Is it normal that i abhor many college classes' textbooks policies?

I know, right?! How many classes have I taken with "required textbooks" that were NEVER even opened the entire semester? Ugggh!

Hey, I appreciate your honesty. And I agree with you. Thanks for suggesting a movement--I think it's what it'll take. Totally a "ripoff."

Thanks for contributing this. Yes, lots of students in my town (Boston) have been pushing for use of various free online textbook sites, but as you say, faculty and school are seduced by publishers the way doctors are by the pharmaceutical industry, and the result is the people who need help don't get what we need. Discouraging.

Again, thanks for a pertinent comment.

I don't know why my original reply to your reply didn't post. Maybe it's fortuitous. Thanks for sharing, though. But I don't find professors' investment of time choosing a textbook that complements their time to be a sound defense of the current state of affairs. Not in the least. That's like defending the aseptic techniques a surgeon chooses based on what's convenient to her or him, when we all know the only justification of aseptic techniques is to overcome the threat microbes present to patients--not a surgeon's convenience. Students are paying customers--and we pay a very great deal. The country recognizes the astronomical costs of college/university. It's criminal to force students to buy redundant textbooks we never even use (the better the faculty the less the reliance on textbooks--despite their remaining "required"--because excellent, expert research faculty usually distribute their own notes as Powerpoints) JUST so we can log into a textbook company's website and complete homework. $450 to be able to complete required physics homework, but otherwise never even use the required textbook? Absurd.

I don't mean to sound argumentative, but I also disagree that "every book presents the content differently." In our engineering classes--and I've heard the same from students in medical school--the concept of the "Gold Standard" requires that every new drug or process with a clear objective be tested against what is currently considered to be the best or most effective in its class. Investing millions to develop a new process that performs an objective no better than an excellent process already available is wasteful and, to the consumer, costly since the consumer must foot the research-and-development bill. There are copious excellent early math and science texts--many written by Nobel Prize winning faculty at the globe's best universities and available to the public for free, complete with keyed quizzes and homework. Forcing students to pay thousands for mediocre textbooks when far superior e-texts are already available free is reprehensible.

Lastly, in just the few years I've been in school, and working for faculty in their labs, I've seen more and more textbook representatives on campus courting faculty like pharmaceutical reps hound physicians. I don't feel paranoid in the believe that these reps influence faculty's choices about required textbooks. Too, as I've taken courses at a variety of campuses, I've noticed that more and more faculty are requiring students to purchase the faculty members' own textbooks. I shouldn't have to purchase a textbook if I am learning everything successfully for exams from attending lectures and completing labs. Besides, there are already hundreds of texts in the library or online clarifying any obscure point missed from lecture.

The textbook game is mostly about making money. For publishers, for book sellers, and lately for faculty. The Internet should have changed this years ago, just like the cost of online education ought to be significantly less than traditional brick-and-mortar education.

I respect your perspective, and I recognize faculty invest time in crafting their coursework. But I disagree that textbooks are integral to courses. I have yet to take a math or science or engineering class that relied on the textbook any more than as a source of homework problems. Faculty aren't crafting their classes to particular textbooks. They aren't relying on the material in the textbook for teaching. These faculty have been teaching the same chemistry, physics, engineering, math classes for a decade or more, and while they recycle exams from year to year, the major concepts are the same. There aren't a myriad ways to present the basics of linear algebra or conservation of angular momentum. And each faculty already has her or his own way of presenting the material. It's not as if they're changing this semester after semester, and somehow the textbooks' presentations are crucial to the faculty member's pedagogy. Even if textbooks supposed variety of presentation styles were crucial to student learning, every university already has a library with copious electronic and physical textbooks available to students. There's no need for a $400 engineering textbook that rehashes the same concepts in the other 200 books in the library on the same subject matter.

What I do notice, however, is more and more textbook representatives on campus, plying faculty with lunches and other inducements to consider their company's new electronic platforms. Worse, even if textbooks were somehow linked to professors' teaching--which I reject as a hypothesis based on the teaching style of faculty in and around the Boston area, many of whom even release their own Powerpoints, which are an infinitely more critical source of knowledge, especially for exam preparation, what is unreasonable is forcing students to invest many thousands a year JUST to have access to an electronic homework release key. If the consumer doesn't need a textbook and only needs to submit her answers to homework questions, forcing her to pay thousands of dollars to do so in addition to tuition--in an age of run-away higher ed costs all the pundits talk about wanting to reduce--is not just unreasonable, it's criminal.

I don't mean to seem argumentative, but I also reject the old, common hypothesis that "every book presents the content differently." The obvious slight differences in thematic presentation copyrighting requires--different example problems or graphs...--do not justify the requirement for different textbooks. The Harvard School of Education even released a series of studies in the early 2000s addressing just this, and found that at least in the sciences and mathematics, there was not nearly enough variation among textbook styles and thematic presentations to justify the broad variety of texts in these subjects. They found, however, from an economic perspective that publisher profits independently were associated with producing new textbooks. Besides, from what I understand about the Gold Standard Hypothesis, it's questionable, minimally, to develop a new product without having quantitative evidence that the new product is better than the best product available. Otherwise, your interests are far more likely profit, not consumer benefit. Producing more and more calculus... textbooks when Harvard, Stanford, MIT--some of the very best scholastic centers on the planet--already offer award-winning FREE e-textbooks with copious notes, practice exams, and keyed homework assignments demonstrates where (many) universities' and faculties' priorities lie. It's not in educating, and it's not in producing affordable, though still profitable, products. It's in making more and more money at the expense of students who, even at the community college level, are going into greater and greater debt to finance school.