Once an instructor has identified alleged academic misconduct (cheating), then you have more choices to make about whether and how to proceed. In my experience, by this point I've already invested an unfortunate amount of time just detecting cheating. I'm not feeling interested in pursuing the formal steps necessary, because it won't benefit me.
However, at least from a legal/procedural perspective, after lots of consultation with peers, staff, and administrators, I decided that I should follow my institution's policy on cheating. One main reason for this is to ensure that students are provided with due process. If an instructor takes any disciplinary action (like assigning zero points on a test, or assigning a failing grade) based on suspicion of cheating, then the student can later contest that action in a formal appeal. Practically speaking, this just triggers even more time-sucking meetings and procedures.
So, here, I will
- describe the formal process I followed
- reflect on how my meetings with the students went, and
- explain how I documented evidence of students cheating using Chegg
Formal Academic Dishonesty Investigation Process
Briefly, my university requires that any suspicion of cheating must be explored by the faculty member either A) holding a Faculty-Student Conference, or 2) referring the matter to the Department for a Departmental Hearing. The agenda of the Faculty-Student Conference, which need only be attended by the faculty member and the student, is for the faculty member to present the student with the charge and evidence of cheating. If the student admits to cheating at this time, then the instructor can impose an academic sanction within their power as an instructor (i.e within the scope of the class, like assigning zero points or a failing grade), and the instructor can also recommend additional sanctions for the Dean of Students to consider, like not allowing the class to be repeated for credit (in the case of the student failing the class) or expulsion from the University. If the student does not admit to cheating or does not agree with the assigned sanction, then the instructor advances the investigation by notifying the Department Chair, and the process repeats with a Departmental Hearing.
Regardless of the outcome of the Faculty-Student Conference, the instructor must file an "Instructor's Report of Cheating or Plagiarism" with the Dean of Students. Here, the instructor not only provides a narrative of the situation, but also must collect and submit a number of pieces of information that can take some time to assemble, like the date of the incident, the unique course section number, the name and ID number of each student, the documentation of cheating (e.g. the student's work as well as evidence of cheating), and copies of all communication the instructor has had with the student about the alleged cheating. I make this point now just to alert you of the value of knowing in advance what will be needed, so that if you find yourself in the same situation, you'll know what records to keep and organize in advance.
Because I identified several cases of cheating last semester, after holding multiple individual Faculty-Student Conferences, I then spent additional hours submitting the individual Instructor's Reports documenting the outcomes of those Conferences.
About the Faculty-Student Conferences
I prefer to avoid confrontation at all costs, so I was not eager to have these one-on-one meetings. I was also skeptical whether students would respond to emails in which I informed them that we needed to set up individual Zoom meetings to discuss whether they cheated. At the very least, I was glad that my first exposure to this process was during a global pandemic, because having these conferences over Zoom made me feel a bit more at ease than I would have been for in-person meetings.
It is important to note that, before I sent individual emails requesting Conferences, I had announced to the entire class that I had found evidence of extensive cheating using the Chegg website and that I would be contacting individual students in the near future. Thus, many of the students knew that they had been caught, so they were probably anticipating that email from me. In fact, my announcement that I had received data from Chegg about who had been posting and viewing answers to exam questions (details below on how to do that) prompted an insightful chain of texts on GroupMe (an external chat platform that students often use to message each other outside of the class LMS platform):
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All of the students I emailed responded promptly, and none of them in an aggressive or overly defensive manner. They were all polite and respectful.
When it was time to meet, this is the approach I took: I started the conversation by explaining the purpose of the meeting and the process (including a description of how I was following the University policy, what the potential outcomes were, and the student's rights), and asked if the student had any questions up front. Then, I explained the evidence and why I thought it constituted academic dishonesty, based on the academic policy definition. I next asked the student if they agreed with my perspective (i.e. that cheating had occurred). If they did agree, then I explained the sanction I was going to make (usually zero points on the cheated question or the entire exam, depending on the severity). I ended by asking the students to please not do this again, emphasizing the worse things that could happen, and reinforcing the point that they're paying me to be their teacher, and that I hoped in future they'd come to me with questions.
In the conferences themselves, I found that most of the students knew they had been caught; some even seemed relieved to be able to talk about it and explain themselves - it had clearly been weighing on their conscience. Most students were, I think, appropriately apologetic.
However, there was one group of three students that didn't use Chegg to cheat, and I wasn't able to find any other evidence on the internet of the source of their exam answer - so I suspect that the three of them collaborated to produce that answer. When I individually confronted these three, none of them confessed, although they also didn't provide any believable justification for how they might have submitted the exact same (and very wrong) answer as two other students. I asked each student what process they had used to come up with the answer; could they explain their reasoning to me? None had any remotely relevant answer. One said they were drunk when completing the exam, so they didn't remember how they completed it (but they did assure me that later, when sober, they asked the friends they had been with if they had been cheating, and the friends said that they hadn't noticed anything odd).
