PlatypusDude
Member
Often times in my experience the books that come with codes are the most likely to be loose leaf which just makes the whole thing suck even more.
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So lets talk about access codes for College books
- Thread starter shoreu
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Often times in my experience the books that come with codes are the most likely to be loose leaf which just makes the whole thing suck even more.
It's literally a code you have to buy in order to access the webpage to do the homework for the class.Valtýr;215079594 said:
So take a class like Calculus 1 for example.
Pearson will sell you the textbook for say $50 or the textbook and the access code for $75.
The access code by itself will be something like $60, so as a student you have no choice but to buy the bundle or save like $15 and pirate the text and just buy the access code.
It was a reaction to students refusing to abide by their bullshit $100 textbooks by buying used books or pirating texts entirely.
Walker_Boh
Member
Valtýr;215079594 said:
Most of the time access codes are used so that we can do our homework/quizzes/tests. Basically you will fail the class if you don't have them. In my case at least.
It's kind of cute how you're pretending like every major university in the U.S. isn't in bed with Pearson and forces the departments to use access codes.
This shit goes way deeper than individual professors or specific departments.
The government has never shown interest in trying to regulate "fairness" in the collegiate system and I don't expect them to start any time soon.
bobbychalkers
Member
I can't even front, college got so expensive that I resorted to piracy. When the decision becomes, "am I gonna buy this book for class or will I save the money for gas and food", there is a clear problem. Most of my classes that required access codes were really frontloaded into my freshman and sophomore years so I lucked out a bit near the end.
Team Alucard
Banned
If the textbook is from Pearson then 9/10 times there will be an online code. Fuck Pearson.
One semester all 5 of my classes (calc, stats, econ, accounting, spanish) had this nonsense. I ended up paying $800 for books, it was awful.
One semester all 5 of my classes (calc, stats, econ, accounting, spanish) had this nonsense. I ended up paying $800 for books, it was awful.
40 dollars for a clicker for attendance. You'll never use it again.
bobbychalkers
Member
I have 3 clickers because the standard changed 3 times during my college years....I ought to go back to campus and just leave them around spots for people to find and keep.
WhiteRabbitEXE
Member
It's common as fuck. Hell, I've had classes with online exams where I had to pay $25 to schedule time with an online proctor who I had to allow full access to my laptop online, including the mic and and camera. And you HAD to have both, so if you had a desktop only you had to borrow a laptop or buy a webcam.
Bremsstrahlung
Member
Had to deal with this for one of my classes. Professor was at least nice enough to let groups of 3 share a code rather than requiring each student buy their own. Still ridiculous.
jasminlovesyoux
Banned
That is fucking ridiculous. This shit should be illegal.
WhiteRabbitEXE
Member
I pirate literally every textbook I can and don't feel even remotely bad (and I'm someone who always refused to pirate even music, so that tells you something). The prices are absolutely and deliberately exploitative.
One time last semester I was in the middle of taking a proctoru exam at my house, working diligently along, when my roommate briefly passed by me to get to the bathroom.
The proctor then decided to make a fuss about it, demanding I drop what I was doing and show them the room again, show them my workspace to confirm that I wasn't cheating, and to tell my roommate to not pass by again to use the restroom.
So I essentially lost 2-3ish minutes of work time because of my motherfucking bitch ass proctor decided that my roommate going to use the restroom was jeopardizing the academic integrity of the exam.
To say that my blood was boiling and that I wanted to choke somebody out is a severe understatement.
This happened to me back in College in my freshman year, in 2010. I had to buy my chemistry book "brand new" because it included a stupid code to some online system where the homework was. The homework was essentially multiple choice questions that we answered via a website.
Essentially this shit fuck companies realized students could easily buy and sell the books used online, so they had to come up with something to force us to buy brand new. It's really shitty.
Essentially this shit fuck companies realized students could easily buy and sell the books used online, so they had to come up with something to force us to buy brand new. It's really shitty.
WhiteRabbitEXE
Member
I had a proctor session start over 30 minutes late. The exam had a hard deadline and I lost all 30 minutes. And it was literally 100% on ProctorU.
For politics 101 my professor required two of his own books, one of which consisted of really awful scans and was overall really poorly done.
