
Should students profit off my classes? - cwan
http://www.professorbainbridge.com/professorbainbridgecom/2012/02/should-students-profit-off-my-classes.html
======
patio11
If there is a "hacker mentality", teachers _tend_ to have the opposite of
that: given a maze and a cheese, any route to the cheese more efficient than
the one the teacher suggests is morally suspect. I've had more than one
discussion that devolved into "The journey to the cheese is the real reward!"
said by someone who was essentially fetishizing the particular contours of the
maze rather than the journey.

(More broadly I think most conceptions of education where "Hide the knowledge
from the students" is an acceptable operating principle are probably borked.
Exceptions to be awarded if you're teaching nuclear engineering or Charms and
skipping ahead a few chapters can result in the lab vanishing in a fireball.)

There is, for example, a well-trodden path in elementary schools of assigning
"busywork", which is essentially a classroom management technique whereby you
purposely assign work which has zero or negative marginal educational value
such that your faster students do not run out of things to do before the class
period ends, so that you can focus your efforts on slower students or class
discipline problems. I remember a few incidents where I was chastened for
dealing with busywork too efficiently. (e.g. "Draw 10 flags of the world."
"Can we pick the countries?" "Sure." "Libya, Japan, Ireland, France, Italy,
umm, can I use an encyclopedia for a moment?" "Why those countr... PATRICK."
"Yes ma'am?" "That's CHEATING. All the other students will do lots more work."
"Happy to suggest better flags for them too, ma'am.")

~~~
yequalsx
You have what appears to me a bias against teachers. I find this curious given
one of your products.

I personally think that bingo is a worthless activity but I don't thrust this
opinion on other teachers. Personalities come into play with teaching. I could
never make a bingo activity work in my class because it is antithetical to my
personality. But some people do make it work. And with 30 people in a class is
it reasonable to believe that all 30 will enjoy the activity or find merit in
it?

I sometimes hide knowledge from my students because I want them to see it for
themselves. Do you know how hard it is to get someone to understand that -4^2
is -16 and not 16? I can say this fact ad nauseam and it just doesn't click
until a person sees it. They have to be guided into understanding this. Me
telling them it is so and explaining it doesn't work.

At any rate it seems you have a bias against teachers. Have you taught much?
When was the last time you were in a classroom?

~~~
JacobAldridge
Wait - I thought -4^2 _was_ 16 not -16. But then the 2^3^4 discussion here
lost me as well.

~~~
jhurliman
Order of operations. -4^2 is equivalent to -(4^2).

~~~
aaronblohowiak
heehee, programmer's error. -4 is assumed to be the value, and not seen as -1
* 4, which i believe is the interpretation.

order of operations is a useless source of confusion -- we should just use
parens always and avoid ambiguity. #toomuchcprogramminglately

~~~
patio11
I tend to agree, and always did explicit parens for that sort of thing. Then
again I use parens in ruby code, too, so maybe I just like them a little too
much.

You could argue from consistency that the standard convention is more
aesthetically appealing, though. I tried writing this in a HN post but it
boiled my brain so I sketched it on the back of an envelope instead.

[http://images2.bingocardcreator.com/blog-
images/hn/arithmeti...](http://images2.bingocardcreator.com/blog-
images/hn/arithmetic-consistency.jpg)

Basically, assume high school algebra works the way you think it works. If we
treat unary negation like it magically grabs the nearest integer prior to the
exponent happening, things we assume are equal in high school algebra start to
break catastrophically. You'd have to invent a new and perhaps uglier way to
do algebra which would lose properties like "moving terms around the same side
of an equation on paper for clarity is allowed because it doesn't change what
they sum to."

Anyhow, if this ever comes up in my household, I'm going with "Yeah, that
one's weird. Your dad didn't like it either, but convention is that -2^2 is
-4. That's totally separate from math, it's just how we choose to represent
math in squiggles, and this collection of squiggles is supposed to be read as
-1 * (2^2) instead of (-1 * 2)^2 . Why did we pick that math-to-squiggles
mapping? Long story and kind of boring, but it's sort of important that
everyone read the squiggles the same way, for the same reason that we don't
get into an argument over which side of a road should be called 'left' and
then smash our cars into each other. Either way would have been a perfectly
good 'left' because left is ultimately just squiggles, but now we're stuck
with one of the squiggles."

~~~
aaronblohowiak
At the risk of getting off in the weeds, I'd rather re-frame the problem here
as to wether unary negation makes sense as an operation, at all!

In my ideal world, -EXPR would be a parse error, and it would only be valid to
write -LITERAL * expr. (-1 * a.) So, you could have -4^2 is 16 because the -
would not associate to the nearest constant, but rather be part of the
4-value.

