Experts offer free homework help online

By Anick Jesdanun

updated 2:58 p.m. ET Aug. 16, 2005

NEW YORK - Robert Stewart, the man behind the "Ask Dr. Bob" Web service, is glad to answer any questions students may have about oceans.

But he draws the line when students ask him to complete entire homework assignments. When one e-mailed a list of 10 questions from an assignment on octopuses, he replied simply with a link to a Web site about them.

It's all in a day's work for Stewart, a Texas A&M University oceanography professor who responds to questions from teachers and other adults, too.

Stewart is one of scores of experts from academia, government and elsewhere offering free advice to students needing homework help — as long as they're motivated by curiosity and aren't merely lazy.

"I find a lot of very curious students out there who really have an interest and are trying to find out something to arouse their curiosity," said Stewart, who gets a $100,000 a year grant from NASA to run the service and his OceanWorld Web site.

Henry Fliegler gets no such funding, yet he's no less dedicated to helping students around the world with math problems. He spends about three hours daily answering 25 or so questions, up from three or four when he started in 1996.

The retired engineer from Orange, Calif., said he gets enough reward from the "17 jillion responses of thank you notes," including one declaring him "my math God."

"It doesn't get any better than that," Fliegler said.

Among his favorite questions is one from a second-grader who asked whether it's OK to count with her fingers (Yes, as long as the answer isn't more than 10). He also hears from adults, including an Italian math professor who wanted him to critique a paper on a new number theory (He suggested contacting wiser folks at Princeton).

Rosalie Baker, a former Latin teacher who now edits a nine-issue-a-year archaeology magazine for children called dig, said she's happy that students with assignments "are not just looking at a book on archaeology and giving some rote answer."

Students can also turn to for-fee services.

Text-message help
AskMeNow will launch a mobile service this fall in which people can call or message in a simple question and receive a text reply on their phones within a few minutes. More than 10,000 are now participating in a free test, and the company eventually plans to charge up to 49 cents a question, possibly less for students.

Google Inc. offers the Google Answers service, in which users are matched with researchers willing to conduct online searches for a fee. Though a credit card is required, Google says parents sometimes sign up for their kids.

Google also runs ads from companies offering to complete homework assignments, including one promising to "solve hard problems" for a recommended $20 a problem. "Why not pay us to do your homework?" the ad teases.

Such come-ons hint at some of the downsides with homework help services.

For one, students have to evaluate them for credibility, as the Internet allows anyone to claim expertise. Services offered by universities and government agencies, for instance, may be more reliable than a commercial service with little information about its operators.

And because many of the free services are run by volunteers, responses can take days, weeks or even months. Baker said she saves the best questions for her magazine, meaning students with an assignment due in five minutes may be out of luck.

Many services stopped as more people found out about them because the volunteers simply got overwhelmed, said Joshua Koen, who tracks such resources at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

Students should think twice before submitting a question and make sure it's not something — such as what "NASA" stands for — easily answered elsewhere, he said.

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