You know, when I was in b-school people were not above purchasing notes from others, or sharing notes about the case answers between friends if we had different class periods and the earlier class just had the same case and professor.
The answer key would be the same for the same cases, and it tells you what to look out for and how it turned out in the end.
Honest to blog, I did NOT share notes with anyone I knew, nor did I care to spend money buying notes.
Even if I only got a 75% or a 80% instead of a 90% or a 95% on an assignment, I didn’t care for a number of reasons:
1) I didn’t cheat so I felt good. (Call me weird.)2) I learned a lot more doing the challenging case on my own or in a group than I did by just reading the answer key.
3) I earned that mark, even if it was considered low. No point in cheating if you didn’t deserve that 90%.
4) I just wanted the degree. I didn’t care about marks because no employer has ever asked me for my college grades and I doubt they ever will.
5) I was in it for the networking – to already have a network of 300-500 undergraduate and masters’ students in your alumni network is really powerful.
What employers and professors are really looking for is how you got to the answer, even if it wasn’t perfect and if you got it totally wrong.
They’re interested in your thought processes and how you got to the answer, and in fact that’s what hiring companies look for.
In almost all of my b-school interviews, I had to answer weird questions like: “How much would it cost to paint a Boeing 747 airplane?” They wanted me to sound out my thought process, see numbers and that I could calculate on the fly and even if the answer was totally wrong, they wanted to see that I could reason my way through any weird challenge or question.
So new site developments like FaisMeDevoirs.com (French for Do my homework) starting up in France, where older kids can be paid off to answer hard math problems by providing the answer to them for a fee (I think it’s something like 10 EUR or something).
And for longer assignments like essays, they charge 100 EUR. And apparently this is a growing little side business, as kids who are older want to make some good, fast cash, and younger (richer) kids want to just buy the answer instead of working through it.
But isn’t this indicative really of our society?
If you work as hard as hell to get to the top, without a lot of money and connections (let’s say you’re in debt), you will have to work harder than those who were born with the natural privilege of money and connections.
It’s just a fact of life.
We are all on different socio-economic levels and no matter how hard we try, we are all advantaged and disadvantaged in some way (male or female, rich or poor, connected or not, in debt or not, and so on).
I am not saying that rich people have it easy and are lazy, I’m saying they have it easier in relation to others who aren’t rich and then it’s up to the person themselves to decide whether they develop a solid work ethic or not.
We are all brought into the world at different starting points, and raised in different environments.
It’s how we get through our disadvantages that is the true lesson in life, and I feel like these pay-for-school-answers’ sites are not the answer to making it to the top.
It’s the easy, lazy, cheater’s way out and one can only hope that karma comes around and bites them in the butt, which I am sure in Europe it will.
I hear that in Europe, you have to sit through standardized tests (extremely hard exams that rank you from 1-20 for all the subjects), and those scores determine whether you get the top ranked business and engineering schools or if you end up in a lower-end community-like college because of your scores.
They are tough and strict because everything for the rest of your career depends on what school you went to. If they see that you went to a really amazing school, then you’ve aced 50% of the interview right off the bat, because they know how long and hard you worked just to get the scores to qualify for those schools.
And you can’t memorize math problems. Correction, technically you can do anything, but on those tests they’ll as you questions that have no real answer, just to see how your brain works to get to that answer.
It’s not just about Math, Science or English. Any monkey can do rote memorization with little or a lot of effort, but very few can rationalize through a problem intelligently.
These kids that pay for the junk food equivalent of homework on FaisMesDevoirs.com, are cheating themselves out of their own education that their parents are working hard to pay for because they aren’t learning that mental process or methodology to solve problems that will help them be successful for the rest of their life.
But I do have to note that the businesswoman in me applauds capitalism at work here. Supply = Demand, and this site is apparently doing quite well for itself.
