Questions tagged [homework]

Questions concerning work meant to be solved outside classroom time by a student, including questions about writing suitable homework assignments, grading, etc.

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148 votes
23 answers
90k views

A student in my course does well on exams, but doesn't do the homework: Go easy on them, or make them "pay the price?"

I have a student in my course that does well on the exams, and his answers to the exam questions show a deep understanding of the material. However, this student has not been handing in the assigned ...
Mad Jack's user avatar
  • 12.5k
123 votes
18 answers
122k views

Knowing that most students submit assignments right around the deadline, is it advisable not to set deadline that is very late at night?

Like many on this site, I use a Moodle-type online Content Management System to give assignments to my students, and receive the finished work for grading. This is in a traditional context where the ...
ALAN WARD's user avatar
  • 1,880
109 votes
24 answers
41k views

How can I prevent students from writing answers on an assignment, then claiming I didn't see their answer?

What is a good way to prevent students from writing an answer after you hand back a graded assignment (exam/homework) and claiming that you did not see their answer? It is clear to me that this ...
user14802's user avatar
  • 1,785
103 votes
20 answers
29k views

Professor does not care about cheating, what should TA do?

I am a PhD student, working as a Homework marking TA in a school where cheating is extremely blatant. The university has an extremely strict policy against cheating. Hundreds of students in math ...
Radiant Dawn's user avatar
97 votes
12 answers
22k views

First year Math PhD student; My problem solving skill has been completely atrophied and continues to decline

I'm a first year PhD student in mathematics and I'm in a pretty bad spot. Over the last year or so of undergrad and first semester of grad school, I've completely atrophied my problem solving skill. ...
Atrophied_Skills's user avatar
80 votes
14 answers
43k views

How to handle students who try to negotiate away penalties for late submission of coursework?

I'm teaching a course where coursework is submitted online. Recently, an important group project assignment was due. The students are required to submit a project report, which contains a link to a ...
I Like to Code's user avatar
72 votes
16 answers
16k views

Should I prepare new homework exercises each year, 20% of the final grade is homework?

This year I prepare a new course (in programming, but it could be any other course). I spend a lot of effort in creating homework exercises. This is fun, but also very time-consuming. I wonder if I ...
Erel Segal-Halevi's user avatar
68 votes
14 answers
15k views

How to deal with students who lose their digital work?

In my courses, students work on large, on-going projects, but submit some parts each week, showing their progress. All of the work is done on a computer or table. Mid-semester, I always get reports ...
Village's user avatar
  • 12.4k
68 votes
6 answers
13k views

A student posted my lab materials as a "project" on Instructables, and hid its origin as a lab assignment. How should I address this?

TLDR: A student posted my lab assignment as a “project” on Hackster.io and Instructables. His posts hide its origin as a lab assignment, in which a lot of the materials (texts, circuit diagram and ...
ff524's user avatar
  • 108k
65 votes
5 answers
14k views

Students using the same flawed online solution sheet as the grading TA

I am in a small electricity and magnetism class, and I have recently become aware of other students using an online solution sheet (on slader.com). On the most recent homework, I (who didn't use the ...
Murey Tasroc's user avatar
62 votes
13 answers
17k views

Accidentally leaked the solution to an assignment, what to do now? (I'm the prof)

TL;DR; I accidentally made the solution of an assignment visible to some of my students. How can I now fairly address that problem? A few weeks ago I set a programming assignment to be done using ...
user3780968's user avatar
  • 1,410
58 votes
5 answers
19k views

How to handle a student who will not accept that he is wrong?

I am a university marker TA, and after midterm exam I met with a student who would not accept that he was wrong. He thought his answers were correct but didn't explain to me why his answers were ...
Rapidturtle's user avatar
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55 votes
17 answers
16k views

Should a teacher be able to solve all the assignments they give their students themselves?

A moment ago, I happened upon https://puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/99712/almost-impossible-sudoku-like-puzzle which explicitly mentioned that this student was given a puzzle in math class that ...
Nzall's user avatar
  • 2,066
55 votes
12 answers
15k views

What to do with students coming to office hours asking to check their homework?

As a teaching assistant (TA), how to handle the situation where a student comes to office hours asking to check their homework? I.e. the student hands in their solution to the homework and ask the TA ...
Franck Dernoncourt's user avatar
53 votes
13 answers
14k views

Nice vs. ugly numbers in homework and tests

This question revolves around using integers (−1, 0, 1, 2, 3) or simple fractions (½, ⅓, ⅗) vs. real numbers (−1.254, 42.72) in teaching concepts, assigning homework, and preparing tests for math, ...
ZachS's user avatar
  • 641
46 votes
11 answers
12k views

Is it ethical to publish homework?

