And they make a ton of money.
Please watch this talk for more context (even if you don't like TED talks): https://youtu.be/BnC6IABJXOI
The entire thing is a racket.
Pearson etc offer them a time saver they don't have to pay for - they take out the effort of assigning and marking exercises, and don't add any cost to the educator. The students pay, and Pearson uses these codes to inconvenience students and force them to buy new copies.
If you think like an MBA, it's a great idea - the person in decision making power benefits from this move (exercises handled for them), is probably unaware of the issue for students, and has more time to spend on something else they need to do (raising grants, trying to write papers to keep going on the tenure treadmill). But you also get to sell a new copy of each book annually, at full price, without used sales cannibalising your returns. Given there isn't a huge growth in universities each year, this is a great way to boost revenues sustainably.
In my experience on the other side of the pond, we used 1 textbook in the entire degree. It was reasonably priced, readily available second hand, and didn't have any single use license codes. Indeed, one instructor used to upload the relevant chapters of their own book as PDF files, insisting nobody buy the book as it wasn't worth it!!
The other part is that Pearsons lobbies, the tests are already accepted as mandatory and then not every teacher is capable of coming up with his own test that allows you to then perform well in the Pearson test. You probably also risk a lot if you used your own test.
It's basically industry developing its own industry.
Some education board (with heavy influence from various companies) decides that you need to select from a set of curriculum to be accredited. Other universities (and some employers) won't honor credits or degrees unless they're from accredited courses.
All of my courses with smaller class sizes were much more careful with their book selections; occasionally those books were still expensive (even used), but only if they were really the best tool for the job. Even with expensive books though, this kind of online subscription nonsense was never used.
And it's especially prominent in math courses for students who don't know nor want to learn math.
Situation in private school is not better. A prominent private high school in Bay Area, made me run around like a crazy man scavenging used books from all over the place because the recommended books were out of stock. They won’t publish the exact book name until after classes begin in August and apparently varies by teacher by year. This is after paying $$$ fees equivalent to buying a new car. Next year I pulled my kid out of it.
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Can someone give some insight into how much "Surveillance Capitalism" is being done here? Facebook is a giant red-flag to me, personally..
I am glad that many CS authors nowadays make textbooks available for free. And companies like O'Reilly, Packt, and Manning provide DRM free copies.
Pretty sure the publishers anticipated this.
(in 2011) University tells incoming students they must check the book list for their course and get books before classes start. Books are expensive.
First day of class - professor gives everyone a PDF of the physics book I just spend $200 on. Says, "the university requires that I list at least one book for the course and they can't communicate with the students beforehand.
Never bought books before the first day of class again.
Binding and printing: $1.50
Royalties to professor X: $$
I literally changed majors back in my school days over those shenanigans by the department head.
I would expect better from Professor X though.
You can pick one book for the prose and another for the practice problems and neither have to be whatever the professor recommended.
Not just way overpriced, the few Pearson books I happen to own are of an alarmingly low quality. The pages of a phone book look and feel like premium paper compared to my copy of Blitzer's College Algebra.
There are still good TED talks, but you have to sort through TED the same way you sort through YouTube... and at that point, YouTube starts looking a lot better.
And "How to sound smart in your TEDx Talk":
The other thing is that most TED talks follow a certain formula. They do because it works, but watching many of them it sticks out and can be a bit annoying. There's probably a meta TED talk pointing out this somewhere.
Ever had a thought that just kept popping up in your head, that you then mentally suppress because "Dear <insert religious figure here>, how horrifying."
After doing that it keeps coming back again and again? Usually after a shorter and shorter period of time, because it becomes an indexing thought for recollections of all the times you've squashed it or thought about all the ways in which it was wrong?
Ever then talkedabout itwith someone else then had a cathartic release from the sharing, and possibly even a moment of relief that someone else besides you stumbled on <horrible thought> too?
It's the same dynamic. Just writ at a societal scale. It's why no censorship is a truly good idea. Bad ideas crop up organically as we've got a constant influx of new members of society seing the same warts, the same problems, following the same dead ends each and every one of us has. How are they to recognize a false start without being exposed to them?
The part that frightens people is that previously, you never had it possible for the whole world's population of false starters to get into one place and coordinate in real-time. You had an implicit depletion of critical mass activity that ensured the feedback loop for these ideas petered out, or remained tightly constrained to just the local nuts. The world we're in means that barrier has fallen, so everybody has to be able to cope with the entire planet's equivalent of the crazies all the time realistically.
It's a learned skill. Only practice gets you better at it, and I assure you, however good you think you are, cut the estimate in half. Odds are you've got fundamental blind spots you haven't even run into the craziness for yet.
much better version.
I attended one TED back when they were super exclusive, because they were super exclusive. The good lesson: super exclusive for the sake of it a waste of time.*
TED talks were pretty much of the “I am doing this cool thing and isn’t it so exciting?” That actually does sound pretty cool: the world is full of exciting things I’ve never heard of or have heard of but never appreciated.
