Not organised sites like Chegg but I try to keep an eye on several sources. It's very corrosive, because students come to believe that they can't compete on an even playing field if they don't cheat. In classes where professors continue to count homework as a significant portion of students' grades, cheating is nearly universal. Today it's a qualitatively different environment. It was easy to nip it in the bud if you cared enough to read any student work. When I started teaching in 1996, problems with students cheating on homework were minor and intermittent. They are just exposing some pre-existing problems in academia. This will hopefully make it harder for students to post exam questions on Chegg and get answers in time. The consensus in my department seems to be that starting next semester we'll start just doing a half-hour, synchronous quiz every week, instead of big exams.
He ended up not grading the finals and assigning projects instead. One of my colleagues found all of his finals on Chegg last semester. It's especially bad now that we have the campus quarantined, so that all tests have to be take-home. But just anecdotally, in my department the issues are 100% Chegg. It's pretty difficult to know exactly what they're doing unless you pay for an account yourself. I would actually love to see a careful, impartial analysis of which web sites do what and how their business models work, but I haven't been able to find one. The publishers tried to get Chegg to take down copyright-violating material, and ultimately gave up because it was like whac-a-mole.) Chegg is built for that, and their entire business model is based on illegal use of copyrighted material, i.e., the questions themselves. If we’re notified by a professor or a school that there’s copyrighted material, it immediately gets flagged and then removed. We have built technology that removes copyrighted material before it even gets posted.
Let’s face it: Students have always found a way, whether it’s in fraternities, or whether they go to Google. Is this a problem? And if so, what are you doing about it?" He answered with lies and evasions: For example, the NY Times did a softball interview recently with Chegg's CEO, where they asked, "Many teachers believe that their students are using Chegg as a means by which to cheat. It's a little difficult to sort out which of these businesses actually sell solutions, because they don't admit they do that. However, Chegg is the market leader by a mile. Some of Chegg's competitors are Studyblue, Course Hero, Slader, and Cramster. I could editorialize on the line of Chegg being a scurrilous company that lives off of liquidating whatever trust and integrity still exist in academia while exploiting contractors who seem to be mainly from the developing world, but more important is that I currently know of no other websites where students can as easily receive complete solutions to problems quickly.įor instance, on Mathematics (Stack Exchange site), "problem statement questions" are generally closed immediately, while other platforms I'm aware of are mainly forums with a small population of volunteer participants capable of solving problems beyond the high school curriculum.Īre there other sites comparably problematic to Chegg that other instructors keep an eye on for students getting complete solutions to problems? Chegg collects a membership fee from students and uses it to pay contractors to answer their homework and exam problems, no questions asked. I am a college instructor who's just had an outbreak of academic dishonesty connected to students posting take-home exam problems on a platform called Chegg.