Does everyone in the world but me know about Cramster.com? Basically it’s a website that includes as many answers to textbook homework problems as they can possibly put together. As far as I can tell it works on a Wiki system, where members submit the various solutions, although there are apparently also “expert” solutions. Odd-numbered solutions are available for free, but you have to pay to see the even numbers. Nothing there for my GR book, although there were some for Jackson’s E+M book, and plenty for Halliday/Resnick etc.
Not really sure what to think about sites like this. Part of me (a big part, actually) couldn’t care less about whether students do their homework, and for that matter thinks that grading is a complete waste of time. What matters is whether or not the students have learned the material, not how they perform on some formalized exercises. If they get perfect grades but don’t learn anything, ultimately they’re the ones who will suffer; even if they get into a better grad school thereby, they’ll just find that their fellow students are much better prepared than they are.
But then there is the whole “fairness” thing, which sadly does matter. There is a set of rewards — like good jobs and/or grad-school admissions — that we base on grades, and they should go to the most deserving students. So, unpleasant as it might be, we have to evaluate them somehow. But in this brave new world, it would probably be wise to make up original problems rather than using the ones from the back of the book.
May 2nd, 2007 at 7:41 pm
But if they’re not doing the homework they’ll fail their exams. And I don’t know about where you are, but here exams are >60% of the grade. So getting a perfect homework score might help, but if you’re not also working your ass off to learn the material you’ll fail.
May 2nd, 2007 at 7:41 pm
I think this website seems like a good resource for students. Not because it allows them to “cheat” on their homework, but because it is almost like a complete solutions guide. For example, I’m still in high school but I’m taking several AP courses. For those courses, there is only 1 solution guide for the whole class and that is kept with the teacher. So if I want to do some practice at home, right now I’m limited to only half the questions (they have answers in the back). But now with this website, I can try almost all of the problems and check my answer instantly. And if I am lost on some problem, I don’t have to go after school to see the teacher (and wait in a line-up). Instead I can quickly look up a solution to the odd questions (for free) to point my mind in the right direction.
I do agree that some will misuse the website, but then some will use it in a positive way. It is up to the student to decide for himself.
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:11 pm
I think your post is very interesting. I too, agree that grades are very trivial and provide little insight for those “rewards” that appear in every persons life path (grad school, scholarships, top jobs). While I was never one to really care about doing my homework in undergrad, I find it funny when most students have answers to problem sets that are assigned, while others dont. In addition, many professors have been found to recycle test questions that certain privledged individuals are entitled to some way or the other. I find it comedic considering I recently graduated form a nationally recognized school with plenty of companies looking at GPA as an indicator of how well one can really learn and adapt.
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:12 pm
One of my favorite math professors would give a quiz at the beginning of every class, except exam days. He would randomly select one problem from the homework, and change the numbers enough to make the answer different. (Literally randomly, he used the rand() function on an excel spreadsheet). He never graded homework or took attendance. And to pass his class you needed to know how to do the homework, not just what the answer was.
May 2nd, 2007 at 8:17 pm
Sooner or later, the student will come up against a problem for which there are no prerecorded answers… at which point the student has the opportunity to do some original research. The real question is, how does the student react to that situation? There are countless numbers of students who jumped flawlessly through every hoop that was placed in front of them, and yet failed completely when the hoops were taken away and they were asked to do something original.
It’s also important for professors to take the time to invent original problems for their students for which no prerecorded answers exist – but in the end, if the student doesn’t have the motivation, all the teachers in the world won’t be able to help her make any real progress. However, for the motivated but stumped student, a ‘worked example’ can be a great help.
It’d also be nice if the world really was a pure meritocracy, but as everyone knows, nepotism and cronyism are also present in abundance.
May 2nd, 2007 at 9:29 pm
More solutions here
I’ve the impression that US students waste too much time on compulsary homework problems that they have to submit for grading. I work for several homework help companies and almost all of our customers are US students
If you are a student who is really studying hard, then there are some disadvantages to a system where you have to submit homework for grading:
a) It costs extra time to write up the solutions to the problems.
b) Because the homework will be graded you will spend extra time checking for small errors (e.g. sign errors, typos) instead of studying more.
c) Also because of the grading, the Professor cannot make the homework problems too challenging. This means that most students are spending too much time on problems that are too easy.
