Faculty Guide to Chegg, Study notes of Biology

Download Faculty Guide to Chegg and more Study notes Biology in PDF only on Docsity! 1 Faculty Guide to Chegg Michigan Tech Office of Academic and Community Conduct last updated 6/11/21 by RMB Michigan Tech Office of Academic and Community Conduct Faculty Guide to Chegg About Chegg Chegg.com is a website intended to support students’ understanding of course material. The site explicitly states that users “may not use any of the solutions, answers, materials or information available on or through the Services, to cheat. Examples include: 1. Submitting any textbook solutions from the Services as your own to any class. 2. Using our questions and answers service to complete tests or homework when instructed not to use outside help. 3. Otherwise passing along any solutions, answers, materials or information from the Services as your own. 4. Any other violation of your instructor's or school's academic honor code.” (Chegg Terms of Use) The use of Chegg to get answers to exam questions during the exam is one of the most common ways students are cheating in courses taught online. Students usually take a photo or screenshot of the question, upload it to Chegg, wait for a ‘Chegg Expert’ to provide an answer, and then copy it into their exam. Sometimes students will slightly rephrase answers. Usually many students will look at and copy the same answers. If we send Chegg a list of URLs of course material uploaded without authorization, Chegg will send us a report with information about the students who uploaded the questions and students who viewed the answers. It’s a lot easier to hold students accountable for using Chegg when we get this report from Chegg. After we contact Chegg, they notify the student that their account is being cancelled. Unfortunately, the student can simply sign up with a different email account. Other Contract Cheating Sites There are many sites that provide answers for a fee. But unlike Chegg, they often market themselves as sites for cheaters. At least Chegg has an honor code related to academic integrity. To our knowledge, only Chegg will tell us information about who posted and viewed the information. Here are a few other sites: ● bartleby – “Homework Done Right. Homework Done Fast” ● EduBirdie – “High Quality Custom Essay Writing Service” ● HomeworkMarket – “Your Homework Helper” ● Socratic – “Get unstuck. Learn better. Take a photo of your homework question and get answers . . .” ● Studypool – “Home of Best Tutors. Get help with homework questions from verified tutors . . .” Course Hero is a site widely used by students, but it wasn’t a contract cheating site until recently. They now have a ‘tutoring’ service where students can get answers for a fee. It used to be that Course Hero was just a repository of student work. For this service, students can upload their own work (papers, labs, exams, etc.) and then freely access other students’ work. Students use it widely to study for exams or complete assignments. But they also use it to plagiarize. Course Hero will give instructors complimentary full access so you can search for your content that was uploaded without authorization. Email DMCA@coursehero.com and include your educator credentials along with any other information that identifies you as an instructor at Michigan Tech. 2 Faculty Guide to Chegg Michigan Tech Office of Academic and Community Conduct last updated 6/11/21 by RMB Because it is a violation to upload course materials without an instructor’s permission, we can require the student who posted it to remove it. See the end of this guide for information on how to submit a report to OACC. You can also ask Course Hero to remove the content. Finding Your Exam or Assignment Questions on Chegg If you type a question or portion of a question into a Google search and it’s posted on Chegg, it will likely pop up in the search results. You can also use the search bar on the Chegg site. If you use quotation marks around your question or portion of a question, it will produce a list of exact matches. You’ll be able to see if a question is posted, but you have to pay for an account to see answers. Our office has an account for this purpose, as do a few academic departments. If a department has an account, a staff person may be designated to look up questions and answers for their instructors. See a sample question and answer that was posted on Chegg at the end of this guide. Note that when you see a question and answer posted on Chegg, you should look at the bottom of the page for the section “Questions viewed by other students.” There you will often find that other students posted the same question or questions from the same exam/assignment. If you list all those URLs, then we can get all the questions removed and follow-up with the students who posted and probably copied the answers. Asking Chegg to Remove Content and Send Us a Report Once you believe you’ve found all your course material posted on Chegg, send a list of the URLs to studentconduct@mtu.edu. We will submit the list of URLs to Chegg. Per Chegg policies, the letter must come from our office. Chegg will email OACC (and copy you) to tell us that the content on the URLs has been removed. Then, usually a few days later, they’ll send us an Excel spreadsheet with information about the students who uploaded questions and/or viewed answers. Chegg Reports Chegg will send us a report that includes information on students who uploaded the questions and students who either used their mtu.edu email address or listed Michigan Tech as their institution. Some students who viewed the answers and used their personal email accounts may not be listed. The reports usually have enough information to identify some, but not all, of the listed students. The reports will include two tabs, Asker Details and Viewer Details. The Asker Details tab will include the following information: Question ID ID number Chegg assigned to that