19 ms·

Not totally unrelated: Pearson is a piece of trash company. They sell very overpriced textbooks and always use DRM in online copies. They lobby for standardized

by truth_ 5y ago

Not totally unrelated: Pearson is a piece of trash company. They sell very overpriced textbooks and always use DRM in online copies. They lobby for standardized tests in states and get them mandated. Students are put through them. And guess who provides the certificate required by teachers to evaluate those exam copies? Yes, Pearson. And they make a ton of money. Please watch this talk for more context (even if you don't like TED talks): https://youtu.be/BnC6IABJXOI https://youtu.be/BnC6IABJXOI

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago
> very overpriced textbooks Not just way overpriced, the few Pearson books I happen to own are of an alarmingly low quality. The pages of a phone book look and feel like premium paper compared to my copy of Blitzer's College Algebra.
- vector_spaces 5y ago
  Not to mention some of them have wonderful anti-features, such as physical books that have a handful of online-only chapters that you can only access if you buy the textbook new, thereby reducing the value of used copies.
  - generationP 5y ago
    You'll then appreciate the "Pearson New International Editions" (with a chapter and the preface removed to tank the resale value).
    - vector_spaces 5y ago
      Oh yeah, those are all a real hoot with the lovely almost see-through paper and shoddy binding and printing errors like upside down pages.
shakaijin 5y ago
Also, they release new versions of books all the time and force their use in classes, making it impossible to use 2nd hand textbooks in a lot of cases. *I mean, come on. How of ten do fundamental physics change... Pearson is a company that should not exist.
- patmorgan23 5y ago
  Plugging open source text books. There are many high quality option out there that are openly licensed. Openstax is a project by Rice University that has textbooks for most gen ed courses. openstax.org/
  - harikb 5y ago
    Thanks for the link. Didn’t know. Btw, this is why they lobby for state mandates. A single teacher cannot make an exception Situation in private school is not better. A prominent private high school in Bay Area, made me run around like a crazy man scavenging used books from all over the place because the recommended books were out of stock. They won’t publish the exact book name until after classes begin in August and apparently varies by teacher by year. This is after paying $$$ fees equivalent to buying a new car. Next year I pulled my kid out of it.
    - legerdemain 5y ago
      Was this at Harker? I bet it was Harker.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - smolder 5y ago
      I know of a company that had a pretty large set of creative commons licensed learning materials they put together, along with tools to customize lesson plans and rearrange/edit material, make online quizzes, etc. It was offered as a good low cost digital replacement to traditional textbooks, aimed at colleges. Follett, the #1 textbook distributor (which interestingly has common roots with Barnes and Noble) bought the company. Shortly thereafter, the product mentioned was discontinued. The professors that had adopted it, I assume, were somewhat inconvenienced.
shirleyquirk 5y ago
to start with I couldn't get over the presenter's poetry slam style but what made me cry serious salty f*ing tears was his explication of how inequality impacts day to day learning. as in hunger. literal, biological hunger the day before your standardized tests. stresses you had no input into and should have no bearing on your future.
ur-whale 5y ago
libgen ftw
modin 5y ago
OT but is there a reason one would not like TED talks? Your parenthesis made me feel it could be controversial (comparable to social media).
- matsemann 5y ago
  TEDx talks (like the linked one is) are not proper TED talks, there are affiliated events all over hosting them. While there are many good TEDx talks, many of them aren't what you would expect when hearing the TED name. Especially bad is it that some TEDx events let quacks talk, which gives them a kind of legitimacy based on TED's reputation even though they're saying bullshit. Of course, this commingling has also tainted TED's brand. The other thing is that most TED talks follow a certain formula. They do because it works, but watching many of them it sticks out and can be a bit annoying. There's probably a meta TED talk pointing out this somewhere.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Indeed: https://youtu.be/X9advgMBbdo https://youtu.be/X9advgMBbdo
    - sitkack 5y ago
      TED Talk or a pitch for VC money, "Just two Ivy League grads working 6 figure tech jobs with a little too much time on our hands."
      - ok123456 5y ago
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cflCyyEA2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cflCyyEA2I much better version.
  - salawat 5y ago
