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When I was at Oregon State (a couple years ago), all my math and econ classes used "My{Math,Econ}Lab" as homework. Meaning, if you chose not to or could not pay
by darkengine 9y ago
When I was at Oregon State (a couple years ago), all my math and econ classes used "My{Math,Econ}Lab" as homework. Meaning, if you chose not to or could not pay for Pearson's infamous Flash-based "web" app (which I had to spin up a Windows VM to run), you could not pass the class.
It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework.
- Cerium 9y agoAt San Jose State we used "Mastering Physics" which we could only purchase a licence to by buying a new unopened textbook. It was an infuriating piece of software that would mark your answers completely wrong unless they were EXACTLY right.
- neuromantik8086 9y agoIf they aren't exactly right, how can you claim to be a physics master though?
- ambicapter 9y agoBecause "Mastering Physics" doesn't know jack shit about being a "physics master" by any stretch of the imagination.
- throwaway18917 9y agoI... I think it was a joke.
- neuromantik8086 9y agoYou are a Humor Master!
- aphextron 9y agoWhat would you say about your experience with SJSU engineering in general? It's one of my top 5 schools right now.
- prklmn 9y agoI just graduated from a very large university and the number of professors assigning homework this way was alarming. With prerecorded video lectures, assigning homework like this, and using questions from test banks for tests, professors are getting paid to do next to nothing.
- logfromblammo 9y agoTo be fair, temporary adjuncts are being paid next to nothing. The full professors don't have any such excuse, though.
- Jtsummers 9y agoThe full professors at many large universities have to split their time between research and teaching. Both of which can be full-time jobs on their own. The consequence is that many great researchers are mediocre teachers (or only good for teaching smaller courses in their specialty), and many great teachers abandon the time needed for research (or aren't good researchers) which doesn't bring money and prestige to the school. So they get booted. You're left with underpaid adjuncts, under qualified TAs, and research professors that don't want to teach another-goddamned-section of Calculus 1 (as one of my profs referred to it).
- neuromantik8086 9y agoNot to mention that "research" can be further split into myriad activities that take up substantial amounts of time. Personally, I'd contend that writing grants and writing scientific code could also constitute full-time jobs (this might explain why a lot of scientific code is spaghetti; most researchers have to balance coding with publishing- and coding loses in this battle). Regardless of how many full-time jobs the modern researcher is expected to perform, the end result is the same: lower quality science furnished by 80 hour weeks and emotionally wrecked postdocs.
- killjoywashere 9y ago
- koolba 9y agoThe truly savvy professors don't even take the token bribes / hand outs from the publishers. They'll have their own "custom text book" for a class and charge students $X for xeroxed copy of the it. The savviest rotate the problems from semester to semester to ensure zero resale value.
- sharkweek 9y agoMy Economics professor famously used to release a new version of his textbook every year at my school. I suppose recognizing the forces at hand, he was making the most rational decision in doing so.
- nradov 9y agoMy Biology professor wrote the textbook he used in his class. And on the first day of class he gave each student who had purchased a new copy a cash refund on his author's royalty.
- sidrajaram 9y agoThat must've amounted to several tens of cents (per book) on the $200 price tag.
- TallGuyShort 9y agoAnd did he give you a speech about how he was doing you a favor because eliminating the resale market lowered the original price? Mine did.
- fotbr 9y agoMine did that as well. He also offered unlimited extra credit at the rate of 5pts per error found. A small group of us got together that first evening and found enough typos, spelling and punctuation errors that we all passed the class with a high "A" without needing to do anything else. He wasn't happy about it, and I think he later dropped the "unlimited" part. He was less upset when most of us went to class anyway -- The way I saw it, I paid for the class, even if I didn't have to worry about doing the work for a grade, I still wanted to learn something.
- LeeHwang 9y agoWow, It seems like we already have the technology ready to go to create fast track online programs. Why don't we just allow Pearson to bypass universities altogether and award degrees for cheaper than the 40,000 current universities cost.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoPearson isn't accredited. ;)
- theseatoms 9y agoI think that's what GP is suggesting we change.
- thaumasiotes 9y agoI hope not. I'd rather rethink the idea of accreditation.
- LeeHwang 9y agoWhy? If they are already writing the curriculum,lectures labs/homework and Professors are justing using that material and forcing kids to pay for it. Why don't we just cut out the extremely expensive middlemen, universities and professors ?
