'Chegg’s Growth, Response Rate, and Prevalence as a Cheating Tool: Insights From an Audit within an Australian Engineering School' by Edmund Pickering and Clancy Schuller in (2024) Journal of Academic Ethics comments
Online tools are increasingly being used by students to cheat. File-sharing and homework-helper websites offer to aid students in their studies, but are vulnerable to misuse, and are increasingly reported as a major source of academic misconduct. Chegg.com is the largest such website. Despite this, there is little public information about the use of Chegg as a cheating tool. This is a critical omission, as for institutions to effectively tackle this threat, they must have a sophisticated understanding of their use. To address this gap, this work reports on a comprehensive audit of Chegg usage conducted within an Australian university engineering school. We provide a detailed analysis of the growth of Chegg, its use within an Australian university engineering school, and the wait time to receive solutions.
The authors state that over half of audited units had assessment content found on Chegg.
1180 solutions were found on Chegg which directly matched assessment content, with the largest unit having 394 matches identified. We reiterate that the uploading of these 1180 assessment items to Chegg constituted academic misconduct as these were efforts to subvert assessment.
They note that
Chegg is broadly used to cheat and 50% of questions asked on Chegg are answered within 1.5 h. This makes Chegg an appealing tool for academic misconduct in both assignment tasks and online exams. We further investigate the growth of Chegg and show its use is above pre-pandemic levels. This work provides valuable insights to educators and institutions looking to improve the integrity of their courses through assessment and policy development. Finally, to better understand and tackle this form of misconduct, we call on education institutions to be more transparent in reporting misconduct data and for homework-helper websites to improve defences against misuse.
