Re: Me 365 Homework Solutions
Hilke Mcnally
A lot many answers are very helpful. Most of them revolve around introspection and the classical definition of plagiarism. I agree with that. I know I am digressing from the original topic and may seem to justify copying but at the end of the day I have to pass the course. I spend hours trying to learn all the background concepts and then try to apply them to the assignment questions. Thats what I have done till now. Not all the times I get them correct. Many of my classmates get the solutions online, rephrase the wordings and then submit it. Its a no brainer, they end up getting more marks than me. Sometimes(many a times) it feels really bad. Am I just being stupid in that case? should i follow their approach when I am not able to get some questions or to verify just to be sure?
In a perfectly ideal world, we would not need to grade homework, because students would do it on their own to master the material. They might refer to other people's solutions to see if theirs are correct, and that would be fine.
One important point that others have answered is that, if you are going to turn in the homework, what you turn in should reflect your own understanding of the assignment. But, equally importantly, it is important to let yourself struggle with problems for a while before looking up the answer. That is the only way to really learn how to solve problems.
Most professors accept that the internet exists - we know you can look up other people's answers. It used to be that fraternities had giant files of old homework and exam answers for this purpose (maybe they still do). And students study in groups all the time - research shows study groups can dramatically increase learning. So getting help is not a bad thing.
But you don't want to get help too quickly. Make a genuine effort to answer the problems yourself first. If you find that you are looking up the answers to all the problems (even the easiest ones), then something is off - try going for more tutoring, or studying more before doing the homework.
If you find that you occasionally need to look up one of the most difficult problems, that's perfectly normal (but it still wouldn't excuse directly copying the solution into your homework, of course).
Of course, the usual caveats apply: some professors may specifically tell you not to collaborate with anyone or use any other resources. But most professors know that students usually collaborate with each other on homework (e.g. study groups) and know that students can look up answers using other resources. We have no problem with that, as long as each student's submission reflects their own understanding in the end.
Yes, it is unethical. Copying the answer from a solutions manual is considered plagiarism, even if it's from another university's website. The question bank and solutions are likely part of a question bank belonging to either an educational group or the textbook.
Then I went to Yahoo Answers, made a bunch of fake accounts, and posted tantalizingly wrong answers to all of my own HW questions. I have told all subsequent students not to google the HW answers because there are wrong solutions out there.
I'm not too sure about whether or not checking your answers once you've done the work yourself is unethical, however. That's a gray area for me that someone with more experience in academic misconduct might be able to help cover.
If you get a solution from another school (or a previous year, as questions are often reused on problem sets), it's no different than getting a solution from another student in the same section who happened to finish the problem first. In other words, it is unequivocally cheating, unless there is an explicit policy to the contrary.
Ask yourself: would you be comfortable telling to your Professor that you got the answers from a website? Do you think she or he would think you did a good job with your homework if you copied it from a website?
The problem is much less about whether there are rules (and there are, no doubt) than about what is the intended purpose of homework, that is to help students learn. If you don't learn from your homework, you're not doing it right.
I explained to my teacher the circumstances. She had missed classes due to a death in the family. I tried to explain the assignment to her, but it didn't sink in. So, I shared a hard copy of my code, as I had expected her to read my code, and try to understand how it worked. Instead she typed it back in verbatim. So, she learned nothing beyond how to also get an F on a coding lab assignment.
Ideally, your professor should have a policy about this. For example, here is mine. (It get's adapted a bit for each course, based on things like whether or not there is a textbook, or whether the course has TA's.)
Homework Policy: You are welcome to consult each other provided (1) you list all people and sources who aided you, or whom you aided and (2) you write-up the solutions independently, in your own language. If you seek help from mathematicians/math students outside the course, you should be seeking general advice, not specific solutions, and must disclose this help. I am, of course, glad to provide help!
I don't intend for you to need to consult sources (books, papers, websites) outside your notes and textbook. If you do consult such, you should be looking for better/other understanding of the definitions and concepts, not solutions to the problems.
You MAY NOT post homework problems to internet fora seeking solutions. Although I participate in some such fora, I feel that they have a major tendency to be too explicit in their help; you can read further thoughts of mine here. You may post questions asking for clarifications and alternate perspectives on concepts and results we have covered.
The value of university is the learning. So the point of homework is not to solve the task but to learn how to solve the task. If you take a shortcut not only is it unethical but you cheated yourself out of your actual goal!
So the question becomes more obvious. Did this additional material help my understanding where there was some lacking or did it make the question substantially easier where I will lose the benefit of working out how to solve the problem myself? You know the honest answer to that.
Either the policy is, "Do your homework however you like, and the teacher will grade it to let you know if you got the right answer," or the policy is "Homework is a graded assessment that is used as part of your overall course grade. Your homework is subject to the honor code / academic integrity rules / ... just as if it were an exam."
In this track, students would not be assigned homework. In order to pass their classes, they simply would need to attend them regularly and carry out the in-class assignments. If they needed help with those assignments, the teacher--or other students--would be there to assist them.
A high school diploma should be replaced by a series of certificates earned by students, each one articulating a set of skills that society values and the student has mastered. When students have acquired the certificates representing the full set of skills the community believes high school students should possess--whether mastered in two years or six--then we grant them a diploma.
I personally think that most people will not go through their solution since they have some solution and maybe will never more look at the solution. It would be nice to have a reference for my statement.
I think a great reason to post homework solutions is so that students have a way of reviewing their homework before exams (it would be nice if they were to review homeworks whenever they get their graded work back, but this seems to be a rare practice). While a well-graded problem set should have comments pointing out any mistakes the student may have made, they might not make it clear what a correct solution would look like.
Providing homework solutions also gives me more license to ask somewhat harder questions on exams if they are related to homework questions. It is true that some (perhaps significant) number of students will not actually look at the solutions and will struggle, but this seems to me to be a good way to distinguish between the students who are actively preparing for class/exams, and those who are not.
Yes, many students never look at the solutions (I even have a stack of homework and exams from last term that they didn't even bother to pick up). But that some don't bother isn't reason enough to deprive those who are interested of being able to look at solutions and try to learn from them.
I think it is important to make the solutions available for the homeworks and exams administered in any course, perhaps after you think that the students have had sufficient time to think about the questions. A student who has spent enough time thinking about the question will have somewhere to look for; and those who do not think about will not bother any way but this is not a reason against having some solutions written.
In principle, a good homework will entertain student's creativity. In this case, you have somewhere to make additional remarks about the material covered in the class and seen on the homework. Almost always, you can present introductions to other "areas" of Mathematics/Sciences where these ideas pop up.
To ensure that the homeworks are taken sufficiently seriously, a strategy that one could follow is to have them prove some results whose proof is a slight extension of something they have seen on the homework. This will ensure that students actually spend time thinking about the assigned homework and also develop some familiarity with techniques and ideas they would be expected to know.
Yes. The idea is not only to give them well thought-out answers and solutions to the problems presented but also (ideally) to show how these were constructed. Enlightening solutions make explicit the intricacies of the problem and how to deal with them.
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