That people would come to MATLAB Answers first, before reading and attempting themselves, wasn't something that occurred to me. Perhaps they're in some kind of rush.
Having answered... several... questions here, I can unfortunately report that rather a lot of people come here and post their homework assignments without even asking a question, let alone saying anything about what aspect it is they would like assistance with.
We get called... unpleasant things... by people whom we refuse to write complete honors projects for... seldom with more than 5 days notice before it is due. And I do mean complete -- documentation and all, with the person contributing little more than the general topic of the question, and providing no ideas. Some of them specifically say that they want us to invent new techniques that haven't been published before.
We get some many questions where the person does not tell us anything about what they have tried, that we just throw a FAQ at a lot of questions, cf . - a lot of people have not tried anything and do not seem to have any intention of trying anything. Some of them have said explicitly that there is no point in them bothering to do any part of the question when they can just post the question and someone will (or at least might) answer it for them.
- a lot of people have no idea how to approach the question. Some of them it is because they do not understand much of anything about the application topic; others of them it is because they are quite weak on programming. The people who do not understand the application topic... they tend to hope that we will, in a few paragraphs, explain to them what they did not understand from a month or more of university-level lectures.
- It is not uncommon for people who are struggling to understand a topic, to believe that what they really need to understand the topic, is for us to post a complete solution to that particular assignment. Not for us to explain concepts and show examples to work through the ideas to provide the basis for them putting the last parts together themselves, but instead for us to solve the whole thing. The claim being that at after having seen it all worked out, that they will understand it well enough to be able to go away and write their own version without copying ours. We have... doubts.
Our experience has, by and large, been that the people with experience who have taken the time to read through past material, tend to start by explaining why the previous material does not meet their needs.
