I found out last year that about 50% of the students in my 2nd semester
calculus based class had copies of the teacher solution manual. I later
found ads on e-bay for the solution manual on CD; apparently identical
to what the publishers hand out to adopters of their text.
The big clue was on some of the "triple dot" problems I assigned, one's
where experience has shown that only the "A" "B" students make
significant progress.
I become suspicious of the sophisticated responses that were all
identical and checked my solution manual and sure enough they were being
copied verbatim. Including the calculational mistakes in the solution
manual, odd notational conventions and including notation and techniques
not found in the text or covered in class, e.g. use of dot notation to
indicate time derivatives.
For the last two semesters, my solution has been to mostly assign
homework problems that write up myself (mostly taken from other
textbooks). I assign both hand written problems and we also use
WebAssign, so I'm using problems on WebAssign from other publishers
(which has required getting publisher permissions; most have been
cooperative). This appears to have solved the problem at the expense of
my time that could be better utilized in other ways.
This is the new reality. (Assume your students have access to the
teacher's solution manual for the adopted text.) Teachers need to be
cognizant of this fact and plan there courses accordingly. This
represents one of the down sides of technology, IMO.
________________________
Joel Rauber
Department of Physics - SDSU
Joel.Rauber@sdstate.edu
605-688-4293
| -----Original Message-----
| From: Forum for Physics Educators
| [mailto:PHYS-L@list1.ucc.nau.edu] On Behalf Of Bob LaMontagne
| Sent: Tuesday, February 07, 2006 10:10 AM
| To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU
| Subject: Physics Solutions Manual
|
| We have just discovered a very unpleasant occurrence. Someone
| has made photocopies of the solutions manual to Serway,
| Physics for Scientists and Engineers, and is selling them
| (and also a few copies of the manual itself) on EBay.
| Amazon.com also provides a link to a copy, but it appears
| unavailable at the moment. I don't know if it's an instructor
| or a student who is doing this, but it certainly seems, at
| the very least, like a copyright infringement. The publisher
| claims that it does not sell the solutions manual - it's only
| provided to instructors.
|
| For me, this is an absolute disaster. I use homework as a
| major part of the way I present my physics course. I spend
| the first 20 to 25 minutes of each class going over homework
| that the students didn't understand. If a student asks a
| question I work directly with that student, coaxing him/her
| through the solution. I rarely just go to the board and
| simply present the solution
| - it's an interactive process that assumes that the actual
| solution is not available - the student and I "discover" an
| approach that solves the problem. The other students are free
| to contribute comments, but the main interaction is between
| me and the student who brought up the problem.
|
| If the solutions manual is available, then the part of the
| class devoted to homework becomes a defense of the approach
| taken by the person who wrote the solutions manual. A typical
| question from the student now becomes "why did they do this
| way?". The students miss out on the best part of introductory
| physics which to me is the development of the physical
| intuition needed to start a problem from scratch and invent a
| path to a solution. The fun part of reviewing a homework
| problem in class is to uncover all the different paths that
| the students invented to arrive at the same solution.
|
| Has anyone else encountered this mass sale of solutions? Do
| you see it as an impediment to your teaching of your physics courses?
|
| Bob at PC
|
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