In a postscript to her article "Plagiarism and the mechanics of privilege", Teresa @ Making Light has some fun with a student who is trolling the Yahoo! Answers boards, looking for someone to write her essay on "Wuthering Heights". Teresa replies:

Here’s a thesis statement: Wuthering Heights is an early work of science fiction that takes place in a dimensional bubble separate from our own universe. We know this because any time someone gets too far from the Wuthering Heights/Thrushcross Grange/Gimmerton Kirk triangle (think Bermuda Triangle), they cease to exist as far as the story is concerned. Nothing outside the bubble is a solution to anything that happens inside it, no matter how logical that should be. Characters living inside it only leave if they’re desperate, and for some strange reason, they keep coming back. …

Which is awesome.

Unfortunately, begging strangers to do your homework isn't limited to English Lit. essays; it happens all the time on my favorite programming website, Code Project, too. People constantly post Please Do My Homework questions. And they usually get mocked pretty roundly by the rest of us.

Sometimes their questions are simply the text of the assignment (which they've copy/pasted), with no commentary or even a hint that they've done any thinking about the problem.

For example:

This is my question: please do my homework
Implement a standalone procedure to read in a file containing words and white space and produce a compressed version of the file in an output hie. The compressed version should contain all of the words in the input file and none.

Which generated the following replies:

should contain all of the words in the input file and none.

Well that's quite a challenge, I wonder how you will solve it?

and

You should assume your teacher is not as dumb as you, and knows how to use google. They probably already know you are a cheat, you should talk to them before they talk to you, to increase your chances of not being kicked off your course.

Sometimes they put in the effort of retyping the assignment:

write a cprogram using nested for statements
write a cprogram usung for nested statements to dicplay the following output:
1
2 2
3 3 3
4 4 4 4
5 5 5 5 5

Which received, in reply, two complete programs. Some people are kind. I usually tell them to do their own homework.

For whatever reason, most of these pleas are from people for whom English is definitely not a first language, though maybe textspeak is:

I need a code
Pls help me to sort numbers in both ascending and descending orders in javascript with HTML.I need a code for this.Pls send it as soon as possible.

... and ...

will u help me plz
dear Mr. basu
this is KAUSHAL VARSHNEY from aligarh. i m NIITian and persuing GNIIT from ther. we are in some coding trouble, actually we aer governing a project on USB security system, so will u plz help me in coding of my job. specially in identifying default antiviruse on a button click event by which we can provide more security to our project.
i will very thankful of urs. there is not much time we had. so respond me as soon as possible.

Or, the ever-popular chunk-of-code post:

How to convert c++ to c#...pls..
[...1000+ lines of C++ omitted...]

No question, no hint that the poster has tried anything, just a giant chunk of code. Even better, this was the kind of code that really couldn't be translated; it was the kind of code that's intimately tied to a C++ framework for which there is no C# equivalent. It'd be like translating e.e. cummings into Chinese. This person had no idea what he/she was doing. Or it was a joke.

There are plenty of wanna-be game developers:

can anyone give me the source code of pacman in java?
tnx!
i really need it to be able to do my assignment!
i hope you guys can help me on dis! tnx!

As the first reply notes, instead of typing that long, detailed question, the person could have just Googled "source code pacman java" and found the answer. "Have you tried Google?" or links to Let Me Google That For You are popular ways to answer these questions.

And...

How to develop a game from screenshots
hai i am dng project

i m dng blackberry gaming application prjct.
here i want 2 develop the code from screenshots.
plz suggest 2 me how to do it?

Replies included:

Look at the screen shots, and then write code to duplicate them.

..and..

here i want 2 develop the code from screenshots.

Usually the flow goes the opposite way...

But this one might be my favorite of recent questions:

I demand a lexical analyzer
prgram that convert from lex.l to lex.yy.a
plz
in lexical analizer

I realize there's a language issue here, but I just love the phrase "I demand a lexical analyzer". I think it would make a great T-shirt.