Are Students Using Homework Help Sites to Breach Academic Integrity? Slides

I’m always keen to work with student researchers partners to investigate academic integrity research issues. I was pleased to work with Prakhar Nagpal on an extension to previous work I’ve been involved with looking at homework help sites and how these can be misused by students. This was completed as part of the Imperial College London Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programmme.

Prakhar and I presented together about this at the International Center for Academic Integrity Conference 2022.

You can see the slides I used below, along with a summary of Prakhar’s slides. They are also on my SlideShare account).

The question we asked is if there are there any ways of proving that students are posting questions intended for academic credit on Chegg. A lot of evidence suggests this is true, including discussions from students themselves, but it is very hard to verify if any given question is legitimate or not.

Prakhar experimented with some promising computer science techniques to do this. There is more that I hope we can share in other formats. But, like much research, we did not get to a definitive answer, although we did notice some patterns that would likely represent cheating. I do hope that Prakhar or other researchers are able to continue to look further into this.