Is There Such Thing As A Bad Question?
05 Sep 2018
Now, in some part of our lives, we have asked ourselves “is this a dumb question?” Hoping that when we ask our teachers or our professors, they don’t look at us with the expression that the answer to our question is obvious. This doesn’t mean that it was a “dumb” question it could have been a really good one, but it is us doubting that our question has significance to the topic. We were never really taught in school what a good question could be like, we would just assume that the answer cannot be obvious or we’re taught the saying “there is no such thing as a dumb question”. With this saying it created an idea that we should be inquisitive people, we should ask as many questions as we can so that we are able to learn and understand the answers to our questions.
This is can be true if the questions we are asking are smart questions, “what is a smart question?” A smart question has various attributes, that can catch the people’s attention and make them interested in answering the question. With computer science, we have all had our fair share of looking up or posting questions into the website, Stack Overflow. However, some people in this field who are newcomers(not trying to discourage any new programmers) do post some questions that can be simple enough to look up and they won’t have to post it in Stack Overflow. Users that post smart questions can be really interesting and can have an effect on the community to try and help this person find their answer.
An example of a smart question can be seen here. The question that is shown, is precise and effectively explains the type of problem they have within the question. This makes it easier to comprehend the problem before you click to see more detail. The user then goes on to inform the reader what they’re trying to achieve when the problem is solved(in this case they’re looking for an efficient way for findall). They then proceed to present some of their code so that the reader is able to help and adjust the code so that they answer their question. Now some people might think that Stack Overflow must have a lot of good questions people ask, well sometimes users ask simple questions that can be found in Google.
Take a look at this question here, now I’m not saying that this is a bad question, but for this type of website, you could consider it to be a “not so smart” question. This is only due to it being simple enough where the user could have searched up the question into Google and find results. However, I do have to say that some redeeming parts of this question were how short and concise their question was, not many people are able to do this, sometimes the question is too long and confusing to understand, which makes readers not want to look at it and this decreases the users chance of getting it answered. Now there is no such thing as a perfect question nor is there such thing as a terrible question, it’s just the difficulty of the question that makes it simple or difficult.