The reality, both in the old TED and the new: the talks are almost all structured in the same mode: “you are smart for listening to this info that other people don’t appreciate.” Validating the listener for spending their time listening.
If I wanted that I’d go on a walk with my dog. Which I do instead.
* things can be exclusive just because there’s finite space and you want to have people who contribute (e.g don’t invite me to a medievalists convention; I’ll have fun but won’t add to the discussion). This works if it’s not self-congratulatory and if people pro actively mix it up over time to bring in new ppl.
I'd happily stand corrected though.
Honestly, I'm happy as long as publishing companies don't force me to use their crappy proprietary ebook readers.
This is totally false. State standardized test is the natural consequence of state public education accountability system. There must be a comparable measure across all the public schools in the state as the foundation for accountability measurements. And all (>95%) the students must be tested for equity reasons. No matter how many misinformation you read about standardized tests, the simple fact is that it is the only way to measure student learning of a huge population and get meaningful / comparable results. Is it perfect? No. Is there a better alternative? No.
The whole idea that a few testing companies imposed the standardized tests on students is simply a conspiracy theory.
Doing that, they can influence a lot on the scoring, quality, content and certifications around the standardization and fund the psychometric research establishing validity/equity of the tests.
Like any other big org biz, specing the RFP is one easy way to win the contract.
A decision marker (corporate or government) is likely to choose and mandate a pearson test rather than fund the research and development of their own which best fits their needs because it is easier.
Unlike other industries testing by is nature becomes monopolistic, nobody is going to say you can either of these three tests : it is hard to compare between two tests, so winner takes all.
Pearson and others in the space, exploit this by high prices , poor content etc because that's what monopoly tend to do.
This is all because of privatization of school vendors, why can't content and tests be developed by the state as well ?. Many countries do this.
Yes. There are places where tests were developed by the government agencies, which are not professionals. Mostly their tests lack psychometric regorious, not comparable across years.
I'm not sure what you meant "poor content". A few flaws here and there?
If reviews can be done by psychometricians, why test building cannot ?
There are many many qualified professionals affiliated with major universities- several of them owned by the state. Is it difficult to imagine them developing the tests?
Many of these same professionals consult with testing companies for building the tests, so it is not like these companies have some magic expertise no one else has.
Using an vendor test gives that companies allied products basically an Monopoly for that test/skill.
This is a fact of this industry, and testing companies will use it to their advantage because that's their business. It is in public interest not to privatize the test itself, so there is competition amongst providers of allied products and free market can prevail.
Current setup is like government tax code is set by intuit and you can only file tax via turbo tax and nothing else
Yes. University professors do consulting works. How do they have the capacity to build a product as professional companies do? ...
All tests have frameworks underlying them , do you know how long it takes to establish a framework ? How many peer reviewed papers that have to published, and time it takes to shape the opinion of the ecosystem to make it acceptable? Without a established validity and equity nobody is going to buy the test, why would they risk it to get sued?
You think companies go through the full journey of years and take all the risk? in most cases they only come in the latter stages and commercialize and adapt it.
State government is not better at doing things than big companies. Hope your solution is not to ask the government to do everything.
Many of the big tests are developed within an academic setting with university/public funding then licensed out. Almost every book is written by university professor then published by pearson or others.
State government does not outsource writing the tax code or the other regulations to companies why is tests any different ?
The point here is- they lobby to get standardized tests mandated where they were not, then they lobby snd push their tests for statewide use very hard. All school districts have to buy test questions and other infrastructure from them only. And only Pearson certified teachers can evaluate those copies. And every step of the process involves Pearson getting paid.
This is like the Mafia.
Thanks for pointing it out.
Districts do not pay for the state test or buy test questions from Pearson...
Yes, they do.
> The federal government mandates this as a requirement for federal money.
Sure, some mandates come from the federal government; others are from state governments, and still others from local governments.
Guess who lobbies legislators making those decisions, especially at the federal level, but also at the state level, and sometimes, especially for larger jurisdictions, at the local level?
Obviously, they disagree, or they wouldn’t spend money lobbying, which isn’t something companies do just to burn money. They do it because they expect RoI on the money spent lobbying.
Compared to any of the individual incremental mandates? They’ll have a lower ratio of cost to instructional time and a more efficient educational system, probably. While the requirements are often tied to consequences, they are rarely tied to the kond of systemwide analysis of results against other factors and process improvement that would make them systematically useful rather than theater. They are generally “accountability” measures that assume without any empirical basis that the results are within the control of the entity held accountable and that the consequences attached will force decisionmakers to make changes that result in optimization of the results.
Oh, and standardized testing companies will make less money. Hence the lobbying.
Standardized tests can be a window in the performance and health of the overall system, or over a group of students, but it is not reasonably determinate of the knowledge level of an individual student. Which is how they are often used
In the beginning it was used to judge the performance of a teacher or school, today is it used to judge the performance of the student something it is not really equipped for.
This is similar to BMI, BMI is useful as a health metric on a population of people, but is not very useful as a metric on the health of an individual
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