Interface misleads and frustrates users
The interface looks like a free resource website but is is not. Answers are hidden until you pay for a subscription.
Utilitarianism & Libertarinism
Why is it evil?
Profit based model with unreliable answers
Students are paying for the wrong answers while the tutor who provided the answer won't get paid if the answer is wrong.
Virtue Ethics & Kant
Facilitates cheating not learning
Students copy and paste answers to finish their homework instead of trying to learn the material.
Virtue Ethics & Moral Fog
Design Critique
Aspects of Chegg that are evil
What is Chegg?
Chegg is a multipurpose website to buy and rent textbooks, get college advice, tutoring, and answers to textbook questions. For the purpose of our project we have decided to scope the project to focus on the most evil part of their website that is the Chegg Study feature. This feature allows users to look up answers to homework problems and find quick answers. Chegg Study looks free when you search for a question, but then requires users to sign up for a $15/month subscription in order to see an answer to the problem.
Chegg’s interface design looks like a free resource website, when you can’t actually do anything unless you sign up for a subscription. One clear example of this is that the answers are hidden behind a paywall until you pay for a subscription. This violates welfare and virtue. Users are unhappy because they need help and are being fooled into thinking that Chegg will provide them with an answer. The cost of Chegg not only upsets users that can afford it, but excludes anyone who can’t afford it. The overall happiness of the community is lowered due to this frustrating interface.
Second, Chegg prays on students desperation of finishing an assignment that if they can almost see the answer they might pay for it out of this desperation. As a designer the pay block is especially unethical. By designing the interface to look free and then tricking your users into paying to use the service is deceitful and harmful to the company and the users.
Anyone who passes the Chegg placement test can be a tutor who will get paid by answering questions in Chegg. However, Chegg is not responsible for the correctness of the answers, and it relies on the students to report the correctness of the answers. For each question, Chegg will show the percentage of the correctness. However, most of the questions in Chegg are science and math questions, and the answers for those questions can only be right or wrong. By showing the percentage of the correctness, Chegg shifts their responsibility of providing and ensuring high-quality contents to the tutor and students.
While Chegg charges money to view answers, many times the answers are wrong so students are paying for incorrect answers. When this happens, the money doesn’t go to a tutor that answers the question and Chegg won’t say where the money goes. This violates virtue ethics as well as libertarianism. First, Chegg is taking money from users without providing anything in return. Chegg, like the previous critique, uses its users as a means to an ends and not as ends themselves. Second, in the contract you fill out with Chegg when subscribing, it states that they provide answers to their users. So they are breaking this contract and lying upfront to their users about what the platform can do for them.
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How Chegg is currently set up allows users to basically just copy and paste the answer to problems without actually helping them learn. More than half of the interviewees mentioned they only use Chegg when their deadlines are approaching, and they needed to search an answer to finish their assignments on time. They use Chegg since their assignment is grading based on correctness instead of participation. That is the reason why they need to find
the exact questions. Their intention of using Chegg is to get a better grade instead of learning and understanding the concept. The reason why these students use Chegg only for answer checking is that Chegg’s purpose and intention are to provide answers to students instead of teaching. To follow virtue ethics, one of the main ideas is that you are trying to become the best possible person and the purpose of the products should be ethical. By helping facilitate cheating, users are not reaching their true potential.
To solve all the issues we mentioned above, we started our redesign. Click to Learn more about our Redesign process