10 ms·

Should students profit off my classes?

36 points by cwan 15y ago

steve-howard 15y ago
I think the professor's idea is actually a fantastic solution to the problem (i.e. find the mistakes in the available note sets and write the tests accordingly). I can't really see an ethical basis for banning note-sharing (after all, if the class is worth anything, they should be teaching you facts).
- kahawe 15y ago
  > find the mistakes in the available note sets and write the tests accordingly Really great... instead of focusing on enabling students and focusing on teaching them the really important fundamentals and making sure they understood those through exams, let's just frakk with them in a really petty way (likely by musing over petty small technicalities) and put them in their place, helpless little pups that they are!
  - corin_ 15y ago
    Exams are about testing what the students have learned, not about teaching them. This sounds like a great way to sort the students who actually decided to learn something from the students you preferred to memorise some notes they bought rather than learning the subject matter.
    - kahawe 15y ago
      > Exams are about testing what the students have learned, not about teaching them Your job as a prof should be teaching them and exams are a part of that - at the same time exams are typically focused on the 2 or 3 major subjects or points that were taught. And they should be, because ultimately as a benevolent and good prof, you want your students to learn the matter and get a good understanding but you cannot or should not expect them to memorize every little detail you ever taught just because your subject is clearly oh-so-important! A good prof has such a concept that spans from his classes, textbooks to the exams. Putting in questions just to frakk with students because you don't like them sharing notes for whatever reason doesn't fit there - because I strongly doubt good notes would miss major points but rather twist a few tiny facts. > This sounds like a great way to sort the students.. I knew this sentiment would come up and I cannot tell you how deeply I loathe it. Yes, in elementary school this approach is probably a good idea... force students to sit through each class, make them take notes, then check their homework and give them little shiny golden stars to make them happy and then make them write an exam on it. But we are talking university here, this isn't kindergarten - you should be educating and empowering growing adults, you want them to become individuals and that can only mean dropping the retarded elementary-school gold-star mentality because those aren't the people who will accomplish great things later on if you never taught them or gave them any chance to become independent. The exam should check if I have a good understanding of the subject, it should definitely NOT check how I obtained that knowledge. But if I am a lazy and bad prof, I just dish out multi-choice tests and probably you can pass those easier by just regurgitating some facts you learned by heart from copied notes the night before. But this laziness shouldn't be encouraged by trying to limit notes to counter "learning by heart without understanding" because it is just a consequence of being a bad and lazy prof who writes horrible exams that can be passed like that, brute-force style. Stop patronizing students, your job is to prepare them for a career and the gold-star mentality won't get you very far in the real world... whoever your customers are, they care about you getting the job done and not much else.
      - lukeschlather 15y ago
        If exams are just testing, then they're basically busywork. Exams can and should be a learning aid. The assumption is that every student should get 100% if they're doing a good job. But 50% should be okay. Then when you go back and see the mistakes you've made, you learn. Setting people up to fail can be a valuable learning experience. The problem is not the teacher, it's our society's attitude towards failure.
    - forrestthewoods 15y ago
      The vast majority of my educational career could be summarized as memorizing some notes written by myself, given by the teacher, or inscribed in hardback textbook. Getting them from another student is hardly a crime.
      - corin_ 15y ago
        Not a crime, not even something I'd suggest students get punished for - but definitely something that should be actively discouraged. Yeah, you can make notes yourself and memorise them, and even that will probably teach you more than getting notes from someone else and memorising those. But it doesn't change the fact that it would be better if exams could only be passed by learning and understanding the subject material, not by memorising facts.
        forrestthewoods 15y ago
        Tests that challenge a student's deep understanding of the material rather than rote memorization is of course preferable. No has argued that. I place zero value in the transcription of notes. The act of writing is a useful tool for memorization and even deeper understanding, but it's just that - a tool. Everyone learns differently. The test is meant to grade one's understanding of the material. How you obtained that understanding isn't relevant.
  - bradleyjg 15y ago
