A professor has taken extraordinary measures to find out who he thinks cheated in his class. He filed a lawsuit against his students in federal court.
According to the New York Times
After finding that his spring 2021 midterm and final examinations had been posted to Course Hero, a well-known website where students share lecture notes, sample quizzes, syllabuses, and other materials in January, a professor named David Berkovitz from Chapman University in Orange, California, filed a lawsuit against an unknown group of students, only known as “Does.”
Professor Berkovitz is seeking to make Course Hero identify those who uploaded the tests as well as sample answers that were also on the site, his attorney, Marc E. Hankin, said on Thursday.
Mr. Hankin said that if Professor Berkovitz’s plan succeeds, he will hand over the names to Chapman’s honor board. Because business school at Chapman requires a curve grading system, Professor Berkovitz is concerned that students who cheated may have harmed their classmates who followed the rules and received grades lower on the curve as a result.
Mr. Hankin said that “the moral and ethical failing notwithstanding, the real concern is these students are hurting their fellow classmates.”
Students who rely on scholarships that are linked to a minimum grade point average may lose the scholarships and may even be forced to leave school. “That’s the real harm he’s trying to prevent,” Mr. Hankin mentioned.
While the lawsuit seeks compensation and legal costs, Mr. Hankin stated that Professor Berkovitz was “certainly not in this for the money” and may withdraw the claim once he was able to identify those who uploaded the exams.
Course Hero, which is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit, has said it will comply with a subpoena, which Mr. Hankin believes he’ll serve within the next day or two.
Sean Michael Morris, Course Hero’s vice president said that their “response is always in keeping with the law, so if they produce a subpoena, we will help them with their investigation,” in an interview.
Mr. Morris explained Course Hero, which was launched in 2006, as a peer-to-peer learning platform where users can upload papers and share them with one another “nearly like a library.”
Course Hero gives free access to some documents and sells monthly subscriptions for more. The subscription costs begin at $9.95 per month.
While Course Hero has been accused of encouraging cheating, it states on its website that it “does not tolerate copyright infringement, plagiarism, or any other form of cheating.”
According to Course Hero, anyone who misuses the site “to gain an unfair advantage; copies another member’s material as their own; or violates any law, regulation, ethics code, or school code will be permanently banned from the platform.”
Mr. Hankin claimed that after visiting Course Hero in January, Professor Berkovitz discovered that his tests had been uploaded to the site.
He believed that the students cheating in his Business 215 class, which was taught remotely due to the Covid19 pandemic, had uploaded the exams.
According to Mr. Hankin, Professor Berkovitz asked Course Hero to identify the students who had uploaded the tests but was told that he would need a subpoena.
Professor Berkovitz copyrighted his April 2021 midterm and May 2021 final examinations as a prerequisite to filing a federal lawsuit claiming that unnamed students had copied portions of his class material.
According to Mr. Hankin, the case, which he filed on March 10 in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California, enables him to demand that Course Hero hand over the students’ names and IP addresses as well as when they uploaded their exams.
The unidentified students “infringed Berkovitz’s exclusive right to reproduce, make copies, distribute, or create derivative works by publishing the midterm exam and final exam on the Course Hero website without Berkovitz’s permission,” says the suit.
Mr. Hankin mentioned that Course Hero could not be sued because “we don’t have the evidence they’ve done anything wrong other than provide a forum” for documents.
Course Hero said in a statement that it “does not tolerate copyright infringement of any kind and employs a range of preventative measures, investigation and enforcement policies.”
“Course Hero never wants unauthorized content on our site, and before students and educators upload their content, they must agree to our terms of use and academic honor code, which explicitly states they may only upload content they have the right to upload,” said Course Hero.
Mr. Morris said he hoped the case would raise “larger issues” about competitive forces and pressures that lead students to cheat. He called it a “ripe topic to have” when a case like this comes up.
Not being part of the lawsuit, Chapman University stated that “with limited exceptions, professors own the copyrights to their work.”
According to the university, “professors are free to pursue the removal of their copyright-protected content from websites such as Course Hero. However, we encourage faculty to use internal processes to work through student concerns.”
This case seeks to “protect students who did not cheat and perhaps have the students who cheated disciplined,” said Mr. Hankin.
Mr. Hankin said, “we’re trying to get to the bottom of who was it, how many people, and what exactly did they do?”