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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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?).
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A SQUARE HAS A PERIMETER OF 36 UNITS. WHAT IS THE AREA OF THE SQUARE.
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 🙂
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!
what is the effect of shape on the density of samples of the same material?
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.