Slashdot Mirror
Website Does Homework For Kids
A new French website allows children to pay older students to do their homework for them. Faismesdevoirs.com (domyhomework.com) allows children to buy answers to simple maths problems for 5 euros ($6), while a full end-of-year presentation complete with slides and speaking notes costs 80 euros ($100). Founder Stephane Boukris says, "I realized there was a gap in the market. Add to that a dose of insolence, a zest of arrogance and the internet, and you have faismesdevoirs.com." I thought cheating on homework was what older siblings were for.
... is all that matters and not the actual comprehension, then they will find a way around the arbitrary system.
In other words, if you ask for bullshit do not be surprised when they bullshit you.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
That makes perfect sense to me.
Viable Slashdot alternatives: https://pipedot.org/ and http://soylentnews.org/
Just make in class tests worth more...
The domyhomework.com is already squatted.
There goes my business plan of opening the English language version of it.
1984 was not supposed to be an instruction manual.
How long before the education authority shuts it down.
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Shit...... I actually would gotten good grades if it weren't for homework.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For each person that feels as you do, that homework is over emphasized and quizes and tests are under emphasized, I can bet that there are 5 people that feel the opposite way. If you think about it, homework is what prepares your day to day job (though sometimes extreme deadlines begin to feel more like tests). I've been out of college for 2 years now and I've spent 99% of my work time doing what I would call homework, and about 1% doing what I would call tests.
Not that being able to think on your feet isn't important, sometimes it is the 1% that matters after all.
Where was this when in was in highschool??? I would've been valedictorian
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
Isn't that what Amazon Mechanical Turk is for?
OTOH, I can't really object to this. It teaches management skills that might be more valuable than whatever the teachers are trying to teach.
I thought cheating on homework was what older siblings were for.
Not everyone has older siblings, you insensitive clod!
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
What happens to kids these days?
When I was in highschool, if I was actually doing homework and stuck, I usually rang up a friend who could help by giving me the answer and I figured out the workings.
If I wasn't doing homework, I could still go to classes earlier, borrowed a completed homework from friends (with choices of solution techniques) and copied as required.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
As a geek which, in his young years, managed to earn quite a lot of money (and other stuff) be helping my peers, I have to ask :
WHY ?!?!?
Why depriving future generations of geeks of an easy way to earn cash from less brilliant boys and/or dates from beautiful but broke (in addition to less brilliant) girls ?
This website takes aways the only reason for geeks to get out of their basement and socialize.
If you need help to do you homework, just ask the shy bespectacled geek. Give him somem money donate some hardware or take him out to a dinner or to a dance floor.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nothing says that they'll pay for the -right- answer.
And personally, I'd be rather wary of paying $100 for a presentation, since if you don't know the material it's going to be pretty obvious anyway. You'll be out a lot of cash, and still look like an idiot when you get asked a question.
So I'm all for it. The creator is right. They'll have to learn the material sooner or later, because nobody will be able to buy answers on exam day. He might as well make some easy money off of anyone gullible enough to do this.
If firefighters fight fire, and crimefighters fight crime, what do freedom fighters fight? - George Carlin
My question is HOW? ...is this news? Websites like that have been all over the web for years and years.
Obviously English was one of those classes you had to cheat to pass.
... is not writing part of the opening sentence with ellipses after it, then I for one would be a lot happier.
My impression has been that, of those five you mention, most of them don't want homework to count more, they just want less of the test grade to be shoved into a single, high pressure exam. Having smaller, weekly quizzes or more in class projects reduces the odds that a single bad day in finals week wrecks your grade. It also reduces the tendency to only cram for the one test and not pay attention the rest of the semester.
I remember grade school homework as 90% busy work. Forcing students who already understand the material to spend time repeatedly demonstrating their understanding just makes them bored and frustrated. I'm equally against monolithic tests that count for huge portions of the grade (memories of the year I caught a nasty cold at the beginning of finals week come to mind).
