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A comment on Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks. Parent comment

Re:Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks by mindcrime on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @03:55PM (#5403188)
Unless you're teaching at the very cutting edge where new research is emerging regularly, (in which case I imagine you'd be teaching from your own notes and journal articles anyway), then how about just intentionally using an older text and write your own exam questions? There are usually plenty of copies of "recently out of date" editions of most texts on the second-hand market, and the fundamentals of the material probably haven't changed that much.

Or find one of the many "released free for use" maths texts[1][2] that are "out there" and see if one is suitable for your classes?

[1]: http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.ht...

[2]: http://www.reddit.com/r/mathbooks/

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Re:Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks by fnordfnordfnord on Tuesday March 19, 2013 @09:37PM (#5405003)
>how about just intentionally using an older text ...

Tried it. Those god-damned greedy SOB's buy up all the previous editions and shred them. It's hard to find copies even on the internet after a couple semesters. I still list previous editions of texts on my syllabi though, but students who are on fin-aid are herded toward the campus bookstore.

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Re:Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks by mindcrime on Wednesday March 20, 2013 @10:44AM (#5407534)
Ah, interesting. I've seen older texts listed on Amazon.com many times and had always assumed that getting them was pretty easy. OK, well, nix that idea then. :-(
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Re:Supreme Court sides with student in case over textbooks by hatberet on Wednesday March 20, 2013 @03:12PM (#5409467)
That might work at some universities, but there are a (not insignificant) number of students who simply refuse to buy used textbooks. After all, they aren't paying $20k per semester to learn old calculus!

The sad reality of the situation is that a professor's student evaluations (which do matter for things like tenure) will be negatively affected by the decision to use an old edition. Yes, sometimes it makes sense to tell an unprofitable/annoying customer to go away, but professors don't have that luxury in the university environment.

Edit: Curious why this is being down-voted. The truth hurts?

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