Homework questions, and the Tour guidance

Question

I've just VTC a 'homework with no attempt' question, and another user has added a link to the Tour, perhaps thinking it was helpful. On reading it, it offers no guidance to our policy.

These are the lists from the 'do and don't ask' section of the Tour as it stands at 2021/07/28

Ask about...

• a specific electronics design problem
• the theory and simulation of electromagnetic forces
• a communication scheme
• the writing of firmware for bare-metal or RTOS applications

Don't ask about...

• Shopping or buying recommendations
• Consumer electronics such as media players, cell phones or smart phones, except when designing these products or modifying their electronics for other uses
• Programming software for a PC
• Anything else not directly related to electronics design
• Questions that are primarily opinion-based
• Questions with too many possible answers or that would require an extremely long answer

I'd like to add to these something along the lines of

• don't ask for homework answers when you have made no attempt at a solution

• do ask for help with homework when you have tried to solve it, you show your working, and indicate where you are stuck

... if of course this still sums up our current policy on homework.

Answer 1

We are working on updating the process for homework questions, specifically adding a "homework without an attempt" closure reason.

You are right that we need to get some guidance into the Help Center too, so that our stance on such questions isn't a surprise.

I know that some other SE sites already have a similar stance on "homework without an attempt" as we now have, so I'll look to see what guidance they give in their Help and see if that fits for us too. Your proposed text looks good, although I think we should also look for standardization across the SE sites if possible and I also expect that SE staff would want to be consulted on any changes.

So, thanks for the reminder! I'll put this work higher on my to-do list.

Answer 2

I would like to discourage questions along the lines of "Is my answer right?" if we can. I don't feel that such questions fall within the spirit of "indicate where you are stuck".

I am solidly behind any effort to help students understand difficult concepts and learn the craft. I don't think we should be checking their arithmetic or verifying their answers to an on-line exam.

Answer 3

For everyone raising a new question I'd add a "gate" to getting the question posted on the site. That "gate" would be something like this: -

"Is your question about homework?"

"Have you fully described where you are stuck?"

And, if the poster says "yes" and "no", then the whole question text is deleted automatically (before posting) and the good folk on stack exchange never see it.

If the poster says it isn't homework then, the question is allowed to be posted. Of course some folk will lie and there will be a trickle through but it should be less of a serious problem.

Kill the problem at source. Prevention is better than cure.

Answer 4

I have seen a number of questions that have the format "what is xxx" where xxx is something like "Ohm's Law", "Kirchoff's Law", "Boyle's Law", etc. and that is the entire question. I think it is safe to say that this is something that can be processed by Google quickly and efficiently. In fact, it can be answered quicker using Google that with the various parts of StackExchange. I always assume that these are people answering homework questions. In fact, it should be possible to get lists of named laws (Wikipedia has some lists that would be useful, e.g. "List of eponymous laws".) and simply have a canned response for questions which simply contain the name of the law with a phrase such as "What is ...", "What does ... mean", "Who discovered ...", "When was ... discovered", etc. The response could be as snarky or innocent as you wish. My personal choice would be "Stack Exchange is not meant as a substitute for study in doing homework or other assignments. We suggest that you use Wikipedia or Google first, and then return to StackExchange if you still have questions, indicating what part of the answer from Google or Wikipedia that you don't understand."