As we have received two homework questions today, and likely will have more in the future, what should our homework policy be? Should we ban them entirely? If not, what degree of help should we give? Also, do we make a distinction between Mathematica being used to solve a homework problem, or the code being the problem itself?
Please note: I'm not against HW questions. I just think we should have a somewhat uniform way of handling them.
Let me make a few statements:
If I don't like a question - for whatever reasons I don't care to explain now -, I don't answer it. And if I can (and want to), I try to improve it.
I don't care for a few minutes spent each day reading nonsense. My sensibility about that is almost nil, as I also read newspapers and look TV, and sometimes -much worse-, I even pay for them.
I enjoy learning and teaching. But I also hate lazy people trying to pass exams (or meeting work deadlines) by using the personal effort of others, abusing their passion for doing.
I think ivory towers are cold and lonely places, and being a bit smarter and/or wiser and/or having a little better understanding of a convoluted computer language than somebody else does not make me happier nor a better person. I love expert knowledge sharing, but that alone doesn't help to get more experts on-board (expert mitosis is a very rare phenomena)
I have been in a lot of situations when I had to ask an obvious question without realizing it. It is called inexperience and not dumbness or laziness.
Mathematica is a nice wild beast, difficult to understand and tame. And the docs are not up to the language's very steep learning curve. I have yet to find someone thinking different. So, the obvious conclusion is that beginners need some help.
So I vote YES. We should accept HW questions. We also should answer them with utmost care, teaching to fish. And also we should close, delete, burn and obliterate those questions made with the only purpose of making others invest the time the OP is not willing to apply.
Just my 2 cents.
I think we need to make a distinction between beginner questions, homework questions and lazy questions. We have been reasonably open to new users' questions, and patient with their For loops and syntax errors. We have also been quite patient with questions that seem a bit RTFM, when TFM isn't so obvious (I mean, c'mon, 12 upvotes for this answer? Not that I'm complaining really.) Perhaps we could do better on this. I for one don't mind answering beginner questions if they elicit something broader about the Mathematica language (like this answer). We are educating users in good Mathematica practice, which I think is good for the wider acceptance of the application and the job prospects of some of the regulars.
I don't object to questions that come from people's homework, as long as they show their code and explain where they got stuck. Sometimes there is a useful general principle that can be illustrated in the answer. But we should refrain from giving them the whole answer (I like Mr.Wizard's heuristic here).
Where I think we should push for edits and improvements, and downvote/close repeat offenders, is the case of no-effort "plsgivemetehcodez" type questions.
I would not worry too much about the limited resources of the top users. There are intermediate users who could pick up the easier questions and answer them. Perhaps we should observe a convention that the top users should refrain from answering problematic questions in the first 24 hours. Wait until the question has been improved, and then decide if it's worth answering. We consistently have at least a quarter of registered users visiting in any 24-hour period, but I don't know that it's the same people. There are bound to be intermediate users who visit every couple of days, and would enjoy the opportunity of crafting a good answer to what seems like a basic question.
EDIT
I also want to make a distinction between (1) questions related to homework on a Mathematica assignment (i.e. the homework task is "do this in Mathematica") versus (2) an assignment in a subject where it isn't assumed that Mathematica is to be used, and the person is a beginner in Mathematica would would like to try it for that task.
I think we should be strict on (1) and not give them the whole answer, but actively welcoming of (2).
If a homework question resembles a givemethecodez question it should be closed. If it focuses on a conceptual problem that is part of the solution we can help to fully solve that partial problem. Some effort of the asker should be apparent. I feel that in no case should we provide a fully functioning answer in code or otherwise. If the asker isn't straightforward about the nature of the question banning would be an option.
As a student and newbie of this great Q&A community,I would like to share my opinion and my story. Since I started playing with Mathematica on my own, I immediately caught all it's potential power. Anyway,
Mathematica is a nice wild beast, difficult to understand and tame
as belisarius correctly said, so at the beginning it was really hard to implement the experiments/puzzles/ideas I had in mind: I had to search the web for guides,tutorials etc. and even if there are some very good resources on the web, what I really needed was to help of someone who had already a Mathematica forma mentis.
