this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.
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.
And the versioning of those textbooks to make sure it can sell for exactly nothing.
One of my professors had a textbook that was shockingly out of date for the subject.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.
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 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"