> Please do not ask me for solutions to the exercises. Even if you are [an] instructor, I will say no.
That's kind of a bummer. I like to be able to check my answers when teaching myself things.
Am I somehow alone in that?
That's kind of a bummer. I like to be able to check my answers when teaching myself things.
Am I somehow alone in that?
I'm honestly seriously torn about this. There is a serious tension between pedagogical needs of students in formal classrooms and the pedagogical needs of self-learners. I've chosen to aim for the former. Yes, I know it's a bummer.
(From experience) providing solutions interferes with the learning process of my own students at Illinois. I have to change up homeworks and exam questions every semester, because otherwise students will look up and copy/memorize the answers instead of trying to figuring them out, which means they do worse on the exams where they HAVE to figure things out.
Also, a significant majority of the requests I get for solutions are from university students who want to cheat.
I do provide solutions to the homework and exam and lab problems I assign in any particular class, after the fact. (And I release those solutions publicly, despite the protests of colleagues at other universities, until the semester ends.) And I have started proving model solutions in the homeworks, so that the students know what kind of answers I'm looking for. (See the course materials page, under CS 374.)
In practice, my stance is becoming increasingly moot, as more of my official solutions get uploaded to places like CourseHero and Koofers and their many foreign-language equivalents.
I am very likely to include solutions for a subset of problems (maybe three or four per chapter) in a future edition. But that will take a significant amount of time, and I wanted to get something out the door.
Makes perfect sense when put this way.
I also really appreciate the response from the author. I forget the gurus behind books like this often have a presence here on HN.
I've found that whether or not a professor releases solutions to assignments (or even tests), some segment of the student population will have access to the solutions. Releasing them publicly ensures the access is universal, instead of limited to those with the right connections/access.
While I understand the desire of a professor to help out their own students, at what point does this become a matter of individual responsibility? Shouldn’t it be the student who refrains from memorizing answers?
When I took my algorithms course, we had a reference textbook with questions at the end of the chapter, but no solutions. Some people at the beginning of the semester tried to crowdsource the answers using a Google doc but that effort failed. It didn’t really matter though, since our homework and exam questions were always renewed each semester through the work of course staff and the instructing professor. In hindsight, I may have taken this for granted as it seems other schools don’t have a “training” and a “testing” set of problems - I would say having both is better than only having one.
Dangling a juicy piece of bacon in front of their noses will not help them eat their vegetables.
[1] https://scholarlycommons.pacific.edu/soecs-facpres/16/ [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00091383.2011.5...
Wait, did I say that aloud? Sorry, I meant "I'm already busy enough, thanks."
On the otherhand many classes are graded competitively, so there is enormous pressure to do well on homeworks while you know others have no scruples about being dishonest.
Maybe having a separate set of problems for the online version, with solutions, would be appropriate?
I have been wondering this for all freely available textbooks: have you ever thought about turning your book into an open source project? I see you already manage issues on GitHub, but how about managing the actual content there as well?
Producing a printed book might need tighter editing than shipping software, but I feel like there are a lot of books with partially overlapping content, and I feel like self-learners would be better served by larger books that are not meant to be read end-to-end, but that are "integrated" into a larger whole.
But I'm hesitant to release the LaTeX source files in their current (rather grungy) form. Too much of a control freak, I guess. Maybe for the next edition.
Also, the figures are all in a closed file format (OmniGraffle). In principle, I could convert everything to an open-source format like svg, but (0) converting everything would be hell, (1) LaTeX doesn't understand svg files directly, (2) in principle, I can connect latex to inkscape to convert svg to pdf, but the translation is always imprfect, (3) using Inkscape makes me want to tear my hair out, and (4) I'm a control freak.
And don't even talk to me about tikz.
Though I think the benefit would be less about just releasing the source, though the Open Data Structures book makes a compelling case for that, but fostering collaboration on the content. The books you mention have overlapping content and my heart really wants to join them in some glorious whole :)
Maybe that's crazy, the books clearly have different styles, but I feel like writing more advanced texts as extensions to an evolving intro book would be better for self-learners than just having the books stand alone.
FYI, the link to your course materials on http://opendatastructures.org/ seems to be broken now.
Your proposed solution (include solutions for a few problems) is definitely a good approach: enough to help the self-learners along while forcing the students to work—I assume you’ll be assigning the unsolved problems in class :)
Make the unit tests public. Or useable interactively online.
I know it'd be a lot more work. If you had a repo for unit tests, I'd contribute.
