Thoughts on Community's Homework Policy?

Community.rstudio.com has received a few homework questions recently. There has been some discussion about what kind of policy this forum should have. We'd love to get your thoughts.

A few concerns we'd like to try to balance:

  • We want to keep community an open and friendly place, particularly to newcomers and those new to R and the tidyverse.
  • We also don't think community should be dominated by homework Q&As,
  • Posting questions verbatim is probably a no-no. Firstly, it might violate their campuses' academic integrity policies. Also, many of us here are instructors and know how hard it is to come up with good, novel questions. It's annoying to see these questions turned into easily discoverable complete solution sets by next semester.
  • Aren't websites like Stack Overflow and Cross Validated better suited for this type of thing?
  • In all likelihood, no student will ever read the homework policy before posting. So the policy is perhaps best focused toward how the community should respond to homework.

References:

Possibly:

Asking About Homework:

  • Feel free to ask any question related to your homework that you believe fits well here.
  • But note:
    • Community.rstudio.com is a discussion forum for R, RStudio and the Tidyverse. It may not be the best place to get help with your specific problem.
    • Please do not post homework questions verbatim here or anywhere else. This may undercut your instructor’s course materials and it might violate your school’s academic integrity policies.
    • The community is more inclined to help lead you toward your solution, rather than explicitly solve it. Do not expect anyone here to do your homework for you.

Curious what you think...

7 Likes

I generally like the draft. While it leans towards impersonal, it may also help to have a template helping guide students towards asking for help productively. It could include:

  • A link to any policy that comes out of this.
  • A homework-oriented reprex tutorial would be great. It would help guide students on focusing their question on a specific section of a question. In other words, if it's a 6 part question, asking for help on part (e) shouldn't include your code for parts (a)-(d).
  • While I know that there's a lot of homework that uses standard R/R package data sets, for those that are using their own data, instructions on using dput or what standard data sets might be analogues to their data would help.
  • A few links to previous solid answers for very generic homework questions, such as @jessemaegan's great response from last week:
5 Likes