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Frequently Asked Questions |
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A: Student of Fortune is an online tutorial marketplace for those who need or can offer help on homework. Huh? Actually, it's quite simple:
A: To ask a question, simply click on the 'Ask Question' link. Fill in all the fields with whatever pertains to your specific question. Decide how much money you would be willing to pay for a custom tutorial and then just hit 'Submit Question'. Once that is done, your question will be posted to the Student of Fortune site for tutors to access and help you out! Hooray! A: The offer is basically how much you'd be willing to pay for a custom tutorial on how to solve your problem. If the question seems pretty easy, you could offer as little as $0.25 for the solution. Of course, if you want someone to teach you how to solve difficult calculus problems, you had best be prepared to offer a bit more money for their help. Keep in mind that tutors are going to be naturally attracted to higher offers. But that's not to say that easy, cheap problems aren't appealing too! If you post an easy question, offer to pay $0.50 and someone can guide you to an answer without having to do much work, they might be inclined to give you a quick tutorial. So, in the end, the offer is just how much you're willing to pay for a custom tutorial for your problem A: You only have to pay for tutorials you want to see. Here's how it works:
A: Our User Rating system is designed to help you decide if a potential solution is going to be of a high caliber. Our rating system is derived from the Weighted Geometric Mean - in other words, if someone answers a high-offer question and gets an awesome rating for it, that'll influence their overall User Rating more than a rating from some lower-offer question. We've implemented this system because we basically assume that high-offer questions are going to be more difficult to answer than lower offer questions, and we want to weight the ratings as such. A: Yes, of course. Let's say you know everything there is to know about coconut farming. You're an expert in coconut farming... it's basically all you do all day. You login to Student of Fortune and look for questions other people have posted about coconut farming. And, wow, you see a question you know the answer to. Write up a custom tutorial that will teach the student everything they need to know in order to answer the question. (You've done a good job if they can answer other questions that are very similar.) If your students like the preview for your custom tutorial, they'll buy it and you'll earn the price paid for the tutorial minus our fees... that's why its important to post good long tutorials instead of just giving people short answers. See? we told you it was simple. A: Don't worry. We take the security of your money very very seriously. Like we said above, though, you don't have to deposit money to start posting tutorials. Give Student of Fortune a try, first, and see how it feels. We're confident that your worries will be allayed pretty quickly. A: We're not a pyramid scheme, if that's what you're thinking. It's a really simple idea: You refer a friend to the site. They sign up listing you as their referral. From now on, you make 5% of all the money they spend buying tutorials. You basically make money for doing nothing. Not a bad deal, huh? A: More is always better. When we send the random 20% of your tutorial to the question-asker, we will also let them know how long the overal tutorials is. Remember that students are here to learn how to solve tough homework assignments, not to turn in your work as theirs. Always, always, provide more than a one-line answer to a question. Explain each step of how you got the answer you did. The better of a job you do teaching students how, the more likely students are to buy your tutorials and rate your work highly. A: Great question. Let's start out by asking a few more questions... Is using Wikipedia cheating? How about participating in a study group? Reading the textbook? What if a friend proofreads a paper for you? What if you search for something on Google?