    The professor in question is a law professor, specifically he deals with securities law. Nitpicky detail are what that area of law is all about! A newly minted securities lawyer will spend his first few years proofing corporate filings (e.g. an offering document) for the tiniest of mistakes, some of which could cost the client millions of dollars if not found. While it might not be the greatest tactic for professors in general, it is a great idea for this particular professor.
brador 15y ago
Does the university a professor went to then also have a case against the professor "selling" what he learnt by teaching others? How far up the chain do we go?
kahawe 15y ago
Flame-y tone aside, I cannot help but feel exactly like this: > Zounds, Herr Professor Doktor, you seem to be setting a new level of pettiness and arrogance. You don't seem to object to your getting a doubtless hefty paycheck resting on huge tuition rates, nor do I recall any quibbles from you to the costs of textbooks. Gods forbid that any student earn a few bucks from his diligent note-taking! What I do with MY notes should be nothing but MY business, as simple as that. We are talking university here, people. Students should be MORE than old enough to be able to decide for themselves which way of learning works best for them. I do not need some facetious, bored prof patronizing me on how I want to study and ultimately pass the exams. > campuses are taking new steps to limit what students can do with their class notes And this is completely beyond me as well. Even if I could obtain exact 1:1 replicas of all slides used in each lecture plus thorough notes, I still do not get a degree from whatever university they came from and keep in mind that a lot of the HUGE names are releasing course material for free anyway. This whole thing just seems really petty. And don't forget, some students learn a lot better by listening, others learn better by writing it down and others learn best researching on their own and taking thorough, well-structured notes can be a difficult job if you want to follow class and discussions equally well at the same time. Why shouldn't you allow both of those learning types to benefit? Don't we want our students to actually become team-players and independent, autonomous?
- davidu 15y ago
  Maybe I read a different blog post. In my reading, I am pretty sure the professor agrees with you.
  - kahawe 15y ago
    Up to the point where he reveals that... > And then I'll write exam questions testing on those very same mistakes. If we all did that, the market would dry up pretty quick. ...he actually DOES oppose it obviously and wants to stop it.
    - davidu 15y ago
      You missed his point. He doesn't care. He thinks the market can deal with it. He thinks the schools should stay out of it. As a professor, he can route around it by being smarter than the note sellers. You want to restrict his right to do that? Bizarre...
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
patio11 15y ago
If there is a "hacker mentality", teachers tend to have the opposite of that: given a maze and a cheese, any route to the cheese more efficient than the one the teacher suggests is morally suspect. I've had more than one discussion that devolved into "The journey to the cheese is the real reward!" said by someone who was essentially fetishizing the particular contours of the maze rather than the journey. (More broadly I think most conceptions of education where "Hide the knowledge from the students" is an acceptable operating principle are probably borked. Exceptions to be awarded if you're teaching nuclear engineering or Charms and skipping ahead a few chapters can result in the lab vanishing in a fireball.) There is, for example, a well-trodden path in elementary schools of assigning "busywork", which is essentially a classroom management technique whereby you purposely assign work which has zero or negative marginal educational value such that your faster students do not run out of things to do before the class period ends, so that you can focus your efforts on slower students or class discipline problems. I remember a few incidents where I was chastened for dealing with busywork too efficiently. (e.g. "Draw 10 flags of the world." "Can we pick the countries?" "Sure." "Libya, Japan, Ireland, France, Italy, umm, can I use an encyclopedia for a moment?" "Why those countr... PATRICK." "Yes ma'am?" "That's CHEATING. All the other students will do lots more work." "Happy to suggest better flags for them too, ma'am.")
- brador 15y ago
  Yup, same thing all around the world. Teachers have "off" days too where they do the same thing. Crossword puzzle is a common one they keep in the backdraw just in case they don't feel like teaching that day. It's one reason I'm pro electronic teaching aids like Khan Academy - more suitable learning, at the kids level and less "human downtime".
- karamazov 15y ago
  To be fair, on occasion the journey is the real reward - e.g. learning to do arithmetic versus using a calculator. This is a global maximum vs. local maximum problem. Unfortunately, it's extremely rare for a teacher to use this argument for the right reason; much more often they're doing exactly what you describe.
- blahedo 15y ago
lambda 15y ago
Or, you know, the professor could just post notes themselves online, cutting out the middle man. Some people learn better from a live class. Some learn better from offline notes that they can peruse at their leisure. Why not cater to both?