The reason for this is that -a^2 is super confusing, and I believe it should
be treated as invalid. I do _not_ think that promoting the order of precedence
of unary - is the best solution because it leads to the common confusion of
thinking "well, a is already negative, so there is nothing to do". if instead
this was explicitly -1 * a ^ 2, then you can always "plug and chug" with
simpler rules.

Essentially, the confusion is because unary negation is the only operation
that is confuse-able with the value definition.

Final qualm against unary negation: what does --4 evaluate to in ruby? 3? No.
4.

If I had my way, then --4 would clearly be invalid because the inner -4 could
not receive the unary negation.

In more programming stuff, I think that mixed-type operations should be
illegal (no implicit casts!) adding an int64 to an int32 and storing the
result in an int32 should be a compiler error!

------
steve-howard
I think the professor's idea is actually a fantastic solution to the problem
(i.e. find the mistakes in the available note sets and write the tests
accordingly). I can't really see an ethical basis for banning note-sharing
(after all, if the class is worth anything, they should be teaching you
facts).

~~~
kahawe
> _find the mistakes in the available note sets and write the tests
> accordingly_

Really great... instead of focusing on enabling students and focusing on
teaching them the really important fundamentals and making sure they
understood those through exams, let's just frakk with them in a really petty
way (likely by musing over petty small technicalities) and put them in their
place, helpless little pups that they are!

~~~
corin_
Exams are about testing what the students have learned, not about teaching
them. This sounds like a great way to sort the students who actually decided
to learn something from the students you preferred to memorise some notes they
bought rather than learning the subject matter.

~~~
forrestthewoods
The vast majority of my educational career could be summarized as memorizing
some notes written by myself, given by the teacher, or inscribed in hardback
textbook. Getting them from another student is hardly a crime.

~~~
corin_
Not a crime, not even something I'd suggest students get punished for - but
definitely something that should be actively discouraged.

Yeah, you can make notes yourself and memorise them, and even that will
probably teach you more than getting notes from someone else and memorising
those. But it doesn't change the fact that it would be better if exams could
only be passed by learning and understanding the subject material, not by
memorising facts.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Tests that challenge a student's deep understanding of the material rather
than rote memorization is of course preferable. No has argued that.

I place zero value in the transcription of notes. The act of writing is a
useful tool for memorization and even deeper understanding, but it's just that
- a tool. Everyone learns differently. The test is meant to grade one's
understanding of the material. How you obtained that understanding isn't
relevant.

------
brador
Does the university a professor went to then also have a case against the
professor "selling" what he learnt by teaching others? How far up the chain do
we go?

------
danielford
One of my guiding principles as a college teacher is to never make rules I
can't enforce. This clearly falls under that category. Even if I was concerned
about this, there's nothing I can do about it. If a student wants to sell her
notes to one of these companies all she has to do is not write her name on
them, and I'll never know who did it. Prohibiting it would just make me look
like a moron who doesn't understand the limits of his own authority.

~~~
yequalsx
The orientation for new faculty ought to consist solely of your first
sentence. Too many of my colleagues don't seem to understand this.

------
lambda
Or, you know, the professor could just post notes themselves online, cutting
out the middle man. Some people learn better from a live class. Some learn
better from offline notes that they can peruse at their leisure. Why not cater
to both?

------
edgesrazor
I agree with the mountain out of a molehill argument. There's an easy solution
to this - if the profs don't like this, sell their own notes on the site for
the minimum amount.

Most of these sites let you name your own price. Set the price insanely low
and donate the proceeds to the university or a charity.

------
j45
For many students, the purpose of education is achieving a profit in a career
/ job.

A student is as much entitled to their interpretation of education (His or her
her notes) as the prof is entitled to force students to purchase their lab
manuals and textbooks.

Saying you own a set of notes is saying you own knowledge.

No one owns knowledge in education. They teach it. Study it. Learn it. Share
it. Write about it.

This isn't a question of economics, or IP. It's the principle. As a professor,
few are teaching anything new, or novel, or something they invented.

Many are teaching concepts that have been around for many years. Most profs
hate teaching because it cuts into their time to do what they're best at (and
don't get to teach enough about) -- their research.

------
imjoel
On what basis would a university have any say about what a student does with
her notes? I can't think of one--legal, moral or ethical.

I certainly hope this doesn't become something more universities waste their
time on, because this is ludicrous.

(edit: typo)

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newbusox
I worked with/at TakeNote, which is Cornell's commercial note taking service
and dealt with this often. Notwithstanding "ethical" reasons, this is very odd
to me. I think the California law cited that seems to ban the selling of class
notes, and any public schools whose student policies similarly ban resale,
raise colorable First Amendment issues. I know there is extant case law at
least in some jurisdiction that says that your notes are your notes, presuming
that they are not verbatim transcripts of the lecture. This is the case even
if the lecture itself and material is protected by copyright.

------
n_coats
I believe the emphasis should be on the professor to take responsibility and
change his curriculum/exams each semester. If professors did this effectively,
the issue of note sharing between semesters could be dramatically reduced.

Students are paying a lot of money for education these days. Is it to much to
ask that professors provide fresh and original content as opposed to printing
off the same powerpoint presentation or case study for five straight years?

It's simple, make your class exciting and captivating and students will retain
more while enjoying it. Those are my personal experiences and opinions of
course :)

~~~
easp
This strikes me as hopelessly naive on a number of fronts.

