First draft of homework policy, please comment. Thanks for the suggestions, I believe that I incorporated all of them. I aimed for brevity at the expense of details, as I imagine very long documents would not be read.
Homework guidelines for students
- Make sure that you are aware of school and course policy for asking and accepting outside help with homework. It is your responsibility to make sure you adhere to these.
- It is OK to ask help with homework questions on this forum. Strictly speaking, you are not required, but encouraged to say that something is a homework question: doing so will help you and respondents. For example, they can avoid solving the full problem for you (which is generally forbidden in most courses and may cause problems for you even if this was not your intention), and guide you to discover the solution yourself.
- You should read and reread the Julia Documentation, study the documentation and examples for the package you are trying to use (unit tests are also often informative), search online for an answer (including the search box in this forum) before asking questions. For really short questions, consider using Gitter. If you are trying to translate code from another language, learn how Julia is different.
- Your teaching assistant and instructor are there to help you. Consider asking them first, especially if the question is specific to a toolkit or library that they want you to use.
- Make a minimal working example (MWE). An MWE is a self-contained piece of code that can be run with publicly available libraries, and demonstrates your problem. Sometimes constructing the MWE helps you find your own solution. If the problem uses data (eg for plotting), generate fake or random data in the MWE. Post code quoted with backticks (```julia … ```).
- Some courses just use a programming language to teach content specific to a problem domain (eg numerical methods in fluid mechanics). This forum is for helping you with the Julia language. For help with the course material, ask your instructor/TA.
Homework guidelines for respondents
Please read this StackOverflow post for suggestions.