Inspired by talking to a fellow Academia user at SciPy:
Every SE site seems to have a particular genre of questions that are essentially unanswerable. I've come to believe that the questions we get wherein someone asks, with an accompany tale of their career, coursework to date, interests, etc. "How do get into a top program in X" or "Should I apply to the University of Y".
There questions have, in my mind, three problems:
- Many are too specific - they only generalize to someone specific.
- They're also too broad, because they're not actually asking an actionable question.
- They're inherently unanswerable. The people who know (the admission committee of University of X's Department of Y) won't answer, and no one else knows.
While these get closed fairly frequently, should we consider adding language discouraging these types of questions in the FAQ?