Good professors spend years refining their lectures and they change things
year to year, but many of those changes are evolutionary, rather than
revolutionary.

Reducing all education to a simple transaction where money is traded for
knowledge is overly simplistic and invites poor conculusions. Even if it were
that simple, there is an inherent and significant asymmetry of information
that stands in the way of an efficient market.

Further, for some professors, at least, money isn't the only reward they get
from teaching. They may like interacting with students, they may feel their
own understanding of the subject is improved by teaching it to others, and the
dynamic of the classroom provides valuable insight that helps them improve how
they teach the next batch of students.

The professor may feel, and have evidence to back it up, that students who
don't come to lectures, on average, learn the material less well than those
who do. There could be a lot of reasons for this, but at least some of them
likely relate to the classroom experience, the enthusiasm of the professor,
his or her ability to read the room and dwell a little longer on a point that
half the students may be baffled by. Their lectures could have a lot of
deliberate redundancy about key concepts that isn't captured in notes.

You can argue that the student should be free to choose whether or not to
avail themselves of these advantages, but your comment and so many other
comments in threads like these, suggest that many students don't even realize
what they might be missing.

I'm utterly convinced that our education system, from kindergarden through
graduate school and beyond is ripe for significant changes, but I'm mindful of
what can be lost in major disruptions, particularly if people are ignorant of
the value of the things they are sweeping aside.

~~~
n_coats
That's exactly my point. Students remember the content and the professors from
those who took pride in their work and made class exciting and interesting. I
acknowledge that the process is evolutionary, but from a personal stance, I
have had professors who have gone beyond the information or examples listed in
their resources to expose up to date examples which created the ability to
relate and better understand.

As I said, and you conversely reiterated, if the professor makes class
exciting, captivating and relevant, students will enjoy coming to class more
times than not.

These professors aren't the ones having to worry about students notes being
redistributed.

I do agree that our education is ripe for significant change as well... on all
fronts.

"Particularly if people are ignorant of the value of the things they are
sweeping aside." ??? Just as many other industries are being reshaped due to
technology and innovation, the same goes for education. Grade "A" content and
self learning material are more accessible now than ever. A teacher is no
longer necessary to learn.

------
kahawe
Flame-y tone aside, I cannot help but feel exactly like this:

> _Zounds, Herr Professor Doktor, you seem to be setting a new level of
> pettiness and arrogance. You don't seem to object to your getting a
> doubtless hefty paycheck resting on huge tuition rates, nor do I recall any
> quibbles from you to the costs of textbooks. Gods forbid that any student
> earn a few bucks from his diligent note-taking!_

What I do with MY notes should be nothing but MY business, as simple as that.
We are talking university here, people. Students should be MORE than old
enough to be able to decide for themselves which way of learning works best
for them. I do not need some facetious, bored prof patronizing me on how I
want to study and ultimately pass the exams.

> _campuses are taking new steps to limit what students can do with their
> class notes_

And this is completely beyond me as well. Even if I could obtain exact 1:1
replicas of all slides used in each lecture plus thorough notes, I still do
not get a degree from whatever university they came from and keep in mind that
a lot of the HUGE names are releasing course material for free anyway.

This whole thing just seems really petty. And don't forget, some students
learn a lot better by listening, others learn better by writing it down and
others learn best researching on their own and taking thorough, well-
structured notes can be a difficult job if you want to follow class and
discussions equally well at the same time. Why shouldn't you allow both of
those learning types to benefit? Don't we want our students to actually become
team-players and independent, autonomous?

~~~
davidu
Maybe I read a different blog post. In my reading, I am pretty sure the
professor agrees with you.

~~~
kahawe
Up to the point where he reveals that...

> _And then I'll write exam questions testing on those very same mistakes. If
> we all did that, the market would dry up pretty quick._

...he actually DOES oppose it obviously and wants to stop it.

~~~
davidu
You missed his point. He doesn't care. He thinks the market can deal with it.
He thinks the schools should stay out of it. As a professor, he can route
around it by being smarter than the note sellers. You want to restrict his
right to do that? Bizarre...

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shareme
I miss the days when most of the tests were all bluebook essays including
science, computer science, history, etc.

You youngsters have it too easy...

