On a number of websites, students post questions that boil down to:  "Please do my homework for me," "Write an essay for me," or "Fix this essay so that I can get a better grade."  In an even more distressing trend, parents ask similar questions on behalf of their children.  Fortunately, most of the "experts" who work on these sites decline to answer, but that such questions are posted in great numbers suggests an alarming misconception of what education is all about.

Let's put aside for a moment that turning in as one's own work what someone else did is a combination of cheating, lying, and fraud (we'll get to that later).  The point is that students who are given the answers, who have their class assignments written or revised for them, learn little or nothing.  Leading students through the process of finding an answer or writing and revising an essay is tutoring; giving students the answers and writing or revising an essay for them is not.  It does not teach them how to solve problems on their own, how to do research, or how to write and revise their own essays.

Consider the following scenario – which is probably the least extreme example.  Johnny has written a report for English class.  It is very poor.  Johnny's mother or father, seeing that Johnny may fail the report, revises it or, worse yet, posts it on a website and asks some "expert" stranger to do so.  If the parent goes over the changes and explains why they are necessary, that is tutoring and serves a useful purpose.  Better yet, if the parent sits down with Johnny, suggests changes, and asks Johnny to choose and explain the basis for the choice, that is education.  Johnny may learn some principles that can be applied to future writing assignments.  On the other hand, if the parent rewrites the essay (or asks someone else to do so) without involving Johnny in the process, Johnny's next essay will be as miserable as the first one.  He will not have learned anything.

The same concept applies to school assignments other than writing.  If Jane has some math problems or science concepts to look up, providing only the answers doesn't teach her anything she can apply.  If, however, she is guided through the solution to the math problems or shown how to look up the science concepts, she will learn something.  Besides discovering how to solve similar math problems and how to research scientific information, Jane will be learning how to think for herself.

The emphasis on standardized tests probably encourages the view that getting the right answer, by whatever means, is all that matters.  If we can get the right answer to each specific question (which is all that the test can determine), understanding of the process, methodology, and principles is of no consequence.  These tests have caused teachers to "teach to the test," with much more emphasis upon giving pat answers than on learning applicable principles.  (Another consequence is the "memorize --> answer --> forget" phenomenon, by which, once the test is over, facts that are unattached to any general principles or concepts are shoved aside and forgotten.)

To return to the principle of helping kids learn, let's look at the challenge I face when I mark papers that students write.  By far the easiest and fastest course would be for me to rewrite what the student has written as I would have phrased it.  That is not totally useless, and sometimes (when the fault is mostly awkwardness) it is the best I can do.  However, since the goal is to teach the student how to avoid writing similar sentences in the future, I need to use other methods – techniques that enable the students to write their own sentences, to recognize (by themselves) when these sentences need revision, and to understand how to self-edit – a vitally important skill.  Therefore, though I am often tempted to show students what the polished product should be, I must resist this temptation to give them the answer.  Sometimes I will simply write "Awkward" and hope that the student will figure out why.  Sometimes I will give a clue, such as, "This sentence is awkward because you have too many roundabout phrases" (I will have marked these).  Sometimes, if the problem is, say, sentence structure, I will write, "Try beginning this sentence with _______."  Instead of doing the "repair job" myself, I am guiding students into doing their own repair jobs – a skill that they can apply to future essays.

Why bother?  Isn't it better to just show the student the right way, to give the right answer?  If I do that, it's certainly less work for the student.  When a rewrite has to be handed in, all the student has to do is copy my revisions and turn in the paper.  Since I wrote it, it will most certainly get an "A"; the student will have achieved the desired result.  That's okay if the desired result is only to produce an "A" paper.  It is not okay if the desired result is to teach the student how to write one.  If we do this, we might as well treat tests the same way:  hand students the test with the answers, tell them to memorize the answers, and then give them the test.  They will have learned nothing about finding answers, doing research, understanding concepts, or thinking and reasoning beyond mere facts that can be memorized for the test and then, most likely, forgotten.

The well-intentioned parents and website volunteers who provide answers to homework questions and write or rewrite student essays do the same thing I would be doing if I gave my students A's on tests for which I had given them all the answers to memorize or on essays that I have essentially written for them.  They are enabling; they are not teaching or even, in any permanent way, "helping."

They also send the wrong message.  They imply that the end justifies the means, that as long as the work gets a good grade, it doesn't matter how the work got done – or even who really did it.  Whether the student learned anything is inconsequential.  Students begin to believe that getting credit for or reaping the rewards from someone else's efforts is perfectly okay.  It is not a giant leap from this mindset to the view that lying, cheating, and stealing in other areas of life are also okay.

Often overlooked by the adults who "enable" students is the effect upon the students who honestly do their own work.  The classroom is a competitive environment, and students' work is evaluated partly by comparison to the work of other students.  When Johnny gets an A because Johnny's Mom essentially did the homework and Mary gets a C because Mary did her own homework and, unlike Johnny's Mom, doesn't have a high school diploma yet, a great injustice is being done.  True, Mary probably learned something while Johnny learned nothing except how to cheat, but that's little comfort to Mary when Johnny easily gets admitted to the college of his choice while Mary is rejected because her grades weren't good enough.

Of course, Johnny's "end justifies the means" training will eventually boomerang on him – unless he chooses a career as a con man or Washington lobbyist.  In the real world, a high percentage of liars, cheats, and thieves get caught.  At the very least, Johnny will someday find himself in a position where he will need to think for himself and do his own work – and he will, belatedly, fail because he can't.