Do Chegg Reviews Lie or Tell the Truth?
Our Findings

Based on 458 comments on various review aggregators, Chegg is rated 2.4 stars. This clearly shows most customers are not satisfied. Users mention an unresponsive support team, refusal to provide refunds and low-quality services. With a rating of 2.4 out of 5.0, Chegg is ranked 68th among online academic helpers.

If there are some, they are buried under hundreds upon hundreds of negative comments. Chegg's website claims that 91% of its customers say they are satisfied. But checking the reviews shows quite clearly that 91% of Chegg’s customers think that the platform is a scam or just a waste of money. And there are multiple Reddit posts warning people to stay away from Chegg.

The fact that the platform seems to attract almost exclusively negative reviews piqued our interest. So, fasten your seatbelts; we are going to figure out what Chegg is and whether all the negative reviews have any value to them.

Chegg is a tutoring platform that helps with various aspects of academic needs. The service can help you with everything, from getting necessary textbooks to getting your homework done, either with the help of tutors or with the tools Chegg provides. At least, that's what is promised.

Chegg has been in the field of academic help for quite a long time. How long exactly is quite a difficult question. You see, based on the copyright notice at the bottom of the website, Chegg was launched in 2003. Yet, some sources say that the company was founded in 2001, 2005, or 2006. Anyway, the website’s design screams: NOUGHTIES!

Were the reviews always bad? Not really. Yet, the company has been running into multiple controversies since 2019. One of the most obvious things was helping students cheat on their exams. But we were surprised to find Chegg’s name popping up in several articles about tutoring platforms blackmailing students to keep subscriptions and outing users to their respective colleges and universities.

Not that our investigation led to any proof of that, but that’s in line with some comments about Chegg declining refund requests. So, it's getting more obvious where the negative reviews are coming from. But, hey, there are problems with the quality as well.

So, after answering the question, “What is Chegg?” and sorting out what it offers on the surface level, let’s dig a little deeper. Mind you, the homepage of the platform claims that the evolution of 24/7 study starts here. And here is where you pretty much can get lost — at least we did.

You see, Chegg has probably one of the most confusing websites that we had to review. Not that it’s difficult to find this or that section or this or that service. You cannot truly understand what the point is.

You go to the Writing section, and you pretty much see the carbon copy of Grammarly. The only difference is that you can format the text according to APA or MLA.

You go to the Math Solver section, and you get a smart calculator. Where’s the promised evolution of study? Does it imply Grammarly and a calculator in one place?

There are several features that are worth mentioning, like online citation generation. There’s also an expert check option, which is convenient, but we had some issues with that, and we are going to expand on them in a bit. Still, nothing signifies the promised evolution of 24/7 study.

One Chegg review differs from another when it comes to customer support. Some users praise it, calling it the only saving grace of the platform, while others state that it’s impossible to get a hold of the support representatives.

In the previous section, we mentioned that we’ve experienced problems with the expert check option. The issues that we had with it started from the communication with Chegg customer service. We wanted to know what the option was about and who the said experts were.

To get in touch with the support service, as a registered user, you need to click on your profile and select the “Help” option. If you're not a registered user, you can find the help center in the upper right corner of your screen.

In both cases, it will take you to the FAQ section. And there, in the lower right corner of your screen, you can find the “Contact Us” button. Click on it, and select one of the inquiries that suits you. In our case, it was “Other.”

We were greeted by the virtual assistant. We said that we wanted to know more about the Expert Check option. The VA asked us to paraphrase our question three times before asking us to wait till the human assistant gets in contact with us.

We got another “Hi, how can I help you?” message and repeated our question. After which, we were asked to wait till the human assistant would get in contact with us again.

Finally, after half an hour, “Arielle” greeted us and asked us to provide her with our email address so she could help us with our subscription… We repeated our question, and “Arielle” disappeared for another half an hour. Then, she stated that the Expert Check option was part of the regular subscription.

