• ddh@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    132
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    1 year ago

    Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.

    • thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      48
      ·
      1 year ago

      worse than that is professors being required by the school’s contract with the textbook company to tell you to buy a book that they have no intent on using because it’s awful. that was way way more common for me.

      • dogebread@lemm.ee
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        17
        ·
        1 year ago

        And the versioning of those textbooks to make sure it can sell for exactly nothing.

        • Adalast@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          7
          ·
          1 year ago

          I loved getting my math degree. Almost every professor provided us with copies of the book. One went so far as to hand out flash drives with the pdfs on them on day 1. For the few classes I did buy books for, I went online and found the international edition, which was generally around 30 bucks instead of 300.

          Fuck text book publishers and fuck school bookstores.

        • bermuda@beehaw.org
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 year ago

          One of my professors had a textbook that was shockingly out of date for the subject. Like we’re talking using scientific data from 1995 at the latest, and I took this class 2 years ago. He sent a bunch of emails to the textbook author and eventually he came out with a “Fourth Edition” in response that changed NOTHING. The book was exactly the same except for a different cover. It was so bad that in the syllabus our professor warned us not to buy the fourth edition for the hefty $70 upcharge because it’s the same thing as the third edition.

    • AdmiralShat@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      ·
      1 year ago

      This! My English teacher in my first year required us to buy a specific book that she wrote from a specific book store for $250. You had to bring it and the receipt in proving you bought it and aren’t just sharing with someone else.

      We then opened the table of contents to “go over” the book and never touched it again.

      She then said “you should probably leave those here so you don’t forget them”. Never fucking touched it again.

    • The Cuuuuube@beehaw.org
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 year ago

      The professors I have known with text books for their own courses hate this, too. They would always put it on the board for the entire course how to translate page numbers given for the current edition of the book to page numbers for older pages. One in particular was like “Take the page number. Subtract the difference between the current version and your version. That’s the page you need to start on”

    • bufordt@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      1 year ago

      In 1988 I had to buy a book for my chemistry lab that cost $80. It was 70 xeroxed pages in a 3 ring binder.

    • PlanetOfOrd@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 year ago

      I had a hero of a physics professor who figured out that new editions of textbooks just mixed up the number of the exercises, so he advised students that they could just order previous versions of the textbooks and he’d provide the “key” for how the questions were shuffled.