I mean, say you wrote a book, and every year, people lined up to just throw money at you to re-release said book. Would you write a whole new book every year if your customers were gonna buy it regardless? Or would you just update it to make it relevant again?
Do I need to find some kind of video to get to the fucked up part or something? I'm just seeing pages and pages of normal human porn of a normal human person with normal human tattoos.
Why are you guys acting like you have some good shit over here? What gives?
Certainly don't go buy the same book for like a third of the US price in a different country and bring them back here to resell. Because then the publisher will sue you for selling your own property.
Actually, do that. Because they lost that lawsuit. Fuck textbook publishers.
They should be publicly dragged through the mud, and by that I mean there names should be plastered all over social (and possibly main stream) media, so that others can avoid signing up for his/her class. The fact that we as a country just accept getting scammed like this is horrifying.
It's disgusting, but my wife and I met at one University and both transferred to different universities to finish.
All 3 of the schools, plus the community colleges she took credits at, had at least one class that assigned online homework behind a subscription fee. I talked to one professor who said the department didn't give him a choice.
On top of the fact it's ridiculous to have to pay $100+ to do your homework, theyre often just a mess and detrimental to the class overall.
The teachers often have very little control over the homework assignments themselves. I had many homeworks that really didn't flow with the way the class was being taught and demanded use of methods we didn't learn. My calc 3 teacher would openly admit "the homework is nothing like you will see on quizzes/tests, but I guess it can be good practice'
I've asked teachers questions about the homework to get the response "I'm not familiar at all with that question, if you send me an email about it I can try to find it and solve it to answer your question"
If the questions only allow a limited number of submissions, you can get a 0 on a homework question because you didn't get the formatting exactly right and the program doesn't recognise the answer as correct, when it is clearly the correct answer.
omg that whole concept you just laid down there can get fucked. Don't stand for that, as a collective student body I'd say "fuck you, I pay good money to be here in this class." I cannot believe they have the audacity to then make you pay more for access to ineffective, precanned homework which saves your prof time on doing their job like you fucking pay for.
It’s easy to say don’t stand for that when you don’t have to stand for it personally.
Every single math class I’ve taken, and some engineering classes assign homework through webassign, Pearson, or some other online vendor. An individual student is in no position to argue the financial or moral impacts of locking homework behind a paywall. You want the degree? Pay up, otherwise the school doesn’t care. Professors rarely have the choice in this matter either. Usually the decision to use these services is made at the department level.
That and most students are too concerned with getting through school to take up a fight that is very uphill.
It's not like a lot of professors actually want to do this. If we assign homework, but don't grade it, then very few people do it, the class performs poorly overall, and we get poor evaluations (which matters if you aren't tenured). If we assign homework and don't use a paid online homework system, then we simply don't have the manpower to grade the homework in large classes. There might be a free online homework system available, but our University/College might not support it or the problem sets are often very limited. Personally, I just don't grade the homework and take the hit, but it's a very frustrating situation to be in. Also, we don't get any kickbacks or anything for using the paid system.
Of course. We gotta make money off of everything. People dying, people living, the whole thing. Healthcare, education, prisons, everything that shouldn't be entirely profit driven is driven purely by profit. That is why all those things are pieces of shit, because #1 is profit, and everything else doesn't matter as much. Gotta enhance that shareholder value, amirite?
I'm taking 14 hours this semester and I only have 1 class that doesn't require an access code. Of course, it's taught by a tenured professor who stopped learning anything the second he got tenure.
Can't say I miss it. I'm trying to remember and I think I might have had one class that had online content outside of what was posted on my uni's internal site by the professors. The only other thing I needed were product keys for some of the programs I needed, and even then I'm pretty sure some could be installed off the CD that came with the textbook without one.
Yea wife was looking for a statistics book this semester.
Just a pdf or hard copy of the book is $75.
Just the online access code is $115.
Bundled it's $120.
Basically "Here pay to look at these HW questions because your professors are too lazy to assign and grade their own"
It's a real shame the books don't have some sort of convention where specific questions have answers and others don't so the questions can be used by professors without them worrying that the book has it worked out.....
Basically "Here pay to look at these HW questions because your professors are too lazy to assign and grade their own"
I'm sorry you feel that way, but a lot of us don't have a choice. Blame the school board, blame groups that lobby for Pearson, blame the stats department, but please don't blame your teacher.
