(Editor’s Note: Last week, Professor Munger told us a story about having seen a former student attempting to sell his notes for Munger’s final exam. Here is the second part of the story.)
Given that, how should I have reacted to the Facebook post where the student tries to sell his/her notes? Remember, I myself give out the questions, so no harm there. And I suggest that students share the burden of preparing the answers. The only wrinkle would be whether there is something wrong with selling the notes.
The simplest answer would be to accept the argument from the important book, Markets Without Limits (2015), by Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski. They claim that if something is moral when you do it for free, that same thing cannot be immoral if you do it for money. In other words, if there is no moral problem with the thing itself, then no moral problem is introduced by market exchange.
What I found mysterious about the “offer for sale” was that it seemed as if there was a way to make a lot more money, by selling copies of the notes rather than the one handwritten copy. I imagine that what happened was the student found the notes, started to throw them away, and then thought, “Huh. Someone else could use these. This was quite a bit of work. I’ll sell them!”
It could be, though, that the seller recognized that the value of the notes to one person is greater than the value to any one person of many, if the notes are xeroxed. After all, if the answers of many people are the same, or nearly so, the improvement in the grade may be reduced. And there’s a negative externality: if many people all do much better, that will raise the mean and the net effect, after the curve, may be zero. If only one student gets the notes, the answer will be unique (in that class, at least), and it won’t affect the curve; the buyer will capture all the benefits.
But there’s another aspect to this, one that actually says more about professors than about students. I have noticed that the offer to sell notes elicits strong responses from some professors. They aren’t (only) worried that this is a genera ethical violation; it’s also an educational violation. Students should have to suffer through class, and synthesize the material themselves, before they can be said to have “learned” it. Having it already synthesized, so that all the buyer of the notes has to do is review those few pages (I think it’s about 50 handwritten sheets), rather than the readings, is cheating all right. But it’s cheating the students who buy the notes out of the learning experience of the class.
This might be right, but in this case I have tried to make that less likely. The 12 essay questions constitute what I believe to be the important questions, the big questions, that a student being introduced to political economy should know. If the students know those questions, and have good answers, I have done my job. I frankly don’t care much about how that knowledge is transmitted, or acquired. Remember, the students probably can’t memorize an entire essay. Each essay should be 500+ words, an entire blue book more, single-spaced. If the student learns the material well enough to produce a quality essay on all 12 questions, I don’t care much how they came by this knowledge.
All this reminds me of a slightly ribald, but insightful, “Prof joke,” one well known to all professors I expect. It goes like this: A young woman is not doing well in the class, and comes to office hours to talk to the older male professor. The student talks about how worried she is, and says that she will need to do well on the final to pass the course. Then she says, “I have to do well on the final. I’d do anything to do well on the final, you know.”
The professor is a bit startled, and blurts out, “Um….anything?”
The young woman leans forward and whispers breathily, “ANYTHING.”
The professor nods, and looks down at his desk for several long seconds. Then he leans forward, looks over his glasses, and whispers back equally breathily: “All right, then. STUDY.”
Because, as the notes seller rightly says in the ad, “If you study and memorize them….” That means this is not really a short-cut, but an economy. There may actually an educational benefit, if the answers are good and the buyer takes the time to read carefully and understand the answers, because then that student will have learned about the questions more deeply than might have happened otherwise.
Or maybe not. Do you think I have this right? Are there problems with selling notes? And what are the conditions, if there are any, where selling notes should be sanctioned by the professor if he or she discovers the scheme?
Michael Munger teaches at Duke University and is Director of the interdisciplinary program in Philosphy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) at Duke University. He is a frequent guest on EconTalk.
Read more of Michael Munger’s writing at Archive.
READER COMMENTS
JK Brown
Oct 15 2019 at 1:51am
A good set of notes for a class is really just a personalized “textbook” for that class. Textbooks are organized to short-cut the effort needed to study material, by extracting the ideas, organizing them in relative importance, and judging the soundness and general worth of statements in contrast to the student needing to perform those tasks on sources.
Of course, those tasks are integral to study and incorporation of the ideas into the student’s general knowledge. Having shorted those steps, which note taking facilitates, the student is left with a lot more memorization necessary and doesn’t have the familiarity to maintain a tentative attitude in the face of future challenges to the “facts” or have their own opinion rather than having adopted that of the text book or notes author.
Of course, a college student has had at least a decade of inculcation that grade is more important than mastery and retention of material. Incentives matter.
