Advertising Code Committee: ‘AthenaStudies’ advertising is dishonest and misleading’

At the beginning of 2023, Ukrant, the University of Groningen’s magazine, revealed that AthenaStudies, the commercial exam training organisation, was using students – ‘ambassadors’ – to spam their fellow students in study app groups with pre-written scripts to sell their courses. Delta showed that the same was being done at TU Delft.

After a call to students, students shared their irritation about Athena’s practices. One example cited that it had created an app group for first year Industrial Design Engineering students before the ID study association could do so itself. “This made it very confusing for new students as well as for the organisers of our first-years’ weekend as they had to answer a lot of questions about it,” explained one student member of the Education Committee.

Irritation

He shared screenshots of the app group showing some of the pre-written scripts that the ‘ambassadors’ used to sell the courses: ‘Everything is full. Does anyone want to sell their spot?’; ‘I can try to arrange for an extra group to be added’; ‘BTW, there are still some free spots in the super package deal!’.

Students from Mechanical Engineering, Aerospace Engineering and Systems Engineering, Policy Analysis and Management shared similar screenshots. The irritation among other students about the practices of their fellow students is evident. ‘Stop your athena bs’ and ‘I didn’t know that you were doing the Marketing & Sales course’.

Misleading

At the beginning of 2024, the University of Groningen and Radboud University approached the Advertising Code Committee (RCC). A little later, four other universities, including TU Delft, joined the complaints procedure. They all submitted complaints about the way in which Athena operated.

In TU Delft’s case, one of the complaints was about the use of the io.tudelft@athenastudies.nl email address which students could email if they had missed a ‘live session’. TU Delft says that the address is misleading. ‘It gives the impression that there is a formal relationship between the advertiser and the relevant university’, states the RCC judgement.

Holding students responsible

In its defence, Athena said that the students that work for the company know what ‘a suitable way of marketing’ is themselves. ‘The suggestion that confusion could be created about the affiliation … also does not do justice to the students’ ability to assess situations critically.’

Despite this, the RCC judged (in Dutch) that TU Delft was right. The use of the names IO (IDE) and TU Delft in the email address is ‘misleading’ and ‘dishonest’ ‘as this could mislead the average consumer into taking a decision about a transaction that they would not otherwise have taken’. The RCC also makes short shrift of the way in which Athena tries to hold the ‘ambassadors’ responsible for these practices. As their employer, it is Athena that is responsible.

The RCC’s verdict on the complaints from other universities is the same. It views all the submitted examples as misleading and dishonest according to the Social Media & Influencer Marketing Advertising Code (RSM) and the Dutch Advertising Code (NRC).

‘Good starting point’

The question now is whether AthenaStudies has stopped working in this way. Derya Ada, Senior Lawyer at TU Delft, has not received any reports saying otherwise. She points out that the RCC’s judgement is not legally binding, but is ‘a good starting point should Athena not stop using this dishonest way of advertising’ and that further legal action is needed.

The company has not stopped offering exam training, which was not a point of discussion. For TU Delft students, Athena currently mostly offers courses on civil engineering (such as analysis, construction mechanics and fluid mechanics) and mechanical engineering (such as analysis, statics and fluid dynamics).