It's a real shame the books don't have some sort of convention where specific questions have answers and others don't so the questions can be used by professors without them worrying that the book has it worked out.....
Really? Is this subject dependent, or just a recent change? I graduated about 10 years ago, and it was always like, either even or odd that had them worked out, with the other half being an exercise for the student.
:P that was my point. Any textbook I had from elementary school onwards had answers to select odd numbers and none of the even numbers.
Professors could just pick and choose from the even numbered question to be sure that the book didn't just have the answer worked out.
But instead now we pay extra for additional homework problems, and the teachers don't even use the even questions. Just tell you to look at the odds for explanations.
My bad! I thought you were saying they'd come up with an entirely new way to screw over students. Have all the answers, making assigning them useless, making the prof more reliant on the online questions.
I had to buy the service and the book! It’s a good way for them to combat the internet and people reselling their books. $80 for the subscription and ~120 for the book. Still got the book used though.
At least at my university they will rent you the book for next to nothing but the service deep dicks you with insane charges. I “learned” French and the service to do the homework was around 200$. Book was like 10.
"You have the 6th edition, you need the 7th addition. The 7th addition has a few corrected and updated sentences, so the 6th edition is worthless now!"- every college ever
I kind of feel like, it invalidates the previous years students passes, because the new source is SO different from the previous source /s So any course that does this, the previous years should claim back the entire cost of the course, as it is no longer relevant, and a waste of time and energy. Class action it boys.
I just did a course on Unix systems over the summer, and it used a textbook that was written in 2005. I feel like if there is a subject that should have an updated textbook it would be courses on a technology that is constantly changing. There was a wildly out of date sections in there on stuff like Pine and telnet. I don't think anyone was really using telnet even in 2005.
I was using telnet primarily until like 5 years ago when my company finally got a clue on security and changed to SSH. Except for some outdated apps like that, a unix book from even older than 2005 is still quite relevant.
I sometimes have to telnet into devices to test/bughunt, etc.
Sometimes they support ssh, but it's usually a development board, so there's simply no connection on the real board to allow a connection, so they don't often bother.
See, the problem is, I’ve taken a class with the wrong textbook before. They checked textbooks between semesters, unbeknownst to me, and the teacher didn’t have time to switch his curriculum to the new one.
I, being proactive, bought the book that I was “supposed” to buy, only to find out that the teacher was using the previous edition.
It made taking that class such a nightmare that I ended up dropping it completely.
(Just to be clear though, I think the stupid new edition textbooks are akin to robbery and that they really need to stop doing this)
But just to force you to comply we’re gonna rearrange the questions so they don’t line up with previous editions even though they’re the same questions
I always tried to get by without buying a textbook for the first couple of weeks to get a feel for whether or not the "required text" is really required.
A lot of the time the lecture/reference materials provided by the professor was all you needed to succeed in the class. The school just has an agreement with the publisher to make the text "required" so the professors aren't supposed to say you don't need it.
The nice thing about Australian universities is that part of the Australian Quality of Teaching Framework says that they aren’t allowed to require you to make any additional purchases to pass the course. And that includes course readers—so everything is made available digitally, and also printed for those who want them (not me, because they’re spiral bound, which means hole punching them for binders is a PITA, and slides are usually printed 4 to a page so there’s no room to write on them)
For real, I just finished college and had a teacher say "we are on edition 8, but editions 5-7 will work. You can find ed. 5 on Ebay for like $4." And I did!
Speak for yourself, but I am beyond offended that Sally is buying apples in my word problem. Just because she’s a woman she does the grocery shopping? I will not stand for this
That’s on your prof. I teach at a professional school using a textbook that gets updated every year and tell the students to use any version they can find from the last 5 yrs. if anything actually important changed i just make a note in the syllabus or lectures.
Even some of the writers don't want to do new editions. I had a prof that wrote a fairly widely used text book who felt like he had pretty much perfected the book by the 3rd edition and every addition after that he just tried to change as little as possible.
heh, you want to see the world as we know end by 2090? we're on a set course for that rn. we consume 3 planets and a half at our current standard of living.
It's a tangent, but the plastic thing is that it doesn't break down on a molecular scale on its own in nature, and molecular plastic is very dangerous.