You say your job is mostly homework. Are you really doing it at home? If so, I pity you. If it's just homework "style" though, keep in mind, you're performing it in a work environment without distractions and for compensation. Homework is done outside the work environment, and the rewards are small, while the alternate activities available are frequently far more engaging.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
The damning indictment of the education system in general missed by the existence of this website is that the kids haven't figured out that Google is FREE! :o
It's shocking the number of kids on Yahoo! Answers who ask questions (obviously for homework assignments) that a simple Google search would answer for them.
Shouldn't the summary have been "indolence" for lazy? Because if it was insolence(arrogance) they restated themselves...
Homework should be used as a teaching tool, not as a measure of success. Homework tracks your progress through a chapter, and can be used to identify what areas of the material you need to study more. Tests should be the majority of the grade, since they are a measure of the final result of the learning...and material should be retested in smaller amounts later. Graded homework is too easy to BS. Getting someone else to do it, finding answers posted online, etc. With a heavier emphasis on tests, the benefit of cheating on homework disappears...and the testing environment is easier to control than any homeworking environment.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Additionally, we have a clarification process so that we can discuss the homework with the customer and help to educate them. If we were to provide raw answers we would feel very ... empty.
Paid Q&A/Research
In France, it's not uncommon to have in-class tests every week or two, in every subject. So it would be hard to not do any work for a very long time without it being noticed.
According to http://www.arretsurimages.net/vite.php?id=3559 (in french) the "teacher" team members do not exist.
Given the fact that the website owner comes from a marketing school, has closed the site until monday morning, and the overall reaction it caused, it's actually very likely to be a buzz for something else.
Basically, the provocative theme was chosen only to have medias talk about the site owner
You are more than your job. Don't you know that?
Just worth throwing out that I have yet to see a school which does not say that students should expect anything less than 3 hours of homework per class. Down here in florida schools tend to have 5 classes a day.
Either three states' worth of schools didn't do the math or schools genuinely expect students to spend 22 hours a day working, 7 in school and 15 outside of class.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
bri-lliant
In their Ted lecture, the creators of Google mentioned that they incorporated Montessori's method into their company. If you study up on the method and how they run their company, you can see the similarities.
Also...
On the Barbara Walters ABC-TV Special "The 10 Most Fascinating People Of 2004" Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of the popular Internet search engine Google.com, credited their years as Montessori students as a major factor behind their success. When Barbara Walters asked if the fact that their parents were college professors was a factor behind their success, they said no, that it was their going to a Montessori school where they learned to be self-directed and self-starters. They said that Montessori education allowed them to learn to think for themselves and gave them freedom to pursue their own interests.
But be careful. The word 'Montessori' is not trademarked, and schools and certification programs have popped up that have very little to do with this development based approach. You as a parent would need to do a little homework on the method, the school, and the teachers, and find a good fit. I think our children are worth it though.
The "arbitrary system" is simply to encourage you to learn the material. If you cheat it by not learning it then you are only cheating yourself and come the exam, where this type of cheating will not work, you will have a very nasty surprise.
I believe the 3 hours of homework per class is per week, not per day. That would be 30-45 minutes per class per day, or with 5 classes, 2.5-3.75 hours per day. Granted, that could also depend on the caliber of student (stupid kids will probably take longer, and they damn well better, because not everyone can learn at exactly the same pace). 7 hours in class + (approximately) 4 hours of homework + 3 hours of extra curricular activities + 2 hours of *tv = 8 hours of sleep.
Since you only need 6 hours of sleep to handle elementary school, I'd say its reasonable.
*TV could be internet time, or book reading, or "personal time", but it would be 2 unstructured hours.
Well WE had it tough...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I can't vouch for the direct translation in French, but it's interesting to see how words in certain phrases resemble words from different languages, especially in closely related languages like French and Portuguese.