- Larrikin 9y agoI think his point was that universities that are "teaching" like this shouldn't be accredited
- dubya 9y agoI don't think Pearson has such materials for upper level courses. They could probably figure out a way to be contractors for the courses no on wants to teach though, if they can find a way to work for less than lecturers do.
- WoodenChair 9y ago> It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework. Isn't a publisher a third-party for-profit company? If you need to buy a book for a class to read and do homework in order to pass the class, that's okay right? So, why is it wrong to expect someone to do the same thing digitally?
- darkengine 9y agoBooks can be shared in study groups, lent between students, checked out from a campus library, bought and sold between terms, and photocopied. Much the same could be done for a DRM-free PDF. The only way to complete MyMathLab homework is to pay out for a poorly-written Flash app.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ljk 9y agotextbooks don't disappear after one semester
- nhebb 9y agoI graduated from Oregon State in '92. The less-tech predecessor to this process was that they would sell homework packets at Kinko's for $20-30. I've often wondered whether a legal case could be made against universities for price gouging.
- manyxcxi 9y agoOregon State '05, they were charging $60 for the Kinko's packets for my various math and engineering classes. The best was the $150 I had to pay for a 'pre-print' loosely bound CS 'textbook' that one of my professors co-authored. Thank goodness it was only a 200 level class and I was already well beyond it. It was a terrible book and a rough class.
- thearn4 9y agoI taught a calculus class the the department had mandated be managed with MyMathLab. There is a kernel of a good idea in these subject-specific course content management systems, key among them is they give a reasonable way to actually manage homework for large course sections. I tended to grade HW very lightly, I just want them to have their head in the space a small bit every few days, and MML was a way to make that manageable for a section of 70+ students without losing my mind. But the execution is so half-assed that it not only turns off students from the platform, but it runs the risk of turning them off to the actual subject matter as well. The whole thing had the stench of static requirements doc to a sub-contractor to a sub-contractor development pipeline with little to no end-user (that is, students, not department administrators) feedback in the development cycle. It's a bit like self-driving cars in a way. The execution is everything, and the half-way hybridized situation is the most dangerous for the end-user. And the missed execution to me smells a bit like an arms race between Pearson, Wiley, etc. to get their platforms out and entrenched with individual departments before each other.
- foota 9y agoMy abstract algebra course is using a system called mathweb currently, it works reasonably well.
- cmurf 9y agoYay capitalism. Everything is a product or service, everything should have a profit motive, there is no such thing as a right to education, health care, justice, you only get what you can pay for, or are entitled to by the superiority of your family name and blood line. The state has no business here. That is exactly what this is. Old fashioned conservatism.
- thomastjeffery 9y agoMy best math class was with a professor who did not use a textbook at all. He created ~5-10 problem long homework using a pdf we could easily get from his page on the school's website. The focus universities have on homework is absurd. If you want to practice 100+ math problems, you can invent them yourself, or even find plenty on the internet. It only takes one or two problems to show that the student understands the subject matter. Any more required homework is a waste of everyone's resources.
- Gibbon1 9y agoI wonder what my old college is doing now, when I went the engineering and math departments had banned scantrons and everything was hand graded.
- Theodores 9y agoMandatory textbooks that happened to be authored by the professor or department head also had a variant - the collaboration work of different authors writing on some topic together. At my university there were campuses hundreds of miles away from each other so I imagine the department also had to pay for the travel and other arrangements needed to get these collaborative textbooks written. One of these textbooks that I had to buy for the usual massive price was one of the collaborative efforts. However, for the purposes of the degree at the campus I was on, only needed the bits written by our head of department were needed for the syllabus, the rest of it was out of scope. To use a software analogy it was like buying the student version of MS Office when you only needed Word and not the other bits of the bundle. That would mean carrying 43 discs around instead of just the 7 discs around. So you see the problem of carrying a huge textbook up and down a hill every day. I never understood why the lecturers did not produce, update and polish proper course materials that did not require outside materials except for pure reference. They had expectations on us to do homework but I wasn't seeing the results of theirs.
- remarkEon 9y agoHad that same bullshit last year, in a graduate level Econ class for running market simulations. The professor readily acknowledged this was insane, but the response was basically "this is the way it's been, we always have to buy from this vendor."
- wdr1 9y ago> It really astounded me that we had to pay a third-party for-profit company to get access to our homework. I went to undergrad in the 90s & it was true for me then as well. Most textbook companies are for-profit, and I needed the texts to complete the assignments.