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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 s

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 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
    This is absolutely false. There is zero requirement to use anything like Person for accreditation.
- g_p 6y ago
  I think educators are certainly to blame - as much as it's convenient to blame admin staff, educators in my experience set the course book. Pearson etc offer them a time saver they don't have to pay for - they take out the effort of assigning and marking exercises, and don't add any cost to the educator. The students pay, and Pearson uses these codes to inconvenience students and force them to buy new copies. If you think like an MBA, it's a great idea - the person in decision making power benefits from this move (exercises handled for them), is probably unaware of the issue for students, and has more time to spend on something else they need to do (raising grants, trying to write papers to keep going on the tenure treadmill). But you also get to sell a new copy of each book annually, at full price, without used sales cannibalising your returns. Given there isn't a huge growth in universities each year, this is a great way to boost revenues sustainably. In my experience on the other side of the pond, we used 1 textbook in the entire degree. It was reasonably priced, readily available second hand, and didn't have any single use license codes. Indeed, one instructor used to upload the relevant chapters of their own book as PDF files, insisting nobody buy the book as it wasn't worth it!!
- hansvm 6y ago
  As one data point, this only ever happened to me in my general courses -- a department would choose a book that several lecturers would use to teach hundreds of mostly disinterested students. In that context it makes a lot of sense; the decision maker isn't any single instructor, and there's a large pressure to instill a baseline level of knowledge into way too many people at once. All of my courses with smaller class sizes were much more careful with their book selections; occasionally those books were still expensive (even used), but only if they were really the best tool for the job. Even with expensive books though, this kind of online subscription nonsense was never used.
alisonkisk 6y ago
The ironic part is that this only happens in required courses for credentialism, generally at lower tier colleges that created the student loan crisis, not in courses that students choose for an education. And it's especially prominent in math courses for students who don't know nor want to learn math.

8ytecoder 6y 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 6y 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 6y 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 6y ago
  This is absolutely false. There is zero requirement to use anything like Person for accreditation.
g_p 6y ago
I think educators are certainly to blame - as much as it's convenient to blame admin staff, educators in my experience set the course book. Pearson etc offer them a time saver they don't have to pay for - they take out the effort of assigning and marking exercises, and don't add any cost to the educator. The students pay, and Pearson uses these codes to inconvenience students and force them to buy new copies. If you think like an MBA, it's a great idea - the person in decision making power benefits from this move (exercises handled for them), is probably unaware of the issue for students, and has more time to spend on something else they need to do (raising grants, trying to write papers to keep going on the tenure treadmill). But you also get to sell a new copy of each book annually, at full price, without used sales cannibalising your returns. Given there isn't a huge growth in universities each year, this is a great way to boost revenues sustainably. In my experience on the other side of the pond, we used 1 textbook in the entire degree. It was reasonably priced, readily available second hand, and didn't have any single use license codes. Indeed, one instructor used to upload the relevant chapters of their own book as PDF files, insisting nobody buy the book as it wasn't worth it!!
hansvm 6y ago
As one data point, this only ever happened to me in my general courses -- a department would choose a book that several lecturers would use to teach hundreds of mostly disinterested students. In that context it makes a lot of sense; the decision maker isn't any single instructor, and there's a large pressure to instill a baseline level of knowledge into way too many people at once. All of my courses with smaller class sizes were much more careful with their book selections; occasionally those books were still expensive (even used), but only if they were really the best tool for the job. Even with expensive books though, this kind of online subscription nonsense was never used.

alisonkisk 6y ago

The ironic part is that this only happens in required courses for credentialism, generally at lower tier colleges that created the student loan crisis, not in courses that students choose for an education. And it's especially prominent in math courses for students who don't know nor want to learn math.