Sometimes when doing course work for university, I'd like to write about it on my website, or publish it in its entirety, because I think that other people might be interested in it. My goal is not ...
tim's user avatar
  • 1,181
41 votes
4 answers
2k views

Continuum from collaboration on homework to copying

Some of the work I grade does not seem to be copied verbatim, but also seems close enough that one student or another is being a parrot and does not totally understood what they are saying. My ...
eric_kernfeld's user avatar
40 votes
6 answers
7k views

How do textbook authors and professors cook up homework/assignment questions?

I was looking around on the internet and I found some notes with homework appended to them (for those interested, it is math). What struck me is that these questions are not only lengthy, notationally ...
Fraïssé's user avatar
  • 11.4k
38 votes
18 answers
9k views

Is it ethical to assign problem sets and not tell students which subset of problems will be graded?

It is common practice to have a homework strategy as follows: a professor might assign N homework problems but only have some random sub-set of those problems graded. This is motivated by a large ...
Roy's user avatar
  • 481
38 votes
10 answers
13k views

Is a professor required to provide homework solutions?

For graduate school classes, if a professor writes his own homework questions and creates his own problem sets, is he required to provide solutions to the homework problems, after the homeworks have ...
Happy_Student's user avatar
38 votes
5 answers
7k views

Is it unethical for nursing school assignments to require students private medical information?

The curriculum for the nursing program at my university regularly requires the student to write a detailed account of their HIPAA-protected medical information. The assignments usually require posting ...
Susan Taylor's user avatar
36 votes
14 answers
8k views

How do you enforce handwriting standards for homework assignments as a TA?

I am a TA who is helping to grade student homework assignments for an undergrad engineering course which involves a lot of mathematics. The homeworks all together count for miserly 5% and is only ...
Fraïssé's user avatar
  • 11.4k
36 votes
6 answers
9k views

Can a professor require that I collect personal data from family members for an assignment?

I have an assignment for a psychology class that is "requiring" me to contact dozens of family members to find out their traits and what health conditions they may have. Truth is, I don't have the ...
Dan Beaulieu's user avatar
35 votes
12 answers
31k views

How to deal with students who submit their homework as an attachment to a completely blank e-mail?

I am responsible for the exercises for a graduate course (which happens to contain only international students). The students submit their solutions via email and all of them send a normal email: ...
M.M's user avatar
  • 868
35 votes
12 answers
7k views

Letting students grade their own homework

I am going to teach a course in algorithms to 2nd-year undergraduates. The grade in this course is composed of 90% exam and 10% homework. The problem is, this year we do not have enough personnel to ...
Erel Segal-Halevi's user avatar
34 votes
15 answers
8k views

Why do instructors not pursue academic integrity violations?

As a Ph.D. student, I have TA'd many classes, and it seems every semester, we have caught at least one person for directly copying homework answers from a previous year's solutions. In most cases (...
Taw's user avatar
  • 2,009
34 votes
5 answers
9k views

Can I request for a change of a musical piece assigned to me due to physical discomfort?

I wonder if this is going to sound silly, I'd rather vent this anonymously online first before taking any action in the real world... I'm doing a Bachelor's Degree in Creative Writing and part of our ...
PaisleyParkIsInYourHeart's user avatar
34 votes
8 answers
5k views

The challenge large language models (LLMs) pose to programming-based homework

I teach courses in which, as homework, students implement data analysis algorithms from scratch, apply them to real and simulated data, and then reflect on the results. As a student in such courses, I ...
Trisoloriansunscreen's user avatar
33 votes
8 answers
7k views

Do professors work through all the homework problems they assign to students?

I'm wondering if this is case especially for time-consuming work like programming problems in computer science spanning several thousand lines of code. Or when a professor teaches a new course they ...
user2562609's user avatar
  • 6,278
33 votes
7 answers
11k views

Is it rude for me to ask professors for assignments in advance of the class starting?

I will be starting my first semester of an online graduate program in ~20 days. Because of my full-time position, I am expecting things to be quite chaotic over the next month or so and I have ...
Clarinetist's user avatar
  • 1,289
31 votes
3 answers
10k views

Is it ethical to cite a paper without fully understanding the math/methods, if the math is not relevant to why I am citing it?

I'm writing an article for a university assignment, and I am essentially looking for sources to support fairly surface level points. Two of the points I am searching for is evidence of diffusion ...
Talos0248's user avatar
  • 437
26 votes
7 answers
5k views

How to deal with fellow grad students who want to copy assignments?

How to deal with fellow students who put little effort on their part while solving assignments, and sometimes ask you to spoon-feed them solutions. Lot of times these students end up scoring more on ...
winawer's user avatar
  • 383
25 votes
9 answers
16k views

I think I may have violated academic integrity last year - what should I do?

