Re: [Phys-L] Thermal Physics solution manual

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 12/07/2015 06:41 PM, I wrote:

> 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".

Here's another line of reasoning that leads to the same
conclusion:

  c1) Sometimes the teacher (whether pressed for time or not)
   makes a mistake.  That means the students get graded according
   to a wrong answer key.  This is a pedagogical fiasco.  It is
   hard to imagine anything more demotivating.

  c2) Sometimes the solution manual discloses not only the
   "answer" but also a clever /method/ of solution.  We should
   not expect every teacher (whether pressed for time or not)
   to be as clever as the textbook author.

   Many a time I've learned something by seeing that somebody
   else came up with a solution much cleverer than mine, even
   though mine was perfectly adequate.

=================================
We can come at the question from yet another angle:

Once upon a time, in a galaxy not so far away:

A) There were some first-year graduate students who excelled in
 answering the homework questions, not by working out the solutions,
 but by finding the solutions in the library.  As it turns out,
 there are only a limited number of QM homework problems that are
 tractable at all, and every one can be found as a worked example
 somewhere, if you look through enough books.  These guys got
 excellent grades.

B) There were some other students who refused to do that, and insisted
 on working out the solutions on their own.  Their grades suffered,
 because this required more effort and sometimes produced less-than-
 perfect answers.

A funny thing happened a year or two later, when these guys were
not in the classroom, but were trying to do actual research.  The
previously-so-called "B" students could solve problems that the 
"A" students could not.

The point here is that there is some /potential/ downside to having
the solutions readily available, no doubt about it.  Steps should
be taken to minimize this downside.  It seems to me that copyright
is not effective, and secrecy is not effective except in the very
short term.  Instead I suggest that the better approach is to teach 
students that the purpose of school is to learn something ... not
simply to google the answers to questions, and *not* simply to get
good grades.  The students will not believe you the first 100 times
you say it, and some of the students will never believe you at all
... but still, you have to try.

Tell 'em they should take it as a compliment that they are being
treated like adults.  As an adult, you are trusted to do the right
thing, even though you could -- temporarily -- get away with doing
the wrong thing.  Delayed gratification and all that.