3 ms·

> students demand What? I've never heard this particular demand (and I just graduated from a US college). Sure, students might complain about having the wron

> students demand What? I've never heard this particular demand (and I just graduated from a US college). Sure, students might complain about having the wrong edition - but only when lecturers assign work by page number, so that it becomes impossible to do it with the wrong edition. Do you have any evidence that this is the students' fault?

PeterisP 14y ago
Well, that's the whole point - you never, ever assign anything "by page number" since you don't rely on any specific textbook being used or available. You teach a specific topic; and supplementary reading and extra information on that topic will be available in any reasonable textbook of that subject. You might recommend a textbook that, in your opinion, explains it clearest; but in a few of my college years I managed without reading a single textbook as the lectures + prof's online notes + my work experience covered almost everything, and the rest could be looked up online or simply asked.
saraid216 14y ago
Effectively, it was an era before your generation. This is largely speculation, but it's the conclusion I've drawn from my experience in community college (my university experience was more specialized and used effectively no textbooks): Students very often saw themselves as customers to a university, and the consumerist mindset of always being right was unfortunately brought along with this. If they got something wrong, they didn't accept blame for that: they'd push it off onto the TA or onto the professor. One easy vector for that was to blame it on the particular variation of book they had used, so professors started moving towards simply mandating a single golden text and teaching directly out of it. I got the sense that a huge part of it was because the faculty had gotten together and agreed on this solution as the simplest one; it was particularly palpable in cases where the professor was dismissive of and disgusted by the mandated textbook.

PeterisP 14y ago

Well, that's the whole point - you never, ever assign anything "by page number" since you don't rely on any specific textbook being used or available. You teach a specific topic; and supplementary reading and extra information on that topic will be available in any reasonable textbook of that subject. You might recommend a textbook that, in your opinion, explains it clearest; but in a few of my college years I managed without reading a single textbook as the lectures + prof's online notes + my work experience covered almost everything, and the rest could be looked up online or simply asked.

saraid216 14y ago

Effectively, it was an era before your generation. This is largely speculation, but it's the conclusion I've drawn from my experience in community college (my university experience was more specialized and used effectively no textbooks): Students very often saw themselves as customers to a university, and the consumerist mindset of always being right was unfortunately brought along with this. If they got something wrong, they didn't accept blame for that: they'd push it off onto the TA or onto the professor. One easy vector for that was to blame it on the particular variation of book they had used, so professors started moving towards simply mandating a single golden text and teaching directly out of it. I got the sense that a huge part of it was because the faculty had gotten together and agreed on this solution as the simplest one; it was particularly palpable in cases where the professor was dismissive of and disgusted by the mandated textbook.