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Students are, and always will be, good at finding ways to beat the system.

Back in the day, SparkNotes was a saviour (maybe it still is), and there are countless other sites out there offering to help students who find themselves in a pickle.

One, however, is causing some South African universities a decent amount of headache, with MyBroadband reporting that the University of Witwatersrand (Wits) reported a suspected mass cheating incident from 2020, involving between 200 and 300 students.

It’s called Chegg, has an Apple and Android app as well as a website, and is soaring in value as academic institutions around the world try and figure out how best to counter its influence.

Wits issued a statement, acknowledging the incident but denying the extent of the suspected cheating, and they’re not alone.

MyBroadband also received comment from UCT spokesperson Elijah Moholola:

[He said] the university had noted an increase in the number of cases of academic dishonesty – which included cheating on tests and exams – referred to the Legal Services & Secretariat department between 2019 and 2020.

“The university has found that in some of these cases university test and/or exam questions were loaded to the Chegg website and answers were provided by industry experts and submitted by students as their own work,” Moholola said.

Providing this kind of service is a very, very lucrative business, and as of two weeks ago, Chegg’s value had more than tripled during the pandemic.

For a monthly subscription to Chegg Study, which costs $14,95 (around R215), students get access to the platform, reports Forbes.

Using the site is so commonplace that it has a nickname – “chegging”:

Chegg is based in Santa Clara, California, but the heart of its operation is in India, where it employs more than 70,000 experts with advanced math, science, technology and engineering degrees.

The experts, who work freelance, are online 24/7, supplying step-by-step answers to questions posted by subscribers (sometimes answered in less than 15 minutes).

Chegg offers other services students find useful, including tools to create bibliographies, solve math problems and improve writing. But the main revenue driver, and the reason students subscribe, is Chegg Study.

In a short explainer video, Chegg dresses up what they do as helping you get unstuck:

Of the 52 students Forbes spoke with who had used Chegg Study, some of whom attend prestigious US universities like Columbia, Brown, and Duke, 48 said they used it to cheat.

In some cases, the cheating is so blatant that the students are making a mockery of the system.

Consider this, from CNBC:

Texas A&M reportedly found more than 800 cases of academic fraud after a faculty member noticed students were finishing complex exams in less than a minute, with some of the information coming from Chegg…

Students queried have pointed to the difficulties presented by online learning during the pandemic as a reason for “chegging”, like University of Missouri freshman Andrew Labit:

He says he will take a hit to grades, if it is during a period of time when he feels that he is learning, but for now he has adopted a get-the-answer, pass-the-class and move on mentality.

“Unlike in-person work where you have to show your work, where you actually learn something, online is just ‘get to the answer, that’s all we want,’” Labit told NBC’s Stay Tuned.

“And that’s a lot of where our mentality went to, which was just trying to get the right answer.”

At the end of March, the company was worth in excess of $12 billion, and revenue is only rising:

In response to growing criticism, Chegg vice presidents Arnon Avitzur argued that the resource is not there to cheat, but rather to there to “offer students personalised service to help them get unstuck”.

There’s that ‘unstuck’ word again.

The company is at least aware of the unscrupulous use going on:

In a written statement, a Chegg president, Nathan Schultz, says: “We are not naive that [cheating] is a problem. And the mass move to remote learning has only increased it. We remain 100 percent committed to addressing it, and are investing considerable resources to do so. We cannot do it alone and are working with faculty and institutions, and will continue to do more, including educating students.”

As long as those profits keep soaring, as does the company’s valuation, it seems unlikely that Chegg will try too hard to address the issue.

Makes using those Encarta Encyclopedia CDs seem like a lifetime ago, right?

[sources:mybb&forbes&cnbc]