So, I think it would be better if the students were given more difficult problems which they don’t need to submit for grading. The exam would then also be more challenging. Students should be told at the start of the course that without doing a lot of the difficult homework problems they have zero chance of passing the exam.
May 2nd, 2007 at 9:39 pm
Just my two cents as a student finishing an undergraduate physics degree. I agree that grading is (at best) a waste of time. I’ve spent my time trying to understand the physics, not making sure I could solve formal problems by rote. I was lucky that the professors in physics program at my school (Yeshiva University) tended to test that knowledge.
However, when I took the physics GRE, I did poorly. But I still think I’m better prepared for grad school and a career in physics as a thinking physics student, rather than a trained monkey.
(I got into grad school, but was rejected from the “good” ones.)
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:23 pm
Without homework, how can students learn? By passive listening only? And without some kind of feedback — call it grading or what you will — how will students know whether they are learning?
George
May 2nd, 2007 at 10:44 pm
I’m all in favor of assigning useful homework, and then providing feedback. (Generally I assign more than average, and then grade fairly leniently.) But if they don’t want to do it, that’s their choice. Or it would be, in a utopia.
May 2nd, 2007 at 11:03 pm
A couple comments:
1) As a former student, no employer has ever checked my grades. My average performance as a student hasn’t mattered as much as my demeanor and alma mater (yes, I’ve been given jobs for being an alumnus of a particular University)
2) As a former graduate student, I hated grading papers, and found it useless. The good students would do the work regardless, and ask questions when necessary. The bad students wouldn’t care, or would try to game the system.
I always liked having a schedule of what we would be studying, problems that would enlighten the study course, and two or three tests to keep me on my toes.
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:04 am
I had the pleasure of being taught by Dr. Donald Clayton (yes the one that wrote “Principles of Stellar Evolution and Nucleosynthesis”). He was so excellent. Everytime im in a physics class doing robotic type homework (which I could careless about) I feel like im being cheated. For his class, he would come up with these problems that no one had any idea how to solve, and we would have to figure out what we knew about the problem, what a solution would depend on, and figure out some way of putting all these things together to represent the system mathematically, and THEN solve it. It completely took away any advantage held by the “i have no life and my only goal in life is to get a 100 on every assignment” people, and it was an excellent way of testing whether or not we understood the material and could apply it to completely different problems. Needless to say, we learned more than just the material — we learned to think on our feet.
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:15 am
I have been known to answer questions on the Cramster. I don’t see it any differently then correcting or enhancing an entry on the Wikipedia.
Eons ago, when I was a graduate student and was learning EM from Jackson, I had difficulty with several of the exercise questions. I struggled with some, TA had no clue (he probably knew less than I did) and the professor was too busy to help.
And then, I got plugged in to the Chinese graduate student group and guess what, they had a Chinese book with solution to most of the Jackson problems. I had such a great time going through that solution book and I think I increased the depth of my understanding of EM from that book. I didn’t know a word of Chinese, but I didn’t need to; most of the equations were there and I could follow what they were trying to do. In fact, my recollection is that I found several errors in the solutions.
Not sure if any of you remember or not, but there was a book or solutions for physics graduate study entrance exam from Chicago. The solutions were so elegant and beautiful that it was a sheer joy to explore that book. Again, I think I learned more from that book then I did from any Quantum Mechanics text book.
When I was teaching, I would spend more time on doing the solutions of the quiz or exam problems in the class. Because the students had thought about those problems and if they didn’t do them right, seeing the solution unfold within the context of what they have learned was very educational.
If it was up to me, I would provide a “hint book” for all the exercise questions for all the text books that I ever used for teaching.
Coming back to Cramster, more power to sites like these and the fact that a student is seeking to find the right answer is good enough for me.
Over the span of a semester, using a site like Cramster or using any other approved or non approved, ethical or nonethical study aid makes no practical difference in terms of the grades. Most educators are smart enough to include quizzes, closed book exams, open book exams and other interaction to appropriately gauge the grade level for each student.
If one is focused on whether the students are learning or not, I think the sites like these have overall positive impact.
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:40 am
Interesting discussion that goes along with “Elephant not in the Room” on Inside Higher Ed http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2007/05/01/absent
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:27 am
I’d say it makes matters neither worse nor better. It still depends on whether the students are willing to learn something, if they have an ‘instruction sheet’ to find the solution for the homework problem or not. Even before Cramster it was possible to do that, if you knew what to do in a library. At least that was the case when I was a student – most of the homework could be found in one book or the other.
