Online Homework Help for College Students

Online tutoring and other kinds of assignment help are easily available to college students, but are these services ethical? Here's more about this growing trend.
In today's world, college students can find just about anything they need on the web, including help with their homework. The cost of online tutoring and other homework help services vary. Free online homework help for college students is available, but some of these sites and services do come with a fee.
So is it ethical for college students to hire someone to help them with their homework? It depends. It's perfectly ethical for students to hire math tutors and language tutors and other "real life" people to help them with subject matters they struggle with, right? Of course. But it's not OK to hire another student to write someone's paper. The line not to cross is pretty simple: colleges and universities have no problem with students getting help with their studies, but they mostly certainly do have a problem with someone else doing a student's homework.
Here are three different kinds of homework help available to college students on the web.

Websites that help students with their homework are more popular with middle and high school students, but these are catching on with college students as well. Some of the most popular tutoring websites for college students are chegg.com and ASAPTutor.com. These websites tend to offer more help in math, science, and business related topics (like accounting) than with social science topics, but this does seem to be slowly changing.
Some of the services offered on online tutoring websites include:

• Message boards where students can ask each other questions
• Expert message boards where students can ask an expert questions
• Online study groups, where students can gather to go over a particular topic
• Help with questions in particular textbooks
• Resources like practice exams and video lectures

So, are these sites ethical? In most cases, it's doubtful that colleges and universities will have a problem with this behavior, which mimics legitimate ways that students help each other out on campus. Of course, a student can always ask for answers to problems on these websites as opposed to help, but this can happen in study sessions off the web as well.

Having trouble getting an essay to the professional level that professors want? College students with less than stellar writing can hire essay editing services and proofreading services on the web to look over their writing and make corrections. These services can often be fairly costly, especially if a quick turnaround time is required. The level of work these services provide varies, and can include:

• Proofreading for typos and basic grammatical errors
• Copy editing for grammar problems and other small to medium error
• Heavier editing for serious writing problems
• Rewriting papers or portions of papers

So, are these services ethical? This can be quite the gray area. In some instances, professors actually recommend these services to students for whom English is a second language, or for graduate students writing about technical topics who do not have (or need) stellar writing skills. For basic editing services such as proofreading, many colleges and universities don't have a problem with these services.
However, in cases where a student is being evaluated in part by the quality of their writing, using these services constitutes cheating. Students who are unsure should ask their professors if hiring one of these services is acceptable.

For students who don't want to write their term papers at all, there are plenty of websites out there to help! Two kinds of sites offer students help with "writing" papers: sites where students can purchase papers, and sites that offer custom written college term papers.
Obviously, this doesn't really constitute "homework help." Students who are caught purchasing college papers, or hiring someone else to write their papers for them, will face consequences such as failing a class or expulsion. Here are some more good reasons why not to buy a college term paper.
Homework help on the web can be a terrific resource. For students in search of legitimate help with tasks such as solving calculus problems or proofreading a large essay, online tutoring and related services can be a legitimate and genuinely helpful way to go. However, students need to be careful not to cross the line where someone else is doing their homework for them.