By Elizabeth Stuart
Lazy students have been ripping shoddily written term papers off the Internet for years, but a new breed of homework help has hit the Internet ? and it?s not just for grade school students.
Equipped with instant message and whiteboard technology, Web sites devoted to connecting college students with live tutors are springing up with increasing frequency. The degree of help such services provide varies with the site, however, raising questions among BYU faculty and students about whether or not online homework help is an ethical solution to late-night brain block and an effective replacement for flesh and blood tutors.
Joe Pantel developed one of these online homework help sites, gethomeworkhelp.com, after struggling with a statistics class. The father of a four year old, Pantel said he didn?t have time to spend hours in a library and needed a way to get homework help from home.
Gethomeworkhelp.com provides listings for more than 4,000 tutors who walk students through homework questions step by step over instant messaging. Tutoring fees vary and are generally arranged between the tutor and the student.
To explain concepts visually, tutors use a ?whiteboard,? a screen both student and teacher can see where tutors can ?draw? to clarify their point.
?We are bringing old fashioned, one-on-one tutoring into the technological generation,? said Pantel, who lives in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla. ?It?s interactive so it?s as if the tutor is sitting with you going over what you need to cover.?
At first glance, the site, which has a photo and a bio of each tutor, resembles an online dating service, with each tutor trying to attract the attention of students.
?I am dedicated to helping you achieve your goals, the same way I achieved mine during my educational career,? writes one tutor, FemaleBioNerd, to entice would-be tutees to choose her. FemaleBioNerd has a bachelor?s degree in biology and is preparing to attend dental school.
Not all the tutors employed by gethomeworkhelp.com are students trying to turn an extra buck, however. Many tutors are college professors, Pantel said.
With so many tutors and such a wide variety of skill levels, it is difficult to keep track of what tutors are up to.
As quality control, Pantel gives tutors an educational background check and records all tutoring sessions in the history section of the site.
?We spot pick and go through past tutoring sessions, and if we catch anything that looks like it?s cheating or against our terms of service, we try to flag those and warn both the student and the tutor,? he said.
Even with all the precautions, however, Pantel said it is impossible for him to keep track of all the tutoring activity that takes place on the site.
That is what worries Delys Snyder, an instructor in BYU?s English Department and Linguistics and English Language Department. She said the validity of online homework help depends on the type of suggestions and coaching tutors provide.
?I think students could potentially get good English tutoring online, but the fine line is does someone else make all the decisions for you or are you learning to do it yourself?? she said.
Because of the nature of online technology, which, even with instant messaging, involves some lag time, tutors are restricted in how they can convey their suggestions without simply changing student?s papers for them, Snyder said.
?You have to be the one who made the changes, you have to have learned how to fix what you did wrong,? she said. ?Otherwise you might as well send your tuition to an editing service.?
Wendy Warren Austin, author of the book ?Due Credit: Avoiding plagiarism in a remix culture,? said it is easy for students to unintentionally steal other?s ideas in these types of situations.
?You can?t do it for them,? said Austin, who recently came to BYU to instruct faculty on dealing with plagiarism. ?A lot of times well meaning students are helped too much because tutors don?t know how to help without telling them what to write.?
If utilized correctly, however, online tutoring can be effective. Austin, who teaches English composition at Edinboro University in Pa., frequently uses instant messaging to give students feedback on assignments and has been happy with the results.
?Since you can?t write too many sentences, you have to get right to the point,? she said. ?I help a lot of students that way.?
Not all online homework help sites use instant messaging, however. Some tutors opt to use e-mail correspondence. Many of these sites offer a simple, uncomplicated exchange: money for solutions.
?Email me your assignments and I?ll send you back the solutions,? reads the welcome statement posted on lastminutehomeworkhelp.com.
The site, which offers help for finance, accounting, economics, business and marketing/advertising, requires only that the student specify whether they would like the work shown or just the solutions.
While this may seem like bold-faced cheating, some argue as long as students use the solutions to aid in studying and not to turn in as their own, using such an online service is no different than using a textbook that includes the answers to homework problems as an appendix.
?I don?t consider it cheating if a student uses the results to deepen their understanding,? said Juliana Boerio-Goates, professor of chemistry. ?There?s a difference between submitting the whole homework assignment and asking targeted, narrowly subscribed questions, however.?
Most teachers who use books that include the answers to homework problems take that into account when they design assignments, making the use of the Internet a wild card teachers may not have compensated for, she said.
As a result, students may not learn the material as thoroughly as they need to.
?The objective of homework can be circumvented if you get help and haven?t struggled with it for a while,? Boerio-Goates said. ?You won?t get the benefit the faculty member had in mind when they assigned the homework.?
Emily Milne, a sophomore studying geography, agreed students who use such online services might be selling themselves short.
?People should be able to get on those Web sites and do whatever they want,? she said. ?They are going to get what?s coming to them on the test anyway.?
Milne, a Calif. native, said she doesn?t see much difference between paying an online service to see the steps to a homework problem worked out and sitting down with a tutor.
?It?s like paying for a tutor,? she said. ?It?s just another way of getting help ? if they were to go to a tutor lab someone would help them through the steps anyway.?
Even so, Milne said the temptation to simply turn the work in rather than spend hours sifting through each step might be too strong to discount. The likelihood that online homework help Web sites will be misused discredits them, she said.
?If they are just printing off the answers then obviously it?s cheating, but if they are using them as guidelines to learn a concept then it?s a legitimate way to get help,? Milne said. ?The problem is, really there?s no way to monitor that ? do they have good intentions? I don?t know.?