does anyone ever get paid offers to do someones homework ?

[Chance1234]

I got an email the other day from a american car dealership asking for some excel VBA work to be done.

I said i would take a look at it and get back to them with a price.

however when i got the worksheets and the brief. The first thing to strike me was the spreadsheets contained data that in the real world would be pretty useless.

Opening up the brief it read as a text book school IT question with some words very badly changed.

I kindly sent back a ridiculously high quote on the off chance, as personally whilst i alway applaud enterprise and initiative, this was a case of pure laziness.

what is everyone elses views and have you had similiar enquiries and did you do the work ?

Chance,

Filmmaker, gentleman and Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europae vincendarum

 

[tazuk]

Never had this sort of offer, but then my public-facing email addresses aren't linked to my real name or my skill set.

That said, I'd probably do the same as you've done (ridiculously high quote) as I've got a massive overdraft to deal with at the moment.

There are so many sites out there offering piecemeal coding by professionals that eventually the homework will be done by someone anyway - so you might as well take the money and run.

TazUk

Programmer An organism that turns coffee into software.
Unknown Author

 

[edfair]

I've had 2 requests for homework help and declined both. But they were system integration design issues, not coding, and came about from postings in one of the forums here.
I did accept one invitation for a paid job from a car dealership in Guam as a result of some posting in a Unix forum.

Ed Fair
Give the wrong symptoms, get the wrong solutions.

 

[LadySlinger]

The only problem I see with the higher quote is that if the person was THAT desparate to have someone else to do their homework, they may pay the price and then we just one more person in the work force claiming to know what they're doing.

Another thing to consider is that how do you know that it wasn't someone posing for homework? Perhaps the person "liked" the looks of one of the textbook examples and didn't want to take the time to figure out how it was done.

 

[Chance1234]

10 years of experienec working in a variety of different business sectors , tell us that the data on that spreadsheet would serve no real world purpose. This was confirmed when reading through the brief to give you a example , I imagine the question in the text book to be

Spreadsheet A shows a list of car salesman. Spreadsheet B shows a list of territories and in spreadsheet C Sales for each salesman are recorded. Write a Macro that would total the sales for each territory

which the person had then changed to

I need to write a macro as my company has lots of salespeople in different territories and we are only recording the sales by salesman and my boss wants to see them by territories

Was not quite as straight forward as that, but also the language used in the email , no signature in the email etc etc.



Chance,

Filmmaker, gentleman and Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europae vincendarum

 

[Chance1234]

sorry forgot to add , that my quote was extremly high and if they had the money as a student to pay it, then i dont think we have to worry about them working in the it industry, they'll be too rich!

Chance,

Filmmaker, gentleman and Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europae vincendarum

 

[Stella740pl]

Some years back, being a new immigrant to USA, while looking for a job and having a child to support, I was paid to do a few homework assignments for another new immigrant mother who was in over her head. The price was not ridiculously high, it was just right, I would say. A little less, and I wouldn’t bother, a little more, and she would not justify the cost. I had to read assigned books and write essays about them.

The class was English as Second Language. Guess who benefited the most from it.

 

[lionelhill]

Why would anybody bother paying to get their homework done? You just post it a forum and someone, somewhere, will usually do it for free.

 

[Chance1234]

that was part of my reservation as well, that i would do the work and not get paid.

I guess one reason for not posting it to a forum would be to reduce the authors chance of getting discovered, so i see there logic there.


Chance,

Filmmaker, gentleman and Interdum feror cupidine partium magnarum Europae vincendarum

 

[dgillz]

If someone posts homework questions, and I can recognize it as such, I red flag it. Student postings are not allowed.

Software Sales, Training, Implementation and Support for Macola, eSynergy, and Crystal Reports

http://www.gainfocus.biz

"If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word"
--Dave Barry

 

[Melagan]

How about a more ethical answer? Lets look at this from a Utilitarian point of view: Which decision leads to the greatest amount of good for the greatest amount of people?