I’ve had a whole bunch of classmates in physics who made it through the exercises but eventually dropped out when it came to their BS exams. It’s admittedly kind of stupid they didn’t realize earlier it wouldn’t work out.
In maths the situation was completely different. Most of the homework exercises were indeed made up by the Profs, really hard to solve and could not be found anywhere. In addition, even if you found the solution, it wouldn’t help unless you could explain the derivation. The result was (I believe still is), that students realize very early if maths isn’t for them. The drop-out rate is dramatically high in the first semester, it often exceeds 50%. It’s kind of scary to sit in the lectures and each week there are less people around. But anyhow, when you look at the BS and compare to physics, the survivor rate is about the same.
Best,
B.
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:32 am
Well, as a former physics grad student contemplating re-entering physics after a 13-year hiatus, solved problems are a boon. I am doing a self-study review of all of my undergrad work in physics and mathematics in prep for re-applying to grad school; these ’solved problems’ will help me immensely, provided that they are accurate. I don’t need Halliday & Resnik as much as I need solved problem sets for the more advanced texts.
Why is the text in your ‘Comments’ box jumping around as I type it?
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:34 am
Even if the grade is 60% exams, if everyone does poorly the exams since everyone is coping homework, teachers sometimes will curve the scores.
However, I bet you couldn’t get serious research done if you didn’t really know physics very well. That would stop you from progressing up the ladder.
May 3rd, 2007 at 10:42 am
I studied at a University school where solving homework problems was voluntary, not compulsory. They were not graded. I used to solve all problem sets they gave me, and then look for more in textbooks, because I knew I needed the training for the exam. Exams were pretty difficult, but not too much.
Now I teach at a place where homework is mandatory, and must be graded. I find myself having to press students to actually hand in the homework…
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:10 am
What’s ironic is that we try so hard to teach students about the scientific method, the need for controls, the danger of spurious precision, etc. — and then we flout all of it with our ridiculous system of grading. What does a “B+” mean, exactly?
I’ve always thought the root of the problem lies in the strange assumption that the same people teaching students also have to be evaluating them. If one has to evaluate students, why not use a standardized test? And if one doesn’t like the existing tests, why not devise new ones? At least that way the scores would have some semblance of a statistical interpretation (”this student scored two standard deviations above the mean of this population on this test”), as opposed to the current situation (”this student induced some particular professor to give her a B+, either by doing what constituted B+ work in that professor’s mind, or cribbing answers from Cramster.com, or possibly something else — who knows?”).
May 3rd, 2007 at 11:46 am
I almost literally NEVER studied in college and literally never in high school (I went for Psych/Poli Sci, minor in med and law) Except for my psych and poli sci classes i never studied period. And would cheat on my papers in the rest. Why? I didn’t care about the mandotory minimium they set upon us to graduate, but i DID care about what i stated so I want to gobble up all the information. And since i never did any late night cramming, I’d get a B or B- and the ones who did got A’s. It’s important to note cramming gets it into your short term memory makes it into SHORT TERM, but not the long term. But when we get to Psych 400 I sure as hell remembered more then they did. Fact is most people don’t study right. The grading system we have right now punishes those who cram the night before and get 98’s (I have done it a few times). And if someone wants to cheat in college, there loss. There are paying to attend that school, if they want to screw themselves over, let them.
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Even more amazing: many of those “for instructors only” solution manuals can be quickly downloaded as PDF’s using Bittorrent
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:12 pm
Because standardized tests are, almost by definition, extremely rigid, and my gut feeling is that they tend to put severe restrictions both on what students learn and what teachers teach. I’ve always thought that teachers evaluate their own students because only the teacher knows exactly what it is she’s trying to get across. If you prescribe a standardized evaluation, you are also prescribing a standardized curriculum and a standardized teaching method — neither of which are necessarily good things. Yes, a standardized curriculum is important in the sense that professors at level C should be confident that their students have a graps on certain core concepts from levels A and B, but I think a standardized evaluation tends to push the curriculum much too far towards absolute uniformity… and intellectual diversity is probably just as important in science as a firm grasp of the basics.
As a practical example, consider the professor who lets his class decide whether to cover groups or differential equations in the last unit of the class. In a standardized testing environment, he would not have that option.