    You know, there is utility to letting the "quacks" talk, right? Ever had a thought that just kept popping up in your head, that you then mentally suppress because "Dear <insert religious figure here>, how horrifying." After doing that it keeps coming back again and again? Usually after a shorter and shorter period of time, because it becomes an indexing thought for recollections of all the times you've squashed it or thought about all the ways in which it was wrong? Ever then talkedabout itwith someone else then had a cathartic release from the sharing, and possibly even a moment of relief that someone else besides you stumbled on <horrible thought> too? It's the same dynamic. Just writ at a societal scale. It's why no censorship is a truly good idea. Bad ideas crop up organically as we've got a constant influx of new members of society seing the same warts, the same problems, following the same dead ends each and every one of us has. How are they to recognize a false start without being exposed to them? The part that frightens people is that previously, you never had it possible for the whole world's population of false starters to get into one place and coordinate in real-time. You had an implicit depletion of critical mass activity that ensured the feedback loop for these ideas petered out, or remained tightly constrained to just the local nuts. The world we're in means that barrier has fallen, so everybody has to be able to cope with the entire planet's equivalent of the crazies all the time realistically. It's a learned skill. Only practice gets you better at it, and I assure you, however good you think you are, cut the estimate in half. Odds are you've got fundamental blind spots you haven't even run into the craziness for yet.
bayindirh 5y ago
IMHO, the books I've bought from InformIT are not that bad. They're only watermarked, and were useful. IDK, maybe because they're not geared towards universities. I'd happily stand corrected though.
- OnlyLys 5y ago
  I've bought a few Pearson ebooks from InformIT (all the books were programming related), and they all come in PDF format with watermarks. Honestly, I'm happy as long as publishing companies don't force me to use their crappy proprietary ebook readers.
gravypod 5y ago
In college we had to use them. It was a financial burden on myself. $100/course essentially. Our school mandated that we take homeworks using Pearson's online system. This means if you found a used copy of the book it was essentially waste. You needed to have a one-time-use code (printed on the book) to do your homework. If you didn't, you'd essentially fail the class. Also, the system was buggy. The entire thing is a racket.
- 8ytecoder 5y ago
  Why is education like this in the US? Is it the teachers who willingly allow students to spend so much unnecessarily? Is it the admins? Do they get paid to do this stuff?
  - rjzzleep 5y ago
    Because in US the social fabric is based on money. So it's not something you would necessarily consider odd. Kinda how Germans say "was always like this, why should we change" but in different contexts. The other part is that Pearsons lobbies, the tests are already accepted as mandatory and then not every teacher is capable of coming up with his own test that allows you to then perform well in the Pearson test. You probably also risk a lot if you used your own test. It's basically industry developing its own industry.
  - Teknoman117 5y ago
    I think a lot of this hides behind the notion of "accredited" universities and courses. Some education board (with heavy influence from various companies) decides that you need to select from a set of curriculum to be accredited. Other universities (and some employers) won't honor credits or degrees unless they're from accredited courses.
    - alisonkisk 5y ago
      This is absolutely false. There is zero requirement to use anything like Person for accreditation.
  - 5y ago
temp8964 5y ago
> They lobby for standardized tests in states and get them mandated. Students are put through them. This is totally false. State standardized test is the natural consequence of state public education accountability system. There must be a comparable measure across all the public schools in the state as the foundation for accountability measurements. And all (>95%) the students must be tested for equity reasons. No matter how many misinformation you read about standardized tests, the simple fact is that it is the only way to measure student learning of a huge population and get meaningful / comparable results. Is it perfect? No. Is there a better alternative? No. The whole idea that a few testing companies imposed the standardized tests on students is simply a conspiracy theory.
- nitrogen 5y ago
  I read their comment not as saying that standardized tests are Pearson's fault, but that Pearson gets states to mandate that they are Pearson tests.
  - temp8964 5y ago
    Every state has a selection process. Several testing companies will bet on the contract.
    - truth_ 5y ago
      There's a lot of shady practices involved there, that is one of my points.
  - truth_ 5y ago
    Is that not clear from my comment? Whether standardized tests are good or bad is a whole other debate. The point here is- they lobby to get standardized tests mandated where they were not, then they lobby snd push their tests for statewide use very hard. All school districts have to buy test questions and other infrastructure from them only. And only Pearson certified teachers can evaluate those copies. And every step of the process involves Pearson getting paid. This is like the Mafia. Thanks for pointing it out.

