Chegg is an Academic Integrity Nightmare
Before getting too deep into what I really have to say, I first want to make sure you know what Chegg is. Chegg is a private sector company that offers online tutoring services to high school and college students. While the initial mission of the company may have had good intentions, Chegg has quickly evolved into a breeding ground of academic dishonesty.
One of the features Chegg has to offer is the ability to post problems online, and other Chegg users can offer assistance in solving those problems. Unfortunately, this assistance is often in the form of a fully worked out solution that a student can then pass off as their own work.
I've found some reassurance in the fact I'm not the only person who views Chegg as a major problem. Chegg received a lot of attention during the COVID-19 pandemic when many classes were moved online. Moving classes online meant exams were administered remotely. Some students saw this as an opportunity to post exam questions online, get answers to them, and then submit the answers posted to Chegg's website. This would not have been possible if exams were administered in person instead of virtually.
From my own personal experience, I've had to contact Chegg's honor code staff about questions being posted to their platform just about every semester. Since Chegg is a private company concerned with making money, they force you to jump through tedious hoops before you (the instructor) can answer the simple question "Was Chegg used in bad faith?". The average time between pointing out a potential violation of academic integrity and a full resolution is usually between 1 to 2 weeks.
Whenever you contact Chegg about a potential integrity violation, they give you two options. One is essentially a simple copyright claim where you can have the posted question taken down. If you want to see the answer that was posted to their website, then you have to pick the other option, which requires official paperwork to be submitted on behalf of the educational institution. Even if you're an actual instructor or teacher (which can often be verified by searching a course catalog or online staff listing), they won't even work with you until someone from your school's administration gives them the paperwork they require.
There actually was a point in time I was contacting Chegg so frequently, someone from their staff reached out to me about the issues I was bringing up. I asked the person if there was any way I could set up a notification system to alert me when my course materials started getting posted to their website. They did not respond to this request.
I even went so far as to write a script to automatically search their website and see if any of my course materials were posted there. Their website is set up in a way to make this impossible. If you want to search their website, you must do it manually.
Fortunately, Chegg does have a policy that sanctions users who violate academic integrity standards. This policy, however, only applies to people posting the questions; not the people who answer the questions. If Chegg really wants to clean up its act, they need to start punishing people who post answers as well. Otherwise, Chegg is not a tutoring service; just a vehicle to pervade systemic academic misconduct. Tutoring implies someone is assisting another student in understanding the course material. Simply giving out answers that can be copied is not tutoring; that is cheating. This is essentially the same thing as giving your homework and exams to the smart kid and having them do it for you. How is this allowed? If you start punishing both parties involved, it would make the smart kids think twice before they just simply give answers away. Plus, actual tutoring would be much more beneficial in the long run than an exchange of plagiarized material.
Chegg is by no means the only company that makes this degree of academic misconduct possible. A similar platform operates under the name "CourseHero". Social media platforms and group messaging apps are also a means of committing misconduct. These outlets, however, are much harder to police. In that respect, maybe it's a good thing Chegg exists as it enables us catch a few violators instead of zero violators.
Update 2022: The university I work at has created a new reporting form that instructors can use to report misuse of Chegg. Even though this form can also be used for other platforms like CourseHero, the title of the form specifically has "Chegg" in it. Maybe this is a sign that Chegg and these online "tutoring service" platforms need to seriously reconsider their business model.
Update 2024: In order to be reasonably competitive with ChatGPT, Chegg has now created their own AI system to quickly generate responses to uploaded questions. While this system is not perfect, it does make cheating on timed assignments a possibility, so watch out for this if you're also a teacher.