Question

Why there are so many nearly identical questions of the form "How do you find the roots, real and imaginary, of `y=...` using the quadratic formula?" dated about 1 year ago?

There's well explained topic about quadratics with questions and answers.
No question of this particular type is answered except the one that I explained.

Answer 1

Because...

Explanation:

...that's more or less how the questions (on this topic) asked by a lot of students using the app looked like.

Every batch of "identical questions" can be traced back to the questions asked using the Socratic app, which the team then transfers to the site for the community to tackle.

Basically--and I'm not going to go into too much detail here--the team used the app as the main source for questions for about 3 years. They collected millions of questions that they used to train the AI on.

Some of these questions have been transferred to the site, some are still waiting to be transferred. In a lot of cases, the team used a single question format for questions that ask for the same thing and require the same concepts to answer--this is especially common in some Math, Physics, and Chem topics.

So, for example, a lot of questions on how to use the quadratic formula to find the roots of a quadratic equation actually came in on the app in this format

How do you find the roots, real and imaginary, of...

so the team used this format to add these questions on the site. This actually helps with how the app delivers content posted on Socratic, as opposed to on other websites.

This is why some topics contain a lot of "identical questions" that differ only in parameters.

So, long story short, the questions that appear to be identical are part of these batches of questions that were asked using the app and transferred to the site.

Anyway, chances are that the team will stop doing this at some point because let's be honest, having a lot of identical questions floating around is really not a good look for the site, to say the least :D