by truth_ 5y ago

2pEXgD0fZ5cF 5y ago

> very overpriced textbooks Not just way overpriced, the few Pearson books I happen to own are of an alarmingly low quality. The pages of a phone book look and feel like premium paper compared to my copy of Blitzer's College Algebra.

vector_spaces 5y ago
Not to mention some of them have wonderful anti-features, such as physical books that have a handful of online-only chapters that you can only access if you buy the textbook new, thereby reducing the value of used copies.
- generationP 5y ago
  You'll then appreciate the "Pearson New International Editions" (with a chapter and the preface removed to tank the resale value).
  - vector_spaces 5y ago
    Oh yeah, those are all a real hoot with the lovely almost see-through paper and shoddy binding and printing errors like upside down pages.

shakaijin 5y ago

Also, they release new versions of books all the time and force their use in classes, making it impossible to use 2nd hand textbooks in a lot of cases. *I mean, come on. How of ten do fundamental physics change... Pearson is a company that should not exist.

patmorgan23 5y ago
Plugging open source text books. There are many high quality option out there that are openly licensed. Openstax is a project by Rice University that has textbooks for most gen ed courses. openstax.org/
- harikb 5y ago
  Thanks for the link. Didn’t know. Btw, this is why they lobby for state mandates. A single teacher cannot make an exception Situation in private school is not better. A prominent private high school in Bay Area, made me run around like a crazy man scavenging used books from all over the place because the recommended books were out of stock. They won’t publish the exact book name until after classes begin in August and apparently varies by teacher by year. This is after paying $$$ fees equivalent to buying a new car. Next year I pulled my kid out of it.
  - legerdemain 5y ago
    Was this at Harker? I bet it was Harker.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - smolder 5y ago
    I know of a company that had a pretty large set of creative commons licensed learning materials they put together, along with tools to customize lesson plans and rearrange/edit material, make online quizzes, etc. It was offered as a good low cost digital replacement to traditional textbooks, aimed at colleges. Follett, the #1 textbook distributor (which interestingly has common roots with Barnes and Noble) bought the company. Shortly thereafter, the product mentioned was discontinued. The professors that had adopted it, I assume, were somewhat inconvenienced.

shirleyquirk 5y ago

to start with I couldn't get over the presenter's poetry slam style but what made me cry serious salty f*ing tears was his explication of how inequality impacts day to day learning. as in hunger. literal, biological hunger the day before your standardized tests. stresses you had no input into and should have no bearing on your future.

ur-whale 5y ago

libgen ftw

modin 5y ago

OT but is there a reason one would not like TED talks? Your parenthesis made me feel it could be controversial (comparable to social media).

matsemann 5y ago
TEDx talks (like the linked one is) are not proper TED talks, there are affiliated events all over hosting them. While there are many good TEDx talks, many of them aren't what you would expect when hearing the TED name. Especially bad is it that some TEDx events let quacks talk, which gives them a kind of legitimacy based on TED's reputation even though they're saying bullshit. Of course, this commingling has also tainted TED's brand. The other thing is that most TED talks follow a certain formula. They do because it works, but watching many of them it sticks out and can be a bit annoying. There's probably a meta TED talk pointing out this somewhere.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Indeed: https://youtu.be/X9advgMBbdo https://youtu.be/X9advgMBbdo
  - sitkack 5y ago
    TED Talk or a pitch for VC money, "Just two Ivy League grads working 6 figure tech jobs with a little too much time on our hands."
    - ok123456 5y ago
      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cflCyyEA2I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cflCyyEA2I much better version.
- salawat 5y ago
  You know, there is utility to letting the "quacks" talk, right? Ever had a thought that just kept popping up in your head, that you then mentally suppress because "Dear <insert religious figure here>, how horrifying." After doing that it keeps coming back again and again? Usually after a shorter and shorter period of time, because it becomes an indexing thought for recollections of all the times you've squashed it or thought about all the ways in which it was wrong? Ever then talkedabout itwith someone else then had a cathartic release from the sharing, and possibly even a moment of relief that someone else besides you stumbled on <horrible thought> too? It's the same dynamic. Just writ at a societal scale. It's why no censorship is a truly good idea. Bad ideas crop up organically as we've got a constant influx of new members of society seing the same warts, the same problems, following the same dead ends each and every one of us has. How are they to recognize a false start without being exposed to them? The part that frightens people is that previously, you never had it possible for the whole world's population of false starters to get into one place and coordinate in real-time. You had an implicit depletion of critical mass activity that ensured the feedback loop for these ideas petered out, or remained tightly constrained to just the local nuts. The world we're in means that barrier has fallen, so everybody has to be able to cope with the entire planet's equivalent of the crazies all the time realistically. It's a learned skill. Only practice gets you better at it, and I assure you, however good you think you are, cut the estimate in half. Odds are you've got fundamental blind spots you haven't even run into the craziness for yet.