n_coats 15y ago
I believe the emphasis should be on the professor to take responsibility and change his curriculum/exams each semester. If professors did this effectively, the issue of note sharing between semesters could be dramatically reduced. Students are paying a lot of money for education these days. Is it to much to ask that professors provide fresh and original content as opposed to printing off the same powerpoint presentation or case study for five straight years? It's simple, make your class exciting and captivating and students will retain more while enjoying it. Those are my personal experiences and opinions of course :)
- easp 15y ago
  This strikes me as hopelessly naive on a number of fronts. Good professors spend years refining their lectures and they change things year to year, but many of those changes are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Reducing all education to a simple transaction where money is traded for knowledge is overly simplistic and invites poor conculusions. Even if it were that simple, there is an inherent and significant asymmetry of information that stands in the way of an efficient market. Further, for some professors, at least, money isn't the only reward they get from teaching. They may like interacting with students, they may feel their own understanding of the subject is improved by teaching it to others, and the dynamic of the classroom provides valuable insight that helps them improve how they teach the next batch of students. The professor may feel, and have evidence to back it up, that students who don't come to lectures, on average, learn the material less well than those who do. There could be a lot of reasons for this, but at least some of them likely relate to the classroom experience, the enthusiasm of the professor, his or her ability to read the room and dwell a little longer on a point that half the students may be baffled by. Their lectures could have a lot of deliberate redundancy about key concepts that isn't captured in notes. You can argue that the student should be free to choose whether or not to avail themselves of these advantages, but your comment and so many other comments in threads like these, suggest that many students don't even realize what they might be missing. I'm utterly convinced that our education system, from kindergarden through graduate school and beyond is ripe for significant changes, but I'm mindful of what can be lost in major disruptions, particularly if people are ignorant of the value of the things they are sweeping aside.
imjoel 15y ago
On what basis would a university have any say about what a student does with her notes? I can't think of one--legal, moral or ethical. I certainly hope this doesn't become something more universities waste their time on, because this is ludicrous. (edit: typo)
danielford 15y ago
One of my guiding principles as a college teacher is to never make rules I can't enforce. This clearly falls under that category. Even if I was concerned about this, there's nothing I can do about it. If a student wants to sell her notes to one of these companies all she has to do is not write her name on them, and I'll never know who did it. Prohibiting it would just make me look like a moron who doesn't understand the limits of his own authority.
- yequalsx 15y ago
  The orientation for new faculty ought to consist solely of your first sentence. Too many of my colleagues don't seem to understand this.
j45 15y ago
For many students, the purpose of education is achieving a profit in a career / job. A student is as much entitled to their interpretation of education (His or her her notes) as the prof is entitled to force students to purchase their lab manuals and textbooks. Saying you own a set of notes is saying you own knowledge. No one owns knowledge in education. They teach it. Study it. Learn it. Share it. Write about it. This isn't a question of economics, or IP. It's the principle. As a professor, few are teaching anything new, or novel, or something they invented. Many are teaching concepts that have been around for many years. Most profs hate teaching because it cuts into their time to do what they're best at (and don't get to teach enough about) -- their research.
edgesrazor 15y ago
I agree with the mountain out of a molehill argument. There's an easy solution to this - if the profs don't like this, sell their own notes on the site for the minimum amount. Most of these sites let you name your own price. Set the price insanely low and donate the proceeds to the university or a charity.
shareme 15y ago
I miss the days when most of the tests were all bluebook essays including science, computer science, history, etc. You youngsters have it too easy...
newbusox 15y ago
I worked with/at TakeNote, which is Cornell's commercial note taking service and dealt with this often. Notwithstanding "ethical" reasons, this is very odd to me. I think the California law cited that seems to ban the selling of class notes, and any public schools whose student policies similarly ban resale, raise colorable First Amendment issues. I know there is extant case law at least in some jurisdiction that says that your notes are your notes, presuming that they are not verbatim transcripts of the lecture. This is the case even if the lecture itself and material is protected by copyright.

