'Widespread use of Chegg for academic misconduct: Perspective from an Australian engineering school' by Edmund Pickering and Clancy Schuller 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. Alarmingly, we find Chegg is broadly used to cheat and 50% of questions asked on Chegg are answered within 1.5 hours. This makes Chegg an appealing tool for academic misconduct in both assignment tasks and online exams. 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.
Academic integrity is of critical importance to the modern tertiary education sector and underpins pedagogical approaches to teaching and learning. To ensure the integrity of their courses, academics and institutions must be aware of the latest methods students use to cheat. Universities must be agile in their response to new trends in academic integrity and student misconduct, especially given the new challenges and opportunities offered by the digital era. While early academic integrity research placed emphasis on plagiarism (Walker, 1998), new forms of misconduct are growing, including homework-helper, contract cheating and file- sharing websites (Curtis et al., 2022; Lancaster & Cotarlan, 2021a), automatic text-spinning and paraphrasing tools (Prentice & Kinden, 2018; Rogerson & McCarthy, 2017) and AI tools (Finnie-Ansley et al., 2022). Of interest in this paper is the growing prevalence of homework- helper websites, in particular Chegg.com (henceforth referred to as Chegg), the largest such website (Chegg Inc, 2022).
Homework-helper websites, offer to aid students in their learning, however they also represent a growing threat to academic integrity. In this article we draw a distinction between contract-cheating websites (e.g. essay mills) which exist exclusively for the purpose of cheating, and homework-helper websites which present as a legitimate service, but whose business model is extremely vulnerable to misuse. We also make a distinction between homework-helper and filesharing websites. The latter term is commonly used in literature, but is not preferred by the authors of this article as file sharing is only one such service offered by homework-helper websites (Lancaster & Cotarlan, 2021a).
Homework-helper websites offer to aid students in their studies through a range of services, for example question & answer (Q&A) services, file-sharing (e.g. study notes and assessment) and citation assistance. Of concern in this paper are Q&A services, which are identified as a concerning source of cheating (Broemer & Recktenwald, 2021; Lancaster & Cotarlan, 2021a). Through these Q&A services, students can look-up solutions to questions on a database or submit their own questions to be solved by the website’s ‘tutors’ (these are then added to the database). By far the largest homework-helper website is Chegg, with a market capital of 3.7 billion USD and 7.3 million subscribers (Chegg Inc, 2022; Nasdaq Inc, 2022). Other large homework-helper sites include CourseHero, Studocu and Bartleby. These websites generally operate under a subscription model by which students pay a monthly fee (14.95 USD for Chegg as of writing) to access the solution database and to ask their own questions. While these sites purport to be for legitimate study, they are highly vulnerable to misuse, and there are limited mechanisms to prevent students using these Q&A services to cheat. Broemer and Recktenwald (2021) proposed that the Chegg’s Q&A service is primarily used for cheating, this is further supported by Lancaster & Cotarlan (2021b). Figure 1 provides context on use of these sites by showing (a) a unique assessment question, (b) Google search results identifying solutions to the questions on (c-d) Chegg and (e) CourseHero. ...
Considering a student’s motivations to cheat, homework-helper websites are highly appealing. A small portion of students routinely cheat, while a much larger group, approximately 44%, fall within the cheat-curious category – these are students who may cheat under certain circumstances (Bretag et al., 2018, 2019; Rigby et al., 2015). Drivers of cheating behaviour include a perception of low risk (Diekhoff et al., 1999), perception that there are lots of opportunities to cheat (Bretag et al., 2019) and perception of norms (Curtis et al., 2018) (i.e., the perception that cheating is the norm, or that others are cheating).
Homework-helper websites embody these motivators. Homework-helper websites appear high in search engine results pages (often as the first result), and thus may appear when students engage in normal and healthy study behaviour (e.g. researching an assignment problem). It takes just one student to upload an item to a homework-helper website for it to appear in common search engines like Google. The appearance of these links provides a low barrier to entry, provides ample opportunity and feeds into a low perception of risk. Further, the fact that a peer has uploaded the assessment to a homework-helper site feeds into the perception that others are engaging in this behaviour. Combined, cheat curious students are vulnerable to these motivators. Finally, due to the large subscriber base and ease of uploading questions, these websites can rapidly include unique assignment questions (Christodoulou, 2022).
The global COVID-19 pandemic has increased rates of academic misconduct and usage of homework-helper websites (Comas-Forgas et al., 2021; Erguvan, 2021; Lancaster & Cotarlan, 2021a). Subsequently, the pandemic has seen an increased focus from tertiary education institutions on modern trends in academic misconduct (Erguvan, 2021; Reedy et al., 2021; Turner et al., 2022). A recent study by Lancaster and Cotarlan (2021a) studied the impact of COVID-19 on Chegg usage, finding 196% increase following the transition to online learning. This trend is particularly concerning for engineering and other STEM disciplines. STEM is known to be overrepresented in academic misconduct (Bretag et al., 2019; Lancaster & Cotarlan, 2021a). For example, a recent Australian based large-scale survey of students found engineering students were 1.8x more likely to engage in cheating behaviour (Bretag et al., 2019). Adding to this concern, Chegg’s own data shows that a majority (59%) of their userbase are STEM students (Chegg Inc, 2022).
While there is growing concern about homework-helper websites in the tertiary education sector, there remains little information on the use of these websites. To demonstrate, as of the date of writing, a Scopus search for ‘Chegg,’ the largest homework-helper website, returns nine journal articles, with only four related to academic misconduct, the others relating to Chegg’s textbook hiring service or geology (Busch, 2017; Emery-Wetherell & Wang, 2023; Lancaster & Cotarlan, 2021a; Ruggieri, 2020). Lancaster and Cotarlan (2021a) studied the impact of COVID-19 on Chegg usage; Ruggieri (2020) found 38 – 71% of physics students reported Chegg usage, with increased usage in more advanced units; while Busch (2017) explored methods to reduce usage of sites like Chegg; Emery-Weatherell & Wang (2023) explored cheating via Chegg in an introductory statistics course, explored ways to discourage cheating, and provided code to help identify cheating students.
Broader searches uncover additional literature. In a valuable conference paper, Broemer and Recktenwald (2021) presented a detailed investigation of Chegg usage in a 2-hour online mechanical engineering exam, identifying 129 unique posts to Chegg, with 71% of posts answered during the exam (50% answered within 1 hour). Interestingly, many answered posts were not viewed during the exam, even by the uploader. Manoharan & Speidel (2020) uploaded assignment questions to Chegg investigating factors like solution quality and time for a solution to be provided, finding easy questions were answered quickly and correctly, while complex questions were not answered or received substandard answers. Interestingly, Manoharan & Speidel (2020), ensured the questions they uploaded were clearly identifiable as formative assessment, which violates Chegg’s policy and which Chegg tutors are required to report. None of these questions were identified as attempts to cheat. Finally, Somers et al (2023) developed a tool to automatically detect the upload of questions to the file-sharing and homework-helper sites like Chegg.
As Chegg is the largest homework-helper website, this lack of investigation represents a major gap in our understanding of academic misconduct and cheating. With such sparse information, developing effective strategies and policies is near impossible. To address this gap, this article aims to present a detailed understanding of Chegg usage within an Australian technology university engineering school. This article provides insights into the growth of Chegg’s homework-helper service, prevalence of Chegg usage, and time required to receive a solution on Chegg. The findings provide a valuable resource for institutions and academics in understanding the challenge presented by homework-helper websites.
