I'm starting to see the first signs of the inevitable "homework dumps" on Software Development as the site is gaining traffic a bit. The criteria for a homework dump is roughly:

• A raw copy/paste of a school assignment. It is not necessarily even asking a question, it could as well be a work order: "your task is to-...".
• There is no effort or background research at all made by the OP.
• The OP is unresponsive to any comments or feedback, they just want their homework done by someone else.

Dropping your homework as-is on top of unpaid volunteers and expecting them to do it for you free of charge is of course terribly rude and thereby violates our "be nice" Code of Conduct.

These are a problem & a constant source for conflicts over at SE - they never managed to solve the problem. So I was hoping we could deal with them more sternly than they do, because simply closing & deleting the questions isn't working out very well. They never managed to get the word out that "posting your homework on site x will get you banned". (Even though this ultimately happens because of various secret algorithms looking at new question reception.)

I was about to propose on Software Dev that we deal with these by letting the moderators or even trusted users hand out 1 week ban from the site, as a first reprimand, to signal that this behavior is absolutely not ok.

Then I realized that this will be just as big a problem on the other technical/scientific communities, in particularly Mathematics, Physics and Electrical Engineering. It would be great if we could moderate these consistently across all sites. So how about coming up with a network-wide moderation policy for how to deal with "homework dumps"?

posted over 3 years ago

CC BY-SA 4.0

Lundin‭

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