May 3rd, 2007 at 12:43 pm
Perhaps one way to combat cheating would be to “atomize” homework assignments, in other words break down problems into smaller chunks which must each be answered separately.
That would lend itself more to subjects such as science and maths where aswers tend to be cut-and-dried, in the form of equations and numeric values; but with ingenuity I’m sure it could also be used with a wider class of fact-based subjects such as history and geography.
The idea behind this is that however the solutions are obtained, i.e. whether from the student’s recollection, or their notes or a textbook, or by paying to see a solution at cramster.com, the very effort of having to retrieve and write/type the answer explicitly would impress it on the student’s mind and, one hopes, with all questions collectively, on their understanding.
I’d concede there may be a few disadvantages. One would be where the wording of a question, depends on the answer to a previous question. Also, a homework assignment in this style would perhaps appear more mechanical and with less scope for originality, more like a multiple choice problem set. But there would be other compensating advantages, such as homework in this style being perhaps easier to mark (even if there are more questions).
Cheers
John R Ramsden
P.S. Sean, I’m not posting as Annette today
May 3rd, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Chris (#10): But those grades mattered for getting into grad school, yes?
May 3rd, 2007 at 3:12 pm
I’ve thought about this problem probably for all ten years that I’ve been teaching high school physics. When I started, I had a set of weekly assignments cribbed from some distance learning materials, so they couldn’t be found in the textbook. But marking 2 30+ class sets of those quickly got to be too much, and I dropped the idea, switching to more quizzes instead, which were faster to mark, and simply recommending problem sets from the textbook.
Unfortunately, high school students in my experience won’t do anything if there’s not at least some grading reward for it. Over the past few years I’ve re-instituted the weekly assignments for marks, but now students mark their own assignments in class as I go over the answer key.
There are always those who copy from one another to just get the marks, as well as those even lazier who try to copy the answers from the key and claim full marks (though they are quite easy to catch; they don’t seem to understand not to copy my idiosyncratic notations). With 18+ assignments worth a total of 10% over an 18 week course, neither really bother me sufficiently to exert myself to put a stop to it. Instead, I simply comfort myself with the understanding that those who don’t at least try the work will do very poorly on the tests and quizzes (where they have to do it all right in front of me), which together make up 70% of the mark. I’m a firm believer in the “give them enough rope” school of teaching these days. The sooner they figure out the connection between attempting the work on their own and their test scores, the better off they’ll be.
Even those good students, who for whatever reason can’t get an occasional assignment completed, don’t suffer unduly as they are not heavily weighted.
Since bringing the assignments back, I’ve seen a 5% increase in overall student averages against provincial standards.
The best part, of course, is that now I don’t have a heavy bag of marking to lug around with me. Now if only I could do something about those labs…
May 3rd, 2007 at 5:04 pm
I think there’s an assumption here that these physics textbook problems are, in some way, “rote” problems. When I took GR (using Prof. Carroll’s book, actually, and Ray d’Inverno’s, from Andy Strominger), I definitely didn’t do any of the problems myself until the final exam. I was always in a too-large-for-efficiency group sitting in a dining hall from after dinner to after lunch essentially waiting for the other people to solve the problems, since I did not understand what was going on until I had copied the solutions. I think that this was actually horrible for my learning, and I should have read the textbooks and done the problems myself. But all of these problems were difficult problems. In my calculus class in high school, we were given a set of basic tools — this type of integral, that type of integral — and told to apply it several times, each with different numbers. At that point, copying all of the answers is cheating, since these were “rote” problems with the specific goal of making the student good at solving those particular kinds of problems — a very useful thing if that student is going to do anything with calculus again. I can imagine someone who had copied homework in calculus class having much difficulty in fluid dynamics with the integrals found there many years later, since that rote learning would be completely forgotten. On the other hand, for a specialized and complicated subject like general relativity, the emphasis is (I think) not on being able to DO something but on being able to UNDERSTAND something, and there, copying “rote” problems, like computing every entry in some three-dimensional tensor, is fine, whereas copying the much more difficult proofs about light-like trajectories around a spinning charged black hole may give momentary understanding but not the truer understanding of the entire problem.
May 3rd, 2007 at 7:09 pm
I don’t have the slightest problem with Cramster, because I never grade my students’ homework. I assign it, post the solutions to problems, and have my TAs go over these problems with students. But it doesn’t count toward their final grade.