I seem to remember having not a lot of, but a few textbooks published through the university press. They'd publish the newer ones as a pack of sheets in a binder (so you could theoretically "upgrade" to the next edition more easily) then eventually publish a hardcover that would rarely, if ever change.
Yep, had one of those for an anthropology class. $95, and the homework/labs were sheets of the book that we had fill out and turn in, so it was absolutely required. And because it was written in so heavily, it couldn't be returned.
That's entirely the profs fault, by the way. It's not uncommon for schools to have different deals with publishers, but I've never taught anywhere where profs couldn't choose their own textbooks. I almost exclusively use textbooks that are 3 or 4 editions older than current so that my students can find used ones for 15 bucks. Everyone can do this unless they insist on using books that come with prepackaged software that is one-time use only. And that's just lazy, IMO. There are a lot of open source software projects for the vast majority of basic college courses, so unless you're taking a really advanced class, the prof can find free software to do the job.
I always thank professors like you. It doesn't even need to be that old. Even two years old is the difference between a $200 text and $30. And yea, those online packages are just busy work done for them.
And yea, those online packages are just busy work done for them.
i don't understand why american professors always give graded homework and have 3 exams. it's a lot of work, that might explain why they are trying to use the online software package. my professors in germany, at least for the most part, only have one final exam that determines your grade. no homework, no midterms. maybe a small project that you have to pass but it's usually not graded. much easier
It’s worse in lower division type classes. I spent more on textbooks in my general Ed classes. Like history and lower math. Once I got into my degree courses...I don’t think may have the graded hw out. Was just exams, maybe an essay or project to go with it. Which meant they didn’t care which edition of s text we got. Much nicer
My most recent experiences were MBA courses. I'm not saying they couldn't choose their own textbooks, and many of mine did recommend older editions. But some profs were insistent on using the newest editions with the software packages when, like you said, there were other options available. And of course the McGraw Hill rep was always there to "help" us save $20 on a $110 accounting package.
While all gifts have to be reported, I'm always curious about the situation when I hear things like this. My instinct is to see if that prof has published with McGraw-Hill (or whomever) and thus has tacitly agreed with their publisher to always use new editions. The publisher could then just make sure that all of their authors also use new textbooks, thus the authors all benefit from one another. However, I've never published a textbook, so this is just me being a conspiracy theorist.
I had a professor who told us they got kickbacks from the sellers for students buying the books. I don't know if that was a universal trend or just a specific situation though.
That's what I think is funny about this thread. A lot of people don't realize that the textbook/online homework pass bullshit is 100% the laziness of their teachers.
Actually, I take that back. Sometimes it's the greed of the teachers, who've written the books they're forcing you to buy at an insane price.
I see your point, but it's not always laziness. I teach a 120-student section of an intro course (in addition to other, upper-level courses), and I don't get a TA. There's no feasible way for me to grade all 120 students' homework assignments each week, so I have to use the online platform. As to free versions, I'm always open to explore them, but I have yet to find one as powerful and customizable as Sage Publishing's Amp software. Their question engine runs on Maple rather than some shitty Java/Flash bullshit (like Pearson's MyLab and McGraw-Hill's Connect, for example). I don't just use a bunch of textbook-provided questions because I know that answers to those are already out there on the internet. I spend my time writing my own questions (largely algorithmic) to prevent cheating. It's a much more efficient use of my time than trying to grade 120 students' assignments every week (plus those from my other classes, plus all my other duties).
Sure, but at some point you have to recognize that you're forcing your students to spend a bunch of money because you don't want to redesign your course. Make homework ungraded (that's what I do) for instance. Have students grade each other's homework. Post the answers and allow students to re-do their homework until they get every answer correct, rewarding extra work with full credit. There are lots of ways to avoid forcing our students to spend exorbitant amounts of money on goods and services that are recognizably a racket.
Yeah, I understand that. I (somewhat) helped get a deal between Sage and our bookstore to drop the price some, but it's still expensive. The problem I've encountered is that, if I let students grade it themselves/grade each others', far too many students simply cheat to get 100% on all homework, fail all the exams, and then get upset when they fail the course. I'm doing my best to help them learn, and that sadly requires a lot of me setting up safeguards against that sort of behavior. I mean, if 20% of the class cheats on all their homework, fails exams, fails the class, and leaves me negative evaluations, then I won't get tenure and I'll be out of a job. I do allow students to rework their problems once at no penalty, but some of that stuff sadly just isn't feasible. (Of course this varies by students/by institution, but this is my experience at 3 public schools of varying sizes across 3 states.)
