1. A student posts a math, physics, or chemistry problem to the website and requests the level of urgency to have it answered. A highly urgent problem will be answered in a matter of minutes because it awards a premium of points. But such service will cost some of your own points. A non-urgent question is free to post, while it also awards less points.
2. Others keep an eye on the discussion board and answer whatever questions pop up, noting the potential points available. Building points allows you to use the express service or redeem them for real stuff.
3. When a student gets a response, he/she is required to rate it. The highest rating gives the maximum amount of points available, whereas the maximum is defined by the difficulty of the question and the urgency level. Other ratings give less points.
4. The economics of points dictate a win/win situation for both people who post and answer questions. The quality of the answers is extremely good, and far more detailed than any textbook solution manual or other standard website would give.
Of course, one has to ask if this is cheating. I've brought this website up at school several times with colleagues and have been lambasted for even suggesting such a thing exists. Yes it exists, deal with it.
In defense, 9 times out of 10, when students ask a question on the website, they have tried it themselves first and gotten stuck. This is evidenced by them writing things like, 'I've done this so far, but not sure what to do next' or 'I'm not sure how they got this answer'. The goal of replying to questions is to provide hints and steps to get the answer, and not say the answer directly. This is really no different than what happens in class. Student tries a question, he then asks classmates, and if he still can't get it, he asks the teacher.
The student would then internalize what was provided, and then come up with his or her own answer. Most of the time, this is exactly what happens. Literally thousands of students have said how the website helped them get As in class as the feedback process prepares them very well for tests. Of course, in a test, they do NOT have the website available as a crutch.
Cheating occurs if a student simply gets an answer, and then copies and pastes the answer to hand in as an assignment. Not only is this dumb, but there is no learning in this process.
Most universities these days now assign questions using 'Web Assign' which randomizes the numbers in a physics problem and ensures that everybody must submit a unique solution. In this way, the help from the website above is really good because it can then be modified to the unique question that the student must answer by himself.
To make a long story short, I'm also going to be relying on hints and help from others by posting questions to the website for my current assignments that I'm stuck on with my masters course. Even the mere thought of having this 'lifeline' available is increasing the motivation I have for doing this next assignment. I've nearly finished it and am rather confident of the results without having posted any questions yet.
It gets better: if you do a web search, there is no way to see any answers to questions posted by yourself or others unless you are already a paying member of the website and have logged in. You can, however, see the question itself, which tells you that it may not even be necessary to post because somebody else already did. Just log in and learn. Nuff said.
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