I am now completely convinced that the British system (as I understand it) is really the way to go. Separate the testers from the university. Now that students are generally less moral, the measures that have been put in place to fight cheating have made test giving barely tolerable.
I just finished administering a midterm to 300 students. In addition to the usual sleep deprivation, this task literally involved physical suffering — lugging the tests around (from copy center to office to lecture hall), lots of painful stooping to sort the separate versions that are assigned seat numbers in the lecture hall, creating the seating charts, ensuring that no two students with the same version are in close proximity during the test, checking student IDs, directing a team of proctors, etc. This is insane. Giving tests, especially so that cheating is minimized, is a specialized task that people presumably optimized for scholarly output are ill-equipped to perform.
The only way I’ve found to teach these large classes and have non-zero scholarly output is to cut back on sleep. This shouldn’t be. Any help that Cramster gives me — by showing students how to solve problems (without my involvement) — is definitely welcome.
May 3rd, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Aaron: I agree that, if teachers decided to teach not to their own tests but to a standardized test, that would be worse than what we have now. But another possibility is that, realizing it would be worse, teachers would decide instead not to teach to any test — and that would be vastly better!
May 3rd, 2007 at 9:38 pm
What I found most discouraging while teaching remedial math (algebra, trigonometry) as a TA was the “partial credit” issue with exams. In theory, it’s a good idea, but in practice what usually happened is that the students would adopt the strategy of scribbling anything and everything they could possibly think of, in no particular order, and at every conceivable non-horizontal angle on the page It’s often difficult to figure out if they really understand what they’re writing, and it also makes the grading process torture for the instructor. Problem sets and proofs in higher level courses force a certain amount of use of language to tie thought processes together, and in that context it’s a little easier to figure out if the student really understands what they are doing.
May 4th, 2007 at 1:47 am
I am a first year grad student in physics. I have a friend from Italy in my class who says the method over there is as follows: Profs give out many problems and solutions. Usually a whole semester’s worth of problems along with a course syllabus is given at the beginning. Coming to class is optional. The student has to pass a test at the end of the semester. I think this is the way to go.
Instead of wasting effort coming up with assignments, grading them and worrying about cheating, unbalanced collaboration, and (m)any other problems, let those be optional. Give students enough rope and put the effort in one or two tests which should be designed and graded carefully as to distinguish those who know the material in the end from those who don’t.
I have always thought that worked-out problems are a invaluable resource. I’ve never used cramster, but I imagine it is as good a resource as any.
May 4th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
I still think its cheating yourself to use these tools. Its rather like using calculator algorithms to do matrix multiplication/rowreduction etc in a linear algebra class.
The point is that you make mistakes, and part of the learning process is either catching them or figuring out how not to make them next time.
A similar (but slightly less bad) form of cheating is what near 99% of all physics students do, which si to form study groups. Invariably its one or two members of the group who do the lions share of teh work, and the rest just copy or ask stupid questions. Somewhere around junior year in college I stopped going to them, and just did the problems myself. So yea, i’d be vulnerable to making a sign or algebra mistake or something else that a group would spot, but then again i’d have solved problems that the group couldn’t.
Grading wise, i’d come out behind on homework problems as a result. But come test time, and more importantly in research, I came out ahead.
May 4th, 2007 at 9:18 pm
I’m grateful for the solved problems available online, both those for the textbooks and those that are now available for the physics GRE practice tests (crap exam, but somehow the scores count for something; I wish those had been around when I took the exam). If the intent is for the textbooks to be real pedagogical tools then the solutions need to be available SOMEWHERE for those of us doing additional self-study.
I can’t tell you how many times I took physics classes where the instructors would hand back marked homeworks without any solutions available for us to review our mistakes, just a tick mark if wrong and nothing if right. (Yes, I went to two state universities in the United States to get my BS and frankly, most of the physics/maths instructors were ghastly.)
When I was an undergrad, working together in study groups was actively encouraged as a means to get through the homework sets. Yes, if the students are lazy flakes then this will not work as a teaching tool for most of them, but study groups are certainly not a form of cheating if used well. And some of us slower ones do need the help of the smarter students to get through the sets.
The solved problems online don’t help much if you don’t learn the methods in them before you have to take the exam. And they certainly don’t help if you are really planning to go to graduate school. As far as I am concerned, I would rather see solutions freely floating around and run the risk of some students getting the extra 10% for homework sets taken from the textbook (who does that nowadays, anyway?).