Documenting evidence of cheating: Chegg
In addition to guidance I provided in previous posts about designing cheat-resistant exams and about detecting cheating, here's what you need to know about working with Chegg.
Chegg is a commercial website that does lots of things related to providing students with study resources, textbooks, and other things. The aspect of Chegg that seems to me to be most controversial is that students can pay for a "Chegg Study" account and then ask questions of "Chegg Experts." From their website:
"Ask an expert anytime. Take a photo of your question and get an answer in as little as 30 mins. With over 21 million homework solutions, you can also search our library to find similar homework problems & solutions. Our experts' time to answer varies by subject & question (we average 46 minutes)."
So, what most faculty dislike about Chegg is that students can pay for an account (of course despite the fact that they're already paying tuition for us, the experts, to help them learn - there's no reason they should pay Chegg, too!), upload any sort of course material (like homework questions, exam questions) and get a pretty rapid answer. Also, anybody else who has a paid Chegg account can also view every other member's questions and the provided answers.
My totally uneducated guess is that Chegg's "Experts" aren't really such experts. I don't know how the "Experts" are hired and vetted, but I do know from my experience with students cheating using Chegg is that the answers are not always correct!
Not surprisingly, Chegg asserts that their business, "should never be used by you for any sort of cheating or fraud" (see their Honor Code webpage). It is clear, though, that lots of students use Chegg to cheat, in part because Chegg has a dedicated system for faculty to request an Honor Code Investigation. So, here's another opportunity for faculty to spend lots of time investigating potential academic dishonesty.
In my previous post, on identifying cheating, I mentioned that an easy well to tell if your exam questions have been posted to Chegg is to perform a web search with text from the question. That's how I discovered that my materials had been submitted to Chegg. Here's one really irksome thing about Chegg: they don't provide faculty with accounts to let us investigate academic dishonesty. Without paying for a Chegg account, you can see questions that have been submitted, but not the answers. Of course, what I need, beyond seeing that my exam question is on Chegg, is to see the expert response, so I can tell if it matches the submitted answers of any of my students. I did register for a free account on Chegg, but that doesn't let you see the Chegg Expert answers. One solution, of course, is to pay Chegg for the privilege of seeing the answers, but I didn't really feel like I should help financially support this company, so I didn't - although I did suggest to my university's Student Conduct Office that they might consider paying a staff member for a single license so that they could conduct better investigations on behalf of faculty. There is a way, eventually, to get the answers (detailed below).
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| Screenshot of one of my exam questions, with a "See the answer" prompt for paying for a Chegg account. The URL of this Chegg page was found using a Google search with part of the question text as the search term. |
Here's a great example of hypocrisy: because I signed up for a free Chegg account, I now receive the occasional solicitation email from them. Last week, the subject line read, "Do you know the best way to solve that Biology problem?" The body contained, in part: "Give your GPA a boost. Chegg Study to gain access to millions of problems posted by students like you, fully solved by Chegg subject experts." But yet users are cautioned not to use Chegg to cheat…
Chegg Honor Code Investigations
The good news is that Chegg does a pretty awesome job at responding to faculty inquiries about cheating. They state that, "We respond to all Honor Code violation escalations from faculty within 2 business days and we will share usage information - including name, email, date, IP, and time stamps."
Here's what a faculty member needs to request Chegg to investigate potential cheating:
- The URL of each Chegg webpage that you claim has your course content. This can be problematic, because multiple students can post the same question, and they'll appear on separate Chegg pages with separate Expert responses - so it is likely you might not find all of your content.
- Your contact information
- The exam start day and time and end day and time (maximum of 24 hours apart). As far as I can tell from my experience, Chegg simply uses this information to know what date/time range in which to search their server logs for account activity. Because I was running asynchronous exams, though, sometimes my exams were open for multiple days before they were due, which isn't optimal for this sort of limitation.
- The name of your Dean or administrator for academic affairs. In my case, I provided the name of my Dean of Students.
- A signed copy of an investigation request on university letterhead.
It only took a day or two for Chegg to send me the results of their investigation, in the form of a spreadsheet file with the following information.
One tab contains "Asker Detail" - these are the Chegg users that submitted the questions on the URLs I reported:
- The timestamp of when the question was submitted, and when the Chegg Expert answer was posted
- The Asker email address
- The Asker name
- The Asker IP address
- The Asker School Name
- The Question
- The Answer
The second tab contains "Viewer Details" - these are the Chegg users that viewed the Expert answer pages. The content of that tab is almost identical to the first tab.
