1. Their "homework help" service is more of a "do my homework for me" service
2. They intentionally don't require any verification that questions submitted are actually from homework rather than from an exam
I'd posit it's the latter; huge sums of money are at-risk for a fail grade not to mention time invested. People want to get on with their lives. Meanwhile institutions act as gatekeepers while jointly setting arbitrary standards and acting with the pretense that they're institutions of higher learning which simply isn't the case: they produce licensure for occupations. All of that pretense, the arbitrary expectations set makes it far more worthwhile to cheat. Why type up a paper on Shakespeare in a class deemed mandatory that a student has zero interest in or application for? And that can be stated about so many facets of college, the textbooks I've been expected to buy are formatted like a dumpster fire. The tuition I'm paying for what is essentially proctoring burns my ass. The fact I can get superior products across the board and actually have a gamut of options in instruction, methods, curriculum and resources - at significantly lower cost makes it a whole lot more justifiable both at the ethical and at the rational level to "cheat", I find it strange that someone might be upset that someone is swindling the swindler.
Having said that, I'd propose a bifurcation: actual higher learning institutions and vocational institutions. This weird amalgam that has developed, by my reckoning at least, results in the worst of both worlds.
Think of it this way:
If the institution implies that it is the arbiter of knowledge, or if society promotes it to be as such, and those who are empowered to act with the authority of such institutions lack the scruples to remedy the myriad issues, this is just the most seamless means to escape it.
I am amazed at all the possibilities of cheating which were technically impossible when I studied. Look at it now, students can have answers on chegg. They can translate using DeepL. They can find teachers explaining any topic they like on YouTube. Seriously there is no excuse to fail anything now. University need to do something about it real quick, otherwise their diplomas will not be worth anything
Cheating in next to universal. You didn't just cheat with people you knew. You could go ask any member of the year above for assignment solutions and quiz/test answer keys. You could ask any member of the prior section for what was on the quiz. Student union ran a solutions bank for past tests.
And yeah, plenty of us had Chegg.
Why do we do this? Very few of us went to university to learn. We wanted an access pass to the upper middle class.
Same thing with the students I mentor for remote interviews. I offer to help them cheat on them by sitting on a second webcam and feeding them the answers. Only one has turned me down, and not for moral reasons, but because they fear getting caught.
If you offered to just give everyone an A for a given course, maybe 10% of students would attend.
I am not sure that businesses care all that much, because the same skills work in companies too and it is considered legitimate outside of the academic world to take the work of others. In school, using a library is cheating. At work, it is good work.
Exams were done in classrooms, with multiple people (usually TAs) watching, pen, paper, usually notes/book or even old exams were allowed (or at minimum 1 sheet of whatever you wanted on). Yeah sure, some minimal cheating was still possible, but not a lot.
No, that’s learning.
Similarly here someone thought that watching YouTube videos of lectures is cheating!
The fact that you can’t seem to tell what is cheating and what is education is… very telling.
If the assignment does permit you to use a certain library and you use it, I don't see why the instructor would complain.
If it's ambiguous, then I would possibly ask for clarification.
Personally I would expect an assignment using a language like Python, Java, or C++ (for example) to permit use of the standard library (including STL in the case of C++) unless otherwise specified, or unless it was clear that the assignment was to reimplement some function or algorithm which is already part of the standard library.
I think we greatly need to reduce the scope of what we test and require for a job. Maybe create smaller project based certifications that prove you know X.
I don't need a graduate to know that much in software, they already know very little of practical utility straight out of uni. Other professions are different and you need to know more fundamentals before doing something productive.
Too late.
I don't think that's true anymore.