<p>Why do people pass down solution manuals and old lab reports to their friends who take the class after them? Is that a favor to them? </p>
<p>It's like you spend 20-25 hours on each gruelsome lab report, you pass the class, and then you give them to your friend .... who just copies them or borrows your ideas (sometimes with no idea what you just wrote) and only spends 5-10 hours for the lab report ... and ultimately gets the same grade that you do or ever higher.</p>
<p>Similar idea in homeworks and solutions.</p>
<p>Does that sound fair? I don't get the logic behind this ....</p>
<p>It’s only a problem if your professor is too lazy to change their problem set or design new labs. Personally, it was only a problem in one class of mine where the professor would intentionally make an error in the solutions the year before, correct them in class, but left it to the next years class to catch it. If you didn’t he reported you for cheating.</p>
<p>The rest of my profs were good enough to write their own problem sets and leave the book problems for additional practice.</p>
<p>It’s pretty stupid to rely on those heavily. You are only cheating yourself out of practice for the exams, which are a larger % of your grade . . .</p>
<p>i saw someone with every single lab report in my chem lab (from friend who took class already), of course there is tons…almost 200 pages of writing and ideas already done for them.</p>
<p>For the most part, it just serves as extra practice problems. It’s no different then getting a Schaum’s 1000 Solved Problems in (Insert Course Here). I don’t consider it unfair at all.</p>
<p>I think the majority of the concern is not within the solutions manuals … that is another argument … but mostly about lab reports as rsala004 mentioned.</p>
<p>I want to know why people pass them along? They’re not making money from giving old reports to friends … they’re not helping them academically … why do they do it? Is it cool for your report to potentially massively-spread to other people who take the course later?</p>
<p>^ they are obviously trying to help their friends out. With Formal lab reports, since you don’t have that many a semester, it’s very helpful to see an older report so you can better understand what kind of information the grader likes and dislikes in the report. They grade Formal lab reports very hard so you can only benefit from seeing an old friends work.</p>
<p>Depends on who you give it to. Many of my friends do fairly well and would not take stuff I give them and directly copy. They know how to learn, so to speak. It’s just helpful to have these things and we help each other :)</p>
<p>I’ve never heard of old lab reports getting passed down since all the ones we do are too individualized to make that really helpful, but my school has an entire website set up (not by the school) just for old homeworks and tests. It’s helpful to see how to do a problem if you get stuck, and the problems aren’t exactly the same, just similar.</p>
<p>I think students pass around solutions to problems for the sake of maintaining their networks and friendships. A student who does not share answers will not make many friends in certain engineering programs. I remember early in my engineering education we would work in small groups and only consult other groups after we couldn’t solve a problem despite trying our best. By the time we were seniors most everyone tried to work together to get the work done as fast as possible.</p>
<p>There’s nothing wrong with handing down solutions. There are many valid uses for old solutions beyond copying. If someone wants to copy they will just be hurting themselves in the long run when it comes time for a test. Homework scores, at least at Purdue, compromised a small portion of the final grade (usually about 10%).</p>
<p>Old tests and homework assignments, particularly those written by other professors, can often have different kinds of questions on them. Usually the homework and test questions vary from semester to semester and professor to professor quite a bit. So a good way to ensure you’re well prepared for an upcoming exam is to work on as many different kind of problems as possible.</p>
<p>Also, it’s nice to know if you’re solving a problem correctly (or at least are on the right track). I know I wasted countless hours attempting to solve problems only to figure out I approached the problem incorrectly. Spending hours “learning” the wrong way to solve problems is not learning. It’s wasting time.</p>
<p>Being able to reference old lab reports is very valuable. After spending a substantial amount of time writing a lab report, it is very easy to omit a certain key part of forget to discuss an important topic because you’re so wrapped up in the rest of the report. By being able to see what kind of content other</p>
<p>I passed all the stuff I had on, just like I expected stuff to be passed to me. Pouring 20+ hours into a lab literally drains you. I made it my #1 goal in any class to attempt to get old tests from the same professor. That effort probably did more for my GPA than any other single act.</p>
<p>I did all my hw alone but i shared them with my frds in my class. only because i know they really want to learn and check the answer and won’t copy it. If they just want to copy it then i won’t share cuz its like screwing them for the exams which is like 90% of the class that’s not what frd do to frd. Sharing the hw with them is like tutoring them but no presence required. I do that cuz i am too lazy to explain.</p>
<p>project on the other hand is too much work spent to be shared with others. spend your own freaking hundred hours to do the research!!!</p>
<p>It’s good to hear that there are people who don’t directly copy … or look at the old lab reports/hw solutions before working on the ones assigned to them. I think that they are good to reference to some extent, but with great discipline.</p>
<p>At my school, there are many people who straight up copy and it’s a shame. They copy old lab reports, and some of them have errors which they just blindly copy and paste, and turn in.</p>
<p>It’s frustrating when there are group lab reports, and they copy exerpts of their friends’ lab reports. I have to go back and edit them (ex. the efficiencies of the parallel flows were higher than the counterflows as well as flowrates)</p>
<p>Sentences like these make me wonder if they understood the theory about heat exchangers at all, knew what they were writing about, or did they just have problem with grammar and sentence structure?</p>