Do Professors Need to Change Teaching Methods?

This is a response to Let’s Take A Moment To Appreciate ‘Chegg,’ The Real MVP Professor

Every college student knows what the homework help service Chegg is, either they have used it themselves, or been told by their professors not to use it, or have heard discourse about it. Services like Chegg, CourseHero, ChatGPT, and Bartleby are extremely popular. Due to the demand for these services, students are willing to pay subscription fees to get homework help.

Professors often say not to use these services as they are essentially plagiarism and cheating. At the same time, the fact that students need to turn to homework help services to gain help for assignments means they don’t understand the material enough for class. Maybe that should be an indication to Professors to teach differently.

While a good portion of students probably subscribe to these services because they don’t feel like doing the work themselves or they are lazy, these students are not indicative of the entire student population subscribed to these services.

Some material learned in college classes is definitely complex, hard to understand, and requires a good amount of outside work to be understood. At the same time, students obtaining homework help to answer challenging questions on homework means that they do not grasp the material and the foundational skills sufficiently in a class by their professors.

For classes like these, maybe it is also time for professors to teach a little differently, or ease up on the students so that they can do better. Don’t professors want students to perform better? In order for students as a collective to perform better, maybe it is also time to get rid of assignments that don’t necessarily pertain to the exams in class but are merely busy work. Maybe it is also time to re-evaluate teaching standards and teaches in a way that students obtain the foundational knowledge and are able to complete homework on their own.