Stop the off-hand "this sounds like a homework question" comments that offer no guidance and raise false flags?

Question

The recent comment This sounds like a homework/test question is

1. unhelpful as it offer no guidance and is not actionable
2. bad because it raises the false flag that there can be something wrong with questions about homework simply because they are about homework.

This is the opposite of being welcoming to new users, especially on their first question.

There is prior art on this here in Astronomy meta:

• Homework policy
• I can't find this site's "homework policy" or find out how "suspected homework question askers" should be treated

and in Space SE meta

• Does this site have anything like a homework policy?

and generally the guidelines are that we can generally never know if a question is really about a homework problem that is due or not, and so the only way to proceed is to treat all questions the same; simply ask the OP to kindly add something that addresses

• "What have you tried so far?"

and/or

• "What research have you done?"

and to remind them that adding this kind of information is done in general and that you are not singling them out for special treatment.

"This sounds like a homework question" can sound to the OP like "I think you are trying to cheat" and it can make other users reading the comment (remember, comments can be read by anybody!) begin to believe that there is a rule against homework, which there is not!

What topics can I ask about here? (help/on-topic) and What types of questions should I avoid asking? (help/dont-ask) have no mention of homework whatsoever.

Question: Shall we stop the off-hand "this sounds like a homework question" comments that offer no guidance and raise false flags?

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In fairness the same user later commented:

Astronomy SE, like all other Stack Exchange sites, are meant for Q&A. Sometimes we let by a few homework questions. See the meta discussions: Homework policy and What is the policy here on homework?

but the second item is 13 years old and way, way before Stack Exchange has become the nearly 200 separate sites and communities it is today and so probably irrelevant.

"Sometimes we let by a few homework questions." once again is both false and raises a false flag. There is no "letting" of a few homework questions. We treat all questions equally and we absolutely do not deem to have knowledge or suspicion of the OP's situation or context unless they share it.

Answer 1

Well, uh, this is embarrassing. As the user who put these comments onto the post, I've learned the consequences of doing so. Originally, after seeing several posts that turned out to be homework questions get closed on various Stack Exchange sites, I assumed that homework questions are discouraged.

I responded to @uhoh's comments regarding the topic in concern:

Yes, I understand the counterproductivity of my actions and will work to improve them.

It seems like this has been happening too many times to me in the past few weeks/months (see Are my comments being poorly received?). I'm going into "voluntary suspension" regarding said close-reason comments. As @uhoh mentioned in a comment, there is no need for a mea culpa. I will avoid the generic and unhelpful "This sounds like a homework question" and take a break from closing new users' questions.

Feel free to express your concerns in comments.

For other users reading this post, take note that "...we should not judge or even try to infer the OP's motives or situation and view all questions on equal footing." (quoted from one of @uhoh's comments) Instead, try "What have you tried to solve your problem?" or "What research have you done?" If the OP doesn't respond or provide the necessary actions in a reasonable timescale (perhaps a week), vote to close. The instant close vote is unhelpful and harms the new user's first impression of SE, and also clogs up the review queues. This takes precious time away from other users and especially moderators, who already have plenty of work on their plate.

Answer 2

Astronomy SE is a bit odd (in my view) in having no policy on closing homework questions. If homework-type questions get answered regularly (whether they actually are homework or not) the site will fill with homework questions and that's far more of an issue than clogging up of the review queues (e.g. only 16 in the close queue today and I think it rarely gets much bigger).

As an astrophysics professor who at present is forced to set online, uninvigilated examinations, I regard the answering of straightforward homework problems as a bad thing. The example given at the top of this question is a really clear example of someone appearing to ask (innocent until proved guilty and all that) for a simple homework problem to be done for them. The stone-cold give-away is that the OP ends with "Find the apparent magnitude of first quarter moon."; i.e. not even a question; it is an instruction, just as you would find on an exam or problem sheet.

Personally, I would like to discourage people from asking questions like this. Aside from the question of their motives, such questions are next to useless in terms of helping any other reader in the future. They are usually not very searchable and because they are so specific in terms of asking for some numerical answer to a particular problem they are rarely of interest to anyone but the person that asked.

That's not to advocate being rude (and I'm sure I have been guilty of the "this looks like your homework" comment in the past). However, sometimes it is so obviously someone's homework that the comment is apt - and I believe your example is a case like that. If it isn't homework then I don't see why a poster should be offended, especially if it is obvious that their question does look very much like it is. And if it is their homework, I don't really care if they are offended or not and if it discourages them, so much the better. Saying "this looks like homework" does not violate any site policies does it?

Maybe my future comment would be: "This looks like your homework. Such questions are rarely of any use to others unless they are made less specific and are of more general interest. Some people on this site are very much against answering such questions."

Answer 3

In the early days of the internet I got suckered many times into doing people's homework for them. The "thanks for doing my homework, sucker" comment I received on the last time I did someone's homework made me very sensitive to homework-like questions.

It is odd that Astronomy.SE does not have "this is homework" as a reason to close. It does however have "Other" as a vote to close option, and the person voting to close has to fill in what "other" means. I have used that option multiple times to close homework-like questions, and others have agreed with me.

The question in question has all of the hallmarks of a homework-like question. There's no research, there's barely a question, and there's a statement that looks just like a homework question. Another dead giveaway is that this question was asked, verbatim, on other sites. Most of the posts at other sites have now vanished because those other sites have a policy against "do my homework for me" questions.

We are not helping the people who post such questions learn by doing their homework for them. All we are doing is helping them to learn that cheating works. We are hurting rather than helping the cheaters' classmates who worked hard to solve the problem. They learned something in solving the problem on their own or as a group, and that learning will transfer to later times in their lives. But those honest people are competing with cheaters who, at least in school, can solve a problem with much less effort by simply spamming the homework question across the internet.

We should not be enabling cheaters.