Dear Chris-- Many of us instructors who use (or have used) these textbooks (or others that have exercises) in university classes have found from experience that 1. Students learn best from exercises when they make a real effort to solve them before looking at the instructors' solutions. b. Students tend not to attempt exercises that don't count towards their grade. They don't usually decide consciously not to do the exercises, but if the exercises don't count, no deadline means anything, and the exercises get put off in favor of homework in other classes that actually counts. (I've found a "sweet spot" at 10%-- that's enough to induce most students to hand in most of the exercises, while minimizing the advantage of those who merely put their names on a copy of someone else's paper.) iii. If homework counts and solutions are available before the hand-in deadline, some students will find those solutions (particularly easily if they're available on the web) and hand them in as their own. They thus gain an advantage (I like to think it's only a temporary one) over students who play by the rules. It seems to me that a policy that makes folks who follow the rules feel like suckers is a not a good policy. An instructor who is teaching a course for the first time has plenty of work just organizing lectures, selecting exercises, overseeing their grading, and making up and grading exam questions. After a semester or two, when the lectures have stabilized, one typically starts making up new homework exercises. The first time around, however, it's really nice to have exercises that have already been devised, and used in actual classes, by the textbook's author. So I don't believe your misery is the result of a deliberate plot to make your life hard. It's the result of instructors organizing things for the benefit of their students, and authors and publishers addressing the needs of their largest market. In my own classes, I hand out suggested homework solutions, but only on paper (although they could be scanned and put on the web, I haven't yet seen that happen). Exam solutions, however, I make available on the web, because all the exam questions are composed by me, and used just once (or used again only after a lapse of quite a few years). I currently use Haskell in my Programming Languages class, and five semesters' worth of exam questions (not all Haskell, of course) with solutions are posted on-line at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ham/UTCS/CS345/OldTests/cs345OldTests.html . These aren't the same as textbook exercise solutions (the context is not as explicit as it is for exercises at the end of a chapter), but you're welcome to them. If you use these up --or don't find them useful-- you might reflect on the fact that the conference papers and journal articles from which many folks learn lots of "interesting stuff" seldom include exercises. With best wishes, --Ham At 11:37 PM +0100 2005/1/26, Christian Hofer wrote:
Maybe I am too much rooted in the German university system, where the students' autonomy is held high (against all evidence). But I never understood, why we - who have to learn the interesting stuff completely on our own, because bad luck supplies us only with Java teachers (although other professors use Scheme, Lisp, Prolog) - are punished for a possible misuse of the exercises' solutions by students who would by cheating loose some years of their lifetime before failing in the exams.
Regards, Chris
Am 26.01.2005 um 15:41 schrieb Paul Hudak:
I'm not sure how Simon Thompson feels, or other instructors using his or my book, but a downside of posting all of the solutions is that the problems cannot be assigned for homework. I have many of the solutions to SOE problems, and could post them, but am wondering if it would be better to make them available only to instructors, or to those who might convince me that they are not reading the book for credit. Or is that being too draconian?
-Paul
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------ Hamilton Richards, PhD Department of Computer Sciences Senior Lecturer The University of Texas at Austin 512-471-9525 1 University Station C0500 Taylor Hall 5.138 Austin, Texas 78712-0233 ham@cs.utexas.edu hrichrds@swbell.net http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ham/richards ------------------------------------------------------------------