<p>I'm a college freshmen majoring in a technical field. I'm in a class with a very hard/strict teacher who gives hw problems form the text book, which are very hard. The examples in the book are far simpler than the problems. The other day, someone (an upper classmen) gave me a solutions manual in PDF format. I subsequently (without thinking) disclosed the file to a friend on my floor, and I'm seriously concerned about my choice. This kid does not work very hard and would be the type to copy the solutions at the last minute. I use the maunal for reference when I'm really stuck. I'm worried that if he copies the hws, the TA or professor will eventually figure it out and trace the problem back to me. The professor has been known in the past to give XFs to students for copying hw. I'm worried about the implications of my stupid choice. Any advice?</p>
<p>If you throw away the solutions manual and never use it then you should be fine.</p>
<p>The thing is the problems are just very hard. Doing problems in this book is like shooting darts without the target. I have absolutely no method of knowing whether I’m doing them right or not. The professor is tricky; he hands out solutions, but only after you have turned the problems in and they are graded for correctness. Also, I sent my friend the e-mail with my name attached. I’m afraid when pressed by the professor, my friend will try and deflect blame on him and say that he got the solutions manual from me, with proof from my e-mail.</p>
<p>In the end, your grade will depend on how well you do in the professor’s tests. If you only use the solutions manual in exceptional cases, your homework won’t look exactly like the textbook solutions in any case – it’s not cheating if you’re really doing the work. If the prof is too lazy to write his own problems, and you have a commercially-available answer key, it’s the professor’s problem and I would take my complaint to the administration if he tries to punish you for simply being a good researcher.</p>
<p>I don’t see your friend turning you in for forwarding him a copy of the guide, anyway. Would that get him out of trouble? No. He be more likely to hide his “secret,” claiming to have had temporary tutoring help or something like that.</p>
<p>If you use the manual then you would be cheating. What your friend does with the manual is his business.</p>
<p>When you write one of these posts, it’s a good idea to create a disposable identity.</p>
<p>You appear to be an EE freshman so is this physics or a math course? Can you get help from the tutoring center instead of directly from the solutions guide? Does the solutions guide provide answers to all of the problems or just half of them? At my son’s school, the tutoring center has the solutions guides so that the tutors can verify their results (I don’t know if they have worked-out solutions). It might be a pain but could you use the tutoring center or office hours instead of the solutions PDF?</p>
<p>Could you specify the subject? What can work is having another textbook in the same subject. Some college libraries do have textbooks for many subjects so that students can get a different look on a topic. Some textbooks have better examples than others do. There are also online homework sites like physicsforum. They won’t do the work for you but they will provide hints or guidelines to problems that may help you out.</p>
<p>I’ve taken classes where the professor told us to buy the key for problem sets in the book. We did our homework, checked it against the key, and if we still couldn’t figure it out, we talked with the professor about it. Think of all the math textbooks you’ve had in your life that had the solutions for some (if not all) the problems at the end. This is not necessarily a big deal.</p>
<p>If most of the students have access to a key, why not just bring it up in class: “Professor Jones, I have a copy of the key to the problems and would like your suggestions as to the most effective way to make use of this. For example, should I check all of my problems, or just the odd/even ones? Would you like me to make notes for you about which ones I needed help with and which ones I could entirely solve on my own? Do you agree with all of these solutions in this key, or are there some that you think are messy/inefficient/not sufficiently elegant?”</p>
<p>I’m gonna talk to my friend tomorrow and see what he says, and get a feel for how he is going to approach HW sets for the rest of the semester. I’m strongly considering destroying the solutions manual as you guys have suggested since to play it safe. It would just mean hrs of headache and pain, but that’s better than a potential XF.</p>
<p>Students should do not have this manual. This manual is not commercially available… The upperclassmen who gave it to me somehow got a hold of it.</p>
<p>A former co-worker of mine went to a fairly well-known engineering school and found out that one of the fraternities had solution sets for homeworks and past exams that they passed down from class to class. Was this cheating? I don’t know.</p>
<p>In primary and secondary school, the Teachers Editions are sometimes hard to get from the publishing company to prevent students or parents from buying them but some will sell them to a parent if they can provide evidence of a homeschooling program. Anything that is in print can be had for a price and sometimes the price isn’t very high (as in zero).</p>
