I’m a computer engineering major and sometimes I get other students who email me or in class ask me for answers or help on certain problems. Some , you can clearly see what to legitimately understand it, while others may shoot me an email who I talked to 1 time before, and they only hit you up when they need answers, so its pretty clear they are using you.
How many of you actually help other students or say you finish an assignment early, will give another student you know help on it, to get the answer?
OR do you guys have a more cold, Darwinian evolution-esque point of view that “only the strong should survive” and that these students are your potentially foes/enemies for applying for a job ? and help no one and see everyone as threats to your career?
I always worked with others when I was in school. I just wouldn’t be in a group with someone who was clearly just a parasite and not contributing to the conversation.
As with boneh3ad, I was always in a study group in college. It helps tremendously. You learn from other group members and they from you. Nothing makes a subject clearer in your mind than to have to explain it to someone else. The professors greatly encouraged working in study groups. Going it alone was almost a death sentence as far as your GPA was concerned.
As a professional engineer, the work is always accomplished as part of a team and so very collaborative. College study groups were a great way to learn those collaboration skills.
Having said all that, if someone came out of left field and asked for help, I might help them the first time. I might also ask them if they want to join the study group. If all they want is for you to help them and they offer nothing in return, then I would politely decline to offer them help. You don’t have time to be used. It isn’t a Darwinian thing, only being fair to you.
I’ll usually help whoever asks, even the guys who clearly just talk to you because they want an answer. I’ve been that guy before, including bumming answers off students I didn’t know that well, so I figure I can at least return the favor.
There’s two things I would consider though.
For one, it depends on the time investment they want from me. “What equation do you use for problem X” takes no time to answer, and that’s no problem for me. But I have had people ask to debug their month-long hardware simulation projects for them, and after I had sunk 20-30 hours into getting my code running, I wasn’t going to invest that kind of time for someone I didn’t know.
The other would be how easy my work would be to plagarize, or if there’s any academic lines they are asking me to cross. I had a case this last semester in one of my classes where that happened. Someone’s old work was given to another student, and he passed it on to a dozen other students without the original author knowing. When word of this got out, the professor and TAs spent two months investigating the whole class for plagarism, and several people were sent to our school’s honors council. So be smart about those things. The standard is “would you do this if you were in your professor’s office”, and I would keep that in mind when people are asking you for help.
Back in engineering school a few decades ago, I sometimes sought out peer help and often gave it. But I didn’t like to help people that just wanted to copy answers for homework points, rather than learning.
I still remember in sophomore year many of us had an hour break between Materials Science class and Strength of Materials class (both with professor “bowtie Bradely”). Over time, we ended us having an informal study group to review the Strengths homework, worth 10% of the grade. We’d compare answers and delved into reasons if different. In honestly, that collaborative experience was more useful than the course content (which happened not be n/a for my jobs). The most memorable case was where only 2 of us got an answer, but off by a factor of 10. It turns out we each had made a math error. Working through it as a group was helpful.
Sometimes a grade-grubber would drop by our table and try to copy our answers. We declined.
