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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

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."

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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?

you would think Princeton professors would think that their students wouldn't cheat. Must be those kids who paid to get in.

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.)

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