<p>We are talking about a freshman course, right? They may seem very, very hard to you know but think about all of the students in their sophomore, junior and senior years. They’ve all gotten through that course and they probably consider it easy now. Perhaps you could find someone that can help you out with some of the problems that you have trouble with. That is if you can’t find other ways to simplify the problems (tutoring center, library, similar books, free books on the internet, video lectures on the internet), homework help sites).</p>
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<p>Funny you should mention this. When I was in engineering school I found the tests and homework to be really hard. Now I’m no genius, but it was really shocking to me how many of the students in some of my classes seemed to find very difficult tests almost trivial. I was an older student than most, so didn’t really befriend many of the youngsters until near the end of my work for the degree when they invited me to a group study session where I was surprised to find they had collections of old assignments and exams, which turned out to be very similar to the actual test. </p>
<p>Well, apparently this type of thing was quite typical and actually probably well known but it made me feel uncomfortable so I didn’t return for any more sessions. But at least I understood why so many A students seem to have such a hard time with fairly simple engineering licensure exams (and also my own organization’s hiring screening exam)…</p>
<p>By now that manual, since in the form of a PDF file, could have spread like wildfire - someone gave it to you, you gave it to your friend, that friend could have sent it to others, etc.</p>
<p>From the way you describe it, it sounds like you’re cheating and if your friend (or others) use it, they’re cheating as well. It wouldn’t be cheating if it was okay to use it by your prof but it sounds like that may not be the case. If you’re cheating, frankly, you deserve an F for the class and discipline for cheating. Sorry to be so blunt but it is what it is. You know that using this reference gives you an unfair advantage over your classmates who don’t have it. </p>
<p>If you haven’t used it much then you should delete the file right away and not use it. Sure, the HW problems will be harder that way but that’s the way the material and the course are designed. It’s likely done that way purposely to make you think instead of following a rote procedure. In engineering much of the material is hard - no way around it. If you keep the solutions you’ll likely find yourself referencing it more and more to the point where you’re thinking less and less.</p>
<p>I’m a little concerned that in your post you see your friend as using this reference for cheating but not yourself when really, between the two of you (i.e. your use of it and how you think your friend might use it), it’s just the degree of cheating that’s at question but in both cases it’s clearly cheating (unless the prof says it’s okay for everyone in the class to use the reference).</p>
<p>You need to destroy your copy of the .pdf immediately. What you are doing is cheating. And by giving a copy to a friend you are assisting him to cheat. (That’s an honor code violation separate from using the solutions manual to do your own homework.) </p>
<p>D1 was a TA, grader and recitation lecturer for PChem last spring. A number of students somehow got a copy of the instructor solution manual and used it in place of actually doing their homework themselves. (D1 said it was easy to tell who had and who didn’t. Some kids were so lazy they even copied the typos from manual into the homework they turned in!)</p>
<p>Because of repeated instances of copying, D1 went to the PChem professor who warned the class not to use the manual and when its use continued, he eventually brought 6 student up on honors charges for plagarism. (Copying homework solutions from any source–whether from a solution manual or another student-- is actually plagarism.) The prof also failed an additional half dozen or so students because he gave them zeros for ALL of their homework sets for copying from the solutions manual</p>
<p>BTW, the prof and D1 were so irritated by the cheating on the homework when it came time to write the exam questions, they wrote really hard exam questions totally different in format than anything that had been assigned for homework.</p>
<p>You, of course, should have deleted the solutions manual right away and reported the incident to the prof. Now, it is a real mess. You should still report the incident to the prof (and I would warn the student you gave the file to that you are doing this).</p>
<p>I have an issue with professors that use the problems out the book and not giving out the answers. They should know that someone from the year before may not have the solution guide but they will have their solutions. Very tempting to the next class coming along to use them, if they can get ahold of them. The best practice is a fresh set of homework problems each year.</p>
<p>As homework is a teaching tool, I have no problem with a prof giving out the answers (not the step by step solutions) to the homework so one can check their results, in fact I believe it is a better teaching experience to do so. Why practice doing it the wrong way if you can catch it earlier in the homework assignment?</p>
<p>I’m sorry, I still don’t see how using such a guide is “cheating,” if you only use it to gain an understanding of how to tackle the occasional tough problem, rather than just block-copy the answers without doing any of the underlying work. How is this any different than going to see a math tutor who will help you work out the necessary steps?</p>
<p>Of course, I am assuming that homework is a minor portion of the total grade and that you take the time to learn the material properly for the tests. Copying answers blindly in blocks is NEVER a good idea because A LOT of typos crop up in these solutions – my son has successfully protested dozens of incorrect answer-key answers the last two years in subjects ranging from chemistry to calculus to German.</p>