36 points by cwan 15y ago

I think the professor's idea is actually a fantastic solution to the problem (i.e. find the mistakes in the available note sets and write the tests accordingly). I can't really see an ethical basis for banning note-sharing (after all, if the class is worth anything, they should be teaching you facts).

kahawe 15y ago
> find the mistakes in the available note sets and write the tests accordingly Really great... instead of focusing on enabling students and focusing on teaching them the really important fundamentals and making sure they understood those through exams, let's just frakk with them in a really petty way (likely by musing over petty small technicalities) and put them in their place, helpless little pups that they are!
- corin_ 15y ago
  Exams are about testing what the students have learned, not about teaching them. This sounds like a great way to sort the students who actually decided to learn something from the students you preferred to memorise some notes they bought rather than learning the subject matter.
  - kahawe 15y ago
    > Exams are about testing what the students have learned, not about teaching them Your job as a prof should be teaching them and exams are a part of that - at the same time exams are typically focused on the 2 or 3 major subjects or points that were taught. And they should be, because ultimately as a benevolent and good prof, you want your students to learn the matter and get a good understanding but you cannot or should not expect them to memorize every little detail you ever taught just because your subject is clearly oh-so-important! A good prof has such a concept that spans from his classes, textbooks to the exams. Putting in questions just to frakk with students because you don't like them sharing notes for whatever reason doesn't fit there - because I strongly doubt good notes would miss major points but rather twist a few tiny facts. > This sounds like a great way to sort the students.. I knew this sentiment would come up and I cannot tell you how deeply I loathe it. Yes, in elementary school this approach is probably a good idea... force students to sit through each class, make them take notes, then check their homework and give them little shiny golden stars to make them happy and then make them write an exam on it. But we are talking university here, this isn't kindergarten - you should be educating and empowering growing adults, you want them to become individuals and that can only mean dropping the retarded elementary-school gold-star mentality because those aren't the people who will accomplish great things later on if you never taught them or gave them any chance to become independent. The exam should check if I have a good understanding of the subject, it should definitely NOT check how I obtained that knowledge. But if I am a lazy and bad prof, I just dish out multi-choice tests and probably you can pass those easier by just regurgitating some facts you learned by heart from copied notes the night before. But this laziness shouldn't be encouraged by trying to limit notes to counter "learning by heart without understanding" because it is just a consequence of being a bad and lazy prof who writes horrible exams that can be passed like that, brute-force style. Stop patronizing students, your job is to prepare them for a career and the gold-star mentality won't get you very far in the real world... whoever your customers are, they care about you getting the job done and not much else.
    - lukeschlather 15y ago
      If exams are just testing, then they're basically busywork. Exams can and should be a learning aid. The assumption is that every student should get 100% if they're doing a good job. But 50% should be okay. Then when you go back and see the mistakes you've made, you learn. Setting people up to fail can be a valuable learning experience. The problem is not the teacher, it's our society's attitude towards failure.
  - forrestthewoods 15y ago
    The vast majority of my educational career could be summarized as memorizing some notes written by myself, given by the teacher, or inscribed in hardback textbook. Getting them from another student is hardly a crime.
    - corin_ 15y ago
      Not a crime, not even something I'd suggest students get punished for - but definitely something that should be actively discouraged. Yeah, you can make notes yourself and memorise them, and even that will probably teach you more than getting notes from someone else and memorising those. But it doesn't change the fact that it would be better if exams could only be passed by learning and understanding the subject material, not by memorising facts.
      - forrestthewoods 15y ago
        Tests that challenge a student's deep understanding of the material rather than rote memorization is of course preferable. No has argued that. I place zero value in the transcription of notes. The act of writing is a useful tool for memorization and even deeper understanding, but it's just that - a tool. Everyone learns differently. The test is meant to grade one's understanding of the material. How you obtained that understanding isn't relevant.
- bradleyjg 15y ago
  The professor in question is a law professor, specifically he deals with securities law. Nitpicky detail are what that area of law is all about! A newly minted securities lawyer will spend his first few years proofing corporate filings (e.g. an offering document) for the tiniest of mistakes, some of which could cost the client millions of dollars if not found. While it might not be the greatest tactic for professors in general, it is a great idea for this particular professor.

