The Algebrator could replace teachers, sometime in the future. It is more detailed and more patient than my current math teacher. I, personally, understand algebra better. Thank you for creating it!Chris Ress, OH
math cheat homework
Chinese Internet search company Baidu launched an app called Homework Helper this year with which students can crowdsource help or answers to homework. Users post a picture or type their homework questions onto online forums, and those who answer the questions can win e-coins that can be used to buy electronics like iPhones and laptops.
Slader is a crowdsourcing app for high school and college students to post and answer questions in math and science. While students can post original homework for help, many questions in popular textbooks have already been answered on the app, according to Fast Company. An Illinois high school said earlier this year that it suspected students were using the service to cheat on their math homework.
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.
Bill Fulton informs me that there is a user on math.SE whose questions are almost entirely copies of homework questions from Math 592 (Algebraic Topology) and 597 (Real Analysis) here at Michigan. In the case of the analysis course, almost every question which had been assigned appeared on math.SE. These courses do not have their problem sets online, so it is extremely unlikely that this is someone self-studying the material at a different location. I am sure this is not the only case.
I think it is safe to assume that someone who enrolls in graduate school at UMich is aiming to produce a thesis, and most likely to get a tenure track position at a research institution. Some of our students are aiming to teach at a Liberal Arts or Community College, but these positions require research too. Your future career success depends on your ability to understand the mathematics you are learning in your courses, and apply it to produce new results. There is no way to learn math without working tons of hard problems. Every bit of time you put into problem solving is a slight increase in the odds that you can get the job you are dreaming of. Why on earth would you waste that opportunity?
Finally, you are dramatically harming the instructors ability to teach the class. When I teach advanced courses, I grade all the homework myself, and I use it to adjust my teaching. When no one solves a problem, or when the solutions all miss a basic insight, I add lectures on the relevant background. If the homework is actually being done by posters on math.SE, I lose all ability to calibrate my instruction.
I think a lot of people in grad school are just there to dodge entering the real world, and do not really understand what the point of a PhD is. Of the people who enter math grad school, what percent ever end up even just submitting a single paper to a journal?
Many things to respond to. In this comment, I want to tackle why we have homework. In particular, does working in small groups damage this purpose? Is the purpose fulfilled by finding a solution in an outside source, as long as the student can explain the solution in their own words?
In our lower level classes, this is why we try to minimize our lecturing and give our students extensive opportunities to interact with us and each other. In our upper level classes, we have too much material to get through to teach in this way, so we lecture in class and assign homework to provide students with the opportunity to learn more actively. In a well designed graduate course, students are spending somewhere between 1 and 3 times as much time on the problem sets as in class, and this is where a large portion of their learning takes place.
Full Disclaimer: I am a student from Australia. I just completed a BSc at the University of Sydney majoring in pure mathematics with first class honours and the university medal. At the end of 2011 I applied to 8 of the top pure mathematics graduate programs in the US. I have been rejected from 6 of them and seem to be on the wait list for the other 2 (The reason for this seems to be my poor GRE scores). I just want to stress that I am commenting not because I am bitter, but because this post is quite relevent to the situation I am in.
Both mathoverflow and mathstackexcahnge are great tools for learning mathematics, but if there is a problem at graduate schools with students abusing these sites to complete homework sets, then is it possible that the wrong students are being admitted? All I can really say is that If an honours student at USYD tried to weasel their was out of an assignment (via MSE or some other method), then they would probably be eaten alive by the other honours students. (In fact, there was someone taking algebraic topology at USYD in 2011 who tried to obtain a copy of an older PhDs written solutions. It did not go down well and they ended up droping the course).
However, I feel that it is even *more important* that these non-research career track students be made to learn in some depth as broad a swath of mathematics as possible: they are likely to end up teaching in small departments and will need to be able to teach a wide variety of courses to accomodate their students, to stay in touch with contemporary mathematical developments, etc, i.e. properly represent mathematics at their institution. If the only math they know is the tiny slice their thesis work required, they are unlikely to inspire their better students.
Chegg is based in Santa Clara, California, but the heart of its operation is in India, where it employs more than 70,000 experts with advanced math, science, technology and engineering degrees. The experts, who work freelance, are online 24/7, supplying step-by-step answers to questions posted by subscribers (sometimes answered in less than 15 minutes). Chegg offers other services students find useful, including tools to create bibliographies, solve math problems and improve writing. But the main revenue driver, and the reason students subscribe, is Chegg Study.
Forbes interviewed 52 students who use Chegg Study. Aside from the half dozen students Chegg provided for Forbes to talk to, all but 4 admitted they use the site to cheat. They include undergrads and grad students at 19 colleges, including large and small state schools and prestigious private universities like Columbia, Brown, Duke and NYU Abu Dhabi.
Students have always cheated. In the 12th century, Chinese test takers sewed matchbox-size copies of Confucian texts into their clothes so they could cheat on civil service exams. Henry Ford II dropped out of Yale in 1940 after he was exposed paying someone to write his senior thesis.
Chegg Study started life as Cramster, a southern California startup founded in 2002 by a recent UCLA engineering grad, Aaron Hawkey, then 24. In college, Hawkey wished he had a place to look up answers to tough problems. His idea: Build a website that had carefully outlined solutions to math, science and engineering problems.
"It was just any regular day of doing homework," Cueva told the Post. "I'm in the living room, and I overheard him asking Alexa some math problems, and I could not believe it! What you don't see is after he says, 'Thank you, Alexa, for helping me with my homework.'"
So I strongly suspect that one of my students is asking all their homework questions here. In particular, all the questions that user8917 has asked about probability are homework questions that I have assigned in my current course. I am using a standard text (Pitman, Probability), so coincidence is possible, but there are many problems in our textbook that I have not assigned -- it seems unlikely that a person studying the book on their own, or even a person in another class using the same book, would choose exactly the same set of problems to be handed in.
My policy on academic dishonesty is simply that students cannot copy their answers from any source, although of course with relatively simple problems this is difficult to impossible to enforce. I of course would not want to forbid my students to use sites such as this one - if they have more general questions, or questions which are not specifically "how do I do this homework problem". But I don't want people solving my students' homework questions for them! I would appreciate the community's advice on what I can do here.
This is in some respect a repeat of this question, regarding a similar anonymous user who consistently asked homework questions; the major difference is that I, the instructor, am the one who noticed this.
In my quest to use original problems, Math.SE (and similar sites) creates a problem: not only does asking here spur 20-30 PhDs to vigorously compete for rep, racing to answer my students' homeworks, but it also permanently renders the problems useless. So I'm forced to find new problems every term. 2ff7e9595c
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