[Phys-L] Re: Physics Solutions Manual

[John Denker <jsd@AV8N.COM>]

> > This is the new reality.  (Assume your students have access to the
> > teacher's solution manual for the adopted text.)

At the college level, this is not much different from the old
reality.  Verrry old.

Frat houses keep "homework files" and "exam files".

The savvy teacher lives by the principle "utlisé, c'est usé"
(utilized once = used up).  Alas there are always plenty of
non-savvy teachers, which gives frat members a treeemendous
short-term advantage over other students who have to actually
work out the homework problems (with the corresponding long-
term disadvantage that they don't know how to solve any
problem where the answer can't be looked up).

For homework, the only defense is to re-jigger the problems
each year.  (But be careful;  sometimes a seemingly-slight
change in wording can transform a difficult problem into an
easy problem, or vice versa.)

For in-class exams, you can re-jigger the problems, and/or
draw from such a large pool that learning the principles is
easier than memorizing the entire pool.

If teachers would cooperate, constructing such a pool would
be relatively easy.  One might imagine that this mailing-list
could be a vehicle for organizing such cooperation:  If a few
hundred teachers contributed a few well-designed questions
apiece, it would be quite a corpus.
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