–How to Study and Teaching How to Study (1909) by F. M. McMurry
Ian Fellows
Oct 15 2019 at 1:56am
I suspect that you may have put significantly more time into thinking about this than the seller. The seller probably thought:
1. I have these great notes that I spent time on.
2. Someone else might find them of value, and I could use a little beer money.
3. There isn’t anything wrong (by the rules or morality) with selling them.
4. It isn’t much effort to sell them.
Number 4 is likely why they didn’t photocopy the notes and sell copies. Also, there may be value attached to the provenance and visual quality of the notes in the same way a copy of an expensive painting has almost no value.
To the professors who have the gall to call studying notes cheating I’d say: If your semester long course can be replaced with the cursory reading of $20 worth of notes, how much does that imply you should be paid?
Phil H
Oct 15 2019 at 5:17am
Oops, I didn’t realise this was a two-part post. My comment on part one is completely obviated by part two!
The idea of exclusivity raised by the possibility of selling only one copy of the notes is interesting. Instructors may have an interest in preventing unequal access to educational resources in the university (as part of the product their university offers for its tuition fees: expert teaching + fair assessment), so they may have an objection to the selling of an exclusive aid.
In general, I don’t mind “teaching to the test” or “learning to the test” – a good education system should offer challenging enough tests that passing them really does mark the achievement it is supposed to. But it can be taken too far. Where I live (coastal China), my 12 year old’s curriculum and school life seem s to be completely defined by a set of tests that are still 3 years off. And the old conception of a university as a participatory scholarly community does seem to require that students do slightly more than just learn enough to pass the exams.
Brandon Berg
Oct 15 2019 at 5:58am
I think there may be something to the view that the work of synthesizing information has greater educational value than being spoon-fed the end product.
My personal experience is that I end up with a better understanding of a subject if I do this work than if I just read the abridged version, probably in part because I spend more time in total thinking about the subject if I do this.
Of course, there’s probably some selection bias here: If I don’t understand a topic well enough to do the synthesis, I won’t. Still, with all the usual caveats about the reliability of introspection, I feel like there’s a real causal effect here.
Tian
Oct 15 2019 at 11:16am
Hmm… what if the buyer decides to sell copies of the notes?
It appears that there should be no problem with the buyer selling the notes for the same reasons that there should be no problem with the seller selling the notes, yet I notice that I am less comfortable with the former.
danno
Oct 16 2019 at 12:02pm
The main issue with selling notes is who owns the intellectual property rights. As long as the student sells the notes created by herself, she can do whatever she wants with them. If she sells, or just posts online, her professor’s outline, then she is violating your property rights.
There are sites where students can upload notes, answers to assignments, etc. Last year someone mentioned one such site and I was surprised to see the outline I posted on our learning management system uploaded to the site. I quickly told the students that they were violating my property rights by posting my outline. And I wondered why they would post them since everyone in my class can download them directly from the LMS.
If its only the student’s notes that are being sold, I agree with you. But if it is answers to exam questions, then the issue becomes plagiarism.
Kyndle Wallen
Oct 17 2019 at 12:13pm
When I see posts online of former students of a course trying to sell their notes, it always seems inviting to a current student because buying the notes means one less thing on the to-do list of homework. All they would have to do is study the notes rather than write them down, which can be time-consuming. Most students would rather be able to use the time that could be spent on writing their own notes, on other things, perhaps other coursework or extra-curricular activities. I know for me, as a current college student, having a ton of homework and notes to do all the time, it would be nice to have someone do part of it for me.
However, the problem with this is just like the writer of this article says. Buying the notes from a previous student cheats the current students who buy them out of the learning experience of the class. I know that writing the notes down and reading them over in my own handwriting helps me to learn quicker and more efficiently. Most students that I have talked to work the same way. They have to write down their own notes and study them on their own because just reading over someone else’s notes really doesn’t help all that much. Therefore, while selling the notes might be a great idea for the seller, only a select few students will choose to buy them, so it may not be the greatest market.
Another thing is that though it didn’t cost the seller any real monetary value to create the notes, though it may have costed them so time and hard work to create them, there is no real profit made here. They could give the potential buyers any price and even if they were to pay a significant amount of money for the notes, if they are not xeroxed or copied, the seller cannot continue to make money off of this because it is a one-time exchange of goods. Even if the notes are copied, the value of the notes will not be the same for all buyers. The main issue here is that the students who purchase these notes will most likely create their own notes and study off of them, they will only study what they have purchased and the value of the learning experience of the course will decrease.
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