Question

I want to help people, but I feel like nobody asks questions. Open Study has been poorly moderated and now people are simply allowed to copy and paste their homework rather than genuinely asking questions.

Can this bad habit of giving the very bare minimum on the side of the "question asker" be a cause for question deletion? I'm asking is if the question posted appears to be clearly without original content, the question is deleted and the user is sent a message:

"Please ask a question about your assignment when posting, show your best attempt to solve, or explain your difficulties."

Answer 1

I agree, that is lots of work, but it has to be done !

Answer 2

I agree with you on how students are simply copy and pasting test and homework questions from online courses such as flvs, and receiving answers. I do think that something needs to be done about this. Perhaps we can give warnings to those who are simply just wanting answers instead of wanting to learn. If the cheating continues, after a while,we should be able to report or suspend the account.

Answer 3

That is what the moderators kind of do, suspend cheaters, but they do a very small fraction of the entire job though-:(

Answer 4

True

Answer 5

I Honestly think we need more moderators...

Answer 6

@camerondoherty true, we need more moderators, but we should have more moderators that actually do their job. I feel like most moderators do not suspend and give out warnings to cheaters because of their fear of losing fans, and not gaining medals.

Answer 7

Pretty sure moderators don't care for medals and fan. Js ~ ^

Answer 8

fans*

Answer 9

thats true

Answer 10

but its not anything to do with the mods losing something... its just they dont want to take responsibility... If there is a report give a warning... if they get reported 3 times it is time for a suspension... but we do need more mods to moderate different places of Openstudy

Answer 11

It is true, this is a serious issue.
No matter how many moderators there are though, this issue will always be present.
It is also true that sometimes the moderators don't do their jobs. Usually they appear online, when they are away, and that could be why they are not fixing the issue. There are things you as a normal user can do, though, such as warn that user. If they continue to post those questions, report them. Then if after that, nothing happens, pm a few mods about the issue, then, one is bound to solve the issue.

Answer 12

Sometimes there are only one mod online... there should be at least 3 per day...

Answer 13

That is also true, but moderators are normal people volunteering just like you and I, they also have a life and a busy schedule, so they can't be active all the time.

Answer 14

Yes that is also true... So maybe a good solution would be if the mods could get a much neater and organized schedule? so they need to be online at this time for this much time before another mod replaces them...

Answer 15

Many points are being made. It's a complicated issue.

1. Moderators are volunteers designated to help police the site.

2. It is difficult to police the site since there are more users than moderators.

3. We depend heavily on the "report user" feature. If regular users report issues as they see them, it would help us out greatly.

4. Believe it or not, we can't see everything that happens. There are many subject areas and many users. There is so much that happens at once. It can be difficult to keep up with.

5. We moderators do what we can. Many of us do have busy lives outside Open Study. Some of us actually use OS to take a break from our real lives only to be bombarded with abuse reports, complaints, trolling, spamming etc. when we get here.

6. We do need more moderators, but also many improvements will need to be made to the moderation system in order to make it more effective.

7. Also we can all agree that many improvements that need to be made to the way Open Study functions as well--something @Kainui was alluding to.

8. Never assume that we mods don't care. If that were the case, then we wouldn't be here. Remember, we're regular people just like you.

Answer 16

Question how will we know that the question is homework?

Answer 17

1. true
2. what do you want, a slave plantation with a security guy per slave (just an analogy)
3. I report, and never do so falsely, and I got a warning that I report when shouldn't several times.
4. I understand
5. Yes, moderators do what they can. They don't have to die for OpenStudy !!
6. We need not more moderators, but we just need to raise the average level of maturity. This is where I am a big problem ;)
7. yes, but please whatever should be first is first, and then the rest of the secondary stuff. Trying to improve some app, when there is an issue with a server crushing for many ppl .... (?!)
8. I am not one of those that thinks that mods don't care. They do. Perhaps not always care SO much... but yeah, I agree :)

Answer 18

I agree, I feel as if most of the questions on here are test questions, and when I try to lecture them on learning, it goes downhill and they start insulting me haha.

So I basically gave up on that, and now just ignore posts I feel people are cheating on, and it's pretty rare if I report for such behaviour since not much gets done about it.

You can't stop people from cheating nor giving direct answers (as it is right now), but also you have don't know everything going on behind the scene, of coarse it's not the peoples concern, but it has a huge impact on this site, many of the users who come here are usually taking courses online, and their parents have no idea how they're doing and they don't have much time themselves, though you can blame the problem on the parents, but like I said you have no idea what's going on behind the scene. A lot of these kids have no where to look to, so they rely on cheating, I hate to say it but they'll learn it the hard way eventually (happens all the time).

So really, our best bet for now is to try our best to lead them to the right direction and if you think they're cheating, just ignore and move on, however hard that may be to do.

As far as moderators go, most of them do a very good job, but there are some I've seen who aren't really interested in the responsibility that comes with it and rather not deal with the things going on when someone submits a report or whatever, so in a way they treat it as a superior title, but there's not much we can do about that either.

Answer 19

One of my friends uses this site to basically, cheat on all her tests; all she does is copy paste her test questions and pretends to be dumb to just get the answer. @just_one_last_goodbye it is easy to recognize online test and homework questions because they all have a similar type of wording. A test question contains intricate and complex wording, opposed to someone asking "hey can anyone tell me the pros and cons of using radians"? The moderators do care, but I'm also referring to people that aren't moderators too; most of them answer questions and simply give answers to test questions to get medals. For example, in questions that start with "WILL GIVE MEDAL AND BECOME FANS" and only have the test question following, openstudy users tend to ignore the fact that the person is cheating and give the answer to the person asking.

Answer 20

Well i know there are like hidden things that say like this at the top of a question (points worth: 5) meaning its a test but i think its hard to recognize it besides if you search a question up for the asking and you get like 10 results on either Open Study or Yahoo answers it means its a test question but im sure most users wont even search it up they'll just answer it.

Answer 21

Will give moderators some time, they can't fix the issue of cheating on the website.
Just sharing, that yesterday I had some conversation with a teacher that was catching a cheater, on this site. (It was for some online school.)

Answer 22

I remember i use to use this site to cheat on my tests ^_^ well the answer was wrong and the next day my teacher calls sounding all nice and im like c: hi how are you? and then she says frustrated and i said why? then she says YOUR BUSTED YOU CHEATER!!! did you know the same question you answered is over 20 years old and more than 200 people gave the same answer and its wrong -_- and i was like O_O

Answer 23

to cut it short last time ill ever cheat in my life

Answer 24

Yeah... cheating is easy but not guaranteed to be correct.
I have a friend who is a teacher, and he failed people out of the class if they couldn't answer some question(s) about the course, that they should have known at that point in the course.

That perhaps can be another solution to online cheating.

Answer 25

Well my L.A. teacher she gives out a study guide and the definition to words and i gave definitions from googleing them and she was ready to fail me SHE WANTED ME TO GET DEFINITIONS FROM THE course word by word not from the web.

Answer 26

can you guys show me how to do a reduction for apush? I've never done it before and i don't know how to start.

Answer 27

??

Answer 28

"apush"