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If you’re a student or you know someone who’s a student, then you’ve almost certainly heard of Chegg. This controversial service connects students looking for answers with tutors able to provide them, and it also features a full database of millions of exam and textbook answers that students can simply look up if they’re stuck on a question.
Needless to say, Chegg has proven divisive; some say it’s an essential service for an education system in need of reform, while others say it’s basically legitimised cheating and shouldn’t be used by any serious student. Whatever your personal opinion may be, there are plenty of services adjacent to Chegg that are worth a look as well. Here are the best Chegg alternatives to try in 2022 (although not all of them will be one-to-one alternatives).
Quizlet (free, paid plan available)
If you sign up for Quizlet, you’ll be able to browse a large selection of textbooks for free, and you’ll also be able to look up various questions across a variety of topics. Quizlet lets you generate flashcards for your study, too, so you can augment your revision. Whatever you might want to do with your study plan, you can almost guarantee Quizlet will let you do it. There’s a paid plan available, too, which lets you create diagrams, study offline on mobile, and more. For our money (or lack of it), though, the free version of Quizlet should be more than enough for most students.
Paul’s Online Math Notes (free)
Admittedly, Paul’s Online Math Notes is something of a specialist resource, so it won’t be much use to you if you’re not a maths student. If, however, you’re studying mathematics at any kind of serious academic level, then this is an invaluable resource. You can’t ask questions like you can with Chegg, but it does contain answers to pretty much any maths question you might have, so you probably won’t need to ask. It’s also completely and utterly free, with no paid plan hiding content, so no matter what you want to find here, you won’t need to pay a penny.
Course Hero (free, various paid options available)
Just like Chegg, Course Hero allows you to ask questions and receive answers from experts. Sometimes, you’ll get answers extremely quickly; experts have responded to students within 15 minutes, so Course Hero is a great option if you need info in a pinch. It also offers lots of textbooks across a variety of subjects, and its repository of textbooks is constantly updated, so make sure to keep checking back. The Course Hero premium plan allows you to ask a certain number of questions per month, and if you don’t sign up for it, you’ll need to pay per question.
Stack Exchange (free)
You might have heard of Stack Overflow, which is the programming-focused wing of Stack Exchange. This site, however, is a more generalist affair; you can ask pretty much whatever you like, and it’ll get answered by someone. The downside to Stack Exchange is that there’s no vetting process regarding who gets to answer questions, so the answer someone gives could be wrong (and, indeed, debates often spring up around Stack Exchange regarding this very point). However, if you can verify the information you’re given, Stack Exchange can be a powerful resource indeed.
24 Hour Answers (paid)
In many ways, 24 Hour Answers is a refreshing alternative to the way most modern service model sites work. You will need to cough up some cash for answers on 24 Hour Answers, but you won’t need to subscribe to anything. Rather, you browse questions, and each question has a sum attached to it regarding what the tutor thinks it’s worth pa
ying for that answer. You can also ask custom questions, and if a tutor chooses to respond to your question, they’ll attach an amount to it, which you can then decide whether it’s worth paying or not.
DoMyHomeworkPaid (technically free, practically paid)
Unlike a lot of the options on this list, DoMyHomeworkPaid isn’t actually an official website; rather, it’s a subreddit where you can post a request and have a paid tutor respond to you with a quote. Of course, being a subreddit, it’s not as well-vetted as other options, but there is a list of known scammers that’s constantly being updated by disgruntled students. If you’re desperate and you don’t know where else to turn, then DoMyHomeworkPaid could definitely be an option for you, but we’d only recommend it if you know you can trust the tutor you’re hiring.
School Solver (paid)
In 2007, Radiohead released their album In Rainbows using a “pay what you want” economic model. This allowed users to pay whatever they thought the album was worth, and if they wanted to pay nothing for it, then they could. School Solver works in a slightly similar way; you pose a question on the site and attach a value to it yourself based on how much you’re willing to pay. Tutors can then decide whether they think it’s worth their time to answer the question or not. Usually, someone will answer, no matter what the value you attach might be.
Answers.com (free, paid plans available)
Answers.com resembles what many people thought the internet would achieve back when it was first conceived of. You can input a question and receive an answer quickly, and you don’t technically need to pay to do so. Answers.com is one of the only sites out there that allows you to ask as many questions as you want, and it also comes with a number of useful tools including a flashcard maker and a maths problem solver. Paid plans are pretty cheap, too, so if you don’t have much to spend, then Answers.com should be your first port of call.