I think I may be overthinking things, as I’m known to having a huge guilt complex. As an undergraduate last year, we were given a coding assignment to complete that was worth 15% of our overall mark ...
user avatar
25 votes
11 answers
4k views

How to motivate students to complete low-point homework?

I teach a course consisting of about 50 assignments. These include readings, many short writing assignments, and group projects. Additionally, students complete 2 large projects as the mid-term and ...
Village's user avatar
  • 12.4k
24 votes
6 answers
8k views

What should I do if I regret paying online services for homework during my last semester of college?

During my last semester of college, I was going through many difficulties. I could get into detail about everything I was experiencing and feeling during this stressful time but it would be too long. ...
user avatar
24 votes
9 answers
7k views

Balancing empathy and deferring to the syllabus in teaching responsibilities

Questions of similar topics have been asked here for the situation of instructing a course and here and here for the situation of 'no late work' policies. Additional questions about balancing teaching ...
user avatar
24 votes
3 answers
4k views

Should I delete my question on Stack Exchange to reduce my own plagiarism?

I created a new account and posted a question on Math Stack Exchange asking help for a specific part in an exercise from class. It was duly answered. That question went on to gain a lot of hits and ...
Ahmad Shumayal's user avatar
23 votes
2 answers
2k views

Can we use students' class homework solution for research purpose?

A colleague of mine would like to compare 25+ different Java implementations of the same homework. Is it OK (ethically/legally in the US) to share my students' class homework solutions with him for ...
Franck Dernoncourt's user avatar
22 votes
6 answers
7k views

Is it considered plagiarism when you modify your professor's proof when solving a problem in a homework assignment?

I have a homework wherein a problem is eerily similar to a theorem we have proven and discussed before in class. Since we have a policy that the only concepts and theorems that we can apply to our ...
Eugene's user avatar
  • 229
22 votes
6 answers
10k views

What to do about a student who missed multiple assignments and claims illness?

I am the professor in charge of a first-year course for undergraduates. Recently, I received an e-mail from a student, the general meaning of which is the following: Dear professor, I am sorry ...
I Like to Code's user avatar
22 votes
6 answers
6k views

Balancing between students who do homework and those who do not

This other question is about assigning videos as homework and this one is about what to do when students do not do their homework. However, there is another question to ask which is similar, but I ...
earthling's user avatar
  • 23.1k
22 votes
4 answers
3k views

Is it normal for an instructor to charge students to complete copyrighted homework?

I have a class in a US university that is using a 3rd-party site to charge students a fee to access some of the homework essential to the course. One of the instructors (not mine) holds the copyright ...
user avatar
21 votes
12 answers
6k views

Why are exercises in US university classes graded?

I have been wondering a while why many universities in the US have graded homework in the STEM field. I completely understand the grading for mid-term exames or final exams. In those exams you have to ...
laolux's user avatar
  • 457
21 votes
8 answers
10k views

How to deal with student putting their (home)work on github

While using github for source code is generally something I love to encourage, if a student puts their (computer science) homework there, it's generally easy for others to find and copy - which ...
user2813274's user avatar
  • 1,076
21 votes
5 answers
2k views

Is there any evidence that students are more likely to watch a video over reading homework?

As background, many of my students fall into the "un-prepared" for university category. This has introduced many challenges. Some challenges are easily handled when a student is sincerely interested ...
earthling's user avatar
  • 23.1k
20 votes
8 answers
7k views

Would it be considered cheating to ask for homework help on the internet, if I openly acknowledge the help received?

Say you have a homework assignment and you're struggling with it. You ask a question about some portion of it on a site like physics.stackexchange or math.SE or stackoverflow.com, etc. You then cite ...
AmadeusDrZaius's user avatar
19 votes
7 answers
9k views

Instructor listening in secretly in simulated intake assignment -- allowed? Ethical?

I am in an online, accredited, public, post-baccalaureate degree program. I think it's the first time my instructor is teaching a university course -- at least at this institution. The instructor ...
aparente001's user avatar
  • 38.9k
19 votes
12 answers
10k views

Is it cheating to get help with graded homework?

Suppose a person X asks person Y to explain some material from a course. Person X shows Y some homework that counts for a third of the grade and asks for help. They go through the homework, with Y ...
user2316602's user avatar
19 votes
8 answers
22k views

Is it cheating to use solutions to identical problems from other universities to do my homework?

Is it unethical to refer to solutions to assignment questions that have been asked at other universities before? The questions are the same word for word. EDIT: A lot many answers are very helpful....
Works On Mine's user avatar
18 votes
5 answers
1k views

How to deal with the wealth of "help" available for programming assignments?

I teach programming, and I myself learned mostly self-taught about 30-35 years ago (pre-internet). I learned mostly by thinking things through and trying out alternate solutions. It never occurred to ...
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