brador 15y ago

Does the university a professor went to then also have a case against the professor "selling" what he learnt by teaching others? How far up the chain do we go?

kahawe 15y ago

Flame-y tone aside, I cannot help but feel exactly like this: > Zounds, Herr Professor Doktor, you seem to be setting a new level of pettiness and arrogance. You don't seem to object to your getting a doubtless hefty paycheck resting on huge tuition rates, nor do I recall any quibbles from you to the costs of textbooks. Gods forbid that any student earn a few bucks from his diligent note-taking! What I do with MY notes should be nothing but MY business, as simple as that. We are talking university here, people. Students should be MORE than old enough to be able to decide for themselves which way of learning works best for them. I do not need some facetious, bored prof patronizing me on how I want to study and ultimately pass the exams. > campuses are taking new steps to limit what students can do with their class notes And this is completely beyond me as well. Even if I could obtain exact 1:1 replicas of all slides used in each lecture plus thorough notes, I still do not get a degree from whatever university they came from and keep in mind that a lot of the HUGE names are releasing course material for free anyway. This whole thing just seems really petty. And don't forget, some students learn a lot better by listening, others learn better by writing it down and others learn best researching on their own and taking thorough, well-structured notes can be a difficult job if you want to follow class and discussions equally well at the same time. Why shouldn't you allow both of those learning types to benefit? Don't we want our students to actually become team-players and independent, autonomous?

davidu 15y ago
Maybe I read a different blog post. In my reading, I am pretty sure the professor agrees with you.
- kahawe 15y ago
  Up to the point where he reveals that... > And then I'll write exam questions testing on those very same mistakes. If we all did that, the market would dry up pretty quick. ...he actually DOES oppose it obviously and wants to stop it.
  - davidu 15y ago
    You missed his point. He doesn't care. He thinks the market can deal with it. He thinks the schools should stay out of it. As a professor, he can route around it by being smarter than the note sellers. You want to restrict his right to do that? Bizarre...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

patio11 15y ago

If there is a "hacker mentality", teachers tend to have the opposite of that: given a maze and a cheese, any route to the cheese more efficient than the one the teacher suggests is morally suspect. I've had more than one discussion that devolved into "The journey to the cheese is the real reward!" said by someone who was essentially fetishizing the particular contours of the maze rather than the journey. (More broadly I think most conceptions of education where "Hide the knowledge from the students" is an acceptable operating principle are probably borked. Exceptions to be awarded if you're teaching nuclear engineering or Charms and skipping ahead a few chapters can result in the lab vanishing in a fireball.) There is, for example, a well-trodden path in elementary schools of assigning "busywork", which is essentially a classroom management technique whereby you purposely assign work which has zero or negative marginal educational value such that your faster students do not run out of things to do before the class period ends, so that you can focus your efforts on slower students or class discipline problems. I remember a few incidents where I was chastened for dealing with busywork too efficiently. (e.g. "Draw 10 flags of the world." "Can we pick the countries?" "Sure." "Libya, Japan, Ireland, France, Italy, umm, can I use an encyclopedia for a moment?" "Why those countr... PATRICK." "Yes ma'am?" "That's CHEATING. All the other students will do lots more work." "Happy to suggest better flags for them too, ma'am.")

brador 15y ago
Yup, same thing all around the world. Teachers have "off" days too where they do the same thing. Crossword puzzle is a common one they keep in the backdraw just in case they don't feel like teaching that day. It's one reason I'm pro electronic teaching aids like Khan Academy - more suitable learning, at the kids level and less "human downtime".
karamazov 15y ago
To be fair, on occasion the journey is the real reward - e.g. learning to do arithmetic versus using a calculator. This is a global maximum vs. local maximum problem. Unfortunately, it's extremely rare for a teacher to use this argument for the right reason; much more often they're doing exactly what you describe.
blahedo 15y ago

lambda 15y ago

Or, you know, the professor could just post notes themselves online, cutting out the middle man. Some people learn better from a live class. Some learn better from offline notes that they can peruse at their leisure. Why not cater to both?

