I would settle for people simply giving full disclosure.
The problem I've seen with homework questions in the past is twofold:
- Homework often introduces one or more artificial constraints to the question
and answer. "Find the min using recursion". Huh? Why recursion?
So we don't know if the person knows that this isn't the best way to do something,
and spend a lot of time mis-answering.
- Yes, it's possible that what we are saying is keeping a person from doing
their own learning. Handing them a fish instead of teaching them to fish.
Yuck. Anti-ethical, in my book.
So, as long as someone says "homework question", I'm OK with people helping,
but not if it's covert.
-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker | [reply] |