<p>If the textbook company publishes an answer key it’s “commercially available” through Amazon or eBay or ABE, used if not brand new. Having a professor declare you can’t look at it is as silly as when the State Dept told its employees that they couldn’t look that the Wikileaks documents that everyone else was looking at. </p>
<p>Throwing away your guide won’t help you now that you’ve already proven you had it and “passed it on.” What prof would believe you? A better solution might be to redo an answer in your own distinctively different way, finding a more elegant and compact method, once you know A process that works and the right answer. Your best protection from being accused of cheating, guide or no guide, is to frequently come up with solutions that don’t follow the answer key’s exact step-by-step process.</p>
<p>I got the manual last week and there has been only one assignment (which is due tomorrow). I haven’t looked at the assignment until yesterday. I will delete the manual today and do the assignment. There is no way that I have cheated.</p>
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Not sure it matters, but I don’t recall the OP ever saying this was commerciailly available. He got it in pdf from a friend (seems like this pdf is flying around the campus). So it’s not clear where exactly it came from. </p>
<p>Whether it is cheating or not it would sure be a shame to go throuigh a whole course using the manual sparingly as you suggest, and then recieve an F because somebody found out you had it. If it is not a big deal, it should be no problem askng the professor if it’s okay to use something like this.</p>
<p>I believe that the OP said that it isn’t commercially available.</p>
<p>Publishers usually don’t make their books available in PDF form as one could just send it to another. Something that I’ve heard of is that there are students that scan complete textbooks into PDF form and then make them available on the web. Perhaps students get a hold of a textbook and do the same thing.</p>
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It’s very clear to me. Anyone in class would be permitted by the prof to seek out the tutor but (apparently) the prof wouldn’t allow anyone to use this reference which means that if only a subset has access to it and uses it, that subset of students has an unfair advantage over the others in class on a part of the class that’s apparently graded - regardless of the percentage of the final grade it happens to be, it’s still a part of the grade. It’d probably also be ‘helpful’ to have all formulas written down when doing tests but in some courses profs allow this and in some the profs don’t and if one came to a test with this ‘cheat-sheet’ or formulas it’d also clearly be cheating (even though the formulas are available in the textbook). The profs usually have their reasons for either permitting or denying the use of a sheet with formulas on it. Not following the rules, whether the student happens to agree with the rules or not, is cheating in this context.</p>
<p>It’s easy to find out if it’d be considered cheating or not - the OP could ask the prof. 
I suspect the OP already knows though and whether some people agree with it or not the prof can conduct the class in this way if the prof wants to - it’s not unusual. </p>
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Good for you. This way you can have a clean conscience on your own work.</p>
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<p>If the professor is OK with this then of course it would not be cheating. If the professor always writes new and original exams and provides the students with copies of old exams, this would not be cheating. If the sets of homework are from a different text or if the professor does not grade hw and says that it is only for your own learning, then this would not be cheating. I think it is OK to have all the supplemental material you need (similar to an AP prep book, SAT/ACT review books, etc) as long as it is not something that is not meant for you to have.</p>
<p>The thing that really bothers me with this situation is that there is clearly something the students have that they are not meant to have. The professor cannot be that naive and simply stick his/her head in the sand and just expect that the students do the right thing. The reason is because it puts some students at an advantage and “penalizes” those who are doing what the professor asks. Yes, I do understand the long term consequence to the cheaters, but a stressed out college kid is often unable to look that far down the road.</p>
<p>The professor has a responsibility to ensure that the class and all methods of assessment are fair. He/She needs to be very clear about expectations and remind the students of the college honor code. I also think it is helpful if the students are given an explanation of why they are to struggle with these difficult problems (learn to problem solve, collaborate, apply what you have learned, perseverance, …). After that, then it is the students responsibility to inform the professor about breeches to the honor code. If the professor does nothing about it then a complaint should be filed with the department.</p>
<p>I loved the example of the chemistry class! This gives the students that little extra nudge to make sure they are doing the right thing.</p>
<p>OP–can you send the professor an anonymous note about the fact that this pdf exisits? It might cause him/her to come up with a more fair grading policy.</p>