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I'm taking my 8th course since the Covid-19 shutdown of universities has forced everyone to come home. When looking up stuff, I have inevitably come across almost all the questions from psets, quizzes, tests, etc posted to Chegg, where I presume other students are cheating. I am 100% sure these are from the current term's class questions, as the questions are usually rewritten every term by the profs in my department and are posted as a picture, so sometimes one can even see the header for the current term (not to mention the picture is directly of the question paper). I think at this point it is a fair assumption to make that there is cheating going on.

In my first 7 courses, I reported this, to varying degrees of success. All the professors tried to address this, but some basically told me even they couldn't do much about it. Even after the "mass cleansing" that happened after each of these reports, almost every question I searched about could be found on Chegg.

My 8th course just started and I'm already seeing questions on Chegg. I understand the professor's predicament of them not being able to do anything and don't want to become the student constantly pointing out flaws in their enforcement of academic misconduct (as doing this would probably cause the prof to grow to resent me through misattribution of arousal). However, it's extremely frustrating to slog out a class and be working 16 hour days when others are cheating their way through a course (not to mention destroying the curve, making it even harder for me).

At this point, does it even make sense to report this to the prof?

I phrased the question title as such because I suspect many others are going through the same problem during Covid-19

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    You aren't reporting cheating. You are reporting the opportunity to cheat. This is very different.
    – Anonymous Physicist
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 6:12
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    @AnonymousPhysicist I mean someone has to post it and I think it's fair to say that that given the post (and the post's intention) and given the opportunity to cheat, the person in question is probably cheating.
    – user760900
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 6:48
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    @Louic I don't report any more than once per class, but it is still somewhat frustrating
    – user760900
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 6:49
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    @AnonymousPhysicist To answer your question, the question is directly off the question paper usually (sometimes even with the current semester and teacher name there) and most of my profs write their own questions. But thank you for the advice.
    – user760900
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 6:51
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    @AnonymousPhysicist You might be surprised how many naïve professors there are. I think he should definitely report it to raise awareness about how cheating works in 2020
    – Louic
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 7:10

1 Answer 1

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In general it is useful to report cheating. Some institutions require students to report it.

In this case, however, you do not know who cheated and faculty have already made reasonable efforts to make cheating harder. The information you are providing is not doing anything to reduce cheating, so you can stop reporting it.

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    Someone who has used Chegg might have more information.
    – Anonymous Physicist
    Commented Jul 9, 2020 at 8:25

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