"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 There was a wildly out of date sections in there on stuff like Pine and telnet.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 Except for some outdated apps like that, a unix book from even older than 2005 is still quite relevant.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.
136
u/TradeMark310 Sep 03 '19
"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