It should be a conflict of interest for a WWU professor to write and publish a textbook and also teach the class to which the textbook is required reading. Furthermore, many professors will allow other editions to be used and will give alternate pages where study/test questions can be found within that other edition. Not so in this case. Why, I wonder?
My daughter-in-law just informed me that her professor is also the author of the required textbook. It's a paperback, measures 7-by-9 inches and is three-quarters-of-an-inch thick and has 545 pages, published in 2012. It costs $96 used and $120 new at Western.
A student asked if they could use the first edition and the professor said no because the problems at the end of the chapters wouldn't be the same. The first edition, written in 2010, has 534 pages (roughly the same number) and costs only $11.62 used and $36.90 new. I read the chapter titles and they are basically the same, different font.
Why did the book need to be rearranged in a second edition only two years after the first edition and why should the instructor profit off the sales of a required text? My son and daughter-in-law have a 2-year-old and scrape to make ends meet. I cry foul!
- Lesley Trunkey of Bellingham
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