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Well from my experience at an American university(though not in the US, so this may not apply). Some professors will assign graded homework problems by simply r
by entropy_ 14y ago
Well from my experience at an American university(though not in the US, so this may not apply). Some professors will assign graded homework problems by simply referencing the page/problem number of problems to solve. If you have a different book or edition then you simply cannot do the exercises.
Also, as for requiring the newest edition, it's because bookshops may not have older editions in stock, so you cannot require an older edition. Therefore, the only way to make sure all students can get the same edition of a textbook you have to ask for the newest one.
Yes, it sucks. The solution is to scan the problems you want to assign and make them available as PDFs to students, but most professors are too lazy or don't have time for this.
- SEMW 14y agoI think if any lecturers here assigned a problem set from a particular textbook (that the library didn't have enough of) without either photocopying it or putting up pdfs, conscientious students would complain to the students union about the lecturer, others just wouldn't bother doing the assignment. (Actually, in practice, tutors would just give out copies to their own tutorial group). As someone doing a humanities subject, our textbooks don't have problem questions, they're just textbooks. But even for subjects like maths, the lecturers generally have their own set of questions rather than using textbook ones (usually with only minor changes from the ones used by whoever lectured that course last year) and put them online - e.g. http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/examples/ http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/examples/
- loganfrederick 14y agoI just graduated from one of the largest universities in the USA and your comment about "conscientious students" complaining to the student union just isn't realistic. The issue is so pervasive across the majority of departments that to effectively complain would have to be on a scale equivalent to just voting on an ballot for legal intervention. I envy the UK system in this regard. But the practical issues of convincing US universities to switch to the UK model are significant.