question Question Date date and time the student uploaded the question Answer Date date and time the question was answered Asker User ID Chegg ID number assigned to the student Asker First Name first name the student provided to Chegg (often blank or a pseudonym) Asker Last Name last name the student provided to Chegg (often blank or a pseudonym) Asker Email ID email address the student provided to Chegg (sometimes blank) IP Address IP address student used when they uploaded the question (sometimes blank) Asker School Name school name the student provided (often blank or the student’s prior institution) Question the question the student posted Answer the answer a ‘Chegg Expert’ provided The Viewer Details tab will include the following information: View Date date and time the student viewed the answer 5 Faculty Guide to Chegg Michigan Tech Office of Academic and Community Conduct last updated 6/11/21 by RMB Filing a Formal Report with OACC For each student suspected of misconduct, we need you to fill out an online report and submit it to our office. Fill in the form and upload related documents. If a group of students are suspected of the same type of misconduct on the same assignment(s), you can submit one report. We need any related documents, such as the student’s exam/assignment, a syllabus or other documented instructions, and any additional evidence. If you believe the student copied, we’ll need an explanation of the evidence, copies of the student’s exam answers and the answers that were posted on Chegg. Be sure to tell us if the answers are wrong in unusual or suspicious ways. The clearer you can make the case in the report, the more likely it is that a responsible student will admit it when they meet with one of us. After you submit the report, it goes into our database. We will assign the case to a Conduct Officer and ask the student to meet with us. After the Conduct Officer meets with the student, they will contact you to share the student’s response, if the student admitted to misconduct, and discuss possible sanction and educational condition(s). If you would like the incident to only be documented in our database, and the student to be addressed informally, you may also request this at the time the Conduct Officer contacts you. An Idea to Thwart Chegg Cheating A math instructor came up with an idea to thwart Chegg cheating – divide the exam into two parts. This will significantly reduce the likelihood that a student will get an answer before the exam is over. In Biology for example, 68% of the posted questions were answered within an hour, but only 38% were answered within 24 minutes. In Math, only 14% of the questions were answered within 24 minutes. % of questions answered in Physics Math Economics Biology Chemistry Agricultura l & Resource Economics Statistics less than 24 minutes 33 14 30 38 23 30 19 24 minutes - I hour 30 30 20 30 33 31 33 I - 2 hours 21 18 5 10 16 13 9 more than 2 hours 16 38 45 22 28 26 39 Identifying the students who are using Chegg and other online cheating sites is labor intensive. Making it difficult to use may make it less likely that students will be successful in using Chegg or other similar sites. Chegg’s Honor Shield Program Chegg is offering "a new program, Honor Shield, which allows faculty to submit exam questions to the site in advance so they can be blocked during designated exam periods." (A Spike in Cheating Since the Move to Remote?) According to Chegg. “the proctoring tool, Honor Shield, is meant to do the following: 1. Block any existing answers that match questions from your exam during the duration of your exam, which you determine at the time of upload from 1-6 hours. 2. Delay the answering of any questions that are posted by a student that match your exam questions until the exam expires. So, if you share your exam questions with Chegg, they will block the questions from being posted for up to six hours. But, if a student posts the questions, they will permit the uploads after that time frame and the 6 Faculty Guide to Chegg Michigan Tech Office of Academic and Community Conduct last updated 6/11/21 by RMB questions will remain posted unless we find the questions and ask them to take the questions down. More information is available on Chegg’s faculty resources FAQ page. Three Recent Articles on Students Using Chegg to Cheat This $12 Billion Company Is Getting Rich Off Students Cheating Their Way Through Covid Meet superspreader Chegg, which has become the most valuable ed-tech company in America by connecting college students to test answers on demand. A Spike in Cheating Since the Move to Remote? The number of questions asked and answered on the “homework help” website Chegg has skyrocketed since classes migrated online due to the pandemic, an increase that authors of a new study published in the International Journal for Educational Integrity link to a likely increase in cheating. Contract cheating by STEM students through a file sharing website: a Covid-19 pandemic perspective Students are using file sharing sites to breach academic integrity in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper analyses the use of one such site, Chegg, which offers “homework help” and other academic services to students. Nurturing Academic Integrity in your Students Prevention truly is the best medicine with respect to student misconduct. Assessment-related practices that reduce cheating include: ● discussing academic integrity and Michigan Tech’s Academic Integrity Policy with students, ● providing clear guidelines on which resources are and are not allowed to complete an assignment, ● explicitly prohibiting the use of Chegg, other online answer sites, and other forms of contract cheating, and ● having students sign an affirmation that they will complete the work on their own. 7 Faculty Guide to Chegg Michigan Tech Office of Academic and Community Conduct last updated 6/11/21 by RMB Sample Question and Answer Posted on Chegg