@user1271772 yoo, forgot to tell you, I got into more couple of good schools! And finalized my decision today 😬 however, I would like to stay anonymous and won't like to disclose the name of the schools. Thanks for all the advice! Appreciate it!

@FDGod so... if I'm reading this comment correctly, should we close this question?

@glS Do we have a policy on that? If not, why should we close it?

And if we have one, we should enforce it regularly.

@NorbertSchuch I don't think there's anything "officially discussed" no; but still, it seems sensible to close questions that we know are blatantly homework or assignments, no?

though one might argue we never really know I guess

@glS I certainly fully agree that we should close homework questions, but I don't have the feeling this has been the policy here up to now. I'm certainly in favor of adapting such a policy, but only closing it because the corresponding TA comments on it does not seem right.

@glS well, I have solved that person’s query IRL, so yeah, sure. We should close that question

@NorbertSchuch but I also agree with this. So upto you @glS

@NorbertSchuch I feel like it depends on what exactly we're talking about here. If you're thinking homework policy in the style of physics.SE, that's different b/c it's more about whether we like or not a certain style of questions (and I'm pretty sure we already discussed it here on meta as well).

In this case, the issue is more about the "meta" of the question: if we for whatever reason know that a question is being used for some kind of "malpractice" (and we generally cannot know that, so these are kind of edge cases), should we put the question on hold based on that information? That would mean closing the question for reasons that are technically not directly related to the question content itself

to be clear, I myself am not totally sure what's the best course of action here. I can also see an argument that questions shouldn't be closed or judged based on things that are outside of the content of the post itself. Still, it also seems a bit iffy to leave alone posts that for whatever reason we know are directly violating some school's policy

@FDGod also, that seemed to be a nightmare scenario on the student's part haha

@glS I don't think it is our job to enforce a school's policy. It is the school's job. And, moreover, anyone can claim that a question is homework, that they are the TA, and so on. Basing close decisions on that sounds like opening doors to arbitrary closures. I'd say we either leave it open, or we adopt a homework policy of some kind.

OTOH, if the OP feels that they violated their school's policy, then they should go ahead and delete their question.

@FDGod That's not how this works. Questions are not closed when (or because) the underlying problem is solved.

@glS hahaha

@NorbertSchuch Yes, I understand and agree with your argument as well.

@NorbertSchuch kind of, the policy is essentially 'judge by content, not motivation'. We've temporarily locked time-sensitive exam or competition programming questions before but that's about the extent of it

@glS we should at least lock until the deadline is up (unless it needs closed for another reason, sure)

Well, lock if we have official word from someone anyway :P

@Mithrandir24601 I mean, what's an "official word" here though?

@NorbertSchuch I agree that it's not our job, and we don't have to act on these things. But that doesn't mean it's not a good idea to do so. And yes, of course, we don't really 100% know now or ever. But I think in many cases one can tell with enough confidence to warrant action anyway.

@glS Indeed, anyone could easily claim after any homework-like post they don't like that it's from their course.

@glS I'm not against it. (Indeed, I am very much in favor of the PSE homework policy, and even more the tag, as it allows to filter.) I just feel that it would be good to have some kind of official policy on that, whatever it looks like. (E.g.: Should such questions be closed by consensus? Or by mod action - i.e., should we flag those posts?)

@glS I remember we once got a message from someone who was organising one of IBM's hackathons being like 'someone's asking the hackathon questions on QCSE', so it was pretty easy to verify they were who they said they were

@NorbertSchuch but we're not talking about the same thing covered by the PSE homework policy now, no? We do have what I think of as our version of the PSE homework policy, as well as an associated tag. Policy I'd summarise as: we should only judge the post by its content, not by the "meta" of it being homework or not. Among other things, because that's not verifiable anyway.

I guess what we're talking about here is a possible "exception" to such general policy in cases where we somehow "know" some misconduct is happening

but I guess temporary locking is indeed a good alternative to closing in such cases, and when we do have some kind of confirmation like @Mithrandir24601 mentioned