If the education system is at the coalface of our anxieties around technology, then “homework helper” app Chegg might just be the canary in the mine.
Chegg is an EdTech (or education technology) platform that, at its Covid-era peak, commanded a stock market valuation of over $14 billion. The website began life by offering US students a way to rent expensive text books.
Over the next decade or so it grew into something else, a mammoth subscription service that many see as enabling students to cheat on homework and tests.
A core product Chegg offers is its Q&A service, where for about $15 a month, subscribers can access a huge database of tens of millions of answers to common text book, exam and assessment questions.
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The service also allows users to post new or novel questions, which the site’s tutors answer, and add to the database. These tutors include an estimated 70,000 freelancers in India with expertise concentrated in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects.
Pre-Covid there was already a pretty sizeable market for a service that could help students speed through homework assignments. But it was the period of pandemic lockdowns – and the online exams that schools and colleges were forced to adopt – that supercharged the demand for these services.
One Australian study found that a majority of the time, novel questions got a full answer from Chegg in under an hour-and-a-half, perfect for getting real-time answers to exam questions from the comfort of your kitchen table.
While the website has a honour code, where users commit to not use its content to cheat, this has not been the universal experience of educators. One North Carolina statistics teacher wanted to understand the extent to which his students were using “homework helper” websites, so he built an experiment.
When setting a Covid-era exam, he used a computer programme to generate unique questions for each student. When these questions soon appeared in the database of a cheating app, he could trace who had used the service. About 200, or one quarter, of his students did so. This chimes with another study that found that up to a quarter of accountancy students were using Chegg during their exams.
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While this has made the site controversial in education circles, it really helped the bottom line. By 2022, Chegg had 8.2 million subscribers, and more than $200 million in revenue.
Education institutions have always struggled with cheating, with tech tools for both cheaters and for those wishing to identify them racing against each other. When I was in UCD in the early 2000s we had to submit floppy disks alongside our essays to be scrutinised, we were told, by the latest in whizz bang detection tools. This was mostly about plagiarism, but also perhaps intended to scare us into ignoring the whispers of people who could be paid pretty decent sums of money to produce work.
This underground trade was very much the black economy, and you would want to have been pretty brave to trust it.
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Fast forward 20 years and institutions are dealing with billion-dollar companies trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
This transition has not been without pushback. A 2021 Forbes article accused Chegg of “getting rich off students cheating their way through Covid”, while many opinion pieces from teachers decried its impact on their ability to teach.
If Chegg was the canary in the coal mine, AI-powered cheating is the toxic air that followed – free, effortless, and nearly undetectable
But that was then. The last two years have delivered a major reversal in fortunes for Chegg. Its subscriber base has more than halved, and its revenue taken a hit. Most notably, its market value has plummeted. At its peak you would have paid more than $110 a share; at the time of writing the going rate is 78 cents.
This dramatic decline has not been due to any heroic turn towards integrity by the world’s learners, nor to any sort of regulatory crackdown. US regulators are the ones with jurisdiction over the likes of Chegg, and they have been notoriously reticent to do even the most basic regulation of the tech industry over the last 20 years. EdTech is no different.
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The challenge instead comes from a common experience for previous waves of content creation businesses; big tech creating free-to-use alternatives that make their business model obsolete. The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 was perhaps the first sign of trouble for Chegg; why pay a $15 per month subscription to take shortcuts on your schoolwork when you can do it for free?
The company experienced a 20 per cent drop in users the following year. And last month, as it presented another year of disappointing results, it announced that it was suing Google parent company Alphabet.
Google increasingly uses “AI Overviews” to summarise content from all of the websites that it scrapes and indexes from across the web, a process that has fuelled its search engine.
This shift away from actually clicking and reading links may make our online searches more efficient. But it is an ominous sign for the people who do the work to create the content on those websites in the first place, and who rely on Google sending “traffic” their way. The lawsuit against the search giant is for “unjustly retained traffic that has historically come to Chegg”.
Teachers were right to criticise EdTech that undermined learning, but instead of precipitating reform, they’ve had to watch as it evolved into something far more powerful and difficult to detect. If Chegg was the canary in the coal mine, AI-powered cheating is the toxic air that followed – free, effortless, and nearly undetectable.
The lesson isn’t just for educators; when we ignore warnings about harmful tech, the problem doesn’t go away; often it just gets less visible and more insidious.
Liz Carolan works on democracy and technology issues, and writes at TheBriefing.ie
