Is getting/providing homework help from internet message boards cheating?

Great Debates
1

I do it, both in asking for help and providing it. But I’ve often noted around here that whenever a poster admits or alludes to still being in school, that person if often chastised for posting threads to that effect. The charge of ‘cheating’ comes up, too – which I find ridiculous.

Why the hostility to using the SDMB (and other message boards) as a research tool? Knowledge for knowledge’s sake is laudable, but what’s wrong with writing it down and turning it in for a grade? I should point out, there don’t appear to be any rules against it.

2

well, when a poster says I need 2,000 word essay on blah blah blah by tomorrow, come on and help me out, well that’s having someone else do your homework. Doesn’t matter if it’s your Mom, SDMB, google cut and paste, etc. That’s not doing the work yourself.

Now asking for suggestions and some pointers ought to be fine

3

You’d be surprised how many people seem to think that even hints and links crosses some kind of line.

I don’t think cutting and pasting internet responses is wrong as long as you give proper attribution or use MLA or AMA formats for citing internet sources.

4

Well, there’s the matter of it being lazy and dishonest, but what’s wrong with it aside from that? I think many teachers would argue, correctly, that you don’t learn anything from just copying work somebody else has already done, be it a writer or an encylopedia - some random guy on an internet message board is even worse, since if something is in print it’s much more likely to have been fact-checked, whereas you can find all sorts of crap online. There are absolutely rules against plagiarism in schools, it’s cheating.

5

As an undergrad, I made extra money as “The Mad Manic Term Paper Mechanic”.

I did often run into students who thought that for the right price I’d write their papers for them, and I had to explain that that wasn’t the deal.

I had many students who did their own research and wrote decent rough drafts that met the terms of the paper assignment, but who were not good with language (including lots of non-native-English speakers) or lacked the skill of constructing a good paper (premise, elaboration & support, reiteration & conclusion, refs).

Of these, some were in classes where formally a part of the grade was on grammar and paper construction — mostly English Department or “core foundation” level courses — and in such cases I again had to explain that while I could show them generic examples and tips, I could not really do my term-paper mechanic thing on their paper.

But in many other courses (Physics, History, Theatre, etc) students were not officially graded on paper structure, just paper content, although informally it made a significant difference, and for them I’d do heavy editing of their papers, isolating central points and framing them in the early paragraphs, turning rambling sections into tables or bullet-pointed lists of findings or claims, that kind of thing, as well as fixing spelling and other grammatical errors, standardizing the references in the desired format, and so on.

(And, of course, I typed it up and gave them two printed copies and one on computer diskette, this in an era when 30% of students’ papers were being turned in in semi-legible pen and ink and an additional 30% were typed on corrasible bond with typewriters).

The point is, each case has to be considered separately, and it’s not easy to give each case proper consideration over the internet where it’s hard to check up on the requirments and grading policies. So when someone comes in here and asks “HI, can someone please tell me, what were the causes of the Boer war and what did each side hope to get out of the conflict, also, is it a good argument to say apartheid is a major outcome of the Boer war?”, most of us read that as “HI, please do my homework for me so I can get a good grade without doing any of the work”. Many of us probably do tend to err on the side of “I’m not doing your homework for you”, but in part that’s because we don’t know the parameters of your assignment. For all we know, you’re supposed to obtain the answers from a specific book assigned to you; or part of the assignment is to analyze issues in a broad topic and show that you can identify and summarize key points.

6

This equals CHEATING in my Engineering classes where students are expected to be able to present their work visually, verbally, graphically and grammatically. Are you going to be around to hold their hands when they get a job based on your work? When they present your work as theirs they are cheating themselves, their classmates, their professor, and their future employees if the work is presented as their own.

7

Students should NOT cite internet sources to back up facts, unless they are citing electronic forms of peer-reviewed, reputable journals. I have told my students that they will not get credit if some random website appears in the Literature Cited section. This goes for random posts on a message board.

Just because it’s written doesn’t make it a reliable source. Just because a Doper proclaims himself an expert in some esoteric subject does not make what he posts true and accurate. Stuff in peer-reviewed journals isn’t necessarily true and accurate either, but at least it’s made it through some kind of sieve. The internet is a free-for-all where everyone can say anything.

Citing something on the Straight Dope would be like citing a conversation at a party. Your quest for knowledge should start at the library.

8

PictsiePat (w/regards to my “paper mechanic” services):

All the more reason why I wouldn’t offer similar help to students over the internet. Back then, I knew my venue. At my alma, there was a table in the librar offering similar services through the auspices of upperclassmen working as work-study employees, and they had the same list that I did, of courses where composition and grammar and spelling counted directly towards the grade.

I offered the same services as the library table, I was just better at it :slight_smile:

9

Last I looked, APA and MLA formats do not allow for random posts to be cited because they typically fail the title/author/editor criteria.

A strict adherence to your policy would omit such rich internet based sources as 1) Cecil himself, 2) internet newspaper, magazine, video and radio archives 2) UPI and AP photo reference libraries 3) geneological research 4) online slave narratives 5) government statisical and population indexes 6) political websites 7) archived chatroom interviews 8) political cartoon archives 9) graphs, charts and tables 10) the latest in SETI, NASA, Hubble imagery and more.

If a post to a message board querying help for an essay or report leads to suggestions and links to sources such as the ones I just posted, which leads to further researchand citations, I would think the benefits are plain.

10

This is very different from your earlier posts, where it sounded like you thought it would be fine to copy someone else’s post and present it as your own work.

