Math professor forced to use $180 textbook written by his boss
ocregister.com
ocregister.com
Writing your own book is fine, but manipulating these books EA style (where you buy a game that comes with a one time use multiplayer key, neutering your ability to sell it afterwards) on the thinly veiled "improvements" is just downright shady. I commented about this on the other math book to pdf submission, but I had a professor did just this. He basically shuffled chapters around and renumbered problems, making the previous year's book worthless because the problems he assigned are numbered out of the new book, and he refused to provide any mapping of new problem sets to old problem sets. I had mentioned this to the department heads and none of them really cared at all about this practice.
My jaw is a little agape about the whole thing. online passes died in games after awhile, but it almost seems like the college textbook racket could probably get away with doing it forever.
The biggest difference between this application of it and the way it worked in games seems to be that it's designed to force your hand a little more. With games, you just got screwed out of the online features. With this, it sounds like you can't even complete the course without the online pass.
As an undergraduate at a small private college, I can only recall two professors who required their own books. One was a paperback physics reader for a very large class, available from the department for $20 (or from upperclassmen for less). The other was for a small math class, was not unreasonably expensive, but also was not very good, but when the professor left halfway through the semester with health problems, the department bought us all copies of the new book. My professors were always accommodating to anyone who wanted to buy an older edition, and in one case explicitly told us not to buy the expensive new edition.
In my current department at a large public university, I know of only one professor who requires his own book. It's about $40 and has only had one edition since it was published 15 years ago. In most lower division classes we use an in-house online homework system, although we don't have a good database of problems for differential equations, so we've typically required the latest edition of Boyce and DiPrima so students can use the publisher's homework system. But we've started work on our own problem sets, and we are at the point where we can use our own in-house homework system for it, if the professor is willing to put in a bit more effort organizing and debugging homework.
Anyway, this sort of exploitation is not typical in my experience.
The worst example of this is, and I have no qualms about publicly calling out this professor, is Dr. Alan DeSantis at the University of Kentucky. DeSantis is rather prolific, he gets a lot of press for the university, and I'm pretty sure he's our highest rated prof on RateMyProfessor, so I'm sure he knows he can basically just do whatever he wants.
But for his freshman COM101 class, a class where you can basically get all the content out of by just reading the Wikipedia entry on a handful of pop psychology phenomenons, he required us to purchase a $40 "workbook" for taking notes in. But this "workbook" was, quite literally, just his lecture powerpoints with random gaps in sentences.
During lectures we had to fill in the blanks as the slides came up, or else we'd have no idea what was going on because he used his own terms and names for pretty much everything he was talking about.
As if the teacher was really teaching "How To Be A Jerk." or "How to Copy And Paste."
Some of them were good, but some were obviously poorly edited and explanations were identical to lectures.
[1] http://www.collegefactual.com/colleges/california-state-univ...
http://calstate.fullerton.edu/inside/2012su/Promotions-Tenur...
I don't think its bad that the university has the final say in what and to a certain degree how certain elements of the ciricullum are taught. It's not hard to imagine how a bad math course can very seriously compromise the students ability to follow other classes.
Not to say that this applies to this case, the professor proably made a good and ethical choice in class materials and is pressured for other reasons.
However, I tell my students in the syllabus, which I post online well before the class starts, that calculus is centuries old and that they are not required to pay through the nose for this textbook. I regularly go out of my way to facilitate using older textbooks.
>“You acted contrary to department policy when you did not use the single assigned textbook for MATH 250B sections,” the school reprimand states.
Universities may be large institutions that require many decisions to be put on autopilot with official policies, but this issue seems like a clear example of something that is not unimportant enough to be handled with use of "policy" as a magic word. As colleagues that hopefully possess some intellectual sophistication, they should at a minimum explain their interpretation of the relevant policies and why their impact is positive, or alternately explain why the policy is worth preserving in the face of producing a worse outcome in this specific instance.
Considering that according to the article, the past two governors of the state for the entire university system have pushed toward a greater attention to textbook prices, it seems even less likely that a department can get away with undermining the ethical standards of the American Association of University Professors by using the word "policy" like some talisman.
What exactly do they mean by multi-section?
In college I had a very large, expensive calculus book that covered 3 semesters of calc classes. In that case I appreciated the uniformity of using one mandated textbook.
But if that is not what they meant by "mulit-section" then I question why such strict enforcement.
By and large most college textbook requirements do feel like a scam, and it only seems to be getting worse over the years.
I can understand part of the argument here - it would be important to maintain consistency among the different sections, so that students who take the class from Professor A learn basically the same material as students who take Professor B. That being said, the material presented in a low-level class like this hasn't changed in a long time, so any book should suffice.
Yeah textbook prices are really out of order --- the calculus text at my university is $130+, which is just insane.
<selfplug>Anyone interested in a cheaper option for mechanics + calculus should check out my text: http://noBSgui.de/to/MATHandPHYSICS/ </selfplug>
And then just to be a dick, post it online on some Chinese/Russian server and email the link to the professor anonymously.