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.
This! My English teacher in my first year required us to buy a specific book that she wrote from a specific book store for $250. You had to bring it and the receipt in proving you bought it and aren’t just sharing with someone else.
We then opened the table of contents to “go over” the book and never touched it again.
She then said “you should probably leave those here so you don’t forget them”. Never fucking touched it again.
Professors requiring their own, expensive textbook for their course.
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.
In 1988 I had to buy a book for my chemistry lab that cost $80. It was 70 xeroxed pages in a 3 ring binder.
This! My English teacher in my first year required us to buy a specific book that she wrote from a specific book store for $250. You had to bring it and the receipt in proving you bought it and aren’t just sharing with someone else.
We then opened the table of contents to “go over” the book and never touched it again.
She then said “you should probably leave those here so you don’t forget them”. Never fucking touched it again.