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Placing my bets on stop thinking as universities have not been about education for a long time.
But it makes perfect sense that we'd need a new textbook and that the old one couldn't possibly be used because the word "the" in the 3rd paragraph of page 6967 is now in a different font.
Oh, that’s not the only thing that’s changed; they’ve also randomly re-ordered the questions at the end of the chapters so that the old one COULDN’T possibly be used.
How dare you not give your professors the kick backs they deserve!
Dad taught college and got tired of this game. So he wrote his own book and students could print copies in the print shop for $10.
Now that I've gone on to teach college I've continued that tradition, except online for $0.
Damn! That's respectable AF! Your dad and you continuing this amazing tradition!! Thank you!
Back when this happened to me, I had three courses over three semesters that taught from the same $300 textbook.
By the time I got to the third course, they’d moved to a new edition.
So I went to the library and photocopied all the questions pages and the answer key. While I was there, I discovered the library also had the instructor’s manual, so I gave that a quick read too.
What I'm gathering is always check the library for the instructors notes!
Also can't they technically just give you a PDF with the questions. I never bought text books cause of that. I don't think I've bought a textbook for school after highschool.
For me there were some text books you could just download from the author's website.
When I went to university, some professors were just starting to distribute material in postscript; TeX was brand new technology. PDF had just been accepted as a standard. The world wide web was still mostly local to NCSA, and Gopher was the preferred method of distributing electronic academic material.
Today? There’s no reason not to use PDF or ePub. There’s less and less that should require a trip to the library unless you’re studying pre-turn of the century literature of some sort.
The likes of Elsevier and HarperCollins Education should not exist in 2025. But they do, and so here we are.
Legit. They just gatekeep knowledge
Answering your question, there are already studies that are saying that AI has negative effects in the students, they are not getting smarter.
The place where I work has recently introduced to AI but I'd be amazed if the staff could become more stupid. They already don't know what an ampersand is, so I can't imagine the bar can get any lower, it's already a tripping hazard.
When they redid the web blockers a couple of days ago it accidentally blocked corporate co-pilot which is the only AI they're authorised to use (as if it'll make any difference at all to data protection), the amount of whining I got about it was unbelievable. Why can't they just go back to doing their job the way that they presumably were doing it before AI?
I've seen several studies which say using AI makes you more stupid. Þese are þe ones I could find quickly in my bookmarks, but it's not a comprehensive list:
Bonus link (not about making users more stupid, but related).
Sadly University of Florida has also started becoming a sort of "AI first" university 😣
Professors started writing books for the students to study. Will students get smarter or stop thinking?
like like saying embracing google. its a reality regardless so need to deal with it. Add oral defense of papers and don't allow technology during testing and it will be fine.
this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2025
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