Chegg fined by Australian court for facilitating cheating

Australia’s higher education regulator has prevailed in its long-running legal proceedings against one of the world’s biggest edtech companies, with a Sydney court finding that US-based homework help platform Chegg facilitated cheating by students at Monash University.

Federal Court judge Craig Lenehan has fined Chegg A$500,000 (£259,000) for “providing or arranging for a third person to provide an academic cheating service”.

Australia’s Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (Teqsa) had accused the company of enabling cheating through its “Expert Q&A” service, which enlists subject matter experts to provide solutions to study questions submitted by subscribers.

In court documents filed in 2024, Teqsa said Monash students had uploaded questions from five engineering, information technology and physics exams to the Chegg website in 2021 and 2022, despite being instructed not to “collude with others” or post the assessments externally – specifically including the Chegg website, in some cases.

Chegg subject experts had subsequently uploaded the answers to the website. “It was obvious from the face of each question…that [it] was an assignment, and Chegg and each expert either knew or should have known that it may be work that a student was required to personally undertake,” Teqsa alleged.

Lenehan found that Chegg experts had “provided a cheating service” for students undertaking three of the five assessments. He also ordered Chegg to pay court costs of A$150,000.

Times Higher Education has sought a response from the company, which in the past has strongly denied facilitating cheating and stressed its commitment to academic integrity.

Teqsa launched the action in October 2024, after earlier alerting universities to its concerns about how Chegg’s services were being used by students. In a statement, the agency said the judgment was a “significant outcome for the integrity of higher education” and an “Australian-first” for contraventions of the nation’s academic cheating laws.

“Teqsa will act decisively to address allegations of academic cheating services being provided or offered to Australian higher education students,” said chief executive Mary Russell. She encouraged students, institutions, academics and the public to share information about “suspected academic cheating services”.

Lenehan said the fine was less than one-third of the A$1,665,000 penalty he was entitled to impose under Teqsa’s act, but was nevertheless “significant” when measured against Chegg’s Australian revenue. The company’s Australian business earned it around $2.2 million (£1.6 million) of its global net revenue of about $330 million in 2025, he found.

The judge also noted the decline in Chegg’s earnings since 2022, when it garnered $729 million. The revenue from the Australian operations had fallen by around three-quarters over that period, while global subscriber numbers had crashed from approximately 8.1 million to 2.9 million.

Chegg’s share price soared in the early months of the coronavirus pandemic, as it grew into a $12-plus billion company by early 2021. But its fortunes declined with the rise of ChatGPT, forcing it into a series of mass layoffs as its share price reportedly tumbled by 97 per cent.

In late 2021 a New York law firm announced a class action on behalf of shareholders who had bought into the company shortly before the stock lost almost half its value. By early 2025, when Chegg launched its own lawsuit against Google for allegedly strangling its web traffic with AI-generated search summaries, the company had reinvented itself as a “skilling-focused business-to-business organisation” in a restructure that cost almost half of its remaining workforce.

Deakin University assessment expert Phill Dawson said homework help sites were no longer the “big concern” for academic integrity experts, partly because universities had moved away from using unsupervised coursework assignments for “assurance of learning purposes”, and partly because generative artificial intelligence was now the major threat.

But Dawson said the Chegg judgment had “symbolic relevance” as a demonstration that successful action was possible against companies that claimed to provide valid study support. “I don’t think Chegg is still a major player in this space, in the way it was at the peak of the pandemic remote teaching period, but hopefully this discourages other groups from trying to pull the same sorts of ideas.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com