Do Your Own Homework   

That pride and enthusiasm will quickly turn to resentment, however, if it appears that you are cutting and pasting questions straight from a test or homework assignment into your post (Believe it or not, we've even had people paste multiple choice questions in their posts).

Often the best homework questions are not easily answered with one or two sentences. Some don't really have a single, correct answer. Even if there is a single correct answer, often the purpose of a question is not the final answer, but getting you to think for yourself and do the work to obtain an answer. People are more likely to understand things, and remember them, when they workd the details out for themselves. Your teacher probably spent a great deal of time, wording the question in just such a way that answering it would take a lot of reading, research, and work. The benefit to you is not in knowing the answer but in having done the reading and work to get a firm understanding of the underlying concepts for the given technology.

By pasting the question into Java Ranch in hopes of getting your work done for you, quickly and easily, you not only cheat yourself out of an education but you insult those who have already put in the work required to understand this material.

This is not to say that Java Ranch isn't a great resource for students. If you're struggling with a concept, by all means ask. But... Be prepared to show that you've worked on the problem yourself. Take the time to ShowSomeEffort. Tell us what you've read, what searches you've already performed (with keywords if possible). If you've tried writing some code to help understand the issue, post it.

See: TellTheDetails, NotACodeMill, SearchingForSolutionsHasRepercussions