| > I have it in my head that someone said that the solution
| manuals are
| > available on ebay. That being the case, your point is well
| taken, we
| > can't assume they don't have them.
| >
|
I brought this up about a year and a half ago, when I discovered that
about half my intro students had access to the solution manual. It was
real obvious, they copied verbatim, including the mistakes that were in
the manual, as well as using methods that the author of the manual used,
but were not introduced in class or the text. As an example, using dot
notation for time derivatives, that never appear in the text or lecture,
using some advanced series solution methods instead of some straight
forward method.
Naturally I first recognized the problem while grading some of the
"triple star" problems I assigned. It is harder to recognize the
situation for the single star problems I assigned. I now give
handwritten problems for a portion of my HW and I spend more time on the
course, for which I don't have any additional compensation.
|
| eBay now has a complete ban on any teaching related
| materials, including teacher editions of texts and the
| supplements. They have a program that searches through all
| auctions. If such material is found, the auction is
| terminated. While this is good for us as educators, it has
| created a big problem for the home school community as they
| cannot get such materials for teaching their children at home
| via eBay nor sell their used materials.
|
It wasn't so much e-bay auctions, but the used book market; though this
should help, I gather they weren't doing this a year ago.