prior probability

Note: this blog post is the second in a multi-part series on “the law and ethics of Chegg.”

Remember Rick Singer? He was the alleged mastermind of the now-infamous College Admissions Bribery Scandal. In summary, in March of 2019, federal authorities brought criminal charges against dozens of individuals–not just against the ringleader of this illicit scheme, Mr Singer, but also against the many wealthy mothers and fathers who paid him off, 33 parents in all, some of which are pictured below. [1] Among other crimes, Singer and his client-parents were accused of participating in a nationwide conspiracy to cheat on college entrance exams in order to corruptly and unlawfully influence admissions decisions at several elite universities. [2]

My legal theory regarding Chegg’s potential criminal liability is therefore as follows: the business models of Rick Singer and Chegg are essentially the same. Both have received (and in the case of Chegg, continue to receive) payments in exchange for facilitating cheating on exams. Specifically, to the extent the Chegg platform facilitates cheating on college exams and homework assignments — by allowing paid subscribers to literally look up the answers and fraudulently turn those same answers in as their own work –, then Chegg’s business model is essentially no different than that of Mr Singer’s alleged illicit scheme: the payment of money in exchange for higher test scores. Simply put, Chegg has become the Rick Singer of cheating!

But it takes two to tango. That is, in addition to Chegg’s potential criminal liability, what about the many college students themselves who are using Chegg to cheat? This is a key question because, if Chegg’s paid-subscribers are guilty of committing wire fraud, then Chegg itself can potentially be accused of conspiracy to commit wire fraud as well! As I will explain in my next post, a strong case can be made that students who use Chegg to cheat and fraudulently obtain good grades are just as guilty of wire fraud as the wealthy parents who paid Mr Singer off to help them fraudulently inflate the entrance exams of their children. I will take a closer look at the case of one such parent, Jane Ruth Buckingham (née Rinzler), in my next post …

Footnotes

[1] See Press Release of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts, “Investigations of College Admissions and Testing Bribery Scheme,” available here.

[2] See Affidavit in Support of Criminal Complaint dated March 11, 2019 and signed by Laura Smith, Special Agent of the FBI, available here.

Although it was Trump people’s who negotiated the now-infamous withdrawal deal with representatives of the Taliban last year (see picture below, right), Joe Biden’s incompetent implementation of this illicit agreement, his continued prevarications (see here), and our pusillanimous surrender in Kabul are too much for me to bear. We don’t abandon our friends. #WorseThanTrump

I am interrupting my series on “the law and ethics of Chegg,” which will resume on Tuesday morning, in order to let everyone know that the distance between the Arg (Presidential Palace), which is now under the Taliban’s control, and the Hamid Karzai International Airport is a mere 6.2 kilometers (less than four miles).

Note: this blog post is the first in a multi-part series on “the law and ethics of Chegg.”

What is Chegg? I want to begin my series by describing what Chegg is and by explaining how college students use Chegg and other similar platforms to cheat on their assignments.

To the point, Chegg is a contract cheating website (see Lancaster & Cotarlan, 2021; see also Wikipedia), a kind of Napster for college exams, problem sets, and homework assignments. Instead of Mp3 music files, however, Chegg’s database contains millions of textbook and exam problems. Chegg makes money by charging its users a monthly subscription fee; in return, users are able to look up the answers to their assignments in Chegg’s database and then turn in those answers as their own. (Chegg subscriptions start at $14.95 a month.) In other words, students use Chegg to cheat.

Whether this business model is “ethical” or not I will leave for others to decide. Rest assured, I will return to the moral question in a future post; in the meantime, however, I want to ask a more practical question: Is Chegg’s business model legal? Specifically, can an online contract-cheating platform like Chegg give rise to a civil claim for common law fraud or even to a criminal prosecution for “wire fraud” under federal law?

I will devote my next few posts to these legal and ethical questions by revisiting the infamous College Admissions Bribery Scandal of 2019-2020, when dozens of rich and powerful parents, like the actress Felicity Huffman, went to jail for facilitating cheating on college entrance examinations for their children (by bribing a third party to take the entrance exams for them). Spoiler alert: my argument will be as follows: if it’s illegal to facilitate cheating on college entrance exams in order to fraudulently gain admission into a college, then it should also be illegal to use Chegg in order to cheat on college exams and homework assignments after you are already enrolled in college. Later, I will explain why Chegg’s CEO and board members (and many of Chegg’s users as well) should be criminally prosecuted for “wire fraud.”

Works Cited

Thomas Lancaster and Codrin Cotarlan. 2021. Contract cheating by STEM students through a file sharing website: a Covid-19 pandemic perspective. International Journal for Educational Integrity, Vol. 17, Article #3, pp. 1-16, available here.

Wikipedia. 2021. Entry for “Chegg”, available here.

What a disaster: the USA is about to lose another costly, protracted, and unpopular war! Via this report in The Wall Street Journal: “After 20 years of war, much of what the U.S. sought to accomplish in Afghanistan crumbled in just one week. The insurgent movement controlled none of Afghanistan’s provincial capitals until it seized the remote city of Zaranj just a week earlier, Aug. 6.” (More details here and here. Also, below the fold, in chronological order, are a few of my previous posts relating to Afghanistan.)

Continue reading →

Five-hundred years ago today (August 13), in the year 1521 A.D., the darkest day in Mexican history occurred: Spanish forces led by conquistador Hernán Cortés captured the Aztec Emperor Cuauhtémoc and conquered the capital of Tenochtitlan, a map of which is pictured below. More details here and here. (Updated on 8/15.)

File under: places I would like to visit!

Via the Arid Travel blog: https://aridtravel.wordpress.com/

I had to suspend my reading of Samuel Fleischacker’s new book on Adam Smith when my copy of Michael Lewis’s latest book The Premonition arrived in Tuesday’s mail. Suffice it to say that Lewis is a great storyteller (it took me less than two full days to read all 304 pp. of his fascinating book), but at the same he also tends to over-generalize on the basis of flimsy or anecdotal evidence. On pp. 288-291 of The Premonition, for example, Lewis draws a distinction between political appointees, who serve at the pleasure of the president, and career civil servants, who for all intents and purposes can’t be fired (see the footnote on p. 290) and concludes that political appointees are more likely than career civil servants to be risk-averse “Chamberlains” (unwilling to make hard choices or make risky decisions) instead of risk-loving “Churchills” (willing to take risky actions early to minimize the risk of dangers in the future). Although the distinction between risk-averse Chamberlains and risk-loving Churchills is a memorable one, is this observation really true? What about Article III judges, i.e. federal trial and appellate court judges who have lifetime tenure?

According to Wikipedia (footnotes omitted), the question of which of these two characters on the 1960s sitcom “Gilligan’s Island” fans of the show prefer — the glamorous movie-star Ginger or the wholesome country girl Mary Ann — has endured long after the end of the series: “This question has inspired commercials, essays, videos, and a sermon.”