Most of those things are researched and at least somewhat official, so they have some credibility. Straight Dope columns often cite books that provided relevant info. monstro clearly made a distinction between reputable sources and “some random website” as he put it. NASA or the AP don’t fall into the latter category.

11

It’s not like books are peers-reviewed or their content necessarily reliable. I’m not convinced that citing some book is always better than citing an internet site.

12

Here’s how I answer this false-naive question when my students ask it:

Would you have a problem including an account as to the help you got in your paper? Either by acknowledging the help in MLA-style documentation or in a post-script? (i.e., “I asked my Cousin Ed, who’s a biology teacher, and Eddie explained two of the points I paraphrase on the top of page 5, namely…”)

Most of the time, the student says, “What? Are you insane? Acknowledge it? Why would I acknowledge the work if I don’t have to” yyybbb, which kind of reveals that the purpose is to defraud me into thinking you’ve written your own paper.

It’s pretty simple. If you’d be happy to acknowledge getting help and specificially from whom and where, then it’s okay. (On a “plagiarism” level. On the level of “Getting very little credit for having your cousin Ed do your homework,” of course, you may still have problems, just not plagiarism problems.)

13

[quote=clairobscur]
It’s not like books are peers-reviewed or their content necessarily reliable. I’m not convinced that citing some book is always better than citing an internet site.

Always, no. But are you more likely to find a respectable source in the library versus off the internet? You betcha.

To me, it’s like the difference between eating at a cafeteria and a five-star restaurant. The latter is not always going to be better than the cafeteria, which may have some delicious things on the menu. But the quality is generally better at the five-star restaurant. That’s where you should start if you’re hungry.

  1. Um, I wouldn’t want my students citing Cecil. Cecil is a hunter of information. He’s not an expert on most of the topics he addresses in his column. He generally includes references with his responses. These are the things you should cite; not Cecil himself.

  2. I generally do not allow my students to cite newspapers or magazines, whether they be electronic or not. This even includes “smart” rags like Discovery or National Geographic. Perhaps the standards are different in the humanities, but in the sciences, term papers are generally restricted to the scientific literature.

But if for some reason I was open to other kinds of literature, I would feel a strong need to pre-screen my students electronic sources. Citing The New York Times online is one thing. Citing wwww.bubbapapers.com is quite another.

  1. Citing photographs is a new one to me, but I wouldn’t have a hard time with it if a student came to me with the url beforehand.

  2. Is genealogical research only on the internet?

  3. Slave narratives do not exist exclusively on the internet. A website including slave narratives would (I hope) refer you to the publication where they are pulled from (like the book Bullwhip Days), and you would cite this instead. Citing the website they appear on is simply wrong.

  4. Government documentation does not go into the catergory “random website”. For my only doctoral thesis I cited information pulled from online databases maintained by the government.

7)What kind of political website? Does Stormfront count? Unless the topic of the paper pertains directly to political views found in the media, I don’t see why you would need to cite political websites, since they tend to be op-edish rather than fact-focused. If you are indeed writing a paper about political views in the media, the internet would be a fabulous place to start.

8)See above.

9)Anyone can produce a graph, table, or figure and post it on the web. I can produce a purdy bar graph with totally made-up data and slap it on my website in a matter of minutes. Data that has not been scrutinized through a peer-review process is inappropriate for a term paper. This goes not just for internet stuff, but for non-internet stuff too.

10)Information put out through NASA is published by the government, and is thus appropriate to cite.

14

Let’s try this again.

Always, no. But are you more likely to find a respectable source in the library versus off the internet? You betcha.

To me, it’s like the difference between eating at a cafeteria and a five-star restaurant. The latter is not always going to be better than the cafeteria, which may have some delicious things on the menu. But the quality is generally better at the five-star restaurant. That’s where you should start if you’re hungry.

  1. Um, I wouldn’t want my students citing Cecil. Cecil is a hunter of information. He’s not an expert on most of the topics he addresses in his column. He generally includes references with his responses. These are the things you should cite; not Cecil himself.

  2. I generally do not allow my students to cite newspapers or magazines, whether they be electronic or not. This even includes “smart” rags like Discovery or National Geographic. Perhaps the standards are different in the humanities, but in the sciences, term papers are generally restricted to the scientific literature.

But if for some reason I was open to other kinds of literature, I would feel a strong need to pre-screen my students electronic sources. Citing The New York Times online is one thing. Citing wwww.bubbapapers.com is quite another.

  1. Citing photographs is a new one to me, but I wouldn’t have a hard time with it if a student came to me with the url beforehand.

  2. Is genealogical research only on the internet?

  3. Slave narratives do not exist exclusively on the internet. A website including slave narratives would (I hope) refer you to the publication where they are pulled from (like the book Bullwhip Days), and you would cite this instead. Citing the website they appear on is simply wrong.

  4. Government documentation does not go into the catergory “random website”. For my only doctoral thesis I cited information pulled from online databases maintained by the government.

7)What kind of political website? Does Stormfront count? Unless the topic of the paper pertains directly to political views found in the media, I don’t see why you would need to cite political websites, since they tend to be op-edish rather than fact-focused. If you are indeed writing a paper about political views in the media, the internet would be a fabulous place to start.

8)See above.

9)Anyone can produce a graph, table, or figure and post it on the web. I can produce a purdy bar graph with totally made-up data and slap it on my website in a matter of minutes. Data that has not been scrutinized through a peer-review process is inappropriate for a term paper. This goes not just for internet stuff, but for non-internet stuff too.

10)Information put out through NASA is published by the government, and is thus appropriate to cite.