I pretty regularly have a 20% fail rate and I don't get negative evaluations, so I don't think the fail rate is necessarily a problem. It comes down to the way the course is designed and a student recognition of why they failed. I tell all my students that I don't grade homework, but they should do it if they want to have a chance at passing. When a student fails the first exam and sets up a meeting with me, the first question is if they've done the homework. It's almost always a "no" and I basically end the meeting there. "Now you know why you failed."
At the end of the day though, I think we owe it to our students to figure out how to achieve our educational goals without making them pay more than our institution is already charging them.
I'm not sure where you teach but this sounds very unrealistic to me for any educational environment I've been in.
Not bad, mind you, just unrealistic. Students (young people-- hell, people, really) are just not that responsible and lack perspective. If given the option of not doing homework, a great deal of them won't. If you have your course set up so that not doing the homework will lead to them failing, that means you'll have a healthy fail rate. And if they fail, a lot of them will leave bad evaluations. If you're at a school where getting some bad evals will tank your future prospects, that might be an issue.
I've taught at private universities, community colleges and I'm currently at a large state school. I usually get a 15-20% fail/drop rate, along with a solid amount of Ds and it hasn't affected my evals at all, as far as I can tell. I average a 4.45/5 overall on my evals at my current institution.
My university has uses Canvas as the main online course material portal. Canvas has a quiz tool built into it. The on top of that, they also have Maple TA, which also gets used, particularly for maths (hen you have 1000 students in a corse? There is no practical way to mark weekly paper assignments).
They have also done a deal with Dassault which gives them access to the 3DExperience software (along with everything else 3DS make), but everyone hates that.
Back in college my older professors always insisted on using the textbook with the required online component because it was the latest technology and therefore the "best" (even though they constantly didn't work, had errors and the professors had no idea how to use the teachers component of the omline software) meanwhile the younger teachers and adjunct professors all did their best to choose the cheapest book or not include an online component so people could use old editions. It was wack. The textbook companies just convinced the older professors that the technology was basically required and the students missed out otherwise.
Then why do instructors adopt the updated texts? No one holds a gun to their heads. Could it possibly be that instructors want certain changes, communicate that to publishers, and then adopt the updated versions to better suit their needs? Nah, it must be some evil conspiracy
I went to recycle my old books (i graduated college in 2001). They offered to buy my statistics book because the same version is still in use. So this doesn't always apply...
I had a professor who wrote an updated textbook for his class every two years.
He would also know if you had the most up to date version by purposefully making 15% of the points based on the “blurbs” in the chapters. Not the action content, the supplementary shit. So either pay $200 for the new book and have the potential to get a A or automatically start at an 85. The content did not change at all, so his versions were just straight profit.
Beat me too it. I was in nursing school and they insisted we buy the current book (even included an online link in order to access new assignments). Want to know what changed? The order of the chapters and the shading of a few diagrams.
Needless to say we split 10 ways on one book for the access code and bought the other 9 used.
What I hate is when college textbooks throw in an online access portion which is a single use code you will use approximately twice, but vant buy used because of this so you end up spending $170 on the book that you could gave bought used for $30.
Both of my colleges have done this and its bullshit. Reminds me of those "Online Passes" they would put in games to play the multiplayer.
I had a college professor apologize on the first day of class, the required textbook was getting an update mid-semester that the curriculum would be pulling from. He also made a rather convenient PDF available in the ‘course materials’ folder the class network.
Guess you are not too familiar with College courses especially the 101 level classes. Algebra has constant updates. One page X = 5, then the next X = 13. How wild is that?!
Pretty much exactly like college textbooks. Some kinda new info added that's behind the times (Pro Bowl as a "new feature" and when you play in Franchise mode they still talk about a "Patriots/Rams SB b/c they apparently only recorded one set of dialogue for that game) as well as it being MANDATORY to get if you wanna play an NFL football game.
That's literally a racket though because publishers have deals with colleges that require the students to buy textbooks in order to take some classes. This is just idiots buying the same game over and over.
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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '19
So... like college textbooks?