Now I've found this great place;this is one of the few time when you actually find what you were looking for. Up to now I haven't asked any HW related question, but I don't exclude I will in the future.
I can't see nothing bad in trying to transform your (perhaps) boring algebra/geometry/analysis etc. in a great, easy understandable Manipulate function for instance. I think indeed that only by solving this kind of problems one can really dive into the Mathematica style of coding and thinking.
So,please,let noobs as me ask (also) homework questions!
I have a soft mental quota for each user; I'll help in whatever way I can, to a point. Generally for a new user like Andrea I'll post complete code sections. For the next few questions from the same user I'll post snippets, suggestions, and help links. After that I may stop answering, or answer only questions strictly about Mathematica functionality rather than how to apply it.
When my memory expires I'll default to posting more complete answers.
If the user made a pain of himself my memory may take a long time to expire.
None of this overrides my principles expressed in:
Handling blatant RTFM cases---harmful to the community?
EDIT
Looking at other answers, I realized that I should have better formulated what I mean by homework questions, perhaps making a distinction between them and beginner questions (which I have nothing against, if it is clear that some effort was made there), similar to what @Verbeia did in her answer. By homework questions I mean those where we are presented with a very specific context, within which some problem(s) occur, and such that it takes us considerable effort to strip the irrelevant details and see the actual problem. And when we do, the problem happens to be RTFM-type or very close to that. These questions often have these distinctive features:
It is this type of questions that I am concerned about. Here is a very recent (as of the time of this edit) example of such (it may not be a homework, but it is exactly the type of questions I mean).
END EDIT
It was not an easy thing for me to make up my mind on this, but I think that the default for homework questions should be that they are not welcome. We have limited amount of resources, as a community, and homeworks are intended to make people do some things on their own, so by providing extensive help for them, we are not doing anybody a favor.
If we think about what homework-type questions bring to our community, then I don't find anything really valuable. Specifically, homework questions are likely to
There are other concerns which I already expressed in a somewhat different context. Overall, I think that we should do anything we can to keep the quality of information on our site superb. And, if some number of beginners are put off by our policies, I wouldn't find it particularly worrying, since there will also be beginners who will make an effort and ask good quality questions.
That said, I think we need a well thought-out section in our FAQ titled something like "Why my question was closed", as well as "What can I do to make my question better", and we can direct new users there. This way, there will be fewer reasons for them to take that personally, and we won't have to be softer than we should, just because we don't want to hurt someone's feelings.
_?NumericQ, of which there are several dupes. So if not "Too Localized", it'd be closed as an "Exact Duplicate", but I don't feel for the latter, because it's not worth keeping around.
It might sound bad, and I just started with Mathematica, but been a long StackOverflow lurker and someone who asks Homework questions. However, I have strong opinion about this discussion.
Read this
Dr. Stephen Wolfram School of Natural Sciences The Institute for Advanced Study Princeton, NJ 08540
Dear Wolfram:
It is not my opinion that the present organizational structure of science inhibits "complexity research" - I do not believe such an institution is necessary.
You say you want to create your own environment - but you will not be doing that: you will create (perhaps!) an environment that you might like to work in - but you will not be working in this environment - you will be administering it - and the administration environment is not what you seek - is it? You won't enjoy administrating people because you won’t succeed in it.
You don’t understand "ordinary people." To you they are "stupid fools" - so you will not tolerate them or treat their foibles with tolerance or patience - but will drive yourself wild (or they will drive you wild) trying to deal with them in an effective way.
Find a way to do your research with as little contact with non-technical people as possible, with one exception, fall madly in love! That is my advice, my friend.
Sincerely,
(Signed, 'Richard P. Feynman')
Richard P. Feynman
Whenever I read things such as "we will start getting a lot of nonsense questions, quality of questions will go down, knowledgeable people will go elsewhere, we should not deal with people who are not knowledgeable", I think about this letter. Fear of dealing with non-techies(or beginners).
Take StackOverflow.com as an example. Out of thousands questions asked/answered on StackOverflow.com with, very small fraction are homework question, most of the questions are from average programmers.
As long as the person shows clear effort to solve the homework, he/she should be helped.
PS.It just happened, that letter was written to Wolfram. It could have been written to other scientist.