May 4th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
This is addressed to the undergraduates who feel having solved HWs online or
elsewhere in massive quantities is a must for “learning” by “checking” their
work (here we’re supposed to believe that they do above and beyond the
assigned HW on their own, and that, while attempting to do said HW, they
are also doing the thinking required of one to solve a new type of problem using
the current and/or previous material they’ve been exposed to up to the time
of the attempt):
change major to one that does not require individual effort…you’re not learning
anything…all you’re doing is training yourselves to solve a certain subset of all
possible problems that are reasonable to assign for HW in a given course. I’ve
been teaching for a quarter century and if I had a penny for every memorized
solution put down as the answer to a similarlly sounding in-class test problem
(which really had nothing to do with the problem whose solution was memorized)
I would be a millionaire by now. The only thing that saves you is the stupid
curve used by those who want to entice you to reward them through the
course evaluations. I’ve led a successful effort at my U. to junk the stupid
curve for all courses in my dept. and we’re all feeling better.
May 5th, 2007 at 12:59 am
bizdiets, perhaps this wasn’t your intent, but you sound as though you have a lot of contempt for your students. (Some of it may be justified. I have dealt with many students who don’t like it when I tell them they must think through a problem instead of coming immediately to me for The Answer.)
Someone who writes down a memorized solution for a similar (but not identical) test problem has not used the solution sets to learn the material. Hell, they may not have used a solution set at all; having done a similar problem on a homework set on their own, the clueless students could just as easily regurgitate their own remembered work.
By contrast, those solution sets can and should be used as a real learning tool. Of course a problem should first be attempted without outside aid. But if after considerable time one gets stuck at some step, or hits a “thinking wall,” or simply gets the problem wrong, then what good is it not to have any recourse to solutions?
For that matter, for self-study, what does one do without available solutions? There are a lot of us in this quandary!
It sounds like your exams, sans “stupid curve,” are doing a fine job of catching the students who did not actually learn the material while taking the class and doing (or faking) the homework. If so, what’s the problem?
May 5th, 2007 at 7:53 am
>For that matter, for self-study, what does one do without available solutions?
>There are a lot of us in this quandary!
ever heard of office hours ? ever heard of the various Learning Centers
that exist these days on most campuses (here I’m assuming these Centers
have been ordered to only offer help in finding the solution) ? ever considered
approaching your professor(s) without the “instantly gratify me” attitude ?
have you tried extending your attention span ? have you trained yourself in
the ability to spend more than 10 minutes sitting on a chair in a quiet room
with no cell phone working on hw at a desk that does not have a computer
screen on it ?
K-12 in our “best country in the World” is putting out individuals who are
trained in applying algorithms (at best). And as though things weren’t bad, No
Child Left behind comes along and pushes the situation deeper into the hole.
What the noise about these online HW solvers really is is this: Universities
are now to be run like they are the 13th, 14th, you get the idea, grade or
the “market” will provide what the “customers” want. When I learned to
use the mouse to move an icon on my desktop I did not care to find out
what the system is doing while I’m carrying out the action…I’m afraid
most students have had instilled in them the idea that all you need to
do in a physics/math class is to learn to mimic solutions you’ve seen
before. When they fail, they act like they’ve been wronged all the
while thinking that one can write a master piece without knowledge of
grammar and/or syntax.
In many U.’s I see talk of how we must change our way of “delivering
content” in order to please the “Millennials” (we’ll be texting them lectures
using the prevailing argot according to the month each of them was born in).
I thank the Wall Street crooks for the present bubble which allowed me to
take early retirement and will soon allow me to move to Spain.
May 6th, 2007 at 12:12 am
noway wrote:
bizdiets wrote:
Wow, I no longer can give you the benefit of the doubt; it’s clear that you do, in fact, have enormous contempt for your students (and your colleagues, too?). It also seems that that contempt extended to your not having read what I wrote.
When I speak of self-study, I am not talking about a homework assignment of three problems due tomorrow morning in class.
I am talking about the repeated working of problems that many students, undergraduate and graduates, do in order to prepare themselves for further work. This is more common with those planning to do a Ph. D. or with foreign students, many of whom are already equipped (as an earlier post noted) with solutions manuals for Griffiths, Jackson, Goldstein, etc. published in their own countries. (I strongly believe that most of the people accessing the online solutions will be foreign undergraduates, actually.)