This is useful information for a faculty to have! Names and email addresses of people who submitted questions, and all of the people who viewed the answers! But with the following important caveats…
- When students register for a Chegg account, they don't necessarily use their university email address
- When students register for a Chegg account, they don't always use their real name
- Because the answer is originally provided on Chegg as a webpage, the "answer" is formatted as HTML, and that is how the answer is provided in this spreadsheet report: as HTML in a single cell in the spreadsheet. If the Expert's answer involves images, you'll have to grab those image URLs out of the answer text and load them separately on your web browser, or save the entire HTML content as a text file and load that in your web browser. In particular, I'm quite unsure how long those images, which are hosted by Chegg, will remain active, especially because once you notify Chegg that your content is on their site, they remove it! That's a good thing, unless you want that content to remain so that you can continue using it as evidence of an ongoing academic dishonesty investigation on your campus! So, here's another critical point: save all Chegg evidence (URLs, perhaps screen shots or PDFs of all Chegg webpages) before you ask them to launch an Honor Code Investigation.
- Students might be sharing Chegg accounts, in which case you'll only identify the account holder!
By the way, I pressed Chegg (faculty can email their faculty team at faculty@chegg.com) about students registering for accounts without using their real name. After all, I pointed out, students have to pay for Chegg accounts to post questions and view answers, and so they must have had to use their legal name associated with their form of payment. So, would Chegg provide that name to me? No. Their response (emphasis mine):
"Unfortunately, because we are bound by privacy laws and our privacy policy, we may not investigate specific accounts, names, users, or email addresses. We are only able to share information related to the specific URLs reported when an Honor Code investigation is opened. However, if a student requires additional account information as part of an ongoing academic integrity investigation, we are able to release account activity directly to the owner of the account. These requests can be submitted as a ‘My Data request,’ or the student is welcome to reach out to support@chegg.com directly with any questions regarding their account. Also, to help clarify, it is not possible for us to determine whether any particular account has had unauthorized access to a reasonable level of certainty. The information visible to us and made available in investigation results is simply activity on the account, with no indicator of whether the activity is generated by the individual, someone they may have given their account credentials to, or some unauthorized actor. We can only release personally-identifiable information (PII), including billing or payment information, in response to an issued subpoena. This is due to stringent privacy laws which prohibit our release of student PII except in specified cases. Once we have a subpoena, we can promptly provide this information. Feel free to reach out with any additional questions."
Like a University would request a subpoena to get student information to assist in an academic dishonesty investigation!
It is also worth noting, from this quote, a good point related to account-sharing: there is no way for Chegg to know what person is accessing materials on their website - only what account is logged in. So, be cautious when accusing students of cheating - presume innocence at first!
Intellectual Property Rights
As I mentioned above, Chegg will take down URLs on their site in response to an Honor Code Investigation. This is part of their statement that
"Chegg respects the intellectual property rights of others and we expect users of our websites and services to do the same. Chegg is designed to support learning, not replace it. Misuse of our platform by any user may have serious consequences, up to and including being banned from our sites or having an academic integrity investigation opened by the user’s institution.
In keeping with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we will respond promptly to valid written notification of claimed infringement regarding content posted on Chegg sites. Please note that Chegg may forward the written notification, including the complainant’s contact information, to the user who posted the content. It is also our policy to disable and/or terminate the accounts of users who repeatedly infringe the copyrights of others.
We respond to DMCA content takedown requests within 2 business days and will remove material in accordance with the DMCA."
Conclusion
For a company with Chegg's business model, it is nice to see that they do comply quickly with Honor Code Investigations and with DMCA requests. However, we're fighting in an arms race.
I do not care to tally how many hours I spent this semester 1) looking for hints of cheating on exam material, 2) investigating cheated material present on the internet, 3) communicating with campus administrators and with Chegg, 4) assembling the Honor Code Investigation document, 5) analyzing the Honor Code Report, 6) contacting students and holding multiple Faculty-Student Conferences, and 7) submitting a campus Instructor Report of Cheating or Plagiarism for each of those students.
This is the conclusion of the Summer Reflections: Academic Dishonesty series of posts. I've now detailed lots of advice and procedures for helping students learn what not to do, what the potential punishments of cheating can be, ways to proactively dissuade students from cheating, writing cheat-resistant (and cheat-detecting) exam questions, how to spot cheating, and now how to deal with it when it happens. Even though it is an uphill battle with one instructor and numerous students who have much more incentive and collective time to cheat, I still think it is a battle worth fighting.
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