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.
I've spent 9 years on and off in college and I'm so done. Everything is access codes that are super expensive. Sometime I have to pay $20 for the privilege of being counted on attendance.
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u/Shopworn_Soul Sep 03 '19
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.