In these cases, students may not have frequent access to a professor who can explain the problem step by step, may not have any access to a “Learning Center” (not sure what this means, unless you mean the tutoring offered for a few remedial students on some college campuses), and by spending their extra hours in working problems, surely must have already satisfied your criterion of not having given up after ten minutes.
As I said, I understand some of your frustration. I have taught students, ten-year-olds and undergraduates, and many of them have not learned that learning science and maths requires a good deal of work. Many of them have not learned any science or maths, period.
In any case, the point is moot. The textbook solutions exist and are available (and have been available for a long time to Chinese and Indian students), many students find them a valuable resource, and you will soon be sparing yourself the pain of having to deal with the untaught masses.
May 6th, 2007 at 5:30 am
When the average grade for the HW for an entire semester is 97%, it can mean three things: (i) hw was too easy, (ii) the students know the material really well, (iii) solutions sites are doing their work. I was amazed the first few times when I was the only one missing out on points. Man, some of those problems were hard!
Was it really worth spending 2-3 hrs trying to solve a Jackson problem instead of doing other stuff? Well, you are not going to get it perfect and a get a 10/10 anyways. As Sunny says, it does help you understand the material more when you see the solutions (I also find it very satisfying to read through those elegant solutions once in a while). On the other hand, hw is a big part of one’s grade, so it can be unfair. How do you get around that? Do you want to make hw such a big part? Do you want completion of the problems rather than how they are worked? As a professor, will you have the time? There is no fair way of grading hws, it is just something that has to be done…
By the way, working in a group has the same effect; if one person solves a problem, it goes around to everybody. Is it fair to somebody who chooses to work alone and might not have gotten to the end but got there by himself/herself? Yet do we not envourage working in groups? Do we ask students to do the problems by themselves. If not getting help from online solutions and working through the problem should just be fine … as long as you understand the solution.
May 6th, 2007 at 8:06 am
Sean should actually be much more concerned about his “take-home exams”. I think he gave one a year ago or so and posted the problems here too so that we could participate as well.
I have no way of knowing if the problems I do for the homework help companies I work for are take-home exam problems. And even if it was clear that it is a take-home exam problem, there are plenty of online tutors who would help the student.
May 8th, 2007 at 9:31 am
I don’t grade homework assignments, partially because the incentives for cheating (and thus not learning) are too large if you do. Students get full credit for simply turning things in. This also allows me to give hard exams and still end up with a reasonable grade distribution.
May 8th, 2007 at 3:23 pm
I am someone who likes to see a lot of worked examples when studying how to solve problems; it’s why I really like the Landau and Lifschitz books. The existence of lots of solved problems that I can consult is absolutely vital to my learning process. It’s better for me to study 5 or 6 solved problems than to spend a couple hours solving one problem on my own, and I don’t think it’s fair to characterize this as cheating.
May 9th, 2007 at 6:45 am
A SQUARE HAS A PERIMETER OF 36 UNITS. WHAT IS THE AREA OF THE SQUARE.
May 9th, 2007 at 8:09 am
Hmmm, Peter’s posting suggests that Google has given this page too high a ranking when searching for “homework solutions”.
This page is 7-th on the list of search results
May 22nd, 2007 at 9:26 pm
My company seeks to find a happy medium. Many students turn to sites like Cramster out of sheer laziness. But many do it because they are stuck, royally stuck, and need help at the last moment. So I launched ziizoo.com (http://www.ziizoo.com) – the first marketplace for online, on-demand tutoring. So students can find a tutor late at night and use our whiteboard and tex-chat (and soon audio-chat) to get help. And this is a marketplace populated by independent tutors, not low-cost overseas tutors. Students will always wait until the last moment, but perhaps find a tutor on ziizoo will help wean students off of cheating!
September 17th, 2007 at 3:52 pm
what is the effect of shape on the density of samples of the same material?
August 20th, 2008 at 6:48 am
Me and some other Aerospace Engineering Students are posting solutions for textbook problems on StudentsUnited.eu.
It is a Wiki system with a LaTeX plugin so you can render equations.
In the nearby future we will post everything we solve from a textbook on the site.
The more students join us the more accurate it becomes. Also worked out versions of old exams can be submitted and found.
Every student can edit the solutions without registering, just like on Wikipedia.