If you're doing homework for people so that they may earn a credential, pass a class, or whatever, you might be doing them some good in helping them improve their quality of life with respects to finances. However, you are not helping anyone else by helping the person in question into a workforce where they are underqualified.

From the point of virtue ethics - taking money to do someone else's homework (work specifically assigned to them to help increase their knowledge) does not strengthen your character in any way. It, in fact, damages their character.

My short answer: Doing someone elses homework, whether it is for free or paid, is unethical. People ought to do their own homework.


~Melagan
______
"It's never too late to become what you might have been.

 

[kmcferrin]

Melagan, generally I agree with you. Well, actually, I agree with you outright when it comes to "doing" someone's homework for them. There have even been a few cases here where someone posted a "request" for code that looked suspiciously like homework assignments, and I've always asked them for a sample of their code so far, etc. I don't mind helping someone go in the right direction, but I'm not going to do someone else's job (or homework) for them.

I actually got a call the other week from a friend's wife who is working on a degree in human resources. Her final team project was to do something along the lines of revamping a company's structure that had just bought several smaller companies. Most of the other teams had an IT-related person to help them to determine what the fictional company's IT staffing requirements would be, but her team didn't and she wanted some advice. Basically she was looking for what sorts of positions they would need and what skills and pay went with them. I ended up spending about 20 minutes on the phone with her talking about various options and giving her suggestions, along with some very wide pay ranges so that she would at least have something to work with. I justified that by thinking, "In real life she wouldn't know what sort of IT people she needs and would have to rely on input from an IT director or someone similar, so why not me?

 

[Melagan]

Helping is fine - helping, in fact, is great. People ought to help eachother. Helping and "...doing for...", however, are two completely different issues, and I think you have highlighted that well, kmcferrin


~Melagan
______
"It's never too late to become what you might have been.

 

[Thargy]

I've posted in techincal fora, and provided help.

One person asked for help, I provided it, then they asked for a bit more, and so on. After the sixth post, I realised that basically the chump at the other end wanted me to do his job for him.

Leeches and kids doing homework are both easy to spot, the former by the quantity of insipid posts, and the second by the nature of the questions. Everyone on the tek-tips technical forums where I post will refuse to do homework.

T

Grinding away at things Oracular

 

[BJCooperIT]

I once was asked to help a friend of a friend with their final project for a systems anaylsis class. She showed me her assignment and when she described to me what little progress she had made, I realized that she did not have a clue and probably had not attended even one lecture. I spent an hour with her to teach the basic concept and sketched an outline for her to follow, but I did not do her work. I later found out that she passed the class, but just barely. Lord I hope I never have to work with her!

That being said, would you want the surgeon, who is about to remove your gallbladder, to be the guy who paid someone to do his homework?

[sup]Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.[/sup][sup] ~George Bernard Shaw[/sup]
Consultant Developer/Analyst Oracle, Forms, Reports & PL/SQL (Windows)
My website: www.EmuProductsPlus.com

 

[flapeyre]

[W]ould you want the surgeon, who is about to remove your gallbladder, to be the guy who paid someone to do his homework?

Fortunately, new surgeons are assisted on their first operations, with the resident standing over them, ready to rap their knuckles with a pair of forceps if they make a wrong move.

Not always the case with new programmers, so, for that reason, I'm not doing anybody's homework for them. They either know it or they don't (in which case, they will have to memorize the phase, "Would you like fries with that?"

Tibi gratias agimus quod nihil fumas.

 

[grande]

When I was in high school, I took a C class. The teacher was terrible, he didn't know what he was doing, and I ended up teaching half the class.

I did 10 of the 23 final projects for that class and charged $20 a piece. It was then that I decided I wanted to be a software developer.

The best part was watching them try to struggle through their presentations of code they had never seen before. Comedy Gold!

-------------------------
Call me barely Impressive Captain.