In Portuguese:
Faz = do
meus = my
deveres = duties
Isn't the definition of a duty something that you're supposed to do??
fun
For each person that feels as you do, that homework is over emphasized and quizes and tests are under emphasized, I can bet that there are 5 people that feel the opposite way.
I have to say that I hated homework when I was a kid, thought it was pointless and stupid, but as an adult the experience has served me well in some ways. At work, I may be given an assignment like "Write a report on this subject and be ready to present it at a meeting that we're going to have 2 weeks from today." You have to be able to get something like that done without someone standing over your shoulder making sure you do it.
On the other hand, that's not to say that the homework assignments I had as a student were done well. After 6 hours of school each day, I was given another 4 or 5 hours of inane busy work. As I got older, I found it oppressive to think about how much work I was doing that was simply not useful to anyone. Sure, you could say it was helping me educationally, but that was help I didn't want. But I was solving problems that didn't need to be solved because the teacher already knew the answer. I was writing papers that didn't need to be written, since nobody cared about what I had to say.
Every single assignment was simply an exercise in giving back to the teacher the answer that the teacher already knew and already believed. If I did manage to come up with something clever, it was usually marked as "wrong" because it wasn't the answer that the teacher was looking for.
And if you did something wrong, it wasn't like anyone would sit you down and have anything resembling a conversation about how you could do better. It was just "Your wrong, so I'm going to mark you as a failure and punish you. Hopefully this will ensure that you're considered a failure for the rest of your life."
I guess I'm just trying to say that I don't think it's about assigning homework or not assigning homework, taking tests or not taking tests. It's about how we treat kids, what we talk to them about, and what attitudes we display towards education and towards the students themselves.
Rich kids buying themselves out of good education increases the probability for wasting their families fortune when they grow up. Honest, hardworking fellows will be happy to fill in the space.
Rich people getting richer with each generation aren't a good thing for any economy. Deterring work ethics of descendants, who never had to work in their live, have corrected this for centuries.
per class as each and every class day, everyone I asked was very specific about that, apologies if I worded it ambiguously.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
This is a great way to get Americans to learn a foreign language.
That's hella expensive, I agree. Shit, I've got a math degree from Yale, and I'd undercut those prices by a good 75%. Your average middle school problem would probably take an educated person what, a minute (max?) to do, and assuming a full queue of problems available, even at $1 a question that's $60/hour, which is far more than most college students make...how do they expect to not see competition on price here?
Whatever the case, though, I think the bottleneck here will be the number of students willing to pay any amount for help. Kids don't tend to have access to much money, and it's a pain in the ass for anyone to do online payments.
Lazy is a judgement by a certain standard.
Lets use another judgement, sweet, to illustrate. What is sweet (as in sugar is sweet)?
Obviously what I experience as sweet can be very different from what you experience as sweet. Worse, depending on what I been eating before, my mental and physical state, I may experience sweetness in a different way. So wether something is sweet or not is not an absolute. Yes as a society we must be able to label things as either sweet or not sweet based on general consent that doesn't exist. Sugar is sweet even for people who lack any capability of sensing sweetness.
Lazy, in the case of people being to lazy to be intrested works in a similar way. Sure, in lab you might be able to make any task intresting enough to engage a person who is really just bored or any of the other things you mention rather then "lazy". But the world is not a lab and schools/employers can not spend endless resources trying to make every bored person intrested. Some tasks just need to be done because... end of story. If you can't, then the label is lazy.
If you are not prepared to simply say at a certain point "we did all we wanted to do, now it is up to you and if you don't, you fail" you end up with the no-child-left-behind policy. The problem with that is that you end up chasing a rainbow. There will always be a kid who is even futher behind. Even more disintrested even more bored. Chase that kid and all the others, who were intrested will instead be left behind. School nowadays is so non-challenging that kids with brains are left to rot because the most dis-intrested can't be left behind.
