The new study examining usage of Chegg by STEM students comes amid rising concern about the potential for increased cheating as classes have moved online en masse and amid debate about the appropriateness of using remote proctoring technology.
We remain 100% committed to addressing this challenge."
Caught for cheating using chegg reddit code#
"Further," Sue wrote, "we cooperate with every official academic Honor Code investigation and respond to every copyright takedown request as soon as possible. The company recently unveiled a new program, Honor Shield, which allows faculty to submit exam questions to the site in advance so they can be blocked during designated exam periods. We take extremely seriously any attempts to cheat by those who abuse our offerings, and we invest heavily to prevent misuse of our learning platform.” “Students need help and the overwhelming majority of Chegg users are hard-working and honest, and they use our platform to supplement their learning. “Chegg is a learning platform used by millions of students around the world to study, and we are deeply committed to academic integrity,” Sue said. Chegg provides much needed learning support to these students, especially during the pandemic.” With millions of students going online in a matter of months, students have lost valuable on-campus and faculty support services, and stress and anxiety is high. I does seem to me like there are people using Chegg to cheat.”Ĭandace Sue, Chegg’s director of academic relations, said in a written statement that the authors “mistakenly imply - without any evidence - that increased usage of Chegg has correlates to an increase in cheating. “It would seem to be quite a heavy coincidence if this was just purely a lot more students wanting to get assistance for unassessed work. “At the same time, these questions have started to increase in volume with the timing being exactly alongside the move to online teaching, the move to online exams and assessments, often in a completely unsupervised environment,” Lancaster continued. “From the point of view of Chegg, they are not promoting themselves as a service designed to help students to cheat, but they do offer a facility where you can get your answers completed quickly by a tutor, and the answers are delivered within the short time frame which matches an exam.” “From my experience as somebody who has set exams, marked exams, read exams, seen too many exams, these things look like exam questions,” said Thomas Lancaster, the lead author of the study and senior teaching fellow in computing at Imperial College London, where he researches issues related to academic integrity and contract cheating. “Given the number of exam style questions, it appears highly likely that students are using this site as an easy way to breach academic integrity by obtaining outside help,” the authors write in the article titled “Contract cheating by STEM students through a file sharing website: a COVID-19 pandemic perspective.” The number of questions asked and answered on the “homework help” website Chegg has skyrocketed since classes migrated online due to the pandemic, an increase that authors of a new study published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity link to a likely increase in cheating.Ĭhegg, which has an honor code prohibiting cheating and which promotes itself as a site where students can get help on their homework, allows users to post a question to the site and receive an answer from a Chegg-identified expert “in as little as 30 minutes.” (The site’s posted average response time is 46 minutes.) The authors of the new study found that the number of questions posted on the site in five different science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines increased by 196.25 percent in April to August of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019.