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Websites offer homework help, exam solutions

Course Hero and similar sites allow students from universities across the country to post materials from their courses to the site, which can then be accessed by others. For Princeton courses, these materials are mostly syllabi and assignments, though some classes’ listings include old exams posted by students. The Honor Committee, which oversees and recommends punishments for academic infractions, has yet to develop a comprehensive stance toward such sites.

Students register for Course Hero exclusively through Facebook. While registration is free, users are also offered the opportunity to sign up for a $6.95 per month “premium membership” offering “instant unlimited access to all features,” though the nature of these features and this access are unclear.

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Course Hero representatives did not respond to a request for comment.

The listings on the site are divided into University departments, which are subdivided by course. As the site’s content is submitted solely by students and not checked against University listings, though, the departments under Princeton’s section include such nonexistent departments as “ALCOHOL,” “ASAPMEETIN” and “SEMINARBUS.” Furthermore, materials listed under an individual course may not correspond to the course.

Course Hero currently has nearly 280,000 “fans” on Facebook, including several from Princeton. Some of these students, though, said the site asked for too much personal information during the registration process, so they did not actually gain full access to the site.

Another student, whose material was identified on the site, did not respond to request for comment.

Many of the fears surrounding sites like Course Hero are based on the University’s scholastic regulations, which prohibit the unauthorized use of any “outside source.”

“ ‘Outside source’ means any work, published or unpublished, by any person other than the student,” according to “Rights, Rules, Responsibilities.”

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Presumably, then, work submitted by other students that was posted online would fall under this category, but Honor Committee chair Peter Dunbar ’10 said that his organization had not made a general decision on the issue.

“It is certainly possible to use Course Hero or similar sites inappropriately,” Dunbar explained in an e-mail. “The Honor Committee has not developed a particular stance on Course Hero or similar websites. In general, though, professors set class policy.”

According to the Course Hero website, “Intellectual honesty and integrity is a #1 priority” for the organization. The website states that the company does not back “any and all use of user-submitted educational materials for unethical purposes, such as plagiarism or other forms of cheating.”

Computer science professor Brian Kernighan GS ’69 said that when he first came across the site, his immediate reactions were negative. “What they’re doing is between unethical and illegal, because what they’re doing is taking something that doesn’t belong to them,” he said. “It’s a crystal clear violation of copyright [law].” Exam solutions from Kernighan’s class, COS 109: Computers in Our World, are included on the site though Kernighan said he did not understand why students would post the materials there.

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Course Hero maintains that students must only upload materials they “possess rights to … constitute their own unique presentation of commonly available facts or … are free from copyright or other protections altogether.”

Still, the materials posted for courses like Kernighan’s — including old exam solutions — do not fall under any of these three categories, as students have not developed the documents themselves and have not been expressly given permission to share them.

Professors like Kernighan give these solutions to their students during the term. Others, like economics professor Elizabeth Bogan, do not give out old exams.

“I always write a substantial portion of my exams, and you can never get an A from knowing the questions of previous exams,” she explained, adding, “Now I’m going to get even tighter about the need for writing new exams.” None of Bogan’s classes — ECO 101, ECO 307: Economics and Public Policy and ECO 370: American Economic History — have exams posted on Course Hero.

Civil and environmental engineering professor David Billington ’50, though, was not completely negative about sites like Course Hero. “I think we would be happy if materials from the two courses were posted in general,” he said, referring to the two classes he teaches. “Publicity for the course is always a good idea.”

Billington noted that both of his courses, CEE 102: Engineering in the Modern World and CEE 262: Structures and the Urban Environment, already have old exams posted on Blackboard for enrolled students.

“Since we post old exams for the people in the course, it’s not a huge problem,” Billington explained. “On the other hand, some courses probably don’t do that. If they don’t do that, they’re apt to reuse questions, and that would present somewhat of a problem.”

In cases where the professors do not give out old exams, Bogan noted, students who cheat are simply hurting their grades in the long run, as they are not learning key concepts for exams.

Both Bogan and Kernighan drew parallels to fraternity traditions of keeping files of old exams. Still, Bogan said she was not overly concerned about this sort of exchange, as long as professors did not use similar exams year after year. Kernighan explained, “Before the web and such, there used to be collections of old exams. Every fraternity of every campus had those, and I would assume the same kinds of things are true today … so I don’t worry about it.”

Yet some in academia have been spending time trying to legitimize the troubled system of web-based tools like Course Hero.

Bogan said a representative from an education publishing company had recently approached her to gauge her interest in testing a product that would have professors post these materials online. “They would try to have the faculty members themselves decide what they wanted to put up, and they would try harder to secure [the materials,] but I don’t think you can secure it,” Bogan explained.

 She added that she had turned the publisher down, as she determined the effort would exceed the benefit of ensuring academic security. “My parallel is [illegal downloading in] the music industry,” she said. “I’d love to see it slowed down, but I don’t think that’s a realistic desire.”

Bogan noted that she has seen cheating before and that she would likely continue to see it in the future. “If [students] are going to be dishonest, there are two [ways],” she said. “They could already have hacked onto Blackboard from past years, and if they’re cheating on problem sets, which are to teach them the material, they get bad grades on the midterms and finals.”

 While sites like Course Hero might not last, similar ventures will always exist, Kernighan said.

“It’s not entirely clear what the benefit is for the students, because it’s not clear what students get from it,” he said. “[But] there’s going to be an infinite number of these things as people probe the edges of what’s reasonable.”