worse than that is professors being required by the school’s contract with the textbook company to tell you to buy a book that they have no intent on using because it’s awful. that was way way more common for me.
One of my professors had a textbook that was shockingly out of date for the subject. Like we’re talking using scientific data from 1995 at the latest, and I took this class 2 years ago. He sent a bunch of emails to the textbook author and eventually he came out with a “Fourth Edition” in response that changed NOTHING. The book was exactly the same except for a different cover. It was so bad that in the syllabus our professor warned us not to buy the fourth edition for the hefty $70 upcharge because it’s the same thing as the third edition.
worse than that is professors being required by the school’s contract with the textbook company to tell you to buy a book that they have no intent on using because it’s awful. that was way way more common for me.
And the versioning of those textbooks to make sure it can sell for exactly nothing.
One of my professors had a textbook that was shockingly out of date for the subject. Like we’re talking using scientific data from 1995 at the latest, and I took this class 2 years ago. He sent a bunch of emails to the textbook author and eventually he came out with a “Fourth Edition” in response that changed NOTHING. The book was exactly the same except for a different cover. It was so bad that in the syllabus our professor warned us not to buy the fourth edition for the hefty $70 upcharge because it’s the same thing as the third edition.