Are you sick and tired of being given reams of homework to complete after school? Would you rather spend your time playing video games or on Facebook? Then pay someone else to do your school homework for you. But only if you’re French.

It’s been a good few years since I attended school, and I was pleased to leave the place as soon as I could. My least favorite part of the experience was being given homework. Not content with consuming seven hours of my day, five days a week, for 11 years of my life, I was then given an extra couple of hours work to do in the evening. It was a travesty.

If I was a youngster today, attending school in France, I would have another option available to me – getting someone else to do the hard work. According to Reuters, a new Web site called faismesdevoirs.com (domyhomework.com) launched this week offering exactly that service.

“You can’t do it? We’re here to help” is the Web site’s tagline, and the help comes in many forms. Whether it be simple math sums (5 Euros) or a complete essay (30 Euros), the site offers a turnaround of between 24 and 72 hours depending on the complexity of the work and demand at the time.

The work is completed by a team of teachers and higher education students employed by the site’s founders, Stéphane Boukris and Romain Benichou. Thousands of students have already accessed the site, which crashed soon after launch due to an influx of potential customers. Politicians, parent groups, and teachers’ unions are not happy, but the publicity their complaints have fostered is the main reason the site has achieved such instant success.

According to The Times, Xavier Darcos, the Education Minister said, “The place to get educated and have your work corrected is in the nation’s schools. In no way do I encourage paying systems which provide this kind of service.”

Boukris has defended the site in light of the intense opposition, saying, “Our site is 100 percent legal, what we are proposing is advice on strategy. Each returned copy contains annotations, comments that provide reasoned thinking. We don’t give away fish, we teach how to fish.”

With my hatred for homework, I would have welcomed a site such as this when I was at school. Unfortunately for me, the Internet wasn’t exactly what it is today when I was learning “how to fish.” There’s an obvious moral quandary with a business such as this. It brings money into the idea of succeeding at education. But worse than that, the kids who use this site are being cheated of their opportunity to learn.

Because as much as I hated school homework, I did it anyway, and for that I am eternally grateful. The kids who decide to cheat or at least get a helping hand with theirs may end up regretting it when they leave school not knowing a damn thing about the subjects they’ve been awarded pass marks for.

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Entry was posted on Saturday, March 7th, 2009 at 11:01 pm under Internet, Opinion, Technology.

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