Should you help someone do their homework through this site?

No.

Some people really ask for help, and some ask for the answers so they don’t have to do any work or even try.

You can show someone how to do the problem, without actually doing it for them.

@Blackberry so in the case of the former would you answer/help?

Homework help is just that: help. Even if you’re helping a younger sibling or child, you ought not give them the answers or do the work for them. Guiding someone in the right direction or providing resources is quite another thing. If someone were to post a question asking for help in finding appropriate resources for research, I think that’d be fine. Someone asking “What are some examples of foreshadowing in Boring High School Novel?” is not.

As other’s have pointed out, there is a difference between helping someone find/come to the answer on their own and just flat out giving them the answer.

If someone asks a question stating they are lost on a math problem (for example), I’d gladly help get them back on track and figure out the answer. I wouldn’t just simply say “the answer is x”. As long as they are willing to do the work to get their answer, I don’t mind helping. It’s the people that don’t want to do the work on their own that won’t get an answer from me.

It’s not against the rules to post homework questions, and it’s not against the rules to help. It’s also not against the rules not to help if you don’t feel like it. Simply posting an assignment and looking for an answer is rude, but trying to start a discussion in order to generate ideas is good practice for higher-level thinking.

I am personally more likely to help when people show they’ve already done some of the work on their own by presenting what ideas they’ve had so far and by engaging in dialogue rather than merely waiting for a helpful monologue.

Yes that is exactly my question?

How is giving someone the answer to a question (excluding math) any different than wikipedia providing an answer?

Help? Yes.

Do it for them? No.

@sarahhhhh The difference is them doing the work (or looking up the answer) on their own vs someone else doing it for them.

We don’t do homework knowingly, and we are pretty good at detecting it.

No, it is not the same thing as doing research yourself. (That’s one reason we don’t do it.)

@sarahhhhh The difference is the key to them learning the material. It the difference between being a student and just doing schoolwork.

Sure why not?
Although if the homework my kids are currently set is anything to go by, i’m not playing.

There’s really no “should” to this. You can respond as you feel appropriate. There does seem to be a consensus, at least among the more vocal of us, that one should not do someone’s homework, but that’s not Fluther policy. As far as I know, there are only a few constraints on our answers, and those have to do with politeness.

My answer depends on my mood. If the question is interesting, I will answer it as fully as I can, because I learn from that—the same as any question I choose to answer. If it is a “wikipedia” question, I’ll usually ignore it. I think that there is a difference of opinion about how to answer these questions, as we have many differences of opinion around here. I think everyone should answer as they see fit, as long as it’s within the rules.

I have no problem with helping people with their homework provided they want to read my explanation on how I arrived at my answer, and are not just asking for the answer. The hope is that they are using my explanation as an example on how to correctly do a particular kind of problem, and using that knowledge to do future problems without help.

@SpatzieLover Summed it up nicely.

Absolutely..whoever is doing an assignment is gleaning info and putting it together in his/her own format.

@SavoirFaire Did the rules on homework change? Every time someone posts a homework-sounding question, a couple of the first posts will be along the lines of “Is this a homework question? We don’t allow those here”.

I am in favor of more helping with homework, because it still helps you gain a greater knowledge and understanding of the material (with a couple exceptions, like math). For instance, if one were to ask “why is Joan of Arc famous” and I replied “Because she “created” nationalism in France, rallying people into transforming from being Normans and Burgundians and Aquitanians to being French, and uniting the country as one”, do you know what you’ve just learned? That Joan of Arc is famous for creating nationalism in France. Just because someone “hands” you the answers doesn’t mean you’ve learned any less – after all, teachers are just “handing you” the answers when they lecture. Nor does struggle necessarily lead anywhere – a child can struggle with an idea for weeks and not be any closer to understanding it than they were 15 minutes after they first encountered the idea. Our society so discourages asking for help that I figure, if someone’s to the point of actually asking for help and thus committing such a “shameful” act, they probably need some freaking help.

Yes, why should the answer be a secret? what does it matter if the person gets the info from a book or from us, the result is the same.

Personally, I learn much faster when it’s just handed to me on a plate. If I’m learning how to use a new machine, I will learn in 30 minutes if you just explain it all to me once.

@Aethelflaed and @poisonedantidote You may learn the information from someone handing the answer to you, but you don’t learn how to get the answer yourself and that’s also part of what you are suppose to learn (at least in primary school). Knowing how to research why Joan of Arc is famous and where to look to find that information could actually be more important than the actual answer to the question (and in some assignments, that might be what the exercise is actually all about). Handing someone the information without telling them how to get the information themselves could actually be hindering them in the long run. For example, if someone came on asking what the answer was to a chemistry problem they had where they needed to balance a chemical equation and we just gave them the answer, we wouldn’t actually be helping them because in the future they will have others to balance and they won’t know/understand the actual process of getting the answer,

@Aethelflaed The guidelines haven’t changed in the time I’ve been here. For homework questions, it states: “Feel free to ask for help on your subject, but simply posting your homework question verbatim and expecting an answer is rude! We’re not here to do your homework for you.”

It’s the people that post their homework questions verbatim and get attitudes when people don’t just give them the answer that usually get modded. I’ve been part of several great math and chemistry homework questions.

I used to think it was wrong but now I don’t see how it is different than typing something up in google and getting the answer.

@sarahhhhh When someone types it in Google, they still have to filter through all the results and read the relevant links to find the exact answer. That’s the difference. They still end up doing some work. If they just ask here and we give them the exact answer, they don’t do any of the associated work and therefore miss out on that part of it (learning how to filter through various links and read research articles to find the relevant information).

