Is it wrong to ask for help?? In the professional world, being able to communicate and collaborate in finding an answer is more usefuel than doing it all by your own.
On the other side:
If what you want to do is to develop in your brain the mental models to do math. then you need to do your homework... is like triying to get in shape, it's ok to have a personal trainer but he can't lift weights for you.
Asking a concrete, directed question meant to understand part of the problem and get him "unstuck" would probably have been fine and expected.
As a professor, it's good to give your students opportunities to develop in both ways. And for a variety of reasons (some good, some bad), it's more or less necessary to test and grade both types of learning, too. So if a student violates the explicit rules set forth for an exam (which I assume was the case here) by swapping one type of learning for the other, that displays a clear lack of integrity.
You're right to ask whether the hoops are the right hoops or at the right hight.
But, if we're limiting ourselves to how he asks for help: Did he search for help and try to solve it himself? Did he ask partial questions on the specific part that he was stuck on and try to solve the rest?