Recently, a member of our community asked the question In what way is the poem 'Tissue' by Imtiaz Dharker related to power / conflict?. This question was based on a question from what I think is a practice test for a national exam.
What's our policy on these sorts of questions?
TL;DR: whether or not a question is based on homework should be mostly irrelevant to how we treat it, unless there's some cheating or other unethical behaviour going on.
In any case, such a policy would be counter-productive. Since we often can't tell whether a particular question came from homework or not, any OP who wanted to sneak their homework question past an anti-homework policy could easily do so just by not admitting it was a homework question. If there was a particular type of question under consideration here, as opposed to simply a particular place of origin, then this argument wouldn't hold water; but I don't think there is. Homework questions can be either good or bad, regardless of their origins or inspiration.
That said, there are some potential issues which could arise from such questions:
Plagiarism. If people copy questions word-for-word from literature tests without crediting the original author, that could be a problem for our site. The users and moderators here wouldn't bear any legal responsibility - DMCA takedown notices are handled by Stack Exchange the company - but legal issues aren't something we want Literature SE to get involved with on any level.
There's a help centre page on plagiarism and how to reference external material, which is highly relevant here. If people credit the original source, or (even better) rewrite the question in their own words rather than copy-pasting, this problem will be greatly diminished.
Cheating. Ethically, we don't really want to help people cheat; on the other hand, the arguments I made above, about evaluating questions on their own merits regardless of where they came from, are still valid. For a reasonable compromise, I suggest we use the same policy as Maths SE and Puzzling SE: close/lock/delete all questions from ongoing timed contests (are there such contests in literature?), and restore them once the contest is over. That way, we avoid helping people cheat, but still end up with useful content preserved on our site for posterity.
Of course, the Be Nice policy still applies. Leaving a comment like "hey, is this a homework question?" is OK, but saying "you filthy cheat, you're too lazy to do your own homework" isn't. (Not that I'm expecting to see many comments of the latter type here on Literature; this advice is inspired by these Stack Overflow guidelines.) We should assume good faith unless there's good reason not to, and in the latter case let the moderators deal with it. Conversely, of course, OPs asking homework questions should be honest about doing so, and abide by their school or university's policy.
N.B: I am the person who asked the question about Tissue in the first place. See here for more responses about the issue.
People are worried it's unfair to produce content that may be helpful to revise from for people like me who will be sitting an exam that may involve that poem. Indeed, there is one question where Tissue is one of 15 poems we may be asked about.
This is a compare question, and you're not supposed to think on your feet (see mark scheme below). That's for the unseen poetry test . Anyone will have access to your observations, and I wasn't asking you to produce a polished comparison essay, but a few bullet points about POWER in Tissue. Here are a few subjects (of the 15-poem question) that the teachers have pointed out as likely:
Power of Humans, Power of Nature, Effects of Conflict, Reality of Conflict, Loss and Absence, Memory, Negative Emotion [anger/guilt/fear/pride], Identity, Individual Experiences.
Compare how the writer presents X (e.g. Identity) in X (e.g. My Last Duchess), and one other poem from your Power and Conflict anthology.
The 14 other poems are well-known, interesting, and discussable in class - e.g, Ozymandias - but Tissue is five times more demanding, and has lots of strange concepts which are harder to break down. This is from the 2018 GCSE syllabus, with mock exams in May/June of this year and next year. The 15-poems question is 45 minutes. You are given one of the poems you've studied, but you have to compare it to another one that you remember.
Anything that doesn't answer the question gets no marks. E.g, I once said
"In Exposure, Owen uses the first-person plural pronoun 'we' to present the soldier's opinion as universal, whereas the writer of Bayonet Charge uses the third-person singular pronoun 'he' to make it sound like one man's story."
This was irrelevant to "how the writer presents the power of nature", so that point was worth 0. No-one will get away with parroting random points about the poem, such as POWER, which is the only think I'm asking for help with. The exam is designed to more sophisticated now. You cannot get more than a level 3 (grade D) for doing that even if the question is about power.
Here are some links to the real specification: Here for poetry / here for exemplar responses / here for examiners' assessment objectives :
Or, read my paraphrased specification. I've bolded the text that bolsters my argument:
Read fluently, and with good understanding, a wide range of literary texts
Evaluate poetry critically and make clear, focused, sustained and consistent comparisons between texts
Write effectively and coherently using Standard English appropriately
Acquire and apply a wide vocabulary, alongside a knowledge and understanding of grammatical terminology, and linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
My feeling is that "do my homework for me" questions should be closed. On Writers, those are closed under the Tell Me What To Write rubric.
Laura's question in particular is borderline, but seems to be erring on the side of caution. She's asking for help interpreting something so she can answer the question in her own words.
Something which is an interesting question which also happens to be an essay, well, we can't determine that, as Rand notes. I don't mind answering those if they can serve a larger purpose.
I just answered Language in A View from the Bridge which I'm fairly sure is a homework question. I left a comment on the bottom, saying as much. If that's not thought constructive, please let me know.
I studied A View From the Bridge in college and answered various similar questions many years ago. I also took a course on T.S. Elliott which I found highly obtuse. So I went to the library, took out a study guide, and used it to help me write one of the highest scoring essays in the class.
I felt a bit bad about it and went to the lecturer. She told me not to worry, that that was the point of study guides. And that as long as I hadn't plagerised it (which I hadn't) there was no problem. In recycling some of the points made in the guide in my own language alongside my own points I had shown that I understood what I'd read in the guide. That I'd used it to deepen my own learning, rather than as a prop to do an easy homework.
The point of this anecdote is to illustrate that helping with homework questions is fine, indeed I'd say it's to be encouraged, so long as it's not a case of a user asking for help repeatedly. I would suggest that it is helpful if such questions are identified (possibly tagged?) because it might result in the OP getting more useful "school level" answers.
