How Students Cheat with Chegg Study
By: Fulton Tom, Instructor, Economics
Chegg Study (https://www.chegg.com/study) is a subscription-based service where users can request and search for solutions to exam and assignment questions. It also provides solutions to questions found in some of the most popular textbooks. Chegg Study is one of several Chegg services.
Users can register for a Chegg account using pseudonyms and email IDs that hide their identity.
After administering the Final Exam in ECON 1220, a course with 56 students, I discovered that no fewer than 14 students used Chegg Study to cheat in online exams during the Summer 2020 term.
The process for requesting solutions is simple. Users can post questions or screenshots of questions in Chegg Study. In one particularly egregious case, a Chegg user in my course made 14 requests for solutions to questions worth 66% of the Final Exam’s value within the first 10 minutes of a 110-minute exam and made a 15th request that covered another 28% of the exam’s value.
According to Chegg, subscribers of the Chegg Study Pack can post up to 20 questions per month. However, Chegg might be confusing requests with questions because each request can contain up to four questions. Requests for solutions are answered by Chegg experts, whose response times vary. In my course, the quickest response was 5 minutes and 11 seconds. According to Chegg, the average response time is 46 minutes. The quality and correctness of responses also vary. Solutions can be well-organized and explained, wildly incorrect, or somewhere in between. A scan of Chegg reviews shows that incorrect solutions are common.
Chegg experts that see the same or similar requests by multiple users may respond to all of the requests. Sometimes, they miss the slight variations in questions (eg a change in a single number or word in the question) and give the same solution for a slightly different question. These slip-ups can be useful in identifying cheaters.
Once a Chegg expert has responded, the solution is placed in the Expert Q&A Archive and available to all Chegg users.
Identifying your Questions on Chegg Study and Identifying Students that Cheat with Chegg Study
Some red flags that may alert you to cheating with Chegg Study are
- Students, who ask for more time during online exams because of Internet issues. Since Chegg experts can take many minutes or hours to respond, some requests for extra time are not genuine.
- Numerical answers that are missing key details. Due to time limits, students might provide a snippet of the Chegg solution rather than a fully explained answer.
- Answers that appear to have been plagiarized. If you cannot find the source through a Google search, it may be in Chegg Study behind a user paywall.
You can use the search feature in Chegg Study without a subscription to investigate whether users have requested solutions to your questions. If you find your questions in Chegg Study, you can ask the Office of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity (studentconduct@langara.ca) to request Chegg remove the questions and solutions from its website. The URLs found in Chegg are required to fulfill these requests.
Once notified, Chegg removes the questions and solutions within days and provides a spreadsheet with the following information:
- an 8 digit code associated with each request for solutions. This code also appears in the URL linked to the question and solution. The URL is inactive once Chegg removes the solution from its website.
- the date & time the request was made by the asker.
- the date & time the request was fulfilled by a Chegg expert.
- Chegg’s 9 digit number user ID for the asker.
- the asker’s name, if provided.
- the asker’s email address.
- the asker’s IP address, if provided.
- the asker’s school name, if provided.
- the question submitted by the asker.
If the question was submitted as a screenshot, Chegg saves the submission as a png file. To view the file, cut and paste the document file name into your web browser. If the question was typed or cut and pasted from an electronic document, Chegg saves the submission in the spreadsheet (with its HTML text code).
- the solution provided by the Chegg expert. As with the question, the solution is saved as a png file or with its HTML text code depending on how the Chegg expert posted the response.
With the spreadsheet in hand, you can identify students that used Chegg Study to cheat if
- they registered in Chegg Study with their real names or email IDs that include their real names.
- they have used their Chegg email ID to contact you.
- they have cut and pasted or plagiarized Chegg solutions.
- their IP addresses, which can be found in Brightspace, match those of Chegg users.
- their answers are correct for a version of the exam that they were not assigned.
- their answers to a series of questions match the solutions requested by a particular Chegg user.
- they answered questions in the same order as and shortly after the Chegg solutions were posted.
Giving different versions of exams can make it easier to identify students that cheat with Chegg Study. I deduced a Chegg user because they requested solutions for Midterm #2 Make-Up and Version X of the Final Exam, a combination of exams that only one student wrote.
When Chegg experts fail to notice slight variations in posted questions and give the same answer to multiple requests, students that copy solutions from Chegg may inadvertently mention information in their answers that do not pertain to their version of the question.
For strategies to deter cheating including the use of Chegg Study during online exams, see “Fourteen Simple Strategies to Reduce Cheating on Online Examination” by Stephanie Smith Budhai (https://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/educational-assessment/fourteen-simple-strategies-to-reduce-cheating-on-online-examinations/).