Asking homework questions

Question

Is it desirable for people to ask a homework question here?

Set aside for now the question of how this would be enforced. I'm more interesting in the policy question, and in our goals. Is this desirable? Do we want people to post their homework questions here? Do we want to post complete answers to homework questions?

Answer 1

Since nobody else did answer yet, here is my take.

There are several kinds of homework question.

1. Please solve my task. This consists mostly of a copy+paste (or retyped) task from a homework sheet, with or without indicating this fact, and without showing any own research effort. Computational unbounded adversary in its first revision might be an example. (Anything with a sentence starting with "show" is a good indication for this.)

   In this form it is certainly a bad question, and deserves a downvote for does not show any research effort.

2. Here is my task, I already did this part, and I have now this problem. Here is what I tried, but which didn't work.

   Here the asker does not want a complete solution to his problem, but has solved it partly himself, and wants some hint on how to proceed. My experience with SE (not Crypto) shows that these types of question are quite more likely to be accepted by the community, as they show research effort, and also make clear where exactly the help is needed.

Is the following statement about PRG true or false? is somewhere between these two kinds, I think – it at least shows "what did I try", but it does not include the (here necessary) definition of a PRG.

There might actually be interesting questions hidden in there, but to be good questions, they need some rewording to not look like a homework task. I think I did so with my edit to the first linked question.

Of course, handing a complete solution is normally not really in the interest of the asker (even if he is not aware of this) – avoiding this is easier to do for the second type of question. We could also think about including a homework tag in these questions – any opinions about this?

Answer 2

I agree mostly with Paŭlo's answer, except on one bit:

homework - argh. I personally am more likely to ask basic questions, when I finally get some free time. However, none of them are homework. I don't study cryptography in an official at-a-place-of-education capacity. So I strongly dislike the homework tag for two reasons:

1. It actually adds nothing more to the question than basic or beginner. It might not even be accurate in terms of whether the question is actually homework.
2. It creates a culture of "is this homework?" comments, usually three or four at a time. These are not remotely helpful. Nobody cares, because:

The descriminant is whether the question is fundamentally well typed out and shows prior research/a clear problem, not whether it may or may not be an assignment. In fact, if it is an assigment and shows prior research and a well thought out question, the homework is clearly doing its job of getting people to think about the problem space, a process which will take them from being students to researchers in the field.

So, in short, I am not so keen on meta tags like homework. I think taking it case by case, closing blatant no-effort questions and encouraging effort questions, whether homework, basic or whatever, is the way forward. i.e. Paŭlo's "type 2" question.

Answer 3

I don't think we should be answering questions tha are clearly copied out of a textbook/homework assignment.

Effectively we are letting people cheat. Worse, if they are taking a crypto class as part of a computer security program , they will actually go screw stuff up that matters when they get hired somewhere and people (erroneously) assume they are competent.

There is some argument to be made for helping people with a homework problem. However, when all they did was copy the question out of the textbook and couldn't be bothered to ask some question about the subject matter, they don't want help, they just want the answer.