I usually look at the solutions when I've come to the conclusion that the problem is just too difficult and typically discover I hadn't thought of something that made the problem accessible. I would argue that if there are sufficient examples within the chapters, not providing solutions to the exercises shouldn't be a problem.
That is unless you have multi-month/research level problems à la Knuth.
I wonder if a better solution is to provide a set of questions and answers for the book but not use the book questions as the graded homework/exam material.
The one has to be dynamic for the reasons you listed. The other doesn't, and any professor that tries to use your book without creating their own questions will quickly find themselves in the same boat you were, regarding memorization vs internalization.
from what i see elsewhere in this thread, you've got quite a good reputation around illinois. i recently lost a favorite professor of my own mid-semester last year, and it made me realize just how much a good instructor means to people. so thank you for being that for students!
What happens much more frequently, is that I get stuck somewhere, and get tempted to look at a solution if one is provided, which in turn nullifies the achievement. In this sense, not having solutions, makes it easier for me to plough through.
Textbook solutions are good for those that aren’t in school, aren’t in formal programs and have no other way of receiving feedback.
The “you should know if you’re right” mentality doesn’t necessarily fit a person that’s been working for 10-years and has been out of the academic mindset. One that is a beginner and could easily fool themselves into thinking they have a correct answer.
It doesn’t allow for correction of false thinking. Anyone can think their proof is correct. But fewer beginners can properly recognize when they are wrong.
This sort of mentality is a bit elitist and gate keeping.
In the end, he was like "Oh my bad," and corrected his mistake. The point of the story is that they were able to essentially ask him for the solution and they were able to check what they'd done, and in the end he made the mistake. In situations like this, he should provide the answer if nothing else to show that he didn't make a mistake in the problem set. People are fallible, no matter how brilliant you are.
In retrospect I think it was a great lesson for my future career as a data engineer. Doesn’t matter what the source is, any datum can be just plain wrong.
As in, it escaped the gravitational field?
I had a industrial engineering teacher that did something similar. Every team had a (fake money) budget for each project and bought materials from him (sole source). He'd randomly cut corners, to keep everyone on their toes. Good lesson for the real world.
Even if you do have a similar proof to the one in the answer key, that doesn't mean your proof is correct. Correctness can often hinge on very subtle distinctions. You really need a TA or instructor to read your proof if you want meaningful feedback.
One of my colleagues suggested setting up a "club" on PerusAll (https://app.perusall.com/welcome) or something similar that would allow people to discuss to book and/or work through problems collectively. (They have a club for CLRS, for example.) Right now all their "clubs" are restricted to books with Reputable Publishers (ptui), so they might need some persuasion.
As long as cheats are only available for ungraded homework/self assessement tests cheaters are only going to cheat themselves.
Without solutions at the back of the book, self-directed learners can't verify their own work. Don't cut out the less privileged learners from bettering themselves just because you have no concept of discipline.
Solutions are the way I learn the thought process of author if he arrived at the final answer in a better way. Solutions expose errors in questions. Errors and typos in Indian texts were way more a common place in questions than in solutions. There was simply not a chance for a solution to have typo or logical errors.
If there are no solutions, I'd simply put it for later until I am proficient in the subject and want to try out the problems with confidence. There is always this insecurity when it comes to dealing with logic. Little things can slip in abstract thinking pretty easily. Silly mistakes take a toll. People like myself prefer to solve problems individually at our own pace. Solutions are a must for me. Of course, that 'later' almost always never comes.
I spend upto ~1 hour on each problem. And then I google keywords from the questions. Someone somewhere has one possible solution. Usually , this is enough to set me on the right track.
I agree, although looking at the exercises in this book, they seem to be of the form where the only way to give you the answer is you give you the full solution, and they appear to be phrased in a way that makes it easy enough to verify the answer yourself once you’ve figured out the problem. I always feel like the ideal (for me at least) are problems with numerical answers listed in the back of the book – then I can check my answer with the book’s answer; if I got 42 but they got 5, I know I made a mistake somewhere but it’s still up to me to go back through and figure out where the mistake was. It seems like most of these problems don’t lend themselves to short numerical answers like that.
a 5 minute search gave me this - https://github.com/floyernick/Data-Structures-and-Algorithms for algos implemented in Go. github is littered with these kindsa samples(some of them highly vetted) https://github.com/topics/algorithms-and-data-structures
As a sibling comment mentions, it's relatively easy to verify your answer for correctness in some cases. The downside of this is that it becomes difficult to assess whether students are actually learning. One way to mitigate this is to withhold answers and assist with other teaching resources like TAs. This also helps teach the aforementioned 'verification' step.