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From: night@pawl1.pawl.rpi.edu (Trip Martin)
Newsgroups: sci.math,sci.physics,comp.edu
Subject: Re: How to beat the high cost of text books!
Message-ID: <1942@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU>
Date: 5 Dec 88 04:52:05 GMT
References: <2219@cbnews.ATT.COM> <684@stech.UUCP> <17553@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <17738@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <1124@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu>
Sender: news@imagine.PAWL.RPI.EDU
Reply-To: night@pawl1.pawl.rpi.edu (Trip Martin)
Organization: ECSE Dept, RPI, Troy, NY
Lines: 47

In article <1124@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu> vkr@osupyr.mast.ohio-state.edu (Vidhyanath K. Rao) writes:
>In article <17738@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff)
>  writes:
>>[...]  It definitely does appear that publishers are conscious of the fact 
>>that students must buy the **assigned** text for the course[...]
>
>Ultimately the blame must fall on the students (as somebody else pointed
>out). You see, in basic courses, I would rather ask the students to buy a
>problem book, and may be one (or more :-) books out of a short list.
>
>Unfortunaltey, students feel uncomfortable about this. In fact, a biologist
>collegue of mine was bemoaning the fact that students wnat to know which
>pages of the text were going to covered on a given day, rather than knowing
>the name of the topic alone. I often feel the same way. In fact, when I
>lecture, I give only the name of the topic. But student think that that is
>too little. If that the way they feel, they deserve to be gouged.

Being a student who's had to deal with buying textbooks for the past 3.5
years, I feel this is unfair.  I've taken a number of courses (including
one currently) where problems were assigned out of the required text, and
these problems had to be handed in for a grade.  Thus, we must buy that
particular textbook so we can get the problems, or have to rely on getting
the problems from other students (this is a REAL pain -- I've tried it).

There are other factors which conspire against students being able to 
simply shop around for the best book.  For one, the college bookstore
usually stocks only the required or recommended books for each course
(This might not be a problem for a large university, but is certainly
is for RPI and many other schools).  Second, how does a student decide
which text is the best one to use?  After all, the student doesn't already
know the material to be covered, and thus is certainly not in a good 
position to judge the quality of each text (Granted, there are some things
which a student can look out for to get an idea, but that often isn't
enough).  Third, suppose a student gets a text and it turns out the text 
doesn't cover all the material (Possibly a couple of minor topics not
mentioned in the syllabus)?

I certainly wouldn't mind being given a list of books to choose from,
instead of having a single required text.  Having students track down
good textbooks on their own is different story.  And I resent being
blamed for not taking the time and effort to track down such texts.  I 
think that that time and effort would be better spent on other things
(like classes).
--
Trip Martin
night@pawl.rpi.edu
night@paraguay.acm.rpi.edu