Worse, you can do this in school but trust me, that is not going to happen in real life. I see this regularly, "kids" who just never learned that in the workplace school rules do not apply. No, your employer doesn't own you a job, the board of directors is not going to fix your performance review to increase their grade point average etc etc. Most of the time, you won't even get in as nobody is going to hire somebody they got to motivate even to turn up for a job interview.
Your ideas are alright, just not practical. At a certain point our society just can't afford or can't be bothered to keep chasing after people who are lazy. Sure, you might re-label them "too expensive to be motivated" instead if that makes you happy, but the result is the same. If you can't motivate yourself to a certain point, nobody is going to do it for you in the real world.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
French students surrender their learning skills to a website.
Voila! :)
As I got older, I found it oppressive to think about how much work I was doing that was simply not useful to anyone
That was the most important lesson I learned in school. It's the primary reason I dropped out. Delivering pizza was far more fulfilling - people appreciate pizza. These days I stand out as a developer because I solve new problems, and focus on what will be useful to people. Not surprisingly, that pays far better than the repetitive busywork which seems to occupy 80% of coders these days.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
What the hell does it matter if they cheat or not. Cheat well and its ok. You think in the real world an employer will care where information came from or who told you answers to a math question as long as its correct information? Getting the job done is what matters.
There's a healthy market in the US for term papers.
The author of that article notes that most of his clients have trouble with basic reading and comprehension, nevermind actually writing an essay on any topic at length.
If schools stop giving children homework then the children can't cheat.
If children are supposed to produce extra work then why not require the school day to increase by an extra hour? That way they can be supervised.
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
The problem is that exams are a retarded way of judging people too.
They very often test crystalised intelligence okay but are crap at testing fluid intelligence.
I've seen countless examples of people who are fantastic at fluid intelligence and not so great with crystalised intelligence and as such fail miserably in exams, yet when given an aid such as a reference book to make up for their weakness in crystalised intelligence they will far outperform any A* student who has great crystalised, but poor fluid intelligence. What's more there's no real bandaid for poor fluid intellignece like there is crystalised intelligence, so we're failing very many otherwise brilliant people.
This is a problem more prominent now than ever because of the prevalance of the internet everywhere we go the situations where crystalised intelligence is of more benefit than fluid intelligence have dissapeared to an absolute minority of situations.
Of course, the real geniuses are strong at both crystalised and fluid intelligence but right now we are writing off so many potentially brilliant people in favour of those who are mediocre at best because whilst they can remember things, their ability to think dynamically and work things out can often be quite poor. There is something very wrong with the system when we're writing off people who are actually better suited to most real life work situations than those who are getting the top grades and it's a fine example of how academia is becoming ever less in touch with the needs of real world employers.
To be fair, it's not even necessarily an inherent fault of exams, just the way nearly all exams are written. If an exam asks someone to write a particular existing well known sorting algorithm then those with good crystalised intelligence will do fine, but those without may have simply forgotten which sorting algorithm is which. If however the exam gave someone a realistic scenario and asked them to write an algorithm to solve the problem then those with better fluid intelligence would shine. Of course, exams aren't written this way because it would require thought and intelligence from the drones that often mark these papers rather than simply comparing against a sheet of pre-written solutions to see if they match and then mark accordingly.
So I feel talk of kids cheating themselves is rather irrelevant when the system is fucked and we're all already cheating ourselves by allowing the continued writing off of potentially more intelligent people than those we're handing the highest of grades to. I'm sure many people have met straight A*, straight distinction students who still seem particularly dense. There are those with high grades who really are bright of course too, but again these are the afformention people that are gifted enough to have strong crystalised and fluid intelligence. A change to the system like that suggested above regarding the example exam questions would continue to let those who are strong in both areas shine whilst not failing those who have strong fluid intelligence if we have a balance of both styles of question with a greater leaning to questions suited to fluid intelligence because they're the type of people we really need in industry. The particular weighting towards each type of intelligence would depend on the subject or the course and what the course was trying to achieve or for which was most important for putting the subject into practice.
