> For example, though we were provided with practice problems to prepare for our exams, we were never given solutions. My class consistently begged my professor for these, yet all he could say was that not providing them was departmental policy, and it was out of his control.
Wild.
EDIT: A response (and +1) to other comments: of course, there are many solutions to different problems on the internet.
But IMO, a big advantage of taking a class is to have shared context with a group of people, and thus interactive help (from other students, TAs, etc) working through specific problems together.
Being able to know if you were "right" seems to be an important part of this process. So having solutions to the shared problems you're all looking at seems important. (Withholding solutions seems like a method for instructors to reuse questions instead of having to write more every semester.)
To offer a different perspective a bit: For every person who desires to learn for it, there are also folks who want to do as little as possible and see no issue with just copying solutions to turn into homework. This includes groups who hold onto the solutions and will give them out to folks taking the classes. Professors had one of two ways to fix that: change questions every year, or just not allow solutions.
That being said, I seem to recall that when I took math classes in college, we had books that had even questions that the solutions were in the back, and the odd questions did not (they were only provided to the teachers). The questions were largely the same, so if a student had an issue with an odd question, they were able to just go to the cooresponding even question and work it out. I felt that was a reasonable compromise.
Many years ago, my univerity's choice of calculus book also had the solutions to half the problems (evens or odds, doesn't really matter).
Department policy was also one of "we won't provide you the correct answers" even after an assignment had been turned in because the book was used for multiple years. The publisher had a new edition every year, but the university stuck with the same book because it was used for Calculus I, II, and III, which for most students was 3 or 4 semesters between starting I and finishing III, usually due to a scheduling conflict requiring a semester off between them, or because they had to repeat Calc II since the math department's selection of instructors was particularly bad for that course.
Those same (usually bad) instructors were all too happy to follow the department policy and not provide any feedback other than "correct" or "incorrect".
On the other hand, the university book store carried, and put on the shelf right next to the calculus book, the publisher's "teacher's solution guide", in two very reasonably priced volumes, which had the answers for the other half of the problem sets, as well as the step-by-step process for most of them, which was the valuable part, as you could see where you were erring.
Math department policy was that you weren't allowed to have those, either.
You can guess how well that policy was followed.
Those that put the effort in and learned the material did well. Those that just copied from the solutions book and turned it in did not.
At the end of the day, if a university gives out grades, there has to be some sort of objective way of handing out a grade. What I have seen for the good courses is it is a mixture of exams, projects, and homework.
Some students are very good at taking exams, others, not so much. This can be due to a learning disability, stress over test taking, etc (or it could even be that person just is having a bad day!). Having homework and projects allows for students to have a different way of showing that they understand the coursework, and are able to apply the material.
It also gives the professor and TAs insight into the student. Why is a student doing so well on homeworks, and not the exam or project?
Some courses have it where if youre final grade on the exam is an A, you get an A (since it is a comphrensive knowledge base test of what you are expected to know of the material). But, let's say you don't do as well on the exam, you can have the homeworks average out the exam grade. Or you have a project, that can help equalize out the grades, because the application of the knowledge is important as well.
heh, I actually had this discussion with the professor I an TAing for. The (graduate) class is entirely a class project (it is an ASIC design class), and, if you finish the class project (you can tape out your chip), you get an A.
We have a set of homework assignments to help the students learn the tools (kind of a "hello world" script for the project), and I asked if we just tell them we don't look at them and they are entirely for your benefit. The professor said you if you do that, there will be a decent amount of students who will just not do the assignments and later on complain that they have no idea how to use the tools.
The solution we came up with is to have a set assignment due date so students feel like they have to do them.
Personally, I am surprised that graduate students need that sort of motivation to do the work.
Professors could change the numbers in the questions every year, without really changing the questions.
And then give the answers after the homework was handed in, if they want to grade the homework. Or compromise, by giving answers to half the assignments, and not grading those.
It's 100% because the problems come from a textbook and some other professors assign them as homework, as opposed to study, rather than writing their own problem sets.
If it's from the professor's own problem sets then actually WTF.
Textbooks written "for teachers" are the bane of every college student's existence if you dare to actually learn from them yourself. "Only solutions to odd problems -- cool guess I have to look on the internet or never be able to validate whether I got them right."
My mother was a professor of one of my college STEM subjects, and had used my textbook in my introductory class. My teacher was horrible, and she agreed. So she gave me her teachers answer guide, which not only provided answers to chapter questions but explanations (some including comments about where students might go astray, and why, and why that was wrong).
I gave up on lecture, and taught myself the subject by doing problems out of the back of our chapters. Aced the class, changed my prof next semester, changed my major to the subject the semester after that, and graduated with honors.
To this day, I am dumbfounded by an approach to STEM education that would withhold a critical tool to iteratively learn via problem solving.
It would be like XP without writing tests. You ship your knowledge to the exam, and pray it doesn't break. Seems ridiculous.
It puts the responsibility on the student, like it will be on the job. You have all the material on this planet at your disposal. Works in other countries: lectures and classes for two years and then one final exam. No quizzes, homeworks, extra credits, etc. Just the classes, lectures, you, your self-motivation, your peers, and all the knowledge of the world in books or the internet to help you learn the topic.
> STEM education that would withhold a critical tool
How does it do that? Are students locked away? Is there a secret police that storms into dorms and burns all material that students try to learn from? Does the Dean come in to break up illegal learning groups?
Cheaters, if they are good/hard to detect, would be more likely to be at Princeton than at a community college. By the time you get to Princeton, you're either good at studying or cheating (or being born to the right parents.)
It's highly likely that there is a large pool of exam questions, and every year, they are split into "practice" and "actual test". Providing a gold standard answer would lead to memorizing solutions in a way that providing all the questions does not.
It's likely the point is to talk to the professor about the ones you're having trouble with, or where your study group disagrees.
I always believed that if a course assignment needed a student to look up anything online (provided that their background was solid enough), let alone the solution, this would be something professors would feel moderately self-conscious about.
However, I found out the hard way that also in respected universities, the actual assignments in "hard" courses were long-known, extremely challenging problems that were not really meant to be solved at this level, especially on a weekly basis.
Folks handing them in were often using solutions that were quite obviously inspired from online sources, if anything because of the weird methodology needed to solve some of them, without the course teams caring at all.
