up vote 5 down vote favorite

We get scores of low-quality or homework questions where someone just pastes a question into the question box and hits submit. From the help center:

Do we accept basic level/homework questions?

Yes, we do. However, please provide an indication of what you are not understanding/need clarification on and your attempts at solving it, so we have a clear indication of where you are stuck. This goes for all questions, not just homework. If you have just written out your assignment, your question will be closed. You might want to read this article and this article on writing the perfect question.

(emphasis mine)

Yet there doesn't seem to be an (easy) close reason that fits this situation. Do we just downvote these questions and move on?

If we actually want to close these questions, could we get another close reason added to accommodate that? We could (continue to) type text into the custom off-topic field, but these questions soak up enough review time anyway; I'd prefer to streamline dealing with them and moving on.

Here is an example question where this close reason would've been selected, and there are plenty more examples available.

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  • This may be an interesting idea for the next iteration of our close reason election (if we do one this or next year). – SEJPM♦ Sep 26 '17 at 18:18
  • @SEJPM Yes, I mentioned your suggestion in my post. Some sites do have more than three custom close reasons, but SE is very hesitant to offer more, as I understand it. – Reid Sep 26 '17 at 18:18
  • Could you please name / link sites with >3 custom close reasons (preferably more than one ;) – SEJPM♦ Sep 26 '17 at 18:19
  • @SEJPM StackOverflow has 5, Ubuntu SE has 4, Anime SE has 4. There might be others. Continuing to use the custom text is certainly an option of course, but if the text is just going to say (some refrain of) "this is homework/has no effort/etc" each time, it makes sense to me to just have it pre-written nicely. – Reid Sep 26 '17 at 18:26
  • OK, I just went through our close-stats for the past 30 days (using the 10k mod tools). I found about 4 questions closed as homework dumps. This is about the same rate as we get for duplicates and "too broad". For comparison: Our official site-specific reasons have 22, 17 and 11 closed questions during the same time period. – SEJPM♦ Sep 26 '17 at 18:34
  • Awesome, thanks for that. Not enough rep for me to view the close stats. :-( With such a low close rate, it's pretty unlikely we'd get a 4th close reason for it. I actually have used the 'unclear what you're asking' reason for homework dumps before... maybe that, downvoting, or using the custom close text are good enough. – Reid Sep 26 '17 at 18:45
  • I do wonder how many of these questions don't actually get closed, but just downvoted into oblivion and then auto-deleted after 30 days. Another place where not having mod powers is annoying for me. – Reid Sep 26 '17 at 18:54
  • I just went through our deleted questions dating back to Sep 8th (the oldest I could see) and there was no homework-dump type question that was deleted and not closed. – SEJPM♦ Sep 26 '17 at 19:00
  • Negative-score, non-answered questions are only deleted (automatically) after 30 days. – Reid Sep 26 '17 at 19:08
up vote 3 down vote

We should reject what is clearly homework copypasta. It detracts from the value of the homework, it's unfair to the other people in the class, and usually there's a lot of context in the class that we have to spend time telepathically guessing at.

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  • 1
    I agree that it should be rejected - I was asking for guidance on how to reject (custom close vote reason? vote to close as something else? just downvote and move on?) – Reid Oct 5 '17 at 22:45
  • Custom close vote sounds reasonable to me if nothing else fits! – Squeamish Ossifrage Nov 3 '17 at 1:47

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