One of the questions asked about research into homework help sites is if there are any ways to tell if students are using them to cheat or not. The requests could be innocent. This presentation, from the International Center for Academic Integrity Conference 2022, reviews data collected from Chegg and discusses initial attempts to verify that academic misconduct does take place on a homework help platform. It is was conducted with Imperial College London student Prakhar Nagpal.

1. Are Students Using Homework Help Sites to
Breach Academic Integrity?
Dr Thomas Lancaster and Prakhar Nagpal
Imperial College London
International Center for Academic Integrity Conference 2022
#ICAI30Years

2. The Presenters
Dr Thomas Lancaster
Senior Teaching Fellow in Computing
http://thomaslancaster.co.uk
Twitter: @DrLancaster
Prakhar Nagpal
MEng Computing (Artificial Intelligence
and Machine Learning) student
https://www.linkedin.com/in/prakharna
gpal
Research supported by Imperial College London’s Department of Computing
Undergraduate Research Opportunities Programme (UROP).

3. Are Students Using
Homework Help
Sites to Breach
Academic Integrity?

4. Some Previous Studies
Rahul Gupta
Codrin Cotarlan

5. The Noise

6. The Response
Dan Rosensweig, Chegg’s chief executive
“has called claims that the site enables
cheating ‘unfortunate’ and ‘nonsense’.”
Financial Times 14 January 2022

7. The Criticism
The increased use of Chegg during the pandemic may be
due to students needing access to support not available at
their institution
Just because questions are posted on Chegg does not mean
these are current assessments or exams
Questions may be artificially added to Chegg rather than
being posted by students

8. The Defence
Chegg does respond to academic requests for information,
unlike many of their competitors
External support services are of value to students and
services like access to textbooks are of value
Chegg has developed the Honour Shield tool to prevent
questions from being answered

9. The Alternative Evidence
2019 Citron Research Report

10. Are Students Using
Homework Help
Sites to Breach
Academic Integrity?

13. Some Guiding Questions
Do all students using Chegg cheat?
Are there better ways to teach and assess in light
of the availability of services like this?
Is it possible to detect cheating enabled through Chegg?
How frequently are students using Chegg and in
what fields?
No, of course not!
Prakhar will
discuss this

14. Crowdsourced Student Solutions
With full credit to the year 1 Computing Ethics
students who did not want to share their
names

15. Rely on the Experts to approve the questions
Delay the response time
Require student users to validate their identity
Change student behaviour through legislation
Use artificial intelligence
Appeal to Chegg as an ethical organisation

16. Prakhar’s Research

17. Summary of Prakhar’s Research
We can’t statistically “prove” cheating from the data set
collected, but some machine learning led techniques are
showing promise
Large growth in the number of questions posted on Chegg
from 2019-2020. Smaller growth from 2020-2021.
Heaviest use during typical exam months
Top three subjects: Chemistry, Calculus, Statistics and
Probability
See Prakhar’s own presentation for more details or contact him at
prakhar.nagpal03@gmail.com if you’d like to collaborate

18. Closing Thoughts
How do we adapt?