I'd like to bring the following point to your discussion. Before I do, let me refer to a previous post on this forum
Pushy wrote
I don't want to sound rude, but like... people come here because they need help.
It seems to me that most answerers believe that those students "accused" of cheating come here because they don't have any help at all and you're the only help they'll get. For AoPS students that's not the case. AoPS students have a live class, where they learn from an instructor and the class is highly interactive. If you don't understand, then you can ask and there are people there ready to help in real time. The online materials for the class are always available for the duration of the course.
Even if you can't make it to the class, you can see what happened later, as there's a transcript of each session. If you're working on your homework and have questions, AoPS also has a forum that is available 24/7. Lots of people are ready to help there. The website is well designed even for use with smartphones, so wherever you go, you get access to all of this. A student can receive hints on how to proceed. When they show some work, they get tailored replies depending on what's the part they're finding hard to understand.
That brings me to another point that Melody brought up on another thread.
Melody wrote
Are you seriously trying to help the asker to learn?
Are you mostly interested in showing your own cleverness or increasing your own points. (I have not great criticism here)
OR
Are you doing homework for students which is facilitating cheating and making it unlikely that they will attempt to learn anything?:
It's great to see a community of math lovers here. But many times I see answerers are just showing off trying to make it to the top users list rather than helping.
I find HiylinLink's post on the first thread linked above quite helpful to deal with this (though I wouldn't give full answers):
HiylinLink wrote
For those that have made the answerer's acknolwege that they are familar with the problem and have proved so by showing there work either ina picture or in text. The answer then can show them the whole problem in one full answer on what they did and where they screwed up.
For those who do not post how they have solved the problem and why they need help, the answere's can assume they are clueless on how to solve the problem therefore indicating that they may not understand the problem may jsut be throwing homework on here to maintain a grade, the answers can ask question's to indicate if this is true or not, if it is true then the answerer should give helpful tip's on how to solve the problem rather than give the full answer.
We're not saying all this stuff to point fingers to cheaters or answerers, but to make this forum a better place for math lovers.
