, she says.

“Students need help, and the vast majority of Chegg users are honest and use our platform to supplement their learning,” Sue's statement continues. “However, we take extremely seriously any attempts to cheat by those who abuse our offerings and invest heavily to prevent misuse of our learning platform.”

“In addition, we understand the enormous strain both faculty and students are under during this pandemic,” says Sue's statement. “Leading academic integrity experts regularly cite stress and anxiety as key reasons students cheat. Reducing student stressors and evolving traditional assessment mechanisms is the best path to mitigating academic misconduct.”

After filing reports through the university’s office of student conduct channels, Johnson was able to access information about student activity on the site and remove test questions. Other professors who spoke with Teen Vogue say that Chegg provides information on request from academic integrity offices. Rife with details like IP addresses, names of email accounts, and the exact time stamps for when accounts accessed site information, these reports allow professors to identify which students posted and accessed test answers during exams. Johnson says he was shocked to find that 250 to 300 unique accounts had their digital fingerprints on official exam questions. 

At Purdue University in Indiana, Chuck Krousgrill and his colleagues in the School of Mechanical Engineering have written roughly 800 original homework problems for their courses. It was “unnerving,” he says, to find the bulk of those questions on Chegg.

These sites make cheating simple for students, Krousgrill argues. “It is drop-dead easy to get a solution for your homework assignment back in less than one hour and for $15 a month,” he says. “Students might say, 'Okay, I'm busy,' or, 'I don't really have time to do this one set, so I'll go to Chegg and see if I can get an answer.' And then it gets worse. It snowballs, and then they find themselves too busy, ever. So they continue to do it.”

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But it may not be the pandemic and its related stressors that are driving an increase in reports of academic dishonesty. After all, students have been taking advantage of the plethora of available online help sites since they first appeared. The difference, Johnson posits, is that dishonesty is a lot easier to detect now that schooling is mostly online. “Now I actually have a concrete record of access,” he says. “It's harder to gather data in an in-person proctored exam on to what extent cheating is occurring.”

Students have found innovative ways to circumvent the watchful eyes of administrators while professors attempt to patch up leaks in the system. As Teen Vogue has reported , some schools are also using remote proctoring tools that students say are distracting, overly invasive, and have mistakenly accused them of cheating. It’s a complex game of cat and mouse, where the tech-savvy players often win the prize. 

Rettinger mentions a new application that is being developed for professors, which automatically posts their exams online. When students Google the question, they are directed to a fake page, and then if they click on the question, anticipating an answer, the software records their IP address for the professor’s records. 

Some professors have attempted to stamp copyright symbols on exam and homework questions, as sites will more regularly remove explicitly copyrighted material, explains Krousgrill. Students, however, always seem to find a way — even if it includes photoshopping over symbols and watermarks pixel-by-pixel before posting the material online. 

“The problem is that it only takes one person to post it,” says Krousgrill. “And then hundreds can cheat.” 

As remote learning continues, the use of online help sites will continue to blur the lines between what is “fair” for students, professors, and university administrators. 

Last May, the Daily Princetonian reported an incident in which a teacher’s assistant (TA) in the math department posted a purposefully incorrect solution to a homework question on Slader, a popular website promising “step-by-step textbook solutions.” The TA used the pseudonym “Arthur Dent,” a reference to the protagonist in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The course, MAT202: Linear Algebra, is commonly taken by first- and second-year students pursuing degrees in majors like economics, engineering, or the sciences. Students who turned in problem sets containing evident similarities with the posted answer were reported to the Committee on Discipline for violating the explicit ban on the use of sites like Slader, as the newspaper reported. Accused students underwent an investigation process, with appointments scheduled in the spring, during the university’s grueling finals period. 

Princeton students are required to abide by the university honor code, a pledge that binds them to reporting incidents of cheating they are privy to as well as embracing the tenets of academic integrity in their own work. If found guilty, students can face charges ranging from warnings to suspension or expulsion. The stakes are high — and student anxieties are even higher. 

All students interviewed for this story have spoken on the condition of anonymity, and faculty members involved with the investigation have declined to comment.  Teen Vogue has reached out to Slader for comment but has not received a response.

Accused students express anger and disappointment with the course instructors’ decision to pursue cheaters through Slader. “Most of my family had been affected by the coronavirus and it was just a really stressful time.…" one student tells Teen Vogue . "I remember, I was using [Slader] to get an idea of how to do some of the problems, but I didn’t expect it to escalate into all of this.” 

Another accused student describes what they feel is an “unsympathetic” lack of leniency when it comes to requests for extensions on assignments and other accommodations. While battling a low grade in the course, she recalls asking her TA for advice on whether or not she should take the class “pass,” “fail,” or accept a D grade, options that were made available to all students during the latter half of the semester. Her TA brushed off her request, she says, stating that the grade shouldn’t be her focus. 

“It seems especially insensitive to tell a student who’s concerned about whether they are going to pass the course, ‘don’t worry about your grade,’” she says. 

Several students resorted to posting on Tiger Confessions, a Facebook page where current and former Princeton students submit anonymous “confessions” on subjects including mental health and academics. 

“The unique conditions of quarantine and this pandemic placed a lot of new challenges when it came to work,” wrote one poster. “Sickness, housing instability, mental health issues, technological limits, and different time zones: All of these issues required teachers to become more flexible. In most of my classes, this happened.… MAT202, instead, seemed to offer even more restrictive policies.” 

Back in May, Princeton’s Undergraduate Student Government Survey found that 63.3% of students were “somewhat more stressed” or “substantially more stressed” about academics after transitioning to remote learning, and nearly 70% of students experienced self-reported “somewhat worse” or “significantly worse” mental health. 

The academics Teen Vogue has spoken with say they empathize with students’ stressful circumstances during the pandemic, but they argue that academic integrity is a crucial pillar of higher learning.

In an interview with Teen Vogue this past summer, Jill Dolan, dean of the College at Princeton, emphasized the university’s commitment to the honor code. “Don’t misunderstand me — I’m not saying that faculty don't care," she said. “I just think we have to be clear that the honor code is about academic integrity, not about the context in which people are learning.” 

Noting the university’s spring 2020 adjustments — expanding grading options, changing transcript notation, additional resources for students struggling academically — and the unforeseen challenges that have arisen with COVID-era schooling, deputy university spokesperson Michael Hotchkiss states definitively that “cheating is never acceptable at Princeton.” 

Some of the professors who have spoken to Teen Vogue suggest a need for structural changes in what coursework and exams look like to account for a new, virtual learning environment. Rettinger advocates for modifying exam questions and class assignments to formats that are more reliant on a student's ability to learn, rather than to Google. 

Meanwhile, Johnson of North Carolina State acknowledges that students are struggling, but believes they’re still responsible for adhering to an honor code. “Academic integrity is a big enough deal that the responsibility to behave in a manner consistent with academic integrity standards in the course is independent of any issues they were having with their instructors,” he says. “I don't like to hear that the student is not feeling supported by their instructor. That's an issue. But the remedy to that isn't to go and look up the answer to the exam question or a homework question or something like that elsewhere.”

Dina Kuttab, a Princeton senior and former chair of the Student Honor Committee, says trust has to go both ways: Professors shouldn’t assume that students are trying to cheat, and students shouldn’t take advantage of their teachers. “While every person being in their own home deepens the need for that trust and pushes it further than it has in the past,” she says, “it’s based on the same principles that we have on campus.”

Want more from Teen Vogue ? Check this out: Student Debt Relief and Joe Biden: What to Expect From His Administration

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