Google Vs. Yahoo! Answers
By
Team Digit |
Updated on 01-Apr-2007
| Ah, it’s all explained so clearly! | On Yahoo! Answers, it’s up to Them… | |
| 1 | One good way to figure what you’re in for is to look at the assignment sheet. If the symbols look too complex, you’ll need to copy a friend’s assignment, that’s the rule. So I looked, and there weren’t too many funny symbols. Mostly word problems. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand the words. So I Googled them. | For my next assignment, I decided to be the ne’er-do-well cheatin’ student, and let someone else do my work for me. I’d heard of Yahoo! Answers-where you post your questions and wait for someone to reply-and how delighted was I to see there was a section called “Homework Help”! |
| 2 | Turned out these were “statistics” problems. What is standard deviation? What is sigma? I did get answers to all these, but not too much on how to solve the problems themselves. The alarm bells are ringing in my head. |
I didn’t bother to figure what the terms where all about: just put in my questions under Homework Help, and hoped for the best. I’m living dangerously, I know. Except I’d added a “PLEEEEZ HELP ME! :-(” at the end of my post.
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| 3 | Some soul-searching later, I had the idea that I’d just have to keep looking, hoping to stumble upon a tutorial or something. That’s what I did, and about an hour later, I’d found the general method to solve the problems. | Ten-yes, just ten-minutes later comes a mail saying “You’ve received a new answer to your question.” Yahoo! Someone had posted the solution to one of the problems! |
| 4 |
Self-help needn’t be the best help, as they say, so I enlisted the help of a friend to explain that method to me. We worked together-through the night-and our assignment was ready. Hope we don’t each get half the marks!
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The ecstasy and the agony! How was I to get the answers to the rest? The answers poured in, but three of them solved the first question again in a different way, and the rest were unkind: “Do ur own hw you ne’er-do-well cheatin’ student!” “U think I’ll spend time doing your homework?” |
| 5 | Who needs textbooks when you have the Net? I’m just so proud of myself I solved everything without knowing the name of my textbook! | So all I had to show was one problem solved. And here I’d thought someone, somewhere in the world would do it for me! Homework Help indeed! |
And The Winner Is…
It’s clear the old way of Googling up stuff wins. Really, you can’t expect anyone to devote time for someone else. Yahoo! Answers is good, but when you’re asking questions that have short answers-or when the subject of your post is a popular topic-or if you post a puzzle.
No-one’s going to give you a tutorial out there: if you need to do your homework, you’re better off finding out how to solve the problems, believe me. Besides, your parents are paying those exorbitant school/college fees for a reason! Teach a man to fish…
No-one’s going to give you a tutorial out there: if you need to do your homework, you’re better off finding out how to solve the problems, believe me. Besides, your parents are paying those exorbitant school/college fees for a reason! Teach a man to fish…