Practical advice

How Homework Helps Students: Don’t Look For Free Answers

When homework piles up and there seems to be no easy way to get to the bottom of it, you may feel tempted to seek out free answers online. Many people have felt this way at least once or twice but it’s better for you not to. The following reasons should help you understand why.

  • Homework helps you learn.
  • When a teacher gives notes in a classroom, you may understand what they’re saying on one level but a deeper understanding only comes when you apply that knowledge for yourself. That’s what homework is: an opportunity for you to use what you’ve learned so you can understand it better. Some studies have even shown that learner generated material is significantly easier to remember than teacher-generated material. By finding free answers, you may actually be making it harder for yourself to learn.

  • It may be cheating
  • Not everyone will care about this but if you are given an assignment that is supposed to be completed on your own, finding free answers is cheating. This is a behaviour that becomes easier with repetition so you can seriously erode your moral fiber if you do this often enough. This may not seem like much but many of the worst atrocities in history took place with tiny actions that gradually intensified til they could no longer be ignored.

  • Practice
  • Just as practicing to cheat makes you a better cheater, practicing your studies makes you a better student. Each homework assignment makes the pathways in your brain associated with the subject just a little more pronounced. Just like when you learn an instrument, repetition builds muscle memory.

  • It helps correct your course
  • By doing homework on your own you get a clear understanding for how much you really know. Free answers can allow you to maintain an illusion that you’re far better at your work than you are and the worst time for this illusion to be shattered is after you get your grades. When your homework is corrected you can ask for help to fix your problems so you’ll do better next time.

Finding free answers does not make you a bad person but like most behaviors in the gray area of morality, you shouldn’t ever get too comfortable doing it. Do your homework instead.

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