They were only $10 each though, so for what it's worth it could have been worse.
I liked the professor quite a bit though.
Have never found the need to pirate any material. Books only average at about $30 per class on amazon.
They were only $10 each though, so for what it's worth it could have been worse.
I liked the professor quite a bit though.
Have never found the need to pirate any material. Books only average at about $30 per class on amazon.
Yup I had pretty much the same experience for the first exam in that same course I mentioned.
I explained it to my professor during office hours and she basically told me I was shit out of luck.
"Oh I see, that's really unfair, I'll make sure to send them an email and investigate it for you".
Never once got back to me.
Fuck proctoru with every fiber of my being.
Did you follow up with her?
BronzeWolf
Banned
The thing is, the savings are not being passed down to the students. The school should be paying for these codes out of the money they are saving from hiring an actual professor
SunDimension24
Member
They suck sooooooo much!!! Thankfully I only had to use them during my freshman and sophomore years for statistics, biology and English. Once I got to my junior year and was taking primarily computer science classes, they finally disappeared. I hated the statistics one the most since homework and practice test were 50% of your grade and the only way you could do them was to get that access code so you were pretty much forced to get it. Then I would go to my linear algebra class afterwards and he would give us 5 page homework problems that needed no access code at all, it was on cold, hard paper. It never made sense.
I did once and she said that they were still conducting an "investigation" a.k.a. I was shit out of luck.
That's higher education in the U.S. for you.
As a current college student I honestly just look around me sometimes and feel disgusted about how all of this shit really runs.
I don't understand why they didn't just make an app for class.
the-pi-guy
Member
Basically, it lets you access the webpage so that you can do your homework.Valtýr;215079594 said:
It is the text book version of online passes.
Yep. They started doing shit like this when I was graduating... A professor would essentially take a section out of Campbell's Biology text book (whatever section pertained to their class), add their own questions, charge 150-200 dollars.
It's bullshit, but I get it. They were getting murdered on the second hand market. I was buying textbooks for ~15 dollars, so they were going to get their pound of flesh.
They wouldn't have been getting murdered on the second hand market if they weren't artificially inflating the prices of new books to begin with and implementing other bullshit business practices like coming out with a new edition every year with slightly different wording in some chapters and encouraging professors to demand the latest edition of the book.
People did what they had to do to get by and they turned around and decided to rail students even fucking harder. It's disgusting.
WhiteRabbitEXE
Member
My favorite thing is "custom editions" of books designed to "make the books cheaper for students" by removing unneeded material. And the removed content winds up being about 10%, the book is about 5% cheaper, and can't be resold to any bookstores because THEY HAVE NO FUCKING BINDING. And of course you can't sell them online either, because they're "customized" for your school only, and they probably updated to a "new" required customization for the next semester anyway. Had that shit twice. Thanks for the $100 literal garbage!
My calc class got me with this loose leaf shit
DerpButter
Member
I don't want to say much in the way of specifics but for about 3 years I worked for a publisher that transitioned heavily into this DRM nightmare. Instructors generally use access code protected platforms for a 'cookie cutter' course layout that includes ebook links and pre-built quizzes. In many cases these platforms were incredibly tenuous, and would often lose or fail to feedback grades, (fair warning, if you take any externally linked quiz from within a Blackboard etc, that requires opening in a pop up window, be ready to screenshot whatever score you recieve, because the most trivial changes will cause your grade to not return). The other fun part of the equation is that there are generally 'open-spec' question banks out there for any major textbook that are free, but aren't often used due to:
1. Instructors not wanting to spend that much time developing the digital side of a course.
2. Industry-wide fuckery regarding support for the open spec questions. Mistakes would be made with character sanitation and formatting of these banks that would make them fail to import, in a way that had to be intentional.
3. Morally-bankrupt 'personal sales approaches' employed by book representatives that include lunches and gift cards, where these DRM platforms are heavily hyped and foisted upon faculty, usually with no other options presented.
1. Instructors not wanting to spend that much time developing the digital side of a course.
2. Industry-wide fuckery regarding support for the open spec questions. Mistakes would be made with character sanitation and formatting of these banks that would make them fail to import, in a way that had to be intentional.