bayindirh 5y ago

IMHO, the books I've bought from InformIT are not that bad. They're only watermarked, and were useful. IDK, maybe because they're not geared towards universities. I'd happily stand corrected though.

OnlyLys 5y ago
I've bought a few Pearson ebooks from InformIT (all the books were programming related), and they all come in PDF format with watermarks. Honestly, I'm happy as long as publishing companies don't force me to use their crappy proprietary ebook readers.

gravypod 5y ago

In college we had to use them. It was a financial burden on myself. $100/course essentially. Our school mandated that we take homeworks using Pearson's online system. This means if you found a used copy of the book it was essentially waste. You needed to have a one-time-use code (printed on the book) to do your homework. If you didn't, you'd essentially fail the class. Also, the system was buggy. The entire thing is a racket.

8ytecoder 5y ago
Why is education like this in the US? Is it the teachers who willingly allow students to spend so much unnecessarily? Is it the admins? Do they get paid to do this stuff?
- rjzzleep 5y ago
  Because in US the social fabric is based on money. So it's not something you would necessarily consider odd. Kinda how Germans say "was always like this, why should we change" but in different contexts. The other part is that Pearsons lobbies, the tests are already accepted as mandatory and then not every teacher is capable of coming up with his own test that allows you to then perform well in the Pearson test. You probably also risk a lot if you used your own test. It's basically industry developing its own industry.
- Teknoman117 5y ago
  I think a lot of this hides behind the notion of "accredited" universities and courses. Some education board (with heavy influence from various companies) decides that you need to select from a set of curriculum to be accredited. Other universities (and some employers) won't honor credits or degrees unless they're from accredited courses.
  - alisonkisk 5y ago
    This is absolutely false. There is zero requirement to use anything like Person for accreditation.
- 5y ago

temp8964 5y ago

> They lobby for standardized tests in states and get them mandated. Students are put through them. This is totally false. State standardized test is the natural consequence of state public education accountability system. There must be a comparable measure across all the public schools in the state as the foundation for accountability measurements. And all (>95%) the students must be tested for equity reasons. No matter how many misinformation you read about standardized tests, the simple fact is that it is the only way to measure student learning of a huge population and get meaningful / comparable results. Is it perfect? No. Is there a better alternative? No. The whole idea that a few testing companies imposed the standardized tests on students is simply a conspiracy theory.

nitrogen 5y ago
I read their comment not as saying that standardized tests are Pearson's fault, but that Pearson gets states to mandate that they are Pearson tests.
- temp8964 5y ago
  Every state has a selection process. Several testing companies will bet on the contract.
  - truth_ 5y ago
    There's a lot of shady practices involved there, that is one of my points.
- truth_ 5y ago
  Is that not clear from my comment? Whether standardized tests are good or bad is a whole other debate. The point here is- they lobby to get standardized tests mandated where they were not, then they lobby snd push their tests for statewide use very hard. All school districts have to buy test questions and other infrastructure from them only. And only Pearson certified teachers can evaluate those copies. And every step of the process involves Pearson getting paid. This is like the Mafia. Thanks for pointing it out.