AthenaStudies (also) recruits UvA students for commercial gain
The UvA is considering legal action against exam trainer AthenaStudies. The commercial company lets students, in exchange for free summaries and exam training, send push messages via Canvas offering the company’s products and services.
'Hey guys! I found a WhatsApp group for Money and Banking. Here we can help each other and ask questions!' reads like a seemingly helpful message on Canvas - UvA's digital learning environment. The sender is Mitchel Randshuizen, who is studying Economics and Business Economics at the UvA.
However, the content of the message does not come from him, but from commercial exam trainer AthenaStudies. Randshuizen gets free summaries or exam training if he forwards such push messages from AthenaStudies to his fellow students, he says over the phone.
'I was approached once for that, asking if I would be open to it,' Randshuizen says. He then received links to WhatsApp groups managed by AthenaStudies. He circulates them in students' mailboxes on Canvas and in already-existing student WhatsApp group chats.
Paid promotion
AthenaStudies' WhatsApp groups are primarily designed to promote its products and services. They are aimed at all kinds of university subjects, especially studies related to law and economics.
Take the 'Management Accounting 1' chat, named after the subject of the same name from the UvA Bachelor of Economics and Business Economics, which has as many as 272 participants. The screenshot shows an example of the administrator continuously surreptitiously advertising AthenaStudies, assisted by a student employee who responds positively to the message. 'Usually there are about three employees in the chat,' Randshuizen said.
Numerous messages from students also appear on Canvas with direct links to AthenaStudies courses (see image above this article). These are invariably preceded by statements such as, "I saw that many people were disappointed with their essay grade and I just wanted to let you know that there is a workshop available that helps with the content (...). I took it myself and found it helpful!”
That this is promotion being paid for in the form of free summaries or exam training is not mentioned in the message. But: 'If you get any benefit from a partnership with an advertiser, you must be transparent and clear about it,' says Eva van Reijmersdal, associate professor of persuasive communication at the UvA. That is laid down in the Advertising Code for Social Media and Influencer Marketing, she explains. And note: 'Free summaries also fall under ''some benefit''.'
The fact that the company does not send messages itself but has students do so, "adds to the credibility," Van Reijmersdal says. “Other students then think: it's someone like me, and the person has good experience with this: let me listen to that! Those kinds of mechanisms are very effective.”
In fact, Van Reijmersdal's research into influencer marketing - similar to this phenomenon, according to the researcher - showed that influencers who have fewer followers turn out to have more influence on their followers. This is precisely because it makes them more "similar" to their followers, Van Reijmersdal explains.
Legal steps
Meanwhile, the UvA is looking into what (legal) steps it can take against AthenaStudies. After all, this is not the first time the company has been called to account by the university for this modus operandi. 'They stopped their activities then,' said a UvA spokesperson, 'but then they popped up again anyway. It is also very annoying for students, because they may not be aware that these are commercial activities.'
The UvA is going to inform students about this, the spokesperson says, to 'raise student awareness and draw attention to the rules for using Canvas.'
Other universities have already taken legal action against AthenaStudies. In Groningen, Delft, Rotterdam, and Nijmegen, the university's logos were used in similar WhatsApp group chats, the respective university newspapers reported. This violated the universities' copyright laws.
The Groningen Ukrant even reported that AthenaStudies 'sent student employees entire scripts and role-plays' to use with fellow students to put their company in a good light. Students there were also removed from chats if they shared links to competitors' products or services. As far as we know, that doesn't happen (anymore) in Amsterdam.
Never disinterested
Not everyone finds the modus operandi of AthenaStudies at the UvA disturbing, by the way, it turns out on the Roeterseiland campus. Law student Martijn Buur uses summaries from AthenaStudies for every course. 'After I bought the third summary, I found out that AthenaStudies operates this way. But at the same time, I knew: when people promote things, they basically never do it selflessly.'
Buur continues: 'Besides, those chats are also used for other, study-related things, and I wonder if there would be any general chats at all with so many students in them if AthenaStudies were not running them.'
Randshuizen agrees: 'People talk to each other in the chats about how the exams went, how others handle things, and what people thought of the exams.' Employees of AthenaStudies are also sometimes allowed to send a free piece of a summary, he says. He also says that people may send summaries of their own volition: 'As long as they are not from AthenaStudies, because those are private.'
AthenaStudies was contacted repeatedly by e-mail for comment, but could not be reached.