3. Morally-bankrupt 'personal sales approaches' employed by book representatives that include lunches and gift cards, where these DRM platforms are heavily hyped and foisted upon faculty, usually with no other options presented.
NipplesAndToes23
Member
I vaguely remember something like this. Just someone else that makes me think that college is more of a business and a scam.
Yep. I graduated college in 2012 and had a few textbooks that included access codes in order to look at special content and do your homework. These codes would expire about five months after activation so you couldn't sell the books and/or go through the content again once the semester was over.
The college textbook industry is one of the biggest scams out there.
The college textbook industry is one of the biggest scams out there.
Pantaghana
Member
Reading some of this... holy fucking shit. I can't believe stuff like this can even happen.
On several occasions I saw my college professors list available literature for their class (all optional), then they would point out one of the books and say something like: "I wrote that one, you can buy it at <bookstore that was part of the college building> or buy a photocopy at <stationary store literally 5m away> for a fraction of the price. It's not really legal, but I don't care."
Some professors even recommended these things we called "scripts." Basically notes from lectures and various solved problems assembled by the students themselves, all compiled into a single binding and then given to the stationary store mentioned above for them to photocopy and sell to other students for 2$.
Hell, I studied from a script that was made by my sister and one of her friends that attended the same college 3 years before me.
Admittedly the scripts thing is slowly disappearing, professors are now making their lectures and literature available online for free as .pdf and Power Point presentations, with students copying notes into Word and sharing them that way.
On several occasions I saw my college professors list available literature for their class (all optional), then they would point out one of the books and say something like: "I wrote that one, you can buy it at <bookstore that was part of the college building> or buy a photocopy at <stationary store literally 5m away> for a fraction of the price. It's not really legal, but I don't care."
Some professors even recommended these things we called "scripts." Basically notes from lectures and various solved problems assembled by the students themselves, all compiled into a single binding and then given to the stationary store mentioned above for them to photocopy and sell to other students for 2$.
Hell, I studied from a script that was made by my sister and one of her friends that attended the same college 3 years before me.
Admittedly the scripts thing is slowly disappearing, professors are now making their lectures and literature available online for free as .pdf and Power Point presentations, with students copying notes into Word and sharing them that way.
I don't see how you can possibly back up that claim. How do you know that the tuition being charged wouldn't be higher if schools had to pay more graders?
This semester I had to buy only 1 of these fucks, a $100 math "textbook." By and large my most expensive book, the next most expensive one was a measly $65. Fuck this shit, it's unreal. I can't believe schools are charging me $15k/semester AS WELL AS these books that are retardedly overpriced. My favorite is the teacher who is inevitably going to force me to buy their book for their class. If any teacher does that, I'm pirating your book. Fair warning. You want to exploit me, I will just rip you out of a sale and tell the class about it.
dishonestjestI work at Pearson and I feel bad.
Junior Member
(Today, 04:31 PM):31 PM)
I graduated from a very large public university in 2012, and I fortunately didn't run into any of this. I mean books were still mostly a ripoff but professors generally took that into consideration when developing their class and required cheaper alternatives instead. I would have chewed out any professor or department head willingly going along with this shit followed up by a trip to my student union to make a stand. It is unacceptable.
WhiteRabbitEXE
Member
I go to the largest public university in the country (ASU, woooo...) and literally every bit of fuckery in this topic I've experienced, and then some. It's terrible.
I do online only at SNHU, and so I have pay a bunch for purely digital books. Not in the 150 range most times, but two classes (considered full time) is around 200 dollars each term for access codes.
If you want the physical book, you have to pay 100 bucks more for each one. Fuck that noise.
If you want the physical book, you have to pay 100 bucks more for each one. Fuck that noise.
CMojicaAce
Member
Currently on my way to buy a $150 textbook. Can't rent it for cheap because of the access code needed for the class. It's bullshit.
If only you could have the option to buy the access code by itself for a lot cheaper instead of $10 off. Sigh.
If only you could have the option to buy the access code by itself for a lot cheaper instead of $10 off. Sigh.
Smokey_Run
Member
The codes started to show up just as I was done. Thankfully, I didn't have any classes that used a textbook with a code.
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