Trailhead and Exam Preparation questions

Question

We seem to be having a large number of questions lately on Trailhead superbadges (a new one just came out), as well as on certification exam preparation.

These topics have been discussed on Meta before (see for example Trailhead one, Trailhead two, and a brief discussion on certification.

Our Help Center draws a pretty clear line on Trailhead questions:

Trailhead: Questions asking for assistance with finding resources to answer specific Trailhead Questions or for help resolving issues with Trailhead DE Orgs are welcome. Questions asking for a direct answer to a Trailhead Question are not acceptable and will be deleted.

Trailhead is intended to demonstrate your capabilities on an independent basis. As a Community SF.SE wants to demonstrate its support for the purity of that cause by not interfering with your personal learning experience.

I read this as a strengthened commitment to the usual question standards - that is, show your research, ask a detailed, specific question, and don't seek to have others do your work for you.

The injunction to locate resources, I think, is a helpful one, as distinguished from sharing solutions to Trailhead validations, which have limited general value to the community as technical knowledge.

I don't believe we have similar language shown for exam-related questions, but I'd advocate for applying an even more stringent version of the same standards. I don't think it's healthy for our community to support users posting exam questions and asking to be led through them, have their answers confirmed, or have explanations of mislead answers provided. One representative example is this question.

These types of questions don't tend to produce technical answers or referrals to resources, but tend more to be focused on interpretation of the question text itself. Additionally, since we are not in a position to distinguish between real exam questions and mock questions, I think we blur lines when we allow this content to be posted.

Am I being too stringent here? How hard a line should we draw on these types of questions?

Answer 1

I'll throw in my two cents here, as I end up ultimately making a lot of these decisions.

Any exam dumps I see will be deleted post haste.

• As mentioned here, sharing any content contained in a certification exam may be grounds for revocation of said certification.
• Personally, I feel that if I were to vote not to delete such questions, I would be "assisting others in completing a certification exam."
• Even if I weren't contractually obligated, I would find that such dumps cheapen the meaning of any certifications obtained.
• Additionally, these questions are typically extremely lazy and demonstrate lack of research, so even if Salesforce offered a ringing endorsement of such dumps, these questions would violate our quality standards and be subject to deletion anyway.

As for Trailhead questions, the line I draw is when parts of the approach are included in the question or answer.

• If you post 90% of the code required to complete a module, I will delete that post.
• If you post a question which does not contain any aspect of the solution but is clearly asking for such, I may also delete.
• If you post a question which could be answered with a solution dump, but could also be answered by "teaching a man to fish", then I will probably leave it be.
• If you ask a question where a specific aspect of the challenge seems like it should work and you are not sure why it doesn't, I will almost certainly leave it be.

Answer 2

Trailhead Questions

I agree for the most part. Trailhead questions, mostly related to superbadges, have started to become increasingly common. In the past, while flagging questions of this sort, It had been suggested by a moderator that the questions that are more-less on topic, (OP had demonstrated some research effort and was tackling a specific issue) could remain on the forum, however, any reference to trailhead and/or superbadges should be removed. (which is fair imo)

However, most users that post these kinds of questions are clearly looking for someone to provide them an answer to a certain step and those that are code related, tend to dump their whole components asking for some kind of review (which imo is balantly off topic).

Exam Prep Questions

As per the Multiple choice questions (examp prep questions or not) that have been posted, I personally dont believe they belong on this site, but since it is not clear, I simply tend to ignore them.

I believe it is a good idea to have somethign similar for multiple choice questions under What topics can I ask about here? in the help center.