If (students') purpose was having someone else do their work, that would be viewed as a violation. But if people are using it as a tutor, then it's a tutor. It's the same online as it would be getting help at your neighbors apartment.Student of Fortune is not endorsed by any univeristy or any university personnel At the end of the day, we believe that most students don't use Student of Fortune to cheat, and that we make a big difference in helping people learn. Here's what some students have said about the tutoring they've received on Student of Fortune:
A: Yes, and we take this issue very seriously. Please review our Academic Honesty Policy for more details. Students and tutors must agree to our Academic Honesty Policy to use our service. A: We're just normal students and professionals, like you. As students, we grew frustrated with the apparent lack of friendly help that was available on the web for students. All of the other sites made us sign up for monthly subscriptions or just wanted to sell us term papers. We just wanted to get some honest help without having to deal with monthly fees and all that nonsense, so that totally sucked. So we built Student of Fortune. A: We do not offer advertising opportunities on the site. |
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A: Here's how it works: Let's say you have some math problem you can't figure out, no matter how hard you try. You post your question on Student of Fortune and, under 'offer', you put a monetary value on your question to entice people to help you work through it. Once you post it, your question becomes available to the whole of the Student of Fortune community. A: Once people have posted tutorial for your question, we'll send a random 20% portion of their custom tutorial to you for you to look over. This is done so that the person answering your question knows that you don't have their whole tutorial without paying them for it. So you can look over the part we send you and, if it looks good, you can buy the complete custom tutorial from them. You can even buy more than one custom tutorial for your problem if you want, if that seems like a good idea. A: The categories are there to let you tell Student of Fortune how to organize your question. When other users are browsing for students to tutor, they can look through the categories we have listed. So if you're asking a question about Bankruptcy Law, you can select Law => Bankruptcy Law under the categories. If your question spans multiple categories, you can select up to two different categories for your question to appear in. A: Please click here, select "Major/Minor Suggestion" and let us know what categories you'd like us to add. We'll look them over and, if they seem valid, we'll add them to our list. In the meantime, feel free to use the 'General' subcategory to request a tutorial. |
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A: Answering questions is easy. All you have to do is look through other user's questions and find one that you think you can answer. Then write up a custom tutorial that teaches the student how to solve the problem (don't just give them the answer), submit it, and if they think it's a good tutorial, they'll pay you for it! A: The offer is how much the student is willing to pay for a great tutorial that teaches them how to solve their question (and others like it). So if they buy your tutorial, that's the amount you'll be paid, minus site fees. A: We need a bit of money to keep the site running -- stuff like servers, bandwidth, advertising, customer support help, and kitty food are super-expensive. Unfortunately none of us make enough money in our day jobs to pay for all of this, so we have to take some percentage of the payments to keep this whole thing running. Please see our friendly Fees Page for more information about this. A: Sure! Let's say you did a really really good job solving a really tough math problem, like showing all of your work and even writing a little bit about what you were doing in each step. You can upload this as a tutorial for other students. A: Now that you've answered a bunch of questions and have amassed a small fortune exceeding the GDP of a few nation-states, visit Withdraw Funds to request a PayPal withdrawal. |
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A: When asking a question or when browsing other user's questions, you may find a tutorial you want to purchase. We provide you with a random 20% sample of the tutorial so you can ensure it looks good. If you decide you want to buy it, all you have to do is click "Buy Tutorial" and we'll send you the complete text of the tutorial as well as placing it in your Tutorials Bucket. A: In order to make sure you end up buying help you'll be happy with, we provide you with a number of ways of verifying the quality of a tutorial:
A: Take time to carefully read the tutorial and try to work through your problem with the help that your tutor has provided. If you have other similar questions from the same assignment, try solving a few of those too. If you don't understand something, ask your tutor for a clarification. Once you've figured it all out, rate the quality of your tutor's help so that other users can see what you thought! |
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A: 'My Balance' is the section of your account that keeps track of the money you have in your Student of Fortune account. We'd like to emphasize something here: This is real money! The money you earn by selling tutorials is deposited here, and you can withdraw from it at any time. You can also deposit funds from outside sources into your Student of Fortune account in order to ask your own questions of the Student of Fortune community. A: No! You can sign up for a Student of Fortune account and immediately start posting tutorials, thereby earning money. No initial deposit is required. Pretty cool, huh? A: Please contact our support department. We'll deal with it as quickly as we possibly can. And please, be as descriptive as you possibly can in order to help us help you. Everything will be fine, we promise. |
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A: The Tutorials Bucket is a place where we put all the tutorials you've ever purchased so you can refer back to them later. When you purchase a tutorial for a question, we'll email you the complete text of the tutorial as well as placing it in the Tutorials Bucket. That's pretty simple, huh? |



