Cheat On Homework Answers
In one study, a whopping 35% of teens admit to using their smartphones to cheat on homework or tests. 65% of the same surveyed students also stated they have seen others use their phones to cheat in school. Other research has also pointed to widespread academic indiscretions among teens.
cheat on homework answers
Teens with busy schedules may be especially tempted to cheat. The demands of sports, a part-time job, family commitments, or other after-school responsibilities can make academic dishonesty seem like a time-saving option.
A 2016 study found that cheaters actually cheat themselves out of happiness. Although they may think the advantage they gain by cheating will make them happier, research shows cheating causes people to feel worse.
Sometimes it's just easier to not do the work. According to a recent study, 42% of freshmen at Harvard admitted to cheating on homework assignments, putting you in good company if you often feel like you've got better things to do than another worksheet.[1]XResearch source Instead of going about it foolishly and copying off your friend right before class starts, get smart about your cheating. You can learn the best ways to finish off your math homework, your reading, and even cut some serious corners on your essays.
Mathway. This app is similar to Photomath in that you can type in or take a picture of a math problem and get the answer for free. But to see the steps to get the correct answer, you have to subscribe. That makes it a bit harder to cheat, since most teachers want to see the work. For a higher subscription level, kids can also have access to a live tutor.How parents can help: The Mathway website offers some additional features such as the ability to create practice worksheets and access to a glossary, both of which can be especially helpful before a test.
Suppose a person X asks person Y to explain some material from a course. Person X shows Y some homework that counts for a third of the grade and asks for help. They go through the homework, with Y first showing X how to solve each type of exercise, then they solve it together with X taking the lead (doing the calculations, with an occasional nudge or a piece of advice) and with Y checking that no mistakes are made.
Is this cheating? If so, is it a clear case of cheating, or would you say it is more of a gray area? On one hand, X did not do the homework on their own, but at the same time, X would not be able to do it on their own, and this way X learns how to do it (and homework is for learning, after all). The same material will appear on the final exam, counting for the rest of the grade so getting help with the homework will not make X pass the course on its own.
The upshot of this analysis is that professors will often prohibit the sort of behavior you are asking about, effectively defining it as cheating. And they do this precisely to protect students from their own self-defeating urges to take the easy way out and not follow the (more difficult) path that leads to true learning.
The adversarial environment is a serious issue (comment by @PasserBy): I agree. Making many rules about various things being forbidden or considered cheating can make students feel like they are walking on eggshells and in my opinion can really spoil the fun of learning. I believe in treating my students with respect and not making them feel like I am constantly suspecting them of bad intentions. Most of them truly want to learn. So yeah, definitely the anti-homework-help approach, while motivated by good intentions, and justified at some level, also has a cost that should be factored into the calculation of whether the approach makes sense.
If this is done without guidance and permission of the instructor, then most places would consider it to be cheating. General help is fine in most cases, but specific help on graded material needs a prior OK. In my personal view it is not a gray area at all.
The reason for this is that such homework is intended to bring skill and insight to the student. Reading answers is a very different thing than creating them. Watching someone else and following their insights is much less likely to result in the insight in the student given the task.
First: in step 1 ("showing X how to solve each type of exercise"), we tried hard to not use any of the actual questions from the homework (not least because there was often just the one exercise: "finish the program"). So, we'd talk about what the missing code needed to do or about the concepts that it involved. At this point, we would mostly work on a whiteboard to illustrate the concept rather than actually writing code in an editor - the person coming in for tutoring typically didn't understand some important concept, and neither the lecture nor textbook explained it in a way that made sense to them, so they "just" needed help understanding the core concept.
Graded assignments come with expectations of how the work is to be done. If the assignment doesn't state exceptions, e.g., that students may have partners, you should always assume the work must be done individually, with no help from another student. Violating that expectation would be cheating, an academic violation. If you help someone cheat, that also is an academic violation at most schools.
If I help you through the first couple problems, then let you do the next five problems with minimal help, then by the end of the twenty-problem set you're doing them by yourself, it's "cheating", but not really.
Now, I could take the time to create a lesson plan, invent my own homework problems, etc. That would be better, and is what I tend to do with my nephews. But they're in grade school and junior high, and I can do most of their homework in my sleep. And the homework tends to only have one or two problems of a given type.
When it comes to higher-level stuff, I'm not going to always know it as well, or have the time to invent new problems out of the blue. At that point, the goal is to get you to understand enough to get through the problem yourself, with the understanding that you'll probably get tested on this later. If you're struggling with the homework, there's a good chance you're going to struggle with the test, so you should probably get more help between now and then.
There's also a big difference between the student who hasn't even bothered reading the text, and the student who's spent 20 hours on the first problem and gotten nowhere. Clearly, the first student needs to put reasonable effort in, while the second student either needs to go back and do the prerequisites, or get a teacher who does better with homework assignments (and that isn't hypothetical: I've had homework not even the teacher knew how to accomplish, and homework that had nothing to do with either the lecture or the book lesson).
A typical scenario falls somewhere in the middle of those extremes where reasonable help is reasonable. And in general, everyone gets help with graded homework in subjects they're less familiar with (and most homework is graded). I don't think I've ever seen a course where anyone would even blink at getting help as long as the student did most of the work themselves. Especially when there's a test that counts for far more points where the student doesn't get any help at all.
I'm going to differ from the other answers thus far and say this is not cheating. The reason is because when students ask for help from TAs and lecturers, the kind of help they get is very similar to the one described.
Your whole premise is wrong here. Homework should be considered as a service to the student, allowing them to practice what they've learned and perhaps cover additional material / aspects of the same material. If you don't do your own homework, you're mostly cheating yourself out of the benefit of the homework.
Here's my approach. First, I don't like using homework as an assessment. I have other assessments. I assign homework because I want my students to go home, think about material, and experience applications that are illustrative and promote understanding of the material. Homeworks are thus part of the education, not the assessment.
Here comes the first problem with this: if homeworks are not part of the grade, some students (often the students who need it the most) won't do them! Thus, I need to make homeworks a small part of the overall grade. Usually, a chunk just big enough to take an A down to an A- is good enough.
Now, for the copying part. In my syllabus, I say copying will not be tolerated, but I encourage the students to work in groups, suggesting that they go have their discussions about the approach of the problem, WITHOUT WRITING IT DOWN, then at a later solo period, they should write up their homeworks. I think this is an approach where students can learn from each other, and actually do enough work on their own homeworks that they can claim ownership of what they turn it.
The purpose of homework is to familiarize the student with the material; to increase understanding. If the help given furthers that, then it's serving the purpose; if the help given hinders that, then it's subverting the purpose. So to a large degree, it depends on just how "hand-holdy" the help is vs. how much the student struggles.
Having said that, this is why homework should not be a massive portion of the grade as in your example scenario, because that encourages point-gathering by any means necessary, and actual understanding can start to look like as a secondary consideration.