When someone types something in Google and uses the first answer they find, that’s 100% their choice. If we help, that means that we’re helping to foster lazy behaviour.

What if someone has a crap teacher and has to look for help through other means? I had the worst physics teacher in the world last year and had to basically teach myself everything through a combination of the text book and asking on sites like this about the things I don’t understand as my parents weren’t good at physics and neither were my classmates !!

@Aethelflaed The rules didn’t change. Some people just have their own rules.

@Seaofclouds People still have to filter through answers here. Google and Fluther both provide wheat and chaff for students to separate. I had a few students use Google as a study guide this past semester instead of coming to my review sessions, asking questions in class, and/or reading the lecture summaries that I provided. They did poorly. Sometimes trying to take the easy way out and failing is a lesson in itself.

I have not found a homework problem yet that this site can really help me with.

Nothing against flutherites, but 99% of the time a simple Google search can help me solve my problem.

By the way, can someone help me with a homework question?

@Seaofclouds Except that asking for help is often a key part of learning how to get the answer. So by turning people away, you’re really saying that asking someone who would know and could guide you still isn’t good enough. There’s so much debate about what exactly “figuring out the answer is for yourself” actually looks like. If you look it up on Wikipedia, is that cheating? If you ask a friend who gets it for tutoring, is that cheating? And if both of those things are actually how you find things out for yourself, and not cheating, then why is asking Fluther where The Line is?

@SavoirFaire Huh. This post says that “any posts that give you the answer will be removed.”, though I see that’s no longer part of the blurb in the Help section of the site.

@Aethelflaed I never said people shouldn’t ask for help. I even said I will help guide people to getting the answer. The only thing I said was that I wouldn’t give them the exact answer. I never said anything about it being cheating. I said that by giving just the answer without helping the person figure out how to get the answer themselves, we are possibly hurting them since there is more to homework assignments than just the answers (like knowing how to do the work). People should ask for help when they need it, but they should also realize that asking for help doesn’t mean that we should just give them the answer, instead, we should help them find the answer. I’ll try to find the chemistry question from a while back that is a good example of people helping someone with their homework. Here it is. To me, that’s how homework questions should go down on Fluther. Now, some things can’t be quite like that, but it’s a good example.

@Aethelflaed I believe the “any posts that give you the answer will be removed” is basically what they mean by “we’re not here to do your homework for you”.

@Aethelflaed exactly my point. Said it better than I could have myself.

Okay @Seaofclouds say someone has an assignment about Shakespeare. They come here and ask people to tell them what the collective knows about Shakespeare. Would you help?

@sarahhhhh Considering I know very little about Shakespeare, the most I could do would be to recommend places to check out for information about him, which I would do.

@Aethelflaed I don’t think that blurb ever went up under the Help section because the question you linked to seems to be about the moderation policy rather than the question policy. That is, it’s about how the moderators are to treat answers to homework questions, not whether homework questions are allowed in the first place. Homework questions are allowed, even though some members occasionally assert otherwise. And as far as I know, they’ve always been allowed—but perhaps we should get a better Fluther historian than myself on the case.

@Seaofclouds we are possibly hurting them since there is more to homework assignments than just the answers (like knowing how to do the work). See, I disagree that we would be hurting them. Even if we do just give them the answer, that’s to one question. One question out of many (when I was in school, it would have been one out of at least 30, probably more like 50). So then there are the other 29 problems they have to do without our help. Nor was I advocating just telling them the answer without walking them through the thought process on math or chemistry problems – but I also think it’s up to each user to take it upon themselves to post that thought process instead of having a knee-jerk reaction of “asking for homework help? Not on my watch!”.
And then there’s issue of homework itself, and if it’s useful. Everyone agrees that the education system in America needs reform (though they may not agree on the details), and several members of Fluther regularly state how they system is so bad that they would never let their children partake in it. Yet, homework goes strangely unquestioned – it becomes almost a “I did homework, and my father before me did homework, and his father before him did homework, so gosh darn it if you aren’t going to do homework as well!” thing. I’ve looked at the studies saying that there’s no positive impact on grades and success from homework, but there is negative impact on grades and success from homework. So the idea that I could make someone’s life a little better, a little more successful by offsetting a school system trying to doom them to failure makes me want to help people more with homework, not less.

@Aethelflaed I understand what you are saying and see your point. I just still think it’s best to help talk someone through getting the answer instead of just giving it to them directly. If you really wanted to just give someone the direct answer without walking them through the solution, you could PM it to them.

@Seaofclouds I, personally, would never give someone the answer to a math or chemistry problem. But that’s really more because I’m the one asking those questions, not answering them…

It’s not just math questions that show up sometimes with a presumption that the answer should be handed over gift-wrapped, requiring no effort on the part of the asker.

The difference between these two literature questions should be obvious:

• What surprising thing does Pip learn in Chapter 18 of Great Expectations?

• Why does it take Pip so long to understand the value of Joe’s friendship?

In the first case there’s going to be a specific short answer that a teacher is after as evidence that the student has at least turned the pages in the chapter and glanced at them. Why should we provide the answer? There is no reason why the student shouldn’t read the chapter himself or herself. I usually (though not always) manage to bite back a retort to such questions and just exit the page.

In the second case, there’s a process of assimilation and analysis involved that may be difficult for some students even if they’ve read every word. In that case, some leading questions might be helpful in order to point the way for the student who’s really trying. I don’t see anything wrong with offering that kind of help, exactly as I would do for my own kids.

The reason some of us can answer these questions is that we did do our own homework in school. I don’t see that we’re helping anyone when we let them believe they ought to be spared the inconvenience—and yet earn the grade anyway.