Yeah, but there is a slight difference. Unless your job is just busywork, your "test" skills (a broad knowledge base, and thinking on your feet) are more important than your "homework" skills.
For non french readers, this page actually explains that the staff introduced on the website may not be real people : http://www.lepost.fr/article/2009/03/05/1446490_et-si-l-equipe-de-faismesdevoirs-com-etait-bidon.html#xtor=ADC-218
There are things that "busy work" can teach, e.g. discipline, time management. Test skills, on the other hand, can be an exercise in analyzing the psychology of whoever made the tests. When I was in school, there were times when I scored 80% on a test without knowing any of the material I was being tested for.
My larger point here is that, even though "test skills" are skills, tests often don't actually test what they are designed to test. There is no silver bullet-- no magical method that lets you put any random person in front of a class of 50 kids and churn out super-smart kids year after year. There's no replacement for good teachers who care being able to give lots of personal attention to kids and help the kids work through things. Methods are almost incidental.
You forgot to divide by 30 kids in each class, if they club together. Though I doubt if they'd be able to work out how much they'd each have to pay...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
We have this kind of sites in Turkey for at least few years. It is known that even some teachers do homework (off work, anonymously) for money (In Turkey average wage for a teacher -just started working- is below 1000$)
I was in a program in high school where we did very menial scientific research for a local company. It was basically collecting data, plugging it to spreadsheets, and the teacher helped us to some very basic analysis. Our work may not have been helpful to anyone-- hell, they might have simply thrown it in the trash, but the idea that we were trying to come up with answers that someone else didn't already have was a outstanding experience.
And it wasn't that the work was all that flashy and interesting. The research was on a topic that I didn't care about, and an awful lot of my work was reading numbers out of one program and plugging them into another. And I wasn't getting paid. Still, the work had a completely different feel, just to have it in the back of my head that it was possible, just possible, that the work I was doing might be helpful to someone.
I think sometimes the problem is that we underestimate our teenagers. We treat them like they have nothing to contribute and we tell them that nothing that they do really matters. No wonder that they get bored and tend to struggle emotionally.
After creating a big buzz on TV and radio here in France, faismesdevoirs.com is now shut. The homepage displays a note from faismesdevoirs.com's CEO saying that they realized that the goal of their company goes against their own beliefs on what homework and learning in general should be...
I must admit that I am quite impressed by this new kind of auto-censorship, I also thought that before fullfilling a project, and especially a business, you would think more than twice about its consequences.
Oh que j'aime mon pays!
"Il y a bientÃt un mois, nous avons eu lâ(TM)idée de mettre à disposition des Internautes un outil pédagogique innovant.
Nous tenons à vous présenter toutes nos excuses dans la mesure oà nous réalisons à ce jour, à quel point ce site va à lâ(TM)encontre de nos propres valeurs.
Enfin, nous souhaitons faire en sorte que les générations futures soient meilleures que les précédentes, et FaisMesDevoirs.com ne pourra en rien y contribuer.
Les nouvelles technologies doivent servir à nous améliorer et non à nous assister.
"
rough translation
about a month a go we provided an innovative learning tool
we would like to apologize as we realized that this site was going against our values
we wish the future generation will be better than the previous ones and FaisMesDevoirs.com would not be a contributor
the new tech should help us improve, not assist us
but right now we are writing off so many potentially brilliant people in favour of those who are mediocre at best because whilst they can remember things, their ability to think dynamically and work things out can often be quite poor.
Sorry but this is a fault of the person writing the exam but the technique. I teach physics at University and physics is a subject where memorizing facts can only get you so far. For most of the questions in my exams you have to be able to apply the techniques from the lectures to new and different situations. I let the students write their own formula sheet so they do not have to memorize too much but it is a big mistake to think that you can get by without learning anything - reference books are only useful if you know enough to be able to figure out what you need to look up and that requires some memorized knowledge.