n_coats 15y ago

I believe the emphasis should be on the professor to take responsibility and change his curriculum/exams each semester. If professors did this effectively, the issue of note sharing between semesters could be dramatically reduced. Students are paying a lot of money for education these days. Is it to much to ask that professors provide fresh and original content as opposed to printing off the same powerpoint presentation or case study for five straight years? It's simple, make your class exciting and captivating and students will retain more while enjoying it. Those are my personal experiences and opinions of course :)

easp 15y ago
This strikes me as hopelessly naive on a number of fronts. Good professors spend years refining their lectures and they change things year to year, but many of those changes are evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Reducing all education to a simple transaction where money is traded for knowledge is overly simplistic and invites poor conculusions. Even if it were that simple, there is an inherent and significant asymmetry of information that stands in the way of an efficient market. Further, for some professors, at least, money isn't the only reward they get from teaching. They may like interacting with students, they may feel their own understanding of the subject is improved by teaching it to others, and the dynamic of the classroom provides valuable insight that helps them improve how they teach the next batch of students. The professor may feel, and have evidence to back it up, that students who don't come to lectures, on average, learn the material less well than those who do. There could be a lot of reasons for this, but at least some of them likely relate to the classroom experience, the enthusiasm of the professor, his or her ability to read the room and dwell a little longer on a point that half the students may be baffled by. Their lectures could have a lot of deliberate redundancy about key concepts that isn't captured in notes. You can argue that the student should be free to choose whether or not to avail themselves of these advantages, but your comment and so many other comments in threads like these, suggest that many students don't even realize what they might be missing. I'm utterly convinced that our education system, from kindergarden through graduate school and beyond is ripe for significant changes, but I'm mindful of what can be lost in major disruptions, particularly if people are ignorant of the value of the things they are sweeping aside.

imjoel 15y ago

On what basis would a university have any say about what a student does with her notes? I can't think of one--legal, moral or ethical. I certainly hope this doesn't become something more universities waste their time on, because this is ludicrous. (edit: typo)

danielford 15y ago

One of my guiding principles as a college teacher is to never make rules I can't enforce. This clearly falls under that category. Even if I was concerned about this, there's nothing I can do about it. If a student wants to sell her notes to one of these companies all she has to do is not write her name on them, and I'll never know who did it. Prohibiting it would just make me look like a moron who doesn't understand the limits of his own authority.

yequalsx 15y ago
The orientation for new faculty ought to consist solely of your first sentence. Too many of my colleagues don't seem to understand this.

j45 15y ago

For many students, the purpose of education is achieving a profit in a career / job. A student is as much entitled to their interpretation of education (His or her her notes) as the prof is entitled to force students to purchase their lab manuals and textbooks. Saying you own a set of notes is saying you own knowledge. No one owns knowledge in education. They teach it. Study it. Learn it. Share it. Write about it. This isn't a question of economics, or IP. It's the principle. As a professor, few are teaching anything new, or novel, or something they invented. Many are teaching concepts that have been around for many years. Most profs hate teaching because it cuts into their time to do what they're best at (and don't get to teach enough about) -- their research.

edgesrazor 15y ago

I agree with the mountain out of a molehill argument. There's an easy solution to this - if the profs don't like this, sell their own notes on the site for the minimum amount. Most of these sites let you name your own price. Set the price insanely low and donate the proceeds to the university or a charity.

shareme 15y ago

I miss the days when most of the tests were all bluebook essays including science, computer science, history, etc. You youngsters have it too easy...

newbusox 15y ago

I worked with/at TakeNote, which is Cornell's commercial note taking service and dealt with this often. Notwithstanding "ethical" reasons, this is very odd to me. I think the California law cited that seems to ban the selling of class notes, and any public schools whose student policies similarly ban resale, raise colorable First Amendment issues. I know there is extant case law at least in some jurisdiction that says that your notes are your notes, presuming that they are not verbatim transcripts of the lecture. This is the case even if the lecture itself and material is protected by copyright.