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[Phys-L] Re: homework lookup



On 04/15/05 14:18, Rick Tarara wrote:
I think John _somewhat_ underestimates the problem here

Or perhaps I somewhat misstated what I really
believe. I basically agree with what Rick and
Joel have said.

By way of clarification, yes, there are some lovely
problems that become almost worthless if/when the
method of solution becomes widely known (e.g. the
nine dots puzzle, or the south/east/north triangle
puzzle).

And there are some problems (e.g. the Mississippi
discharge problem) where the whole point is to
see how far you can get without looking anything
up.

just as the savvy professors of the past knew that the Frats had all
the old tests and homeworks, we must now be aware that solution
manuals for almost any text are 'out there'.

We agree this is a dark cloud, but the silver lining is
that it forces to do what we should have been doing all
along.

I was serious about level being better than unlevel.
Whether lookup is bad or good, I feel strongly that
it should be available to all *or* to none (not just
to some 'special' persons).

So, in fact there is a greater burden on us now to rethink both our
homework problems and our test problems.

Not entirely a bad thing, as silver linings go.

And all this just when some
authors have started including much better problems (those that are not so
amenable to algorithmic solutions) in their texts.

Any texts you particularly recommend?

solution manuals are
copywrited material and the publishers could move to get sites shut down
that offer them illegally (yes, knowing that they will likely respawn).

I suspect this would not be sufficiently effective ...
an unwinnable cat-and-mouse game ... and IMHO
half-measures would be worse than nothing.
Half-hearted copyright enforcement would just drive
the stuff underground ... which would give the
biggest advantage to the sneakiest cheater. I'd
rather have the stuff out in the open. At least
that way we know what we're up against.

In this connection I am reminded of the written tests
the FAA administers to pilots, mechanics, controllers,
et cetera. All the questions are publicly avaiable,
while they are still current. There is a pool of about
1000 questions on each topic, of which about 60 are
selected to make up a given instance of the test. The
pool is sufficiently large that it is easier to learn
the material than to cram the questions by rote.

I mention this to make the point that openness, even
100% openness, is not necessarily a disaster.

This may partially address the "workload" issue Joel
raised. If people work together, they could construct
a huge pool of high-quality physics test problems.
(Of course getting professors to work together is
like herding cats ... but it's not impossible. I
consider this list to be proof-by-example that some
wide-area collaboration is possible.)
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