When I was in high school in the 1960s I used to copy homework assignments during lunch. Each member of my lunch cohort would do one assignment and then pass it around the table. Since the assignments were generally busy work and our handwritings were illegible, there was little chance the teachers would read anything we handed in, and they probably knew what we were doing anyway and didn’t care. But now with computerization, robotics, the Internet, and capitalist entrepreneurship, “outsourcing” homework has gone high-tech and international.
Not surprising, Pearson Education was a major supplier for homework cheating through a former subsidy called TutorVista. TutorVista, initially an India based company, was swallowed up by Pearson in 2013. Pearson then spun the company off in 2017. Throughout the changes, TutorVista continued to operate out of India with headquarters in Bangalore, but it primarily serves English speaking students in United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia.
An article on the website for Public Radio International (PRI) tells the story of Saswati Patnaik, a homemaker in Bangalore, India who works nights for TutorVista. For a fee of $99 a month, she or one of TutorVistas’ 1,500 other “tutors” help American high school students write term papers and practice S.A.T. essays or just finishing their homework assignments. Early one morning Bangalore time, which is about ten hours ahead of the U.S. eastern seaboard, Patnaik was using webchat to provide ninth grade students from Atlanta, Georgia and New Jersey with a list of the major themes for Stephen Crane’s "The Red Badge of Courage." To help Patnaik and her co-workers converse with American teens, they are tutored in when to use “awesome” as praise and to illustrate math problems “using donuts instead of mangoes.”
At peak times, approximately 2,500 American students are plugged into one-to-one sessions with TutorVista “tutors” that usually last between 30 minutes and an hour. Patnaik, who has been working for TutorVista for over two years, finds that a big problem with education in the United States is that students don’t focus enough. According to Patnaik, “American kids don’t face the kind of academic pressure that Indian kids have to cope with both at school and at home,” which is not surprising since they can always pay someone like her for the answers to homework questions.
English speaking students are not the only ones utilizing online tutoring services to avoid doing homework. In France, the online company Bonnenote.fr offers “homework help” for a fee to students ranging from high school to graduate school. The company employs 500 “editors” who respond to inquiries within minutes. Their service is known in France as “the Uber des devoirs” or "Uberized homework." The Bonnenote.fr website provides prospective customers with a price menu for all their services and takes credit cards.
Similar homework “services,” advertised on a range of social media, bail out affluent students and parents in South Africa. For example, for 200 Rand, about fifteen dollars, students can purchase science projects guaranteed to earn a “percentage mark of 85% or above." An online advertisement, placed by a student at Gauteng University, promises “beautiful, original” writing for about four U.S. cents a word. Customers are assured that “the standard of writing is at a plausible level for the relevant grade so that the teacher will not suspect that it is written by an adult.”
The award for most ingenious “homework helper” probably goes to a Chinese student. In China students are expected to copy pages of text to improve their calligraphy and supposedly memorize content. One teenage girl bought a robot that could be programmed to mimic her handwriting and then had her homework helper copy pages of text for her. She purchased the robot for about 800 renminbi, or $120, with money saved from Chinese Lunar New Year presents. Essentially, the young women got a lifetime of homework help for little more that TutorVistas’ students pay every month.
One good thing about copying homework the old fashioned way at lunch is that we didn’t have to pay anyone. I did take one of the girls out on a date, but that wasn’t really payback.
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