On 12/07/2015 05:34 PM, Daniel V. Schroeder asked:
What should we do?
Here's a consideration that hasn't been mentioned heretofore:
The book has been out long enough that many fraternities will
have a "homework file" containing solutions to most of the
exercises. This doesn't even violate copyright if it is based
on some other frater's work.
More generally, students have been copying the solutions to
exercises for thousands of years. The problem is not with
the solutions; the problem is with the limited number of
exercises. In the real world, you face lots of problems
that have never come up before ... whereas in school, in
all-too-many cases, the assigned exercises have been assigned
before.
Copyright is not the same thing as secrecy. Not even close.
So it seems to me that withholding the "official" solutions
does very little except
a) penalize the students who don't have ready access to
somebody else's solutions, and
b) penalize the teacher who is "pressed for time".
So *in this case* my recommendation would be to release a
set of good solutions.
I emphasize this applies *in this case* because I am not
dogmatic about copyright and/or secrecy. There are some
things that ought to be copyrighted, and some things that
ought to be kept secret. This just doesn't happen to be
one of them.
OTOH I do have strong opinions about a level playing field:
a resource available to some students should be available
to all.
To address some obvious follow-up points:
*) The teacher who is not too horribly pressed for time
should come up with /variations/ on the textbook exercises,
or completely new exercises, so the students can't just
google the answers.
*) The teacher should explicitly explain how best to use
other people's solutions during study. Do not assume the
students were born knowing this:
-- You (the student) should do your best to solve the
problem as if you were the first person on earth to
see such a problem. Remember that the whole point is
to cultivate your reasoning skills.
-- If you get stuck, your first move should be to go learn
more about the subject. Learn the /general principles/
that will empower you to solve not just this one problem,
but a wide range of more-or-less similar problems. This
particular exercise is not important; the underlying
principles are what's important.
-- If you're still stuck, peek at somebody else's solution
to the /minimum/ extent necessary to get unstuck, then
put it away and come up with your own solution. Being
an expert googler is a valuable skill, but it is no
substitute for doing your own reasoning, because in the
real world, usually the answer is not googleable.
-- After you have a solution, check your work. Again,
check on your own, as best you can. Pretend you are
the first person ever to see such a problem. This may
well require coming up with a second method of solution,
so that you can check the two against each other.
-- Can you simplify your solution? Can you generalize
you solution?
-- As a last step, after you have done the best you can,
check your solution against what some other folks have
done. Is yours the same? better? worse? simpler?
more general? See what you can learn from the other
solutions.