Given that we had to wait for an hour for some kind of reply, we were quite close to giving up. But there were other parts that we had to disclose in the course of our investigation, so we decided to press “Arielle” regarding the experts who were going to perform the check.

We’ve been told that the expert was going to be picked by the service and that their level of expertise was going to correspond to the subject of our paper. In other words, if you are planning to know who’s going to review your paper, you won’t be able to do it.

But we could assess the quality of their work nonetheless. While we were investigating MyEssayWriter service, its AI tool crafted an essay for us. It was titled “The Pervasive Tendency to Believe Liars: Insights from Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Sorokin.” It was flawed; it was generic, lacked cohesion, and had no citations.

What do you think the expert had to say about it? The essay lacked citations. Some chegg.com reviews suspect the service of using AI instead of real tutors. Who knows, maybe the platform uses AI when it comes to expert checks as well.

When it comes to Chegg pricing, you will be pleasantly surprised. If you want to have an online calculator, Grammarly, and expert check in one place, good news for you ‒ it will cost you $9.95 per month. Besides, you can expect answers for up to twenty questions per month. When it comes to renting books, it’s not part of the package. But you can expect free shipping for textbooks that cost more than $36.

You might wonder why we are focusing on renting textbooks. Well, the general terms and conditions are all about renting and purchasing them.

If you want a refund for purchasing a physical book, you need to request it within twenty days after the purchase. When it comes to buying a digital book, you can request a refund within ten days. There are no words about a refund for the subscription. But maybe for prices as low as $9.95, there’s no need for reimbursement. Besides, you have a three-day free trial, granted you add all the credit card details.

After thoroughly studying the refund policy and even inquiring support service about the account cancellation, we had to settle on the sad truth that we wouldn’t get a chance to be reimbursed for registering at Chegg. There are hints here and there in the Terms of Use, but nothing suggests that the platform can refund subscription. So, we decided to use it to the fullest extent.

One of the things that you can request is proofreading. Who’s going to proofread your work? The proofreader picked by the platform.

So, we decided to use “The Pervasive Tendency to Believe Liars: Insights from Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Sorokin” essay once again. But we removed some commas from it, misspelled some words, and used different spelling throughout the essay, mixing UK and US English: “analyze” but “rationalise” and “skepticism” but “favouring.”

So, place your bets on what our proofreader has marked as errors: commas and misspelled words. The fact that the essay contained both British and American spellings didn’t bother them at all.

Well, Chegg reviews were correct about the quality of work.

Okay, is Chegg good when it comes to deadlines? The short answer is yes. At least, that’s the outcome of what we’ve investigated. Maybe it some problems with shipping textbooks on time, but we didn’t order any textbooks, so we cannot say anything regarding that. Yet, you already know how long does Chegg take to answer its customers. However, things were different with expert checks and proofreading.

The expert check takes up to 24 hours, and we got our paper checked within 23 hours. The proofreading takes 48 hours, and we got the results within two days. Of course, a lot can be said about the quality of such checking and proofreading. However, if there’s one thing that makes us ultimately positive about Chegg, it’s the deadlines.

One of the writing tools that Chegg provides its customers with is the plagiarism checker. Surprisingly, negative reviews on Chegg never mention that tool. That gave us hope that it would work well. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.

Of course, we could’ve used the AI-crafted essay on Sorokin and Holmes again, but it was unique. So, we randomly picked the first news article on Elizabeth Holmes that we found online. We got a notification that the text will be added to Chegg’s database. And here’s the problem. Apparently, when checking the texts, the platform utilizes its own database.

Running the article through other plagiarism detectors showed, on average, between 75% and 90% of plagiarized material. But Chegg’s tool only showed 35%. Obviously, after that, we contacted the customer support team to figure out how to delete a Chegg account in hopes that we would get a reply from them by the time we published this review.

The question that kickstarted this investigation was, “Is Chegg cheating its customers?” In a legal sense, it doesn’t. It promises a citation generator, plagiarism checker, expert check, and proofreading, and it does provide it. However, if you want something of good quality… you should consider alternatives, especially if you are looking for an academic helper to delegate your duties.