There's a difference between helping someone with the class and walking them through their assignments, line by line. The former is great; the latter is dishonest.
I tutor coworkers in exchange for food and beer. My policy for math and CS is this - if you give me an example, I will walk you through the example with as much detail as you want, but I will not do anything other than proofread your assignments after they've been created.
Good: Student has an assignment to do quicksort on an array of integers. He has difficulty with array syntax and asks me to walk him through basic array operations. He then has difficulty grasping what exactly quicksort is doing and asks me to walk him through a quicksort operation by hand. After this, he feels kind of confident and tries making a function. It doesn't work, and he can't find the problem, so he asks me to help debug the program.
Bad: "Oh man, I don't get this quicksort stuff at all. Can you, like, help me?"
(Cue frustrating half hour where the person shows that he barely grasps the concept of a variable and doesn't give a fuck about the class)
"Uh, I gotta turn this in at 11:59 tonight. I need this now."
The person who pulled the latter with me was male. I said "no" and watched him fail the class.
