What Happens When You Pay a Tutor to Give Your Kid Homework Answers?
The high school tutoring center lobby always smells like lemon surface cleaner and burnt microwave popcorn, and the vending machine by the entrance has had a crumpled Flamin’ Hot Cheeto bag stuck in its coil for as long as I’ve been picking up my 10th grader Jake there. Last month I was 10 minutes early, leaning against the wall scrolling through my email, when I overheard two moms waiting for their kids talking just a few feet away.
One said she pays her daughter’s geometry tutor an extra $75 a week just to fill in all the answers for her weekly problem sets. Her daughter is in three AP classes and plays varsity soccer, geometry’s not her thing, and she just needs a decent grade to keep her GPA up for college applications. “Why make her waste three hours a week fighting through something she’ll never use again?” the mom said. The other mom nodded and said she does the same for her son’s chemistry homework; he wants to major in history, so what’s the big deal?
I didn’t say anything, but my chest tightened a little. I’d been there, tempted to take that same shortcut just a few months before. Jake struggled with algebra after switching schools last fall, and we hired Lila, a college engineering student, to tutor him once a week. After the first month, all his homework was coming back 100% correct, and I was thrilled—until he got a D on his first unit test. I couldn’t figure it out, until a week later when I was helping him pack for a school camping trip and flipped through his algebra workbook while I waited for him to find his sleeping bag. I picked a random problem from the last week’s set and asked him to walk me through how he solved it. He froze, stared at the page for a full minute, and finally said, “I don’t remember. Lila went over it, though.”
I called Lila after that, and she didn’t even try to hide it. She’d been walking Jake through every hard problem step by step, basically doing most of the work for him, because I’d kept saying how important it was that he keep his B average for college. She admitted that a quarter of her clients ask her to go even further—just hand over all the homework answers for an extra fee. “It’s never usually the kids asking,” she said. “It’s the parents. They’re so stressed about grades, they just want the homework done and out of the way.”
I get it. I’ve stayed up until 11pm helping Jake finish homework after a 3-hour cross country meet, and I’ve been tempted to just fill in the last five problems myself to get everyone to bed. When every college admissions article says a 0.1 drop in GPA can knock you out of the running for your top school, it feels like a small, reasonable shortcut. But what I’ve learned since that D on Jake’s test is that the problem isn’t just that it’s cheating. It’s that homework isn’t just for points. It’s practice. You can’t learn to solve an equation by watching someone else get the right answer, same as you can’t learn to run a race by watching someone else cross the finish line. The wrong answers are just as important as the right ones—they tell you, your tutor, and your teacher exactly where the gap in understanding is. If all the answers are always correct, no one knows that gap exists until the test, when it’s too late to fix it.
We changed our routine after that conversation with Lila, and the changes were small, no big extra effort or expensive adjustments. First, Jake does all his homework on his own before tutoring, not during. That means he has to try every problem, mark the ones he’s stuck on, and we don’t get help before he’s made an attempt. Second, Lila doesn’t correct every answer before he turns it in. She only works through the problems he marked, and she gives hints, not answers. If he gets it wrong after working through it, that’s fine—he gets a point off on homework, but we all know where he needs more practice. Third, I do a 2-minute check every night after he finishes homework: I pick one random problem from the set, and ask him to explain how he got the answer to me like I’ve never taken algebra. If he can do that, we move on. If he can’t, we add it to the list for Lila to go over at the next session. It takes less time than arguing about taking out the trash.
I get that sometimes kids are genuinely swamped. If your kid has a major tournament, three AP tests in one week, and a 50-problem homework set due the next day, it feels impossible to get it all done. But paying for answers isn’t the only shortcut. Lila told me she’d rather a kid skip one homework than fake all the answers, and 9 times out of 10, a quick email to the teacher explaining the situation gets you an extra day to turn it in. Most teachers would rather give an extension than have a kid turn in work that isn’t theirs.
Last week I was back at the tutoring center, waiting for Jake again, and I saw the same mom who was talking about paying for answers on the phone by the door, her voice tight: “All the homework was 100% right, how did she get a 52 on the midterm?” I wanted to walk over and tell her what we changed, what worked for us. But I didn’t. I know what it feels like to be that scared, that desperate to keep your kid’s grades on track, and you don’t want a stranger pushing advice on you.
For us, the tradeoff is worth it. Jake’s homework now has a handful of wrong answers every week, which used to make my stomach drop, but his last test was a B+. He still complains about algebra, says he’ll never use it after high school, and he’s probably right. But he can work through a hard problem on his own now, and he doesn’t freeze up when he sits down for a test. That’s more than any 100% on a homework set ever gave him. We’re still figuring it out, same as everyone else.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » What Happens When You Pay a Tutor to Give Your Kid Homework Answers