Interning for Trouble: How Students Are Being Lured into Academic Fraud

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What’s the latest fun at Cluely, the well-funded and difficult to detect tool that its creators say will help you to cheat in academic work, job interviews, sales calls and other situations? The team is now recruiting 50 interns who they say will be paid $50 per hour #academicintegrity

Sounds good money, right? That all depends on how much you think it costs to live in the Bay Area. Not that you’ll get much need for comfortable accommodation, looking at the job details, which require you to be a fun person, making 4 TikTok videos per day, all on top of the day job where you’ll be programming at a rapid pace.

Here is where it gets interesting. The founders and team have set requirements severely limiting who can apply, setting qualification requirements that essentially a rule out anyone over a certain age due to a change in processes. One of the team has made agist remarks on X as a result. I don’t know what the rules are about employment discrimination in the United States, but it seems very brave to me for anyone to make these comments in writing, associated with their real name, as well as putting liability on the company they representing. That said, this is a company that already appears to be offering a service that is illegal in several jurisdictions. There must be all sorts of legal claims that could be unleashed here.

My main concern, however, is not the company or its founders. From an academic viewpoint, the type of assignment that Cluely claims it can help students with are already the same type of assignments that have had long-term vulnerability associated with them. I’m much more concerned about any Computer Science students who sign up as an interns. They may not realise the risks.

The interns producing marketing videos for Cluely, which presumably they post under their own accounts, could be bringing personal liability on to themselves. They may also be costing themselves a degree. Most university academic misconduct policies include an offence relating to bringing the institution into disrepute. Telling students you are helping them cheat, on your social media, could hardly be acceptable. In some universities these policies would even allow them to withdraw the degree of a previous graduate. After all, the founder lost his university place when he started a related company. That company was not even related to cheating in education, but instead to cheating in job interviews. Students taking the $50 an hour are putting themselves at personal risk on all kinds of levels.

This story is a real ongoing issue, which academic integrity is at the heart of. We often talk about the relationship between academic integrity and professional integrity, but classrooms focus on dry messaging about referencing, with no real world focus to engage students. Putting aside the questionable product itself, stories like this one are useful to engage students in discussions about ethics and integrity. It really is worth spelling out the real world dangers that students face. Could missing out on an understanding of academic integrity lead to a student spending time in prison? That would depend on local nuances of law, but the consequences here of an ill-considered internship and a lack of appreciation of the fundamental values of academic integrity are much greater than having to rewrite an assignment due to accidental plagiarism.