Nearly 8 million people buy user services a year and over 100,000 off-line agents of the lesson-recovering platform are involved.
Why is the gray industry so rampant?
A reporter from Beijing Youth Daily learned that as of the end of 2020, my country's MOOC ("MOOC", meaning large-scale open online courses) has ranked first in the world in number and application scale, with more than 34,000 online MOOCs. The number of learners reached 540 million.
Behind the prosperity of online courses, there is a gray industrial chain of paying for lessons.
According to the police report, from 2019 to 2020 alone, there were more than 7.9 million students who purchased class rewriting services across the country, and the number of rewriting courses exceeded 79 million subjects. The number of offline agents involved in the rewriting platform exceeded 100,000. Most of them are students in school.
“Especially in the days when various online courses are approaching the end of the semester, the news on behalf of the relevant QQ groups in the school, and the news that they are looking for is simply screened." A “part-time” senior student of Guangxi University who is purely hand-picked. According to Qiao He, there is even a customary "market price" for brushing classes. "Machine brushes are easy to find in the back office, generally only one or twenty yuan per course. The price of hand-painted brushes is slightly higher, depending on the length of the class. (Trading black talk means that those who intend to take over the course business need to clarify the price they accept, and go to private chat with the party who releases the demand)'Range from dozens of yuan, plus 20 yuan for the exam."
Xiong Bingqi, dean of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, believes that online education has its advantages, such as breaking through time and space constraints and sharing educational resources.
But there are also disadvantages: personalization and poor interactivity, and there may be problems in the assessment and evaluation.
Because online education cannot ensure that the students themselves are studying and taking relevant exams.
Online education has higher requirements for students' self-learning ability and self-management ability.
The "substitution of learning and taking exams" just exposed the problem of online education quality control, and fundamentally speaking, this is a manifestation of whether the school attaches importance to the quality of talent training.
Paid brush
Complete industrial chain has formed market pricing
According to the different methods of brushing, there are two main types of brushing online courses-machine brushing and pure manual brushing.
The Liaoning Police recently detected a case of "paying for lessons" on the platform for brushing customers, which is classified as machine brushing.
According to the police report, data from five lesson-revising platforms show that from 2019 to 2020 alone, more than 7.9 million students purchased lesson-revising services across the country, and the number of lessons was more than 79 million subjects. The offline agent of the lesson-revising platform was involved. There are more than 100,000 people, and most of them are students at school.
There have been media reports that behind the gray industry of machine-based online courses, a complete industrial chain has been formed in the form of "course-recovering platform-first-level agent-second-level agent": these courses are directly connected to 80% of universities across the country. Online course platform (hereinafter referred to as “online course platform”), and even for a few online course platforms with strict supervision, will develop special refreshing software; in the “peak season” of receiving orders, various graded agents will pass QQ groups and QQ groups. Space, WeChat Moments and other channels actively carry out "matrix" advertising.
It is said that in the "peak season" of the class, the first-level agent earns 5,000 yuan a day, while the second-level agent and their superiors will pay dividends based on the number of orders received.
Many students are worried that the risk of computer-based online lessons is too high, and they prefer to find "hand-made lessons". However, a reporter from the Beijing Youth Daily learned from Qiao He that many of them use "hand-made lessons". Those who take orders under the banner are actually agents of machine-based online courses. “Can one person use several terminals to apply for courses at the same time? The ones with cheap unit price and high volume must be the agent of computer-based courses.”
Different from the machine brushing agent, Qiao He said that she has 3 terminals capable of online lessons, which can handle 3 orders at the same time, and can simulate the operation of online lessons. Therefore, it is more concealed and has never been discovered by the online lesson platform.
At the end of the semester, there are always a large number of students accumulating a lot of online classes that they have not attended, and Qiaohe has spotted this "business opportunity" to earn some money to subsidize daily use.
She usually publishes a "hand-made substitute" advertisement on the QQ group of brushing classes. If there is a need to brush a class, she will come to chat with her privately. The price will be discussed according to the hours to be completed. Generally, a course of 50 or 60 yuan is included, and the test includes more than 95 points. "It takes 2~3 days of time and energy, which is definitely more expensive than machine brushing, but it is concealed, and the test scores and the quality of brushing lessons are high. It is not a problem to earn a week's living expenses in two days."
Qiao He said frankly that the machine brushing agent is rampant, but the hand-made group of individual brushing classes like her is even larger and more concealed, "like an iceberg hidden under the sea."
She believes that individuals may not have become a channel for reselling classes, and they are not necessarily willing to risk being punished by the school to earn agency money, but "no one will refuse to make pocket money easily." According to her observation, individuals occasionally accept orders The number of classes is much larger than the number of agents.
In addition, the Beijing Youth Daily reporter also noticed that it is also easy to search and purchase online lesson services on an e-commerce platform, and even software scripts for online lessons can be easily purchased.
In the "details" of a lesson software script, it is written: "This is a universal online lesson script that can be used on a computer instead of manual operation and realizes automation. No matter what online lesson is, it can be used." The price is 98 yuan. , But the store customer service said that the script does not support answering questions or exams.
online education
Lax quality control, flawed assessment methods
Why is the gray industry on behalf of online classes so rampant and has developed to the scale it is today?
On the one hand, the school does not strictly control the quality of online education.
Xiong Bingqi, dean of the 21st Century Education Research Institute, believes that online classes and exams on behalf of the Internet have exposed the problem of online education quality control. Fundamentally speaking, this is a manifestation of whether the school attaches importance to the quality of talent training. If the school attaches importance to the quality of talent training , Will not tolerate any "water lessons", including online education "water lessons".
On the other hand, there is the contradiction between the defects of online education assessment and evaluation methods and the requirements for high self-discipline of students.
Xiong Bingqi said that online education has its advantages, such as breaking through time and space constraints and sharing educational resources.
But there are also disadvantages, such as personalization, poor interactivity, and the possibility of alternative studies and examinations in the assessment and evaluation.
"Because online education cannot ensure that the students themselves are studying and taking relevant exams," he continued, "Some people think that this problem can be solved by perfect technical means, such as face recognition for students, but face recognition can be performed in class. , How to submit homework for face recognition? Unless every test is an interview instead of a paper test, this is unrealistic. This largely depends on the autonomy and consciousness of the students."
In addition to the profitability mentioned in the previous article, Qiao He participated in the online tutorial on behalf of others, and more importantly, “Everyone knows that there are loopholes in back-end supervision, and loopholes are for people to drill.” Qiao He refers to the loopholes, Without using any refreshing software or scripts, real people are always ready to enter the verification code in front of the terminal. This kind of brushing method "is impossible to distinguish in the background".
"As long as you don't be clever in the process of brushing the class," Qiao He said.
Improve supervision
Announce the blacklist of "bad learning records" online course selection
In fact, in recent years, many colleges and universities have introduced relevant measures to strengthen the management of the bad learning behavior of the online course of "swiping courses".
Taking Guangxi University as an example, on June 16, 2021, the official website of the Academic Affairs Office of Guangxi University will publicize 278 students who have bad records of completing online courses, exams, and grades through abnormal means, and stipulate that the semester The behaviors with bad records within this semester are recorded once (the number of bad records during this semester is not accumulated); students with bad records of behavior records reaching 2 times (that is, the students with bad records for 2 consecutive semesters) will be included in the blacklist of online course selection and will be permanently Cancel the elective qualifications for online courses.
The scope of the definition of bad records includes: entrusting others to study courses and course exams; using third-party software to complete course task points and course exams; using platform bugs to quickly complete task points; installing or using plug-in software for brushing or assisting brushing; Others are defined as abnormal study and examination behaviors.
However, in the face of the school’s “strike”, Qiao He did not take it seriously, “The school has done several times in each semester. It is indeed strict with third-party software to brush lessons, but as far as I know this is a probability problem. Some students used third-party software to brush lessons and were not found.” Moreover, Qiao He said that more people like us choose to brush lessons manually, as long as two devices are not logged in at the same time, the security is very high. “At least I have never been Found".
In previous media reports, Zhang Lin, the first-level agent for online courses, said: "No matter how the online course platform is tested, software developers will always have a way to bypass the detection. No matter how strict the online course is, there are ways to overcome it. I spend the cost and import the list to the most stable platform. Although the cost is a bit higher, there will be no problems."
So what other ways can guide the solution to the problem of online class brushing?
In this regard, Xiong Bingqi believes that for a student to complete an online course, the course must be very attractive.
Therefore, schools must first take the training of talents seriously. Schools should reform the assessment and evaluation system for teachers, guide teachers to pay attention to talent training, carry out teaching research, innovate classroom teaching, and increase the attractiveness of courses to students.
my country's education departments and schools have always attached great importance to MOOCs, but if online courses are not attractive, how can the attractiveness of MOOCs be increased?
Second, we must update the content of the course.
The society is developing rapidly, but university textbooks and curriculum content are still teaching outdated content. Some college students think that learning these content is meaningless, and it is reasonable.
In the era of artificial intelligence, students should be taught to learn rather than just learn knowledge.
Schools should also reform their professional settings and curriculum settings in accordance with social changes.
Furthermore, we must change students' attitudes towards learning.
Some students' attitude towards university studies is to obtain a college diploma, rather than to improve their own abilities.
Therefore, there is a problem of paying tuition but mixing credits.
I chose an online course and didn’t take it seriously. Ask someone to study and take the exam.
Our country has entered the era of popularization of higher education. The society should shift from a society of academic qualifications to a society of competence. Students plan their own academic development, not to improve their academic qualifications, but to improve their abilities.
In this way, there will be no mixed credits, mixed academic qualifications, substitutes for studies, and substitutes for examinations.
(Qiao He and Zhang Lin are pseudonyms in the text)
Text